Lily and the Prisoner of Magic (7 page)

BOOK: Lily and the Prisoner of Magic
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‘Do you think they’ll come back for her?’ Lily wondered.

Henrietta snorted. ‘Of course they won’t! They’ll hide that little girl away, and pretend they were never at the theatre. I wouldn’t be surprised if that family went travelling on the continent for a while. Magic isn’t outlawed in Talis; she’d be safe there.’

‘What will happen now?’ Georgie whispered above them. She was sitting on the edge of the stage, eyeing the doll anxiously. ‘Someone will tell. They’re bound to. Or even if they don’t report it directly, the gossip will get to the Queen’s Men.’

Daniel trudged across the stage, wearily peeling off his false moustache. ‘I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised. It’s been happening in the streets, and the grocer’s boy was telling me that someone made a sack of rice explode in the shop the other day. Rice everywhere, and he had to sweep it up. With all the excitement in the audience it was bound to happen sooner or later.’ He put an arm around Georgie’s shoulders. ‘You girls had better get ready to hide.’

I
t was as though the little girl’s explosion of magic had opened a door inside the theatre. There was another outbreak the next night, and a coyly worded article in the newspaper followed, giving the name of the theatre and mentioning the Amazing Danieli – Daniel’s stage name.

‘We’re breaking no laws,’ Daniel muttered, as he smoothed down the pages with a snap. ‘But we’ve been warned before. This is very dangerous.’

‘Surely it must be obvious that this is simply an outpouring of unused magic,’ the dragon pointed out. They were all leaning against him, reading the article over Daniel’s shoulders. ‘What do they expect, after fifty years letting it lie fallow in the ground? Especially here. The land is positively groaning with power.’

Daniel nodded thoughtfully. ‘London has always been known as a magical city.’

‘Your act speaks to the magic inside others. And it may be worse now that I am here.’ The dragon swung his head round to eye Daniel apologetically. ‘Dragons are full of magic, and we strengthen others’ power.’

Daniel sighed, and nodded. He folded the newspaper carefully and laid it down on the stage. ‘Things aren’t going to be the same again, are they? Magic is coming back. The Queen’s Men think they can root it out, but that’s not going to work. The more they stamp it down, the more it will bubble up somewhere else.’

Lily wrapped her arms around Henrietta, feeling her own magic leap inside her with excitement. ‘That’s what I think too,’ she whispered. ‘It’s going to happen. Maybe not for a little while, but…’

Nicholas hugged Georgie, and then let go very quickly, looking embarrassed. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered. ‘It’s just – after all that time at Fell Hall, thinking that magic was dead. It’s wonderful…’

‘But meanwhile, we’re an obvious scapegoat,’ Daniel muttered. ‘I hate to say this, Lily and Georgie, but you’re not safe here. We need to find you somewhere else to hide out. Perhaps the princess as well, although I suppose we can disguise her as any old lady – she sews so well, she’d be convincing as a wardrobe mistress.’

Georgie sighed. That was all she had ever wanted to be, as well.

‘But where are they going to go?’ the dragon asked, his voice a low, disapproving rumble. ‘I do not want them leaving me. They are mine; there’s Fell blood in them somewhere. How can I keep them safe, if I’m not with them? There are not many places in this narrow city where I can stay.’

Daniel looked at the girls helplessly. ‘I don’t know. I’ve friends that you girls could stay with, but no one has a house large enough for a dragon.’ He sighed. ‘I’ll ask around. All right. Nicholas. You need to come and practise your juggling.’ He tucked the paper under his arm, and moved off to the side of the stage, with Nicholas trailing after him, muttering.

‘Just a little magic? Couldn’t I? Just so the balls would stick to my hands – they’re so
slippery
…’

Lily rubbed the dragon’s side, trying to seem comforting. His neck was drooping anxiously, and she could feel vibrations of worry coming off his scales. ‘It wouldn’t be for long, hopefully. Once we’ve worked out the spells to free Father, we can go wherever we like. We don’t have to stay in London. We’ll find somewhere with lots of space for dragons.’ She glanced at Georgie. ‘If we didn’t have to worry about Mama, we could even go back to Merrythought. You could fly us there, you’d love it. I’m sure you’d fit; you could sleep in the library, it’s enormous.’ She looked up at him thoughtfully. ‘Our magic was strong enough to wake you… Georgie, don’t you think that with his power too we might be able to rescue Father? Even though we don’t know all the right magic for the prison guard spells?’

