“Course it still exists, woman!” Skinny threw up his hands, sloshing tea over the armchair. “Why else do you think Bellissima has broken out of prison?”
“Ha! So it is her!” Jones punched a triumphant fist. “I was right!”
“Congratulations, dear,” said Frankie dryly. “Anyway, she knows the Seventh Stone is still out there. And remember – she’s only a spirit these days, no more than a puff of smoke. She’ll know there’s only one thing powerful enough to rebuild a body, and that’s the Seventh Stone!”
“She’s … sorry, this Bellissima is a puff of smoke?” Roxy had to ask.
“Oh, yes, dear,” said Frankie. “The truth is right there, in the fairytale: Snow White’s stepmother, Queen Bellissima, went up in a furious puff of smoke, remember, when she found out Snow White hadn’t been killed by her poisoned apple?”
“Although how Splendid’s people managed to capture a puff of smoke, and then lock it up, is a mystery to me!” said Skinny. “But trust me, that evil spirit will be wafting around out there right now, knowing that she’ll never get her full strength back without that Stone. And when she does, trust me, we’ll all be back to the darkest days of the Perpetual Wickedness.”
“Skinny! Please! There’s no need to frighten the children!”
“Hey, I’m not frightened,” breathed Jones. “This is awesome! So just out of interest, do you think this Seventh Witching Stone could be described as … uh … the stone with all the power?”
Skinny snorted. “Well, it magnifies any spell by thousands and thousands and thousands. So even a totally non-magical non-BOBI like you would be able to cast a pretty decent one. Imagine that power in the hands of a magical being who can already cast dizzyingly potent spells all on their own. Now imagine that power in the hands of someone who practises Dark Magic…”
Roxy, who was pretty frightened by now, cleared her throat.
“So it really doesn’t sound great that Queen Bellissima’s the one who escaped. I mean, if she’s half as bad as the fairytale says, she’s pretty much as nasty as they come.”
“Obviously you can debate that,” said Skinny abruptly, “if you want to give yourself nightmares. Was she the worst Dark Magic practitioner of all, or was it the Gingerbread Witch? Take your pick, really. For me, it’s her. Bellissima. No contest.”
Frankie reached out a hand and squeezed his old friend’s shoulder. “The thing is,” he said, “you sweet, innocent girls couldn’t possibly understand how bad things were in the late days of the Cursed Kingdom. None of the Dark Magic that had come before had anything on the old queen’s evil power. She could do anything, anything at all, and there wasn’t a magical being alive powerful enough to stop her.”
“She’d slaughter people just for the fun of it,” Skinny went on. “Wipe out whole villages – towns, even. On a whim! You might head off to buy a prawn sandwich and an apricot flapjack one lunchtime and come home to find your house a smouldering ruin, burned to the ground by the queen’s purple fire, with everything you loved still inside. Your records. Your hamsters. Your only sister.”
“Now, Skinny.” Frankie spoke softly. “What do we always say, dear? Better not to speak of it. Better not to remember.”
There was a short silence. Frankie stared into space. Skinny stared into his milky tea. Roxy, not knowing quite where to look, stared down at her feet. And Jones stared pointedly at Roxy.
“Can I have a quick word with you, Roxy?” she asked. “In private?”
Roxy hesitated. After hearing that outburst from Skinny, she had to say something. She just didn’t have a clue what. “Skinny, I’m so, so…”
“Give Skinny a moment to himself, perhaps…” Jones grabbed Roxy’s arm and pulled her back through the door to the musty record store. “Oh. My. Stars. This is HUGE!” she hissed, closing the door behind her.
“The fact that poor Skinny’s sister – and his hamsters – were murdered by an evil witch whose spirit is now on the run from prison?” Roxy was feeling sick. “Jones, come on. I don’t know if huge is how I’d describe it.”
“No, well, that’s obviously massively tragic.” Jones, in fairness, did look a bit sick about this herself. She even took off the fedora that she was still wearing, in an apparent show of respect for the dead. “But what’s the use in us all sitting around feeling sad about it when there’s actually something we can do?”
“About Skinny’s dead sister?”
“To stop anything awful like that happening again!” Jones’s eyes were glittering like a pair of electrified sapphires. “Think about it, QG! We’re already on the trail of this Seventh Witching Stone, right?”
