by Webb, Holly
‘There wasn’t time. And you still aren’t well,’ Lily pointed out.
‘I’d be even less well if something happened to you two,’ her father muttered. ‘And Peter. I was grateful you had him with you, at least.’
‘Did you find out what they are going to do?’ Argent asked impatiently, nudging at her father with his massive snout.
Lily frowned. She had been trying to think it through on their way home, but as they got further away from the pretty white house her memories had blurred and faded. Georgie could remember nothing, except dancing, but even that seemed like a dream, she’d said.
‘It was the music...’ Lily told them, looking at Peter for confirmation. ‘It was such a strong spell, it even called me in, and I don’t have any of Mama’s magic in me. Peter stopped me, because he couldn’t hear it. It couldn’t get him.’
They were all mad, Peter scribbled, holding his little pad up to the dragon, who peered at it cross-eyed and shook his head.
‘He says we were all mad,’ Lily told Argent. ‘It was awful, and wonderful at the same time. I wanted to be part of it. But after Peter grabbed me, I could see it was something strange they were calling up. It even smelled weird. I think anyone who hears it will join in – they won’t be able to fight.’
‘And the more people who join, the stronger the spell will grow,’ Lily’s father mused. ‘It sounds as though they’re planning to harness the power of the crowd. Clever. Very clever and nasty. Did they tell you where you’ll be?’ he added thoughtfully. ‘It would help to know. Then we could at least try to build some sort of counter-attack. Or somehow divert the queen, so she never gets to that part of the procession. But these things take planning...’
‘And strength,’ the dragon reminded him, his rumbling voice very gentle. ‘Strength your wife took, before Lily shut her up in that painted tower. You don’t have it in you to fight in two days’ time, and nor does Rose.’
Mr Powers subsided back onto the dragon’s leg, drawing Georgie to sit beside him, and sighed. He did indeed look very weak, as though the terror of discovering that his girls had disappeared had drained him all over again.
‘Just you then,’ Henrietta muttered glumly, nudging her damp nose into Lily’s leg. ‘As usual. And me, of course.’
‘And me,’ Argent growled. ‘I think the time for secrecy is past, Lily. We are unlikely to defeat such a powerful, well-planned spell without making ourselves obvious. We may as well be dramatic about it. And I have a taste for this dark magic now, after I ate away your mother’s spells. Perhaps it’s time for the world to see that dragons are no fairy tale.’
‘I wish it would just happen...’ Georgie murmured. ‘I hate this waiting.’
It was early morning, and they were sitting in a pool of sunshine in the little yard behind the theatre. Argent had curled himself there ready to take off, and everyone was sitting along his back, between the spikes. Even Rose was there, wrapped in a blanket, with Princess Jane watching her anxiously. Rose and the girls’ father were going to scry from the theatre, and watch. They had borrowed a battered old flugelhorn from one of the musicians, and Peter had polished it to a mirror shine. Rose had shown them that she could see things in its glowing sides – they had watched Daniel eating black treacle out of the tin in his office, his secret vice. Mr Powers was determined that if the girls were in danger he had to know, so he could help, whatever it cost him, and Rose felt the same.
When the spells called Georgie, Lily and Peter were to go with her again, and Argent would wait at the theatre until the great dance spell began, and Lily called him. She could feel him in the back of her mind, waiting eagerly, like a huge vat of extra magic. It made her light-headed.
‘The procession’s due to start at ten,’ Daniel muttered. He was striding up and down the yard – as much as he could when most of it was full of dragon. He had to turn every couple of steps, or hop over a tail-end. ‘It’s nine already. So they must want you for one of the later parts, surely, or you’d have been summoned by now.’
‘Yes,’ Georgie agreed wearily. He had been saying things like this for hours, it felt like.
‘So perhaps the presentation of the troops out at the Artillery Field?’ He frowned. ‘Although surely they wouldn’t want to have all those soldiers around. It would just be stupid. And I can’t see the Queen’s Council agreeing to a dance there, it would be too odd... But after that there’s only the ceremonial procession down the river. The queen will be on the royal barge, she won’t be close enough to any masque you’re doing for it to matter, surely.’