‘Talk sense, Lily,’ Georgie snapped. ‘How are we supposed to stand outside an archway in the middle of London, right outside the palace, with a house-sized dragon, and not have anyone asking us what we’re doing? Henrietta’s right – for once. It’s no good just getting into the prison. We need someone to teach us how to defeat those guards. And there isn’t anyone.’

The dragon huffed out a steamy sigh. ‘My magic isn’t like yours – it isn’t spells, it’s just a strength. A power. I can’t teach you. I could go searching for someone who could…’

‘How?’ Lily asked.

The dragon’s thick scales rippled in a reptilian shrug. ‘Fly over the city – I can smell where the magicians are. It shouldn’t be too hard to claw one out.’

‘You mean, just reach into a house and grab them?’ Lily muttered, her eyes widening.

The dragon nodded, and Lily sighed regretfully. ‘It would be a bit obvious. And I suppose that anyone we did that to might not want to teach us anything afterwards.’

The dragon shrugged again. ‘I could command them to,’ he suggested.

‘Not a strong magician, like we need,’ Georgie broke in. ‘Someone like your old Fell masters. Could you?’

The dragon shook the spiny ruffs around his head irritably. ‘Perhaps not,’ he admitted eventually.

‘Maybe you could search us out a magician, and then we’d know the house, and we could simply go and ask?’ Georgie wondered. ‘We’d have to have some sort of excuse. They’d be hiding their magic; it would be dangerous.’

Henrietta sniffed. ‘Everything about this is dangerous.
She
is dangerous.’ She pressed her cold, damp nose against Georgie’s stockinged leg, which she knew quite well Georgie hated.

‘Tonight then, after the performance.’ The dragon stretched out his wings in pleasure. ‘Will you fly with me, dear ones?’

 

‘Lily!’

Lily glanced round, expecting that Sam wanted her to help with something. Nicholas had forgotten one of the props, perhaps, or someone had lost a vital part of their costume. Now that she wasn’t going on stage, everyone was borrowing her to run errands. She’d been dragging Peter around with her too, showing him where everything was and making the rest of the theatre folk see that he was still useful, even if he couldn’t speak. She’d explained lip-reading too, over and over, and it seemed to be starting to work. Peter was curled up in a corner of the wings now, deftly unpicking a tangle of ropes that someone had given him.

At least, he had been. Now he’d cast the ropes down and was standing, fists clenched, staring out of the wings to the passage beyond.

Lily turned round slowly to follow his gaze.

‘Lily, you have to hurry,’ Sam muttered. ‘No, it’s too late. Where’s your sister?’

‘What is it?’ Lily started towards him, but he waved her back.

‘No!’

Henrietta darted quickly out into the passageway. ‘I’ll fetch her. The princess too.’

‘Why?’ Lily would have stamped her foot, if the act hadn’t been going on a few feet away. ‘What’s happening?’

‘Queen’s Men…’ Sam was turning anxiously this way and that, as though he was sniffing them out. ‘Here, you.’ He beckoned to Peter. ‘Out to the yard, you getting me? Out and check if they’ve surrounded us.’

Peter nodded grimly, and slid into the passageway.

‘You could slip out into the audience, but you’d have to get down the steps from the stage – you’d be spotted.’

Peter hurried back into the wings, grimacing and holding up his notebook.
All gates manned. Coming!

Georgie tumbled after him, leading Princess Jane, who suddenly looked to Lily unmistakeably a princess, as though the Queen’s Men couldn’t possibly mistake her for anything else.

She’d been panicking until then, unsure what to do, how to escape, her feet leaden and slow. But she would not let them take the old lady back and seal her up for who-knew-how-many-more years.

‘We can’t get out!’ Georgie hissed. ‘They’re searching all the rooms, everywhere, there’s hundreds of them!’