“If it’s the stone with all the power from Mrs Tabitha’s clue, then yes, we are. And honestly, were you searching for it to get revenge on your stepmother?”
“Well, yeah, OK, a bit. Well, maybe a lot. But also because it’s the biggest historical artefact from the Cursed Kingdom! You heard them in there!”
“I also heard Frankie say that MOOOOOH probably found it and destroyed it, Jones. I mean, remember how quickly they destroyed Mrs Tabitha, as soon as they discovered it?”
“Load of pig poo!” scoffed Jones. “I bet they’d been looking for that book for years, with absolutely no idea it had been stuffed away right under their noses in a dusty old storage vault! And I bet they haven’t really burnt it, and that teams of crack MOOOOOH codebreakers are working on that clue even as we speak.”
“Um, well then, shouldn’t we just let them get on with it? I mean, they are the ones in charge, Jones. If Skinny’s right, and Queen Bellissima is trying to find the Seventh Stone, it has to be found, and by the right people, as fast as possible.”
“Exactly! But who says Minister Splendid and his agents are the right people?” Jones gestured the fedora wildly in the (very rough) general direction of central Rexopolis and the Soup Ministry. “What makes you think we could trust them with the Stone? If they’ve used the six less powerful ones to cast some dishonest duping spell over the entire world, who knows what they’d use the Seventh Stone for? These are the kind of people, Roxy, who order perfectly innocent fairies and gnomes – or whatever the heck Skinny is – to live in grotty out-of-the-way places, hidden away from the rest of the world. Make them get licences, like they’re … they’re dogs, or something! Don’t you think that’s horrible? And don’t you worry that if they can do it to them, they can do it to anyone else they turn against too?”
Roxy had to admit that Jones had a teeny-tiny point. OK, a massive point. It couldn’t possibly be good for someone as power-hungry as Minister Splendid to get a hold of the most powerful magical object in the world, even if he wouldn’t use it for Dark Magic himself.
“And just because MOOOOOH might not use it for Dark Magic,” Jones went on, almost as if she’d read Roxy’s mind, “that doesn’t mean they’d be using it for anything good.”
“All right!” Roxy held up both hands. “I actually agree. Maybe it would be better not to let the Ministry know we’re on the trail. But you can’t seriously be thinking of carrying on the trail, Jones, now you know how dangerous the Seventh Stone is! I mean, OK, when you were just looking for it to wreak revenge against your horrible stepmum, fine – and thanks for telling me the truth about that, by the way …”
Jones gave a pfffffft, but at least had the decency to look slightly sheepish.
“… but now you know the Seventh Stone is the kind of magical object that makes evil witches decide to break out of a top-security jail,” Roxy went on, “do you really think we should carry on the hunt?”
“Sure, it’s dangerous,” Jones admitted. “But it sounds like things are going to get a lot more dangerous if that old witch finds the Stone before anyone else. You heard Frankie: nobody knows where it is. Well, you and I almost do. We have the best chance of stopping Bellissima getting her claws on it! In fact, if we don’t try and find it now, we’re pretty much letting the entire country down!”
Roxy knew when she w
as being manipulated. “Jones, we’re just a couple of kids.”
“Speak for yourself,” retorted Jones, before going on in a deliberately look-how-sensible-I-can-be-when-I-put-my-mind-to-it voice. “Look, QG, I’ll do you a deal. Once we’ve found the Stone, then we’ll take it straight to some boring grown-up, OK? Though not to anyone at MOOOOOH, obviously.”
“Maybe to Queen Ariadne?” Roxy was thinking out loud. “Or maybe to another minister, one that hates Minister Splendid so would never give it to him?”
“Exactly!”
“But then, Jones, why can’t we just go and tell Queen Ariadne or one of those other ministers right now?”
“Because I’ll just end up getting sent straight home, OK?” Jones suddenly snapped, throwing off the sensible voice as tetchily as she might have chucked off a serviceable-but-dull winter coat. “If we tell a grown-up, like a pair of boring old goody-goodies, they’ll call my stepmother faster than you can say cupcake incident! I’ll be back there again, in living misery! With memories of my dad everywhere, and my stepmother screaming at me, and my stepsisters making me tidy their rooms and clean their stinky loos, and…”
She stopped. She was breathing so heavily that her shoulders were rising and falling with the effort.
