Emily Feather and the Starlit Staircase

by Holly Webb

  “No,” she admitted. “You know I’m awful at spelling. And they don’t look how they sound.”

  “Maybe.” Lory eyed her, a little puzzled frown pinching her nose. It was a look Emily was used to. Lark and Lory and Robin all seemed to be naturally clever, even though Robin always got into trouble for not listening, and wriggling about too much. They just didn’t understand how someone could not be able to spell. And Emily didn’t understand how someone could.

  “What about if we. . . No, that won’t work. . .” Lory sniffed. “Hey, have you still got those icing pens?”

  “Yes,” Emily said doubtfully, turning to get the box down from one of the cupboards.

  “And get me a biscuit!” Lory was enjoying herself now, Emily could tell. It made her nervous. She handed Lory a packet of chocolate digestives, which she’d hidden behind the flour.

  Her sister pulled two out of the packet and munched on one of them thoughtfully as she squeezed the icing pens between her long fingers.

  “Yellow,” she said at last, handing the others to Emily to put away. “Definitely the best colour. Pink is sickly, the green sets my teeth on edge and blue food just looks wrong.”

  “All right,” Emily said meekly. She quite liked the pink icing herself, but if Lory was going to teach her how to spell, she didn’t care what colour they used.

  “Hold the tube,” Lory snapped. “With me, there. No, tighter!” She wrapped Emily’s fingers round the tiny tube, with her own long delicate fingers over them, and together they started to write on the top of the chocolate digestive.

  “Think about tracing the words out in sugar,” Lory murmured as the icing spiralled out from the centre of the biscuit. Emily had been sure they wouldn’t fit all twelve months on one digestive, but Lory wrote with the icing as if it were any other pen, her script twirly, with little flourishes on the Ys.

  “Remember the sweetness. . .” Lory’s voice was sweet too, and a sugary haze seemed to float around them as the magic built. Emily could taste caramel in the air.

  “Now what do we do?” Emily whispered as Lory wrote December, and added a border of fancy stars around the edge of the biscuit.

  “You eat it, of course!”

  Emily eyed her suspiciously. “It’s not going to turn into something horrible?”

  Lory pretended to look hurt. “Of course not.”

  “All right. . . Do I have to eat all of it?”

  “Yes! Or you’ll only be able to spell half the words!”

  Emily picked the biscuit up. She could feel the magic in it, buzzing against the skin of her fingertips, and the scent was delicious: sweet, but not sickly. She hoped this worked, that it wasn’t just some silly game of Lory’s. She nibbled the edge of the biscuit, and the sweetness rolled on to her tongue. Somehow, along with it came a sense of the words, dancing just out of her reach, and she took another big bite. Her spelling words started to march across the front of her mind in strong, sugary letters, and she quickly gobbled the rest of the biscuit.

  Lory looked at her expectantly. “So, did it work? Spell August.”

  Emily swallowed the last few crumbs, licked icing off her teeth, and smiled blissfully. She knew it. She knew she knew it. It was the nicest feeling. “A – u – g – u – s – t.”

  “There.” Lory nodded, pleased. “Easy. You’ll always know them now.”

  Emily hugged her. “Thanks, Lory! You know, it’s funny, but now when I think about the words, I can taste them too. . . June tastes like strawberries.”

  “Does February taste like some sort of disgusting stew?” Lory shivered. She hated cold weather.

  “Ummm. More like cough sweets, I think. And it’s still a really hard one to spell. Maybe that’s why it doesn’t taste so nice.” She sighed happily, slipping into a chair next to Lory and resting her chin on her hands. They sat there together, thoughtful and sugar-dreamy, until Emily murmured, “What did Mum and Dad mean, yesterday, about Mum being worried and wanting to keep us all safe?”

  “She always does.” Lory yawned. “You know what she’s like. She fusses about stuff.”

  “Yes, but he said particularly now. What was that about?”

  “Did he?” Lory sat up straighter, frowning. “I don’t know. . . Have you noticed anything different? About Mum?”

  Emily gazed at her big sister, her eyes worried. “What sort of thing?”

  “She just seems odd.” Lory picked up the icing tube again and kneaded it between her fingers.

