by Amy Wilson
I pick up another one, stroke my fingers against the downy, peach-like skin. ‘Is it nice?’
‘Try it,’ he says, taking another bite.
I follow his lead, and my mouth is filled with the taste of golden honey and butter and sunshine and just a hint of spice, instantly warming me.
‘Well, that’s pretty good,’ I say after a while, when we’ve both eaten down to the core. ‘For an illusion, and all . . .’
‘It’s amazing,’ Dylan says, putting another one in his pocket.
‘You try it,’ I whisper.
‘What?’
‘Io always said you could have changed this place. You should try, before we leave.’
He squints at me. ‘Do what to it, though? Flood it with water?’
‘I don’t know – it’s your magic, not mine!’
He huffs and looks around, kicking at the snow. When it flurries up from his foot, it is no longer snow, but tiny threads of ice. He frowns, and keeps kicking at snow, lifting his arms, his eyes shining. The threads gather, and he sweeps up more and more, until I’m standing on the only patch of snow, and rising up from the pale, grass-covered ground is a great ice sculpture, a huge monument to the great shaggy golden dog that is Helios, dwarfing my tiny, slender tree.
‘Wow,’ is all I can manage, when Dylan turns to me. Helios’s frozen eyes gleam in the sun, and I feel a sharp pang at the thought of him being lost here somewhere.
‘Look what I did!’ he says, sounding as tired as I feel.
‘Look what you did!’
He gazes around, taking a great, deep breath, and then marches over to the glass at the edge. ‘We have to get out of here and find the real thing!’
‘We do!’ I say. ‘To the fox world!’
He grins, and we rush around the edges of the globe, looking for the autumn tree with its pile of fallen leaves, but the fox world isn’t there any more. Instead we find scrubby moorland with an iron-grey tower that has bars at every window, a solitary figure standing at the top, surveying the dismal sky. On the other side is another field, this one wild with heather and grasses, a golden dawn making everything glow.
‘She must have re-ordered them.’ Dylan frowns, peering in through the glass.
‘Io? Or Ganymede?’
He shrugs. ‘Either. Both. They had a deal – Ganymede would control the outside, and Io would control the inside – and they left each other to it . . .’
‘They’re as bad as each other,’ I say. ‘Let’s try this way.’
Dylan nods, and we pull ourselves through the warp in the glass to the dawn. Seedheads nod all around us, and the air is thick with wishes. The grass reaches up to our waists, and crickets chirr deep within. The sky is a sweep of pale gold, turning to pink on the horizon. We spread our arms and run our fingers over the tips of the dry stalks, treading carefully as we start to search for the way out. It’s warm here, though, and after all the chaos of Ganymede’s house it’s hard to rush.
‘What does it feel like?’ Dylan asks. ‘Knowing you might see her soon, after all this time?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I’m trying not to think about it too much. I don’t really know what happened; if she’s here, why she’s stayed so long . . .’
‘Time passes strangely,’ he says. ‘Maybe she doesn’t know it’s been years.’
‘Is that better or worse, though?’ I ask, catching at wishes and releasing them, unused.
‘It would mean she didn’t leave you on purpose.’
‘Which is a good thing. But . . . I don’t even know if I’d recognize her, Dylan. I don’t know her at all. She missed so much.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Thank you for saying what you did to Ganymede.’
He shrugs, his sadness filling the air between us. He doesn’t say it, but it’s there. His dad isn’t here. However far we travel, however many worlds we find, he won’t be here.
‘What was he like?’
‘Tall,’ he says after a long silence as we reach the middle of the field. Glass winks in the distance, and somewhere over there is another globe. ‘He had a beard, so he was always scratchy. He was away a lot with work, but when he came back he’d bring something from wherever he’d been. Nothing special: just driftwood, or pebbles, shells. Once an old coin.’ He blows at the wishes that drift too close. ‘He laughed a lot. And he was messy. Mum used to despair.’
‘He sounds a bit like a pirate,’ I say.
‘That’s what she called him when she was cross.’ He smiles. ‘Ole piratehead.’
We keep walking towards the other side of the glass, the dry grass rustling as we go, heat broken by a gentle summer breeze.