‘We don’t know, Daniel,’ Georgie snapped. ‘I don’t know when I’m going to do it! Just stop talking about it!’
‘But I have to know!’ Daniel hissed back at her, grabbing her hands. ‘How am I supposed to come and fight for you if I don’t know where you’ll be?’
‘You aren’t coming!’ Lily told him, gaping. ‘You haven’t any magic, Daniel, you won’t be –’ She had been about to say, You won’t be any use, but she stopped before she got there. It would have been an unforgivable thing to say. Instead she just stared at him, and at Georgie, whose eyes were full of tears as she gazed into his.
‘When did that happen?’ Henrietta muttered. ‘I swear I only turned my back for a minute.’
‘What?’ Lily turned herself away from the pair of them. There was something magnetic about the way they were staring at each other.
‘Them! Look at them, they’ve gone sweet on each other.’
Lily glanced back doubtfully, and noticed that Georgie had put her hand over Daniel’s, and she was crying. Again.
‘Well, at least she’ll be provided for, if we make it out of this with whole skins,’ Henrietta said, matter-of-factly.
‘She isn’t old enough to have a sweetheart,’ Lily whispered, glancing worriedly at her father. But he was only smiling at them rather sadly.
‘She’s nearly fourteen, isn’t she?’ Henrietta shrugged. ‘Daniel’s only three years older. It’ll stop all those ballet dancers setting their caps at him, at least.’
‘And maybe that red-headed juggler will stop mooning around after her,’ Argent rumbled.
Lily blinked. She seemed to have missed all this. But then she’d had more important things to worry about.
‘Georgie?’ Daniel was still staring at her sister, but his foolish smile had been replaced with a look of panic. ‘Lily, she’s not right!’
‘Is it happening?’ Lily leaned around the spikes on Argent’s back to stare into her sister’s face. She shivered. Georgie’s eyes had gone shallow and silvery, like mirrors, and all the expression had been wiped out of her face. She slipped carelessly down the dragon’s side, landing perfectly as the magic took over, and marched away across the yard. They had left the little back gate unlocked – she had to get out, so they might as well make it easy for her, they’d reasoned.
She yanked it open and disappeared out into the back streets, and Lily tucked Henrietta under her arm and hurried after her, quickly kissing her father goodbye.
‘Remember that tapestry spell,’ he called after her. ‘It’s only a thread, Lily. One thread woven through her. We must be able to save her, I’m sure we can. You can...’ he added quietly, his voice full of disappointment.
Lily nodded, but the tapestry didn’t make her think of one dark thread. It doubled over on itself, over and over. The blackness had been spread throughout the whole of Georgie’s story, and they’d half killed her trying to wrench it out.
Daniel and Peter followed Lily as she set off after Georgie, making that same journey back towards the white house, though today the streets were full already, with everyone dressed in their best, ribbon rosettes pinned to their coats.
‘Wait outside the house,’ Lily told them, as they hurried past a crowd of smartly dressed children, buying penny flags from a man wit
h a tray full. ‘At the end of the street, maybe. They won’t let you in.’ She wasn’t even sure if they would let her in, today, but no one stopped her as she dashed up the stone steps after Georgie. Several other children were converging on the house, all with that same strange, determined look in their eyes. There was no one guarding the door, and Lily simply followed the others.
‘I know where it will be.’ Henrietta hissed, as they followed Georgie to the room they had been in before.
Lily looked down at her. ‘What? How can you know? Did you hear them say something?’ She hadn’t heard anything – all the children were horribly silent.
‘No. I can smell it. This house backs onto the river. I should have thought of it before, but Daniel said it this morning, don’t you remember? The grand procession down the river, on the royal barge. They aren’t performing this scene on the riverbank, Lily, they’ve got a boat, I’ll wager you anything. A boat, moored at the back of the house, and it’ll draw up beside the queen. And then they’ll sink us all.’