  “She was crying,” Lark said behind them, and Emily jumped.

  “How long have you been standing there?”

  “Not long.” Lark twisted one of Emily’s dark curly bunches round her finger and sat down next to her. “But you’re right. I think there is something funny going on.”

  “Actually crying?” Lory asked, frowning, and Emily looked round worriedly at Lark. She’d hardly ever seen her mother cry. But the last couple of times she’d curled up on the old sofa in her mum’s studio, borrowing a sketch pad and a handful of pastels, Eva had been very quiet. Not unhappy, though, Emily was almost sure.

  “Maybe it wasn’t bad crying. . .” she said, hoping that Lark and Lory would know what she meant.

  “Maybe. But she’s definitely all emotional at the moment. She keeps hugging Robin,” Lark pointed out. “He’s getting really antsy about it.”

  It was true – Robin wriggled and growled and made faces, but Eva did keep on cuddling him. And she’d been fussing at Emily too, dropping kisses on her hair as she went past, patting her face. Eva had always been a person who hugged, but Lark was right, she was a lot more cuddly just now.

  “Why is she doing it?” Emily murmured anxiously. She thought back to the beginning of the summer, when she’d been worrying about her whole family acting strange. She’d wondered at the time if her parents were splitting up. Her best friend Rachel’s mum and dad were divorced, and the weird atmosphere in the house had felt a lot like what Rachel described before her parents had split.

  “She’s – she’s not fighting with Dad, is she?” But almost as soon as she said it, Emily shook her head, and Lark and Lory snorted disbelievingly. Their parents were far too happy, even if they had argued about letting Emily and the others use their magic more.

  “No.” Lark shook her head firmly. “But something’s happening. I hate secrets. Unless I’m the one keeping them, of course,” she added, her voice annoyingly smug. A faint pink haze swirled around her just for a moment. Pink was obviously a smug colour. Lark’s dress was definitely pinker than it had been when she’d changed after school. As Emily watched, tiny glittering sequins sewed themselves all round the hem, and Lark chuckled to herself and twirled, so that the sequins sparkled and danced.

  “What have you been doing up there in your room?” Lory begged. “You have to tell me, I’m your sister. Your twin sister,” she added, glancing at Emily.

  “Nope.” Lark smirked. “It’s special, and I’m enjoying myself. I’m not telling anyone, not till it’s ready. Anyway.” She flicked her fingers, wisping her sisters’ minds away from thoughts about her room. Emily saw delicate amber-coloured stars floating towards her over the table, and she felt suddenly desperate for a cup of tea. She found herself standing up and reaching for a mug from the wooden dresser.

  But then Lory gently touched her arm, and the amber haze flickered and faded away. “It’s a spell, Emily. Don’t.”

  She didn’t even like tea!

  Emily dropped the mug back down on the shelf with a bang and scowled at Lark. “Don’t do that! You can just say you don’t want to tell us, you don’t have to put spells on me. And tea’s horrible!”

  “Stop trying to glamour us, Lark.” Lory rolled her eyes. “You’re useless at it. And we’re going to find out, you know.”

  Lark shrugged. “Sure you are, when I let you. Anyway, what I was going t
o say, before you so rudely interrupted, was that I think we should ask Mum and Dad what’s going on. At dinner.”

  Emily swallowed nervously, and nodded. It might feel too much like the evening when her family had told her who they really were. But she hated secrets too. She wanted to know. Besides, it wasn’t as if they could tell her they were fairies all over again – and nothing could be as shocking as that.

  “You ask,” Lory breathed, catching Emily’s eye as she slid into her chair. Dinner seemed to be one of Eva’s interesting creations with mushrooms. Eva liked mushrooms a lot, which did make sense. Fairies were always sitting on toadstools in books. But they’d been having mushrooms ever so often recently, and Emily was getting a bit bored with them. Perhaps she should offer to cook dinner sometimes, instead of just making puddings. . .

  “Emily!” Lory hissed.

  “Why me?” Emily glared at her.

  “Spellings!”

  “Oh, all right. . .”

