by Webb, Holly
Georgie gasped. ‘Lily, what have you done to your face?’
Lily shook her head. ‘Nothing. What do you mean?’
Georgie crept over to her, and stroked her fingers down Lily’s cheek. ‘It’s as though you’ve pressed your face on to something. What have you been sleeping on?’ She lowered her voice to a worried hiss. ‘It can’t be Henrietta. Besides, I can see her in a lump down the bottom of your bed. This looks like scales.’
Lily swallowed. The middle of the crowded dormitory wasn’t the place to tell Georgie she might have dreamed a dragon into life. Besides, from the look on her sister’s face, even if the dragon was actually there, and prepared to fly them out of Fell Hall on embroidered cushions at that very moment, Georgie wouldn’t be going. Lily was pretty sure that she had been listening to Sarah dripping poison all day yesterday. And she drank two cups of that cocoa last night, a small voice in the back of her mind pointed out.
‘Pull your hair over your face, for heaven’s sake,’ Georgie muttered.
Lily did as she was told, hurrying through her dressing. How was she going to stand that stupid drill, when all she wanted to do was talk to Peter? Their escape plan needed to happen now – before Georgie renounced her magic for ever. Lily ground her teeth fiercely as she tied her boots. If she had to drag Georgie over the wall by her hair, they were getting out.
She would just have to leave the dragons behind.
Lily could see that Miss Merganser was watching her closely, just waiting for her to make a mistake – to swing her arm left instead of right, for instance, as though the world would end if she did.
Lily concentrated. She didn’t have time to go and stand outside the schoolroom – although she would like to look at the wooden dragons again. Were all the pictures and carvings round the house one dragon? Or if she woke them up, would she be talking to a different creature?
Suddenly she snapped back to the drill class, just in time to change to raising her left foot to knee height – and not an inch higher, as that would be indelicate.
Miss Merganser looked quite disappointed, she thought.
Lily hung back as the others went into breakfast, waiting to catch Peter as the boys streamed across from their Indian club-waving. As she’d expected, he was following on behind – the other boys had no idea how to talk to him, and so they left him alone.
She’d hidden herself behind one of the doors, so that she could grab him as he went past. Luckily he was far enough after the other boys that no one would see them talking. As he came in from the garden, blinking in the gloom, she stepped out eagerly.
But he shrank back from her, a look of horrified surprise on his face.
‘What’s the matter?’ Lily asked, feeling hurt. She put her hands on his shoulders, turning him to face her properly, so he could read her lips.
He pulled away from her sharply, leaving her staggering, and she stared at him.
‘What is it?’ she murmured helplessly.
Peter reached into his pocket, drawing out a small slate, which Mr Fanshawe must have given him. He scratched on to it with sharp, anxious strokes of the pencil.
Who are you?
‘It’s the cocoa.’ Henrietta nodded gloomily. ‘It can’t be anything else. The spell on the house isn’t strong enough to make him forget who you are.’
‘Is it drugged?’ Lily whispered. She couldn’t do much more than whisper. She’d been crying so hard that her voice hurt, and her eyes were swollen. Somehow she had managed to last through lessons, and lunch, and even needlework, but the moment they had been dismissed, she had fled upstairs to find Henrietta, so they could grieve together for the friend who had disappeared. She had lost Peter and Georgie was almost gone. They were all alone now.
‘Spelled.’ Henrietta sniffed. ‘I shall see if I can get a taste of it tonight. Some of them leave their cups on the floor – I’ve seen them do it when I’ve been hiding behind that locker of yours.’
‘Don’t!’ Lily gasped.
‘It won’t work on me, stupid girl. Not if I only have a lick. But I might be able to tell what it is.’
Lily sighed, and pulled a dustsheet from an ancient-looking claw-footed armchair. She wrapped it around herself, and curled up in the chair, burying her face in the cushioned pink velvet. Crying had left her shivery and aching. Henrietta scrabbled her way on to the chair, and burrowed between Lily and the arm, where she promptly went to sleep. Worn out by crying, Lily soon followed her.