“Jones,” Roxy said, reaching out to touch one of her shuddering shoulders. “I didn’t realize it was that…”
Jones shot her such a fierce, wounded look that she didn’t finish her sentence.
“OK,” Roxy finished simply. “OK. We’ll do it. We’ll look for the Stone without telling anyone first.”
Jones gave a curt nod of acknowledgement, then took one last, long deep breath, planted her usual devil-may-care grin back on her face and turned to open the door back to the storeroom. “So, Skinny,” she said, striding through and giving him what she probably thought was a supportive thump on the arm, “Frankie was saying you knew some stuff about –” she lowered her voice to a bare whisper – “witches?”
“Maybe I do.” Skinny was red-eyed but he seemed to have recovered himself. “But like I said, this is a bad, bad time for anyone to be asking questions about them.”
“Oh, but it’s only one question. I’m looking for a witch’s tower. Does that mean anything to you?”
Skinny blinked. “A specific witch’s tower? Now, that could be tricky. A lot of witches used to live in towers in the olden days. It was kind of their thing.” His gaze grew misty for a moment. “Ah, when I think back to some of the parties I went to in witches’ towers—”
“Awesome,” Jones interrupted. “But do you happen to know if any are still standing? Like, I’m sure a lot of witches’ towers were knocked down in the Great Clean-Up, right?”
“Well, don’t badger me, girl!” Skinny’s misty gaze became a glare. “What is this, one of Wincey the Wisteria Fairy’s interrogations or something?”
“Now, Skinny, dear, you really should call her by her official name,” Frankie added nervously. “We must make sure we show the proper respect.”
“RESPECT?” Skinny suddenly bellowed. “I’ve stepped in piles of dog poo I respect more than so-called Mrs Smith!”
“Oh, don’t start all this again, dear…”
“I mean, I was a GOOD GUY!” yelled Skinny, now turning the colour of a ripe tomato. “But just because I accidentally irked her at the first Expedient Fiction Council meeting …”
“You called her a jumped-up lackey and a traitor to her people!” Frankie pointed out. “And told her she had rubbish taste in music!”
“… she made sure the Story Weavers wrote up my story TOTALLY WRONG!” Skinny finished. “And she does have rubbish taste in music. As it happens.”
“Oooh,” Jones said, “who are the Stor—”
“Do you have to know absolutely blooming everything?” Frankie interrupted Jones, before throwing up his hands in a cloud of lavender and exasperation. “The Story Weavers were the ones given the task of making the False Memory Enchantment watertight. They played around with troublesome bits of the kingdom’s history and made sure that they’d be convincing as charming little stories instead.”
“Charming little stories?” howled Skinny. “How’d you like it if you’d been turned into a villainous fairytale weirdo? I never did any of that bonkers baby-bartering stuff! All I ever did in that palace was quietly get on with managing the Weaving Department! Not to mention that it’s total treachery of the so-called Smith woman to have ever taken on the job in the first place. She should never have agreed to work with that insufferable berk, Atticus Aren’t-I-Terribly-Splendid, the way he’s always despised us BOBIs, the way he’s tried to erase us from the history of our own kingd—”
Skinny’s rant was cut short by a sudden noise, so loud that it made them all jump. It was the sound of a large fist pounding, extremely hard, on the front door.
13
“OPEN UP!” yelled a voice to accompany the pounding fist. “SOUP MINISTRY OFFICIAL GUARD PATROL!”
Roxy, Jones, Frankie and Skinny stared at each other. Nobody dared move.
“OPEN UP!” yelled the voice again. “OR WE’LL BREAK THIS DOOR DOWN!”
This had Skinny unfrozen and out of his armchair faster than you could say priceless old record collection.
“That bunch of thugs!” he screeched, charging towards the shop.
“Skinny, no!” Frankie darted round to block his way. “You can’t let them in!” he hissed. “You know I’m unlicensed!”
“WE KNOW AN UNLICENSED BOBI IS ON THE PREMISES,” came the SMOG’s booming voice again. “I REPEAT, LET US IN OR WE WILL RUN AT THIS DOOR WITH A BATTERING RAM.”
“Well, that’s just a waste of energy,” said Jones. “Nobody needs a battering ram to break down a door as old and dodgy as that.”
“How do they know you’re here?” Roxy whispered. She reached for one of Frankie’s hands, to soothe him as much as herself.