‘So I reckon we look for Io’s globe,’ I say. ‘I think we’ll feel her magic when we get closer; it was so strong before. And then we’ll just have to deal with her and get her to hand over Helios and my mum. What do you think?’
‘I guess it’s as good a plan as any.’ Dylan sighs. ‘It would be nice if we found them without having to deal with her.’
‘We can hope,’ I say, and then there’s a roll of thunder that makes the earth quake beneath our feet. ‘What was that?’
‘A storm?’
‘Doesn’t feel like . . .’
The thunder gets louder, the ground trembles and a great white stallion comes flying towards us, steam rising from its flanks, its rider shouting, ‘Yah! Yah!’ We throw ourselves out of the way as the horse comes to a sudden stop, shying and snorting, the rider falling with a crash of metal to the ground.
‘Godforsaken steed,’ comes a dark mutter.
Dylan and I pick ourselves up, and the pile of metal slowly unfolds, rising with a clatter and a creak to form the shape of a man in armour, helmet slightly squashed over his head. He pulls it off with a curse and stares at us.
‘So here you are,’ he says, turning in a circle round us, his nose in the air. He is quite short. His curly brown hair is stuck to his head with sweat, and he sounds like a clash of pans when he moves. ‘I have heard of you – ruinous children, come to thwart our lady.’
I sigh.
‘Ah, ’tis not so bad,’ says the man. ‘For I have heard tale that you offer freedom! Is that right?’ He stalks towards his mighty horse and with a command the great white animal drops to its knees so that the little man can climb back up. ‘Is it?’ he demands, looking down on us.
‘That’s our plan,’ I say, but it comes out a little bit choked because his beautiful horse is not a horse at all. There’s a great shining horn at the centre of its forehead. ‘Is that . . . is it a unicorn?’ I step closer as the unicorn scrambles to its feet, and cautiously lay my hand against its neck. I feel coarse hair, the beat of its heart, the sweep of eyelashes as it looks down at me and blinks huge dark eyes.
‘Why yes!’ says the man, pulling nervously at the reins when the unicorn lowers its head to sniff at me.
I stroke its nose, trying to breathe in the whole sense of it. A unicorn! After all those daydreams, all those imagined adventures, I’m actually stroking a unicorn!
‘But not really,’ says Dylan.
‘What do you mean, young sir?’ demands the man.
‘You’re a magician, so you’ve made your horse look like a unicorn, haven’t you?’
I give Dylan a withering look as the unicorn pulls away from me.
‘It’s probably a little donkey in real life,’ Dylan says, skirting the animal.
The man gives a gasp and starts to rummage at his belt.
‘Dylan!’
‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m very sorry, sir.’
He gives a little bow, and the man looks appeased, though I can still see the twinkle in Dylan’s eye.
‘I am Sir Jones,’ says the man. ‘And this is my gallant steed, Eugene –’ the steed whinnies, as if in agreement–‘who is most certainly not a small donkey, not in any reality we might consider.’ He pulls his helmet back on. ‘I came to let you know that we cannot help you. By all that is right, we shou
ld hold you here and alert our lady. However, we are tired. We spent the night at a party two globes over. We will take our leave, and imagine ourselves to have dreamed of two little children with mischief on their minds. And when we wake we will know that even in our dreams we did not help them, did not guide them on the right path.’ He winks and points over to our left, leaning down. ‘But go quick, for my lady is on the warpath and looking just for you!’
He yanks on Eugene’s reins and gallops off with a clatter, a cloud of wishes following in his wake.
‘Think we can trust him?’ Dylan asks, looking in the direction Sir Jones pointed.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I think we can. If he has the heart to imagine himself a unicorn, I’m sure he has the heart to imagine freedom.’ And I strop off without him in a rustle of grass.
The next world is a tiny town, perched near the top of a mountain, only its crown caught in the globe. We should be cold – every narrow winding street glitters with frost, and twisted spindles of ice line the eaves of the rounded, scrunched-together houses. Candles are lit in the windows, and somewhere in the distance children are singing. Trees line the streets, and there are tiny lights set in all the branches. Overhead, stars wink between shifting clouds, which dust the little thatched roofs in snow as they pass.