She woke some time later, confused by the strange light in the room as she half-opened her eyes. It was early evening, and the sky had been overcast all day. But now the room was bright. She sat up suddenly, her heart thudding. If someone had brought a lantern, then they had been discovered.
There was no lantern. Instead, seated in front of the fireplace, sitting up on its hindquarters rather like a dog, was an enormous, winged creature. The soft white light was coming from its silvery scales.
Lily swallowed. ‘I told Henrietta you were real,’ she found herself saying.
‘I am not quite real yet…’ the dragon told her thoughtfully. ‘I shall be soon, though, I think.’
A muffled whine sounded from beside Lily, as Henrietta woke up, and saw who she was talking to.
‘What a curious little creature.’ The dragon lowered its muzzle – which was now about the size of a tea tray – to inspect Henrietta. ‘Is it a dog?’
‘Of course I’m a dog!’ Henrietta snapped. The easiest way to distract her from anything was to insult her, as Lily well knew. ‘What are you?’
‘The oldest of the Fell Hall dragons.’ The dragon settled back on to its haunches, still eyeing Henrietta in fascination. ‘You do not look like a dog. I know dogs. You are too small.’
‘Too small!’
Lily seized Henrietta by the collar before she flung herself at the dragon. He was a hundred times larger than she was, but Henrietta tended to lose all common sense when she was infuriated.
‘She’s a pug. They were bred in China.’ Lily gazed thoughtfully at the dragon. ‘Have you really never seen a dog like her?’
The dragon shook its enormous head. ‘Wolfhounds, I know. Gazehounds. Mastiffs.’
‘I’m not actually sure what a gazehound is,’ Lily admitted. ‘Have you been not real for a long while?’
The dragon looked uncomfortable for the first time. Its dark, glittering eyes shifted away from Lily, as it tried to think. ‘It may be so,’ it admitted finally. ‘What year is this?’
‘Eighteen ninety-one,’ Lily told him, curiously.
The dragon’s claws scraped across the floorboards convulsively, but there were no marks. It was still only half real. ‘Three hundred years, then.’
‘Why?’ Lily whispered. ‘What happened?’
The dragon twitched its tail, and Lily flinched, as it seemed to be about to destroy several lumps of dustsheeted furniture. But the tail went straight through, as if it wasn’t really there. ‘Things changed,’ it murmured vaguely. ‘There was not as much magic in the earth and the air. It made it harder to fly. We were tired…’
‘Long sleep,’ Henrietta muttered, just loud enough to hear.
The dragon’s eyes glittered, and then it laughed, that same rumbling laugh Lily had heard in the night. ‘Indeed, little dog.’
‘Are you real somewhere, now?’ Lily asked. ‘It’s hard to explain. Is there, I don’t know, a cave? Where you’re all sleeping?’
The dragon swung his head round to her in surprise, and Lily pressed herself back into the chair instinctively. She suspected that when he was properly real, he would be very much larger – too large to fit in this room, perhaps. But he was big enough now. His eyes were like great, glittering, faceted apples, so close to hers. Lily was sure he was a he, now, she realised.
‘We are here.’
‘In the carvings?’ Lily asked doubtfully, peering round the back of the chair at the fireplace.
The dragon snorted a laugh. ‘No. No, I felt you through th
e stone, that was all. Your strong, delicious magic. You wanted us to be real so very much.’
‘Then where?’
‘You were almost right. Underneath. The deepest cellars. There are natural hollows and caves all through our territory. Limestone, you see. The house is built on top of a whole lacework of caves. My old self is stretched out by an underground river that comes to the surface further down this valley. Or it did, at least,’ he added. ‘So much has changed. There seems to be a great deal more of the house than there was.’
‘Why have you woken up now? It isn’t just because we tried to wake you. I saw you twitching the wings of the dragons on the banisters, and I heard you talking to me. And that was before we tried to bring the carving to life.’
The dragon half-stretched out its wings, so that they scraped the ceiling. Then he tested his claws against the floorboards again. This time, Lily thought there might be the faintest of scratches.
‘The magic has come back,’ he told her at last. ‘I feel strong again.’