“The cameras all over Sector Seven, of course!” Skinny snapped. “They must have caught you nipping in here.”
“The what?” squeaked Frankie.
“There are security cameras everywhere. Splendid’s latest way to keep control of all us BOBIs. They’ll be microchipping us next, like dogs, just you wait and see.”
Frankie looked horrified. “And we’ll be in even bigger trouble if they know we’re harbouring two non-BOBIs!”
“WE KNOW YOU ARE HARBOURING TWO NON-BOBIs,” came the SMOG’s voice again. “THIS IS IN DIRECT CONTRAVENTION OF EMERGENCY MAGIC-CONTROL ORDER NUMBER THREE-SIX-SIX, PARAGRAPH EIGHT, SUBSECTION TWENTY-NINE…”
The shouting, mercifully, stopped for a moment.
“CORRECTION,” it came again, “I SHOULD HAVE SAID PARAGRAPH TWENTY-NINE, SUBSECTION EIGHT. IT’S VERY NEW LEGISLATION. I APOLOGIZE.”
“What does Paragraph Twenty-Nine, Subsection Eight actually say?” hissed Jones.
“ACCORDING TO THIS EMERGENCY LEGISLATION,” came the SMOG’s voice, “ANY BOBI FOUND TO BE FRATERNIZING WITH A NON-BOBI WITHOUT PRIOR PERMISSION, AND/OR ENTERTAINING A NON-BOBI IN HIS/HER HOME, WILL BE IMMEDIATELY ARRESTED, INVESTIGATED, CHARGED WITH TREASON AND SENT TO JAIL. THE SAME APPLIES TO THE NON-BOBI.”
Treason? Jail?
Roxy felt her head hit the floor.
She’d been knocked over by some sudden, invisible force… Hang on, what were those lilac-tinged sparks still fizzing from Frankie’s fingertips? And why were the three of them – Frankie, Jones and Skinny – all gazing at her with a mixture of horror and astonishment?
“Did you just … zap me?” she asked the fairy godmother.
“I did.” Frankie clapped a hand over his mouth. “I was trying to make you invisible so you wouldn’t get discovered when the SMOGs come in.”
“Man, am I glad you did Roxy first,” said Jones, still open-mouthed.
“Don’t worry, I’m OK,” Roxy assured them, struggling to her feet. “No blood. No broken bones. No head injuries.” She put a hand to her head to double-check this last assertion.
<
br /> Well, that was odd.
Her hair didn’t seem to stop in the right place, a few frizzy centimetres above her scalp.
It kept going.
And going.
And going.
It didn’t feel like her normal hair, either. It was sticky and crystalline beneath her fingers, as if it had been covered with gallons of hairspray and lacquer.
“I think,” said Frankie in a teeny-weeny voice, “that instead of an Instant Invisibility Spell, I might eeeeeeever-so-slightly-accidentally have done another of my Miracle Makeover charms.”
“How bad is it?” Roxy managed to croak.
“It’s bad,” said Jones. “It’s a metre-high apricot-blonde up-do.”
“It’s not bad,” snapped Frankie.
“You’re right,” said Jones. “It’s awful—”
She was interrupted by the same clear, crisp voice they’d heard in the Septagon earlier. Mrs Smith had evidently taken control of the megaphone.
“I know you’re in there, Francesca the Flotsam Fairy,” she called pleasantly.
Frankie reddened at the use of his full name and the others turned to stare at him.
“Won’t you let us in, Francesca,” Mrs Smith went on, “so we can sit down and talk about all of this? Nobody wants any trouble. Least of all those innocent girls we know you’re sheltering.”
“Back door!” said Skinny, pointing at the tatty striped curtains. “Behind there. Go!”
“I’m not leaving you, Skinny!” Frankie shrieked.
“Not you! You’re staying here with me to sort this mess out. I meant them!” Skinny jerked a thumb at Jones and Roxy.
“Hey!” Jones put her hands on her hips. “We can totally look after ourselves! A bunch of bully-boys like that doesn’t scare me!”
“Um, it scares me a bit,” Roxy mumbled. “Look, you don’t understand,” she went on as Jones glared at her. “I can’t have my sister getting into trouble because of me. She needs that cleaning job! It’s all we have. I’m not being a cowardly custard, or whatever you were thinking, it’s just—”
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