‘This kind of winter isn’t so bad,’ Dylan says, his eyes glowing as we edge past the clock tower that perches in the middle of the town, trying not to alert the magician here to our presence.
I can feel their magic, tinsel-bright and warm, but ahead is the pull of Io’s own power, making the stone in my ring glow bright as a small red sun, and I don’t want to be diverted now. I don’t want her to find us before we find her.
‘This way,’ I say, crunching up over a little bridge to where the glass sweeps down, a pucker in its surface clearly visible.
‘But I can smell gingerbread,’ Dylan complains, his eyes lingering on the clock tower, where the magician’s presence is strongest. ‘Maybe the kind of person who has gingerbread would know where Helios is . . . He might have been drawn here!’
‘When was gingerbread ever a good thing?’ I whisper, pulling him onward. ‘Gingerbread houses mean children in ovens, Dylan – all the stories say so. Let’s hope Helios didn’t get drawn here!’
‘We make a gingerbread house every year,’ he protests. ‘And we don’t bake children – or dogs!’
‘You are not a magician in a snowglobe.’
He grins. ‘Actually I am. So are you!’
I reach out with a laugh, put my hand through the ripple . . . and we’re sucked into the next world, where it feels as if Io is already in full storm. The night sky is dense, and the ground is a plunging, swooping carpet of glittering midnight-blue sand. A solitary winter tree is the only feature, and we scrabble over to it, clinging to its thick, rough trunk as everything shakes. Something calls from overhead, and when we look up there’s a shadow clinging to one of the branches, only its eyes clearly visible, glinting at us.
My lady! calls the shadow in a thin voice. They are here! If you would only stop your tumult, you would see . . . they are here!
But the storm continues, the sand shifting beneath us, the whole world swooping up and over, tiny golden stars spinning down from the sky, their edges cutting into our skin. For a split second I can see a huge eye staring in at us, but Dylan loses his grip on the tree, and I dive for him, clutching at his shirt as we’re turned head over heels, over and over, until we crash against the glass edge of the world and straight through, into cold, clear water.
My breath escapes in tiny bubbles, and I don’t know which way is up. Dylan swims over to me while I flounder, losing feeling in my limbs, and propels us to the surface. A low, flat wooden jetty rises up on stilts beside us – we’re in a lake, a wooden cabin on the grassy shore, cherry blossom trees shedding their petals all around it. Dylan pushes me out of the water and I flop on to the jetty, spluttering and shivering.
‘Ganymede,’ I manage finally, my throat hoarse, when he’s dragged himself up after me, lying face up, breathing hard.
‘What?’
‘The storm wasn’t Io – it was Ganymede. I saw her looking in. She’s searching, Dylan, shaking up all the worlds to find us.’
‘That’s all we need,’ he whispers. ‘Both of them turning everything upside down. What was that thing in the last place?’ He shudders. ‘Made my skin prickle.’
‘Definitely someone on Io’s side,’ I say, flipping on to my back and staring up at the sky. Somewhere here is a magician, so we should be leaping up and moving on, but I’m so tired.
‘Or something,’ Dylan says.
‘They’re all people, though, aren’t they? All the magicians. Just people with magic, like us.’
‘I’m not like that!’
‘Maybe you would be if you’d been in here for a couple of hundred years.’
‘Are we going to let them all out when this is over? Even the bad ones?’
I sit up, crossing my legs and looking at the wood cabin at the other end of the jetty. ‘I guess so. I mean, people are all sorts, aren’t they? Can’t lock them all away just because they give us the creeps.’
‘If they do something bad, though . . .’
‘Then it would be human-bad, with added magic. They’d end up in prison.’
He frowns and drags himself over to sit by me. ‘I don’t know. Not if they could make themselves invisible. Or fly, or something.’
‘I’ve not seen anyone here with that kind of power. My mum’s book says power is just an extension of nature. Like you, with water. And she says Ganymede is all about silver and the moon. And Io is gold and the sun and stormy passion, which we’ve seen plenty of already.’
‘What’s your mum?’