‘But that doesn’t make sense,’ Lily told him helplessly. ‘No one’s doing any magic. It’s not allowed. That’s why we’re here, because we were breaking the law.’
‘Think, Lily!’ Henrietta growled, leaping on to the arm of the chair. ‘No one is doing magic! No spells are using up the magic in the air. That’s what he needs to fly, he said so! No one has been doing magic for about twenty years. It’s all there, still, sloshing around.’ She shivered. ‘Who knows what else is going to wake up.’
The dragon nodded. ‘It has been happening for a while,’ he agreed. ‘I have been waking slowly. And then the children came, and there was so much magic, seeping down to us, through the floors, through the stone. Delicious, strong, young magic filling up the Hall again.’
‘Magic that no one’s allowed to use,’ Lily snarled. ‘They don’t even want to. They think it’s evil.’
The dragon blinked slowly. ‘Magic is neither good nor evil,’ he pointed out, his voice gentle, as though he was teaching a rather stupid child. ‘How could it be? It just is. Like wind, or water.’
‘Your wings are fading.’ Henrietta leaned forward, staring at them closely.
‘I am tired again,’ the dragon agreed. ‘Soon I shall be altogether real, but not yet. Your strong magic is waking me, cousin. These last few days, the blood has quickened in me. It won’t be much longer.’
‘Then what will you do?’ Lily asked, but the dragon was fading faster and faster. If he answered, they could not hear him.
Lily and Henrietta tried again and again to find the dragon over the next few days. But he never returned to the room with the marble overmantel. Lily decided that they must have worn him out, talking to him for so long. She longed to call him back, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to summon a three-hundred-year-old legend. It would be presumptuous.
Every so often the dragons around the house fluttered their wings at her, or stretched out their tiny necks to stare at her as she went past. Little serpentine figures seemed to shine out of the carvings, glittering and blinking as she came by. Lily seemed to see more of them whenever she looked. She wasn’t sure how. Unless it meant that the other dragons were waking now too.
It wasn’t only the carvings. Wherever she went, strange flickering shapes whisked around corners ahead of her. A spiky head even seemed to dart out of the fireplace in the schoolroom once. It eyed the class thoughtfully, stared in fascination at Lily, and wreathed itself around the class as a dragon made of blueish woodsmoke. Everyone coughed, and it reared back in alarm, and then disappeared into the dull glow of the embers.
‘They’re everywhere,’ Lily murmured to Henrietta that night. The pug was hidden under her blankets, half-asleep, and she only grunted in answer.
‘They must all be waking up. Don’t you see them?’ Lily prodded Henrietta’s plump side, and she wheezed crossly.
‘Of course I do. But they’ve been haunting this place for centuries, Lily. We’re only seeing them now because we know what to look for.’
‘You don’t think there are more of them?’ Lily asked her disappointedly.
‘Maybe, maybe not. Tricksy little things. Now be quiet and let me sleep.’
But Lily lay awake. She was sure Henrietta was wrong, there were more dragons now. She could imagine the cavern, deep underneath the house. There had been an old book of engravings of the Natural Beauties of England at Merrythought, an improving volume that had been abandoned in the dusty schoolroom. It had several colour plates of amazing limestone caves, dripping with stalactites. There could have been dragons in those pictures too. The great mounds of glistening rock curled and draped over each other in strangely living shapes.
The dragon upstairs had told them that the caves under Fell Hall were limestone. Sleepily, Lily peopled the caves she remembered from the pictures with huge beasts, their shining bodies still for three hundred years, as they slumbered beside an underground river. That ragged fringe of greenish stalagmites marked the spiked spine of a sleeping dragon. She smiled dreamily to herself. It would be much easier to fight for magic if she knew a flock of friendly dragons.
But they still weren’t moving, she realised sadly, as she drifted into a deeper sleep.
The dull routine of Fell Hall was broken the next morning. Lily was half-asleep, and hardly saw what happened. After a night spent dreaming of dragon caverns, waving her arms exactly as Miss Merganser wanted them waved was taking up all her attention. But the girls around her, more awake, and so practised at drill that they didn’t have to think, were whispering and scuffling at something down by the lake. Lily blinked, and waited for the next head-turn so that she could peer across to the water.