‘But they’ll drown, if they’re still caught up in the spell,’ Lily whispered back in horror, as they watched Georgie slip behind a screen to change.
‘Of course. That’s what your father said, isn’t it? Those sorts of black spells are stronger if people die, Lily. Even if they don’t know they’re going to.’
‘I read about the boat procession,’ Lily murmured. ‘There’s hundreds of them. So many boats. If the people on all those boats get caught up in the music of the spell, it’ll be a disaster.’
‘It’s much easier to take over running a country, if there’s been some dreadful calamity.’ Henrietta gazed solemnly up at her. ‘People will agree to anything when they’re grieving. They’ve planned all this very carefully, Lily. They’ll work their way into power on the back of it somehow, you’ll see.’
‘No.’ Lily shook her head. ‘We’re going to stop it.’
‘Yes.’ But Henrietta didn’t look very convinced. The children were starting to come out from behind the screens now, draped in brightly coloured tunics, trailing strings of shells and seaweed. Several of the boys were carrying model ships, as though they were going off to sail them in the boating pond out in the park.
Lily followed them as they streamed through the house and out onto the perfectly smooth green lawns that sloped down to the river. Henrietta glanced smugly at Lily as they saw a strange floating platform moored at the end of the garden, with a fussy little steamboat, draped in flags, ready to pull it away.
‘They aren’t going to let us aboard,’ Lily realised suddenly, as they watched the children take up their positions on the barge. Georgie, wearing a pretty rose-pink tunic, knelt in her circle with the Dysart girls, and didn’t even look at her. ‘If it’s on the river, I can’t be there, can I? I didn’t think of that.’ She turned to one of the women watching with her, and smiled, trying to look as natural as she could. ‘Please, where would be the best place to go and watch?’
The woman gasped, as though she was trying not to cry. ‘Oh – oh, I don’t know...’ She looked very like the girl with the dark red hair, Lily realised, and she knew what was going to happen.
Lily summoned up an excited smile. ‘That’s my sister, there. She’s so lucky, being chosen to dance for the queen. I do want to see her.’
The mother smiled back at her, a ghastly stretched smile. ‘Davenhall Bridge,’ she murmured. ‘The queen comes onto the barge at Davenhall Bridge.’ Then she stumbled away, a lace-edged handkerchief pressed against her mouth.
‘The queen comes onto the barge...?’ Lily muttered. ‘Oh, of course...’ The throne in the centre of the scene was empty now, and that girl at the rehearsal had looked so bored because she was only the understudy. They weren’t relying on the barge floating near the queen at all. She was going to be right there, in the very centre of the spell.
Lily cast one last look at Georgie, pale and poised on the river, and fled back up the lawns to the house. There had been another barge, this time with oarsmen seated along the front. Jonathan Dysart had been standing beside it, and many of the parents Lily had seen at the rehearsal had been going aboard. They wanted to be there, to see their children dance. Of course they did. Lily swallowed back a sense of sickness. But at least it meant that the house was empty, and no one stopped her as she ran through the echoing rooms and out onto the street, to find Peter and Daniel, and hope that one of them knew the way to Davenhall Bridge.
‘I think it’s this one up ahead,’ Daniel muttered, panting. They had got a hansom cab as far as they could, but the streets were blocked with people, and they had been more than a mile away when they had to start pushing and pleading their way through the crowds.
A low cheer began, rumbling through the crowd, and cries of ‘The queen! The queen!’.
‘Is it happening already?’ Lily gasped. ‘How did they get here so fast?’
‘Boat full of magicians, isn’t it?’ Henrietta snapped. She had been kicked several times, and was in a foul mood. They had wasted a good five minutes apologising to the last person who’d accidentally kicked her – she had bitten him back. ‘And the river takes them straight here. We had to follow the roads.’
‘Listen!’ Lily moaned. ‘The music, I can hear it starting. We have to get to the front.’ She ran forward, elbowing her way through, Henrietta snapping fiercely at people’s ankles. A few people pushed back, or shouted at her, but already the music was floating across the water, and they were staring raptly forward, some of them swaying slightly. Lily had thought that the barge would be too far away, in the middle of the wide river, but she could hear the haunting whisper of the flute quite clearly.
