‘But what you said about girls from the Princess School going on to be rich and successful in later life? Surely if they are going to be eaten . . .?’
‘Oh,’ Crescentia laughed. ‘Not everyone gets eaten. The school deliberately takes twice the amount of girls that they need. The dragon’s taste changes week by week, and he’s always trying different things with his diet, so they need a good stock of brunettes, blondes and red-heads, for example. Girls with pale skin and dark skin. So you can survive. There’s no sixth form. If you make it through fifth form without being chosen then you get released back to your family. Although it’s supposed to be really exciting being chosen by the dragon. Like, who wouldn’t want to die young and beautiful, wearing the finest clothes and draped in the most expensive jewels? And apparently he drugs you first so you don’t even feel it.’
‘It still sounds terrifying.’
‘Yeah, right? Now you know why I didn’t want to get out of the car. My sister passed her audition two years ago. She used to send me letters, until . . .’ Crescentia’s voice started to falter, and it seemed as if she might cry. Then she pulled herself together and carried on.
‘Girls who go to the Princess School end up wanting to be eaten, apparently. They actually compete to be chosen by the dragon. The most creepy bit in my opinion is that the girl who’s chosen has to spend the night with the dragon before she is eaten the next morning. Apparently that’s what all the conversation classes and art appreciation is for. You have to go to the dragon’s lair, right to the very heart of the sunken castle, where apparently you are served a fine meal and given the most exquisite wines, flowers and chocolates, and then you have to spend the whole night there, with him. And then . . .’ Crescentia drew one finger across her throat. ‘That’s it. You get up the next morning and prepare to die.’
‘So presumably we should just fail the audition on purpose. Get there late or something and just be sent home.’
‘Ha! Sent home? If you fail the audition they put you out into the forest to run wild, and you just end up being killed or eaten by something else. A wild boar, perhaps, or a wolf. They have wolves around here, you see. There are also all kinds of weirdoes in the forest. Bandits, vagabonds, people who have been cast out of their villages. They say that some of them have formed tribes and if they find children lost in the forest they catch them and force them to act as their slaves for the rest of their lives. Trust me, you don’t want to fail the audition.’
‘Right.’
‘Also, when you think of how much our parents have spent on our dowries, like, you know, the extremely expensive clothes we take with us, and all the endless audition preparation – nails, hair, eyebrows, teeth, skin – they want something back.’
Effie looked down at her hands. Nails? She had never had her nails done in her entire life. Eyebrows? She wasn’t even sure what that meant. She brushed her teeth every day, but she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been to the dentist. But someone had bought her all those amazing clothes. Effie touched her skirt. What if . . .? What if she got to keep the clothes, and learned those skills that Crescentia talked about, and didn’t get chosen by the dragon? Surely then the Princess School would be sort of fun? Except . . . What was she thinking? How could you enjoy anything while other girls were being eaten? The whole thing was so horrible.
Effie touched her silver ring, twisting it on her thumb. It felt warm and comforting, and she knew she was stronger than usual because of it. But she also felt it would not save her if she were faced with being eaten by a dragon. How would it even feel, to go off to spend a night in a dragon’s lair, knowing that you were going to be lavished with great luxuries and then killed? It would be awful, unbearable. Effie was suddenly overcome with a feeling of wanting to put a stop to this unfair situation. But how could any one person do that?
Effie also still felt strongly drawn towards the big house by the forest. She longed to go through the gates and explore the grounds. After a while, Crescentia fell asleep in the warm afternoon sunshine and so Effie slipped off to look at the gates. They were locked with a huge brass padlock, which seemed unnecessary as they also had two men guarding them. Each man was wearing a uniform and had a sword in a scabbard by his side.
Again, Effie wondered where exactly she was. Was this the Otherworld? But she hadn’t gone into the Otherworld. She hadn’t been allowed. And, OK, here there seemed to be dragons and swords and maidens in peril – but there hadn’t yet been much talk of magic. It felt more like the past than another world. Not that Effie knew anything for sure. This was so confusing.
She touched the lock on the gates. If only it would open . . .
‘Halt and state your business,’ said one of the armed guards.
‘Sorry,’ said Effie. ‘I was just looking. Who lives here?’
‘I can’t give you that information,’ said the other guard. ‘Although,’ he dropped his voice and she could see his eyes twinkle a tiny bit, ‘if you look more closely at the gates you’ll probably find out.’
Effie stood back so she could see the gates properly again. They did remind her of something. Their shape, the ornate, complex structure . . . They were also very beautiful. They were made of dark black metal with gold detailing. There were swirls and flowers and spirals and little pictures of moons and planets and suns, all picked out in delicate filigree. She looked closely until she began to see names made out in faded gold at the top of each gate. Clothilde, it said on one side. On the other, the name Rollo was spelled out. Rollo. That reminded Effie of something, although she couldn’t think what. But she almost missed the most crucial detail. Underneath both names, and linking the two gates together, was one very familiar word. TRUELOVE, it said, and then underneath that, the word HOUSE. TRUELOVE HOUSE. So this was . . . This meant . . .