The Indian club-waving had disintegrated into a knot of unruly boys, staring at the something lying at their feet. Then it resolved itself into a slow procession, carrying a still figure past the girls and on into the house. The figure was Peter. Lily knew it almost as soon as she saw them pick him up.
‘A fit,’ Mr Fanshawe told Miss Merganser as he came past. ‘An outbreak of his magic, clearly. The stupid boy is resisting us.’
Lily swallowed miserably as she watched the boys carry Peter inside. He was greyish pale, and one hand swung limply down from the old rug they’d used as a makeshift stretcher. He wasn’t resisting! He didn’t have any magic to resist with!
She turned to whisper to Georgie, but her sister wasn’t looking at her. She was standing with Sarah, and the two of them were shaking their heads sadly, their lips pursed.
Lily nearly snarled. How could Georgie put on that stupid disapproving face? She knew Peter. She knew it wasn’t an outbreak of magic. It was the cocoa, or the bluebottle spells, or both.
Peter wasn’t at breakfast, but he appeared in lessons, marched into the schoolroom by Mr Fanshawe, with no more colour in his face than before. He sat slumped before his desk, gazing unseeingly at his hands, which lay slackly on the wood in front of him.
At the end of the class he didn’t move, even when the other boys shoved past him. He was like a huge doll, slumping over a little further as his sawdust stuffing sagged.
‘Peter!’ Lily didn’t care any more if the other girls saw her talking to him. ‘Peter!’ She tried to make him understand, but he wasn’t even looking at her. And if he didn’t look, he couldn’t hear. There was nothing. It was as if he were locked away inside.
‘Leave him alone,’ Miss Merganser snapped. She did look faintly concerned about the state of Peter, Lily thought. But not nearly as much as she should. He was only an orphan, of course. A foundling. He had no parents who might make a fuss. ‘What are you teasing him for? Nasty, unprincipled girl! Get out of my sight!’ She hauled Peter up, and he trailed loosely from her hands, only just standing.
Lily fled, but not to the grounds after the others. Instead she raced up the stairs to the room with the overmantel. This time, she wasn’t just going to sit and stroke the marble dragon, and hope that he came back. It was too urgent for that. S
he didn’t care how old he was, or how rare, or if she was being rude. She needed him now. She didn’t know enough about magic to help Peter, and even if the dragon had been asleep for the last three hundred years, he was a legendary, mythical creature. Dripping with magic. Surely he could tell her what to do.
Henrietta was asleep on the pink velvet chair, and she woke with a start as Lily flung open the door.
‘What is it?’ she snapped, jumping up. ‘Have you done something dreadful?’
‘No!’ Lily was too worried even to protest. ‘It’s Peter. I don’t know what it is. Too much more of the cocoa, or maybe they tried to make him tell them about Mama. Whatever it was – it’s like he’s broken. He just isn’t there any more. I don’t know what to do, and I’m sure they don’t either. We need the dragon.’
‘What makes you think he’d want to help?’ Henrietta sniffed.
Lily shrugged. ‘He said it was my magic that helped him wake up. He might be grateful. And if not, perhaps he’ll do it on a promise. I’ll bind my magic to him, or something like that. A year’s service, in exchange for getting us all away from here. He said magic was delicious. He must want more of it.’
Henrietta nodded doubtfully. ‘And how are we summoning him?’ she enquired, leaping down from the chair to stand in front of the marble dragon.
Lily sighed. ‘I haven’t worked that part out yet,’ she admitted.
‘Flattery,’ Henrietta suggested. ‘It always works on me.’
‘What, O Great Dragon, we beg that you help us?’ Lily wrinkled her nose.
‘Exactly. Keep going. And perhaps kneel down, don’t you think? And the right voice, Lily. You’re begging, remember.’
Lily knelt in front of the carving, holding out her cupped hands. She felt stupid, but she had a feeling Henrietta was right. The dragon had seemed a very formal creature.
‘Great Dragon, we beg that you help us. We are in need of your mighty strength, and…’ She rolled her eyes at Henrietta for inspiration.