‘Earth. Gardening.’ I sigh. ‘Which is what I seem to have inherited.’
‘What’s wrong with that? I liked your flowers, back at school.’
‘I just never pictured myself as a gardener. I mean, I enjoyed fixing her garden a bit, but I’m not sure it’s really me.’
‘Maybe we haven’t worked you out yet,’ Dylan says, getting slowly to his feet and holding his hand out. ‘You could be a bit of all of it. Look what happened with Jago . . .’
‘I think that would happen to anyone if they had magic and didn’t know how to use it,’ I say, letting him pull me up.
‘Here, let me try something,’ he says, frowning at my shivers. ‘Maybe I could . . .’ He narrows his eyes, makes a flicking motion with his hands, and droplets of water fly away from me, spattering on to the jetty. ‘Oof,’ he mutters, turning a bit pale. ‘That was quite a lot.’
‘You did it!’ I grin, looking down at my dry clothes, reaching up to touch my dry hair. ‘That’s amazing! Can you do it for yourself?’
He mumbles a bit and draws his hands together over his chest before sweeping them out in the same motion. Water flies up into the sun, making tiny rainbows. I dart out of the way before I get drenched again, and he falls to his knees on the jetty, dry but completely exhausted.
‘Need a bit of practice,’ he says with a pale smile, as a young woman bursts out of the cabin and runs on to the jetty. She’s more like a fairy than a person: light and nimble, her dark hair caught up high in a tight bun, white dress floating around her knees.
‘Oh but, dears – you mustn’t force your magic that way; you’ll hurt yourselves!’ she cries in a soft voice, sweeping over to us, her brown feet silent on the wood. ‘My, but look at you both: you’re so new and shiny! How on earth did you end up here? Was it Io? Has she transplanted you here to keep an eye on me?’ She draws back with a frown. ‘But no. You are not spies. You are more like hunters! What are you hunting, my dears? May I help?’
She seems to question herself, dancing to the edge of the jetty and looking down into the water as if it might have the answers. ‘I may!’ She laughs, turning back to us. ‘I am myself, and myself approves of this. So tell me, dears, what is it you seek? Let me guess, let
me guess – I am sure I can . . .’
She steps around us, her dark eyes glittering, blossoms sweeping from the trees that surround her cabin. ‘Both here for heart, I see, so much the better. You –’ she stares up at Dylan, her face turning serious – ‘for your dear puppy; the one who saw you through so much misery.’ She reaches up and flicks him on one ear, earning a surprised yelp from him. ‘You must not dwell in that misery much longer, dear soul. Your father is still within; he will never leave you. And you have magic! And heart! You have much!’ She nods, as if satisfied.
‘Now you . . .’ She turns to me, putting her head on one side like a little curious bird. ‘You. For your ma, who left you so long ago. Oh, she didn’t mean to! It is writ in you, bold as blood. She is here, you know.’ Her mouth twists. ‘Io has your answers. Oh, dear. You must face Io.’
She backs away from us. ‘Now let me see, let me see if I can help. Ah! Yes!’
She puts two fingers in her mouth, leans forward, her eyes intent upon the cherry blossoms, and lets forth a piercing whistle. It resounds through the snowglobe, makes ripples in the lake, sends whole branches of blossom cascading into the air. And then, through the trees, a familiar shape comes bounding, golden fur catching the light, tongue lolling from a huge doggy smile.
‘Helios!’ Dylan cries, running to meet him.
I watch, not breathing, as they pelt towards each other and meet in a crash of bodies. Helios jumps up and puts his paws on Dylan’s shoulders, his head resting into his neck, as Dylan puts his arms round his furry body, and they stand like that for the longest moment, while our new friend dances on her tiptoes with delight, and I try to keep my tears silent.
‘Oh, my dear, let them fall!’ she says, turning to see me. ‘It is a help, is it not? I cannot fix the rest for you, and there is far to go. At least now you do it with your faithful friend. At least now you may search for just one, yes?’
‘Yes. Thank you,’ I say, grinning as Dylan turns to me, and Helios comes flying over, knocking me back on to the jetty and covering me with slobber.