  “What are you two whispering about?” Eva smiled at them dreamily, and Emily swallowed. There were golden feathery wisps around her again; she could almost the feel the feathers stroking at her cheek. Someone laughed, almost too far away for Emily to hear, and she glanced around the kitchen, confused for a second. It was as if someone had been trying to talk to her.

  “Go on!” Lory whispered, and the tiny feathers floated away as Emily blinked. Then she scooted sideways on her chair, before her big sister could elbow her in the ribs. Lory looked rather surprised, and Emily smirked at her. Her magic was definitely getting stronger.

  “We were wondering if anything special is happening,” she said in a rush, leaning across the table to look at her mother.

  Eva’s eyes widened and sharpened suddenly, her dreamy look disappearing like clouds blown away in the wind. The soft, dark grey of her eyes was suddenly shot through with bluish glints. It was as if she’d woken up inside, and Emily shifted back a little, staring at her nervously.

  “What sort of something special?” their father asked. His voice was gentle and quiet, but it made Emily feel like talking. The words wanted to spill out of her in a river.

  “It’s very rude to do that,” she told him quickly, and then she gritted her teeth, determined to hold the words back. His spell was lining up all their questions and suspicions inside her head, ready to march out. “You shouldn’t use magic to make people do things!” she finished in a rush.

  Ash blinked, his eyelids slowly hooding over his milky grey eyes, and smiled apologetically at Emily. “Sorry. I actually didn’t mean to. . . Yes, it was rude.”

  The spell faded away, and Emily felt the words melt back into her mind. “I was going to tell you anyway,” she said, a little coldly. “We thought something might be happening, that’s all. Mum’s . . . different.” She looked sideways at Eva, who blinked.

  “Too grabby,” Robin muttered, eyeing his mother irritably. “You keep mauling me about and kissing me. You know I hate it.”

  “And Dad said that you were worried about keeping us safe,” Emily explained. “Particularly now, he said. What’s happening now? That’s what we wanted to know.” She stopped suddenly, glancing between them with anxious eyes. However much Lark and Lory had laughed when she worried about their parents splitting up, Emily couldn’t dismiss it from her mind entirely. She had spent so long comforting Rachel – and Rachel’s mum and dad had always looked perfectly happy to her. The thought of something like that happening to her own family terrified her.

  “Emily, what are you frightened of?” her mother asked. Her eyes had softened to grey again, and they were clouded over with tears.

  “You are crying!” Lark said sharply. “There is something wrong.”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” Eva protested, sniffing and shaking her head, but jewelled tears were glittering around her eyes. “But we should tell them,” she added, brushing the sparkling drops away with the back of her hand and glancing at Ash.

  “Mmmm.” He nodded, but he didn’t say anything. He looked a little nervous, Emily thought, and her heart began to thud again, swelling with every thumping beat, so that it blocked her throat and made it seem hard to swallow.

  “Tell us what?” Robin demanded. “Stop making us wait.”

  Eva took a deep breath, and Emily felt Robin’s hand slip into hers under the table. She squeezed it gratefully and stared at her mother.

  Eva smiled at them, but her eyes were still wet and her voice trembled a little. “I’m going to have a baby.”

  Emily squeaked with pain as Robin’s nails dug into her palm.

  “Sorry. . .” he muttered. “A baby?”

  “Yes. In a month or so.”

  Emily stared at her mother, and leaned sideways a bit to look at her middle. From the corner of her eye she could see Lark and Lory doing the same thing. “You haven’t got a bump.”

  “It’s a glamour,” Lory said flatly. “I can see it, now that I look. So, when were you going to tell us? When it arrived? ‘Hello, darlings, this is your new brother or sister’?”

  Her mother swallowed, ducking her head. “I wanted to tell you months ago,” she murmured. “But so much has been happening. I didn’t want to break the news when we’d only just told Emily the truth about us all. It seemed too much. . . We all needed time to settle down again together. And then Dantis.” She glanced up at the white cat, who was sprawled elegantly across the top of the wooden dresser, his green eyes glinting curiously. “I’ve wanted to tell you, so much. I wanted you to be excited.”

  “Is it a boy or a girl?” Robin asked strangely.

  “I don’t know.” Eva smiled at him gratefully. “I could tell, if I wanted to, but I was leaving it as a surprise.”