On stage, Daniel, Nicholas and Mary were reaching the finale of the act – the Vanishing Cabinet. The dragon was coiled decoratively across the back of the stage, looking as much like fabric stretched over wire as he possibly could. But he was staring directly at Lily, and she could see his barbed tail pointing towards the audience. The Queen’s Men were there too. The huge dark eyes were questioning, and she gazed back into them, trying to hear him. At Fell Hall, he had been able to speak directly into her mind, but he had lived there for hundreds of years – the very air had been his to bend and shape.

Now, at last, she heard him faintly.

Fly with you? Break out of the front wall? Could be done…

Lily shook her head firmly. However strong he was, she didn’t think it would work, not here.

Besides, she had another plan.

On stage, Daniel was starting to work his way gradually towards the wings. He could see the dark-uniformed men moving around the sides of the auditorium, and he knew what they were. He was trying to get back to Lily and Georgie, to find some way to help without the Queen’s Men realising what he was doing.

‘Bring the cabinet over here!’ she hissed to him, as he continued his magician’s patter, strolling in wide circles around the stage, making strange magical gestures with his arms, and on every turn, coming closer to her.

He blinked as he heard her, and then raised his eyebrows slightly.

‘Please!’ she whispered. ‘I’ve got a plan.’

‘Have you?’ Georgie muttered anxiously. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘It’s a Vanishing Cabinet,’ Lily whispered back. ‘We’re going to vanish in it.’

Georgie stared at her as though she thought Lily had lost her wits. ‘It’s a fake! It doesn’t vanish people, Lily, it’s a trick, you know that!’

‘This time it will,’ Lily told her stubbornly.

On stage, Daniel was directing Nicholas and Mary to move the Vanishing Cabinet around so that all the audience could see that it had no secret back door. ‘My rivals have been heard to say the Cabinet is placed exactly over a hole in the floor of the stage,’ he told the audience, striding up and down in front of the wooden box as Mary and Nicholas pushed it almost into the wings. ‘Or that we have a secret passage out of the back of the theatre! Nonsense, of course. This is a true Vanishing Cabinet – built of wood from a rare Arabian tree, now almost completely extinct.’

He was making it all up off the top of his head, Lily could tell, busking to buy them some time. She pulled Georgie and the princess into the Cabinet after her, and nodded to Mary and Nicholas that it was safe to pull it out to the front of the stage again.

The Cabinet smelled of wood shavings and the sickly whiff of varnish. As Mary carefully shut the door, Daniel’s voice was muffled. Lily could only half hear as he explained to the audience that his young assistants were going to disappear.

‘Lily, in less than a minute he’s going to open the door for Mary and Nicholas to get in, and everyone will see us!’ Henrietta growled. ‘We won’t all fit into the secret compartment, it’s too tight. I hope you have a plan.’

‘We’re going to vanish. The dragon will help us. He will. He’ll have to.’ Lily closed her eyes.’

‘Er, where are we going to vanish to?’ Georgie asked.

Lily opened her eyes again, and swallowed. But it didn’t help the strange blockage in her throat. ‘I don’t know!’ Her voice wavered, and all of a sudden her plan seemed stupid and dangerous. ‘We have to go now, and I don’t know where we’re going!’

‘I know somewhere.’ Princess Jane took Lily’s hand in hers. Lily could feel her fine old bones as brittle as sticks inside the papery skin, but her grip was determined and reassuring. ‘How do we get there?’

Lily gulped. ‘Just think of it. Think of it hard. Georgie, hold hands. It’s all right, I won’t use your magic; I know we can’t risk it.’ Hurriedly, she scooped Henrietta up, and tucked the little dog into the crook of one arm.

She could feel Georgie’s magic seething excitedly deep inside her, her sister’s own power mixed with the strange, dark spells their mother had implanted in her. The spells felt even stronger than they had before. She darted away from them, searching instead for the dragon’s magic, hoping that he would lend it to her again. It came to her in a sudden surge, lifting her own magic with it, so that it felt as though she were flying with him again.

Clinging to Princess Jane’s frail fingers, Lily borrowed the sense of safety from the old lady’s thoughts. There was a memory of warmth, and sunlight, and buttered scones, and Lily let out a sad sort of laugh. The only place she felt safe was here, at the theatre, and even that refuge had been stolen away from them now.

BOOK: Lily and the Prisoner of Magic
12.98Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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