‘Don’t listen,’ she yelled, turning back to look at Daniel, and he shook himself, and stuck his fingers in his ears. Lily gritted her teeth, and started to hum the very rude song that the scene painters had been singing the day before – Georgie would be furious with her, she thought, feeling an insane urge to laugh. But anything to keep that music out of her head.
At last she pushed through to the balustrade, and saw the barge floating by underneath the bridge, with the queen’s own royal barge close by, the crew pulling back in a sort of floating walkway that they must have used for her to cross between the two boats. They were concentrating hard, Lily could tell, but the barge was drifting, the gilded oars dipping in and out of the water out of rhythm. The music was catching them already.
On the other barge, the queen was seated on the golden throne, cradling one of the model ships. It was meant to be some sort of reference to the sea and the Navy, Lily supposed. All those shells and ships. Foreign trade and the empire, she thought vaguely. It must have seemed very sensible. Quite right and proper. But it was all a front.
Queen Sophia was slumped forward, but Lily couldn’t tell if that was the spell, or the strange sickness she already had. Lily stared into the whirl of dancers, trying to see Georgie, but she couldn’t pick her out, even with that pink tunic. They seemed to be moving too fast, weaving in and out of each other in powerful, dizzying patterns. It was hypnotic, and Lily shut her eyes quickly as she felt the magic begin to seep inside her.
Around her, the crowd of watchers had begun to move in unison, taking hands and bowing gravely to each other, before they set off in a stately swirl, families separated by the spell, even the tiniest children dancing perfect steps.
‘Argent!’ she screamed into the air. ‘Come now! It’s happening!’ There was no need to call out loud; he would have heard if she had spoken silently. But it helped. It felt like she was doing something.
The dancers on board the barge had changed now – it was a circle, like a whirlpool, with a still centre. The throne. But in front of the queen was another figure, and Lily swallowed miserably as she saw that it wore a rose-pink tunic. All their mama’s wishes had come true, and Georgie was leading the spell.
Her sist
er’s arms were stretched out wide, and her face was lifted up to the sky. She was turning slowly, and Lily had a sudden memory of seeing her do this once before, back on the island, when she must have had a rare free moment from their mother’s training. Georgie had been smiling then, blissfully soaking in the sun.
Lily could smell that strange darkness again, and the taste of black, oily water was in the back of her throat. It was the riverbank, she realised, the stretch of filthy mud that led down into the deep centre of the river. The water was moving in sluggish swirls around the barge as the magic stirred it up, building it into a dark shell over the dancers, blotting them out completely. Lily wondered if it would simply sink back into the river, dragging the barge and the queen and the children with it, but the water was still turning and twisting, and shaping into something else, something that was growing in the sky above the river.
Lily realised what it was as she heard the solid thudding of wings against the wind, and looked up to see Argent circling overhead.
Georgie was making a dragon of her own.
Lily reached up her hands to Argent, and the huge silver dragon scooped down one claw to lift her and Henrietta out of the crowd. She could see Peter reaching after her, but she didn’t grab his hand. She wanted him with her, of course she did. But this was between her and Georgie now; she couldn’t drag Peter into any more danger.
She clambered up into her space behind the dragon’s neck, and Argent circled over the river, watching the black water dragon emerge from Georgie’s spell.
‘That – thing – is bigger than I am,’ he told Lily. He sounded rather shocked. But then, it was probably the first time he’d met anything bigger than he was.
‘It isn’t real...’ Lily said doubtfully. It might only be made of mud and water and magic, but it was still there. And it was solid enough to carry Georgie, Lily realised, swallowing painfully. Her sister was sitting on its back, echoing her own position on Argent. ‘It’s because of you,’ Lily murmured. ‘That’s why she’s made a dragon, we made her think of it. The spells use what they can find. Like she sewed the magic inside herself, because sewing’s what she loves to do.’