  “Well, that worked,” Lory said under her breath. “I’m definitely surprised.”

  Gruff’s head appeared over the edge of the table, and for once, he wasn’t sniffing for food. He stared narrowly at Lory, his muzzle wrinkling and a low growl escaping from his mouth.

  “How could you not tell us?” Lark asked. She looked as though she was about to cry too. “No wonder we thought you were being weird. A baby. . .”

  “It’s not having my room,” Lory said suddenly.

  “No one has asked you to give up your room!” Ash glared at her. “Lory, you sound like a five-year-old. Bad-tempered and sulky.”

  “Well, you’re treating us like five-year-olds!” Lory yelled, pushing her chair back. “Did you really think it would be OK? You’ve known about this for months and not said anything to us! What else are you hiding?”

  Emily shivered, watching Lory’s hair lifting around her face, puffing out into a cloud of streaked blonde as her anger shimmered through it. Lory scared her when she was angry – and the worst thing was, she’d inherited the snarly temper from Ash. Across the table, he was reacting in just the same way. A haze of almost-visible fury was rising off him as he listened to Lory shouting. Gruff pressed himself close against Eva, and his growl grew louder, until it exploded into furious barking. Emily shuddered and jammed the back of her hand against her mouth to keep from whimpering. Gruff’s bark seemed to tear at something inside her. It swirled with Lory’s shouts and her father’s furious intake of breath to build a tension that Emily could actually see, thickening around them in a purplish storm cloud. It made Emily feel sick.

  But even so, for once, Emily was glad that Lory was kicking off. Lory was saying everything that Emily wanted to say – and if Emily had tried to say it, she would have cried. She knew she would. The tears were at the back of her nose already. It was a lot easier to let Lory say it for her.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t like the idea of a baby brother or sister. But her mother looked so happy – or she had, until Lory had started shouting. Eva had one hand resting on her tummy even now, as if she were trying to protect the child inside her from the angry voices. This little fairy child,
who would really be hers, like Lory and Lark and Robin were.

  And like Emily wasn’t.

  Even with her little bit of magic, the magic that she had been so happy about, Emily would never be one of them. She would never really belong.

  “Where will the baby sleep?” Emily asked her mother the next morning as she watched her nibble a piece of toast. Lark and Lory had gone out – Lory was still being sulky, and she had a way of stamping around and slamming doors that made the whole house feel fragile. It was definitely easier to breathe without her around.

  Eva looked at her a little cautiously. As though she was expecting Emily to be as bad-tempered as Lory had been. “Well . . . at first in our room. In a Moses basket. And then, probably in that little room just next to the bathroom.”

  Emily blinked at her, trying to think where she meant. There wasn’t a room next to the bathroom, little or otherwise. “Mum, that’s a cupboard. With all the towels in?”

  Her mum smiled at her. “I know. But . . . well, it needn’t stay that way.”

  “What, you can make it bigger?” Emily looked round their massive kitchen, suddenly wondering if it had always been this size. Did her mum just squash another cupboard in whenever she was having difficulty putting the washing-up away?

  “I can make it feel bigger. It won’t actually be bigger,” Eva explained. “But it’ll be big enough for a little one. . .” She bit her lip and looked at Emily anxiously. As though she was worried about what Emily would say next. But Eva was always so calm, so unflappable. What if the baby changes everything? Emily wondered miserably. Her mother was obviously thinking about it all the time. It was stupid and selfish to worry that her parents wouldn’t love her any more, when they had a new baby. Emily knew she was being silly.

  It didn’t mean she could stop herself thinking it, though.

  “I wonder who the baby will look like,” she murmured, glancing at her mum’s bump. She had let the glamour fade away now, and she was obviously pregnant. So pregnant that it was hard to see how they hadn’t noticed. Emily could almost make out the outline of the tiny person under Eva’s flowered tunic. As she watched, the imprint of a tiny hand appeared – as though it were reaching out to her. Emily blinked and shook her head. Of course it hadn’t. She knew that sometimes you could see babies kick, or feel them. But you couldn’t see a hand, a little hand with the fingers outstretched in a baby wave. That was stupid.