‘Please,’ Effie said to the guards. ‘I think I might be related to whoever lives here. My name’s Euphemia Truelove, you see, and— ’
‘Do you have a calling card?’
‘A what?’
‘They only accept calling cards. Or, of course, an invitation.’
‘Um . . . Could you just tell them that I’m here?’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
‘Because those are the rules,’ said the first guard.
‘Just come back when you have a calling card,’ said the second guard.
‘I don’t even know what a calling card is,’ said Effie, feeling tearful.
‘Well, we can’t help you then.’
Just then, Effie felt a tap on her shoulder. It was Crescentia.
‘What are you doing?’ she said. ‘You should have woken me up. We have to get back. There’s a lot to do before tomorrow.’
‘I just . . .’ Effie realised that she couldn’t really explain anything to Crescentia. She resolved to find some way of getting a calling card so she could return to this place. Her grandfather had told her to come to Dragon’s Green, and this must have been why. Rollo. Where had she heard that name recently?
16
‘Doesn’t make any sense,’ said Wolf.
Maximilian had finished telling him what he’d learned on the dim web about Leonard Levar. The boys had enjoyed their dinner – after their cottage pie they had been given three scoops each of Nurse Underwood’s homemade chocolate fudge ice-cream – and gone back into Maximilian’s room. Nurse Underwood had told Wolf to call her Odile and stay as long as he liked. Wolf certainly wasn’t in any hurry to get back to his uncle, who by now would be extremely angry, pacing around their cold, damp, carpetless flat and thinking up painful new punishments to teach Wolf not to steal keys. Wolf shuddered at the thought. Although since this afternoon he had felt a bit stronger, as if he had changed somehow.
‘Which bit?’ said Maximilian.
‘All of it, really,’ said Wolf. ‘So you’ve got this bloke who really loves books. Why would he want to pulp them as well?’
Maximilian shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
&nbs
p; His pager emitted a series of beeps and he picked it up.
‘Aha,’ he said.
‘What’s that?’ said Wolf.
‘Messages from a storage company. They say they’re going to send a quote in the morning. I’ve been making a plan. Now we have the key, we can get the books easily. We just need somewhere to put them. There’s M-storage as well of course, but that’s really expensive.’
As well as explaining about Leonard Levar and all his nefarious activities in the world of rare books, Maximilian had also told Wolf all about magic, or, at least, as much as he knew. Wolf hadn’t understood all of it, but he had grasped that the world was full of secretly magical people and that he was now one of them – he had epiphanised, or something weird-sounding anyway, and was maybe some sort of ‘Neophyte’– since he first touched the Sword of Orphennyus. And he understood that anything with the prefix M was enchanted or magical in some way. But M-storage? What on earth was that?
‘It’s more secure,’ said Maximilian, as if he were reading Wolf’s mind. ‘I saw an ad in The Liminal. They basically ship your stuff to the northern plains of the Otherworld and keep it there. Obviously no one apart from liminals can get to it if it’s in the Otherworld, which makes it more secure for a start. Well, Otherworlders can get to it too, but they don’t care about property the way we do . . . And the locks are magic, of course. And there’s some kind of cloaking or secrecy that they turn on at night and . . .’
‘Can’t you just stick the books in your garage?’ said Wolf.
Maximilian sighed. Surely he was supposed to be the practical one and Wolf was just supposed to provide the muscle? Maybe life wasn’t that simple.
‘That’s actually not a bad idea,’ he admitted. ‘At least, in the meantime. The only thing is that we’re going to have to work out how to get them here.’
‘Have you got any money?’ said Wolf.
‘No. Wait. Yes.’ Maximilian remembered the twenty-pound note he’d taken from Leonard Levar for Effie’s books. He explained to Wolf how he’d obtained it. ‘Do you think . . .?’ he began. ‘I mean, would it be immoral to . . .?’
Wolf shrugged. ‘I reckon for twenty quid we could get my brother to come and drive us over to the Old Town and help us break into the main shop and load up the car, no questions asked. He’s an apprentice locksmith. He’d probably do it for a tenner.’
‘Well . . .’
‘I think Effie would rather have her books back than the twenty quid,’ Wolf said. ‘And anyway, if one book’s worth twenty, think what 499 are worth.’
‘You’re probably right.’
And, Maximilian remembered with a gulp, he wasn’t exactly a moral person anyway. Before he could protest any further, Wolf had started paging his brother.
‘Where’s your dad?’ asked Wolf, when he’d finished.
Maximilian shrugged. ‘I haven’t got one,’ he said.
‘Really? Me neither.’
‘So the charity man is . . .?’
‘My uncle,’ said Wolf. ‘He took me in after . . .’ He paused.
‘What happened?’
‘My mum walked out on us after an argument with my dad. Then my dad got a new wife but then he walked out on her. Then she got a new husband and he hated me. Used to beat me up. So my uncle took me in, although he’s not much better, to be honest. How about you? What happened to your dad?’
Maximilian looked at his hands.
‘I just don’t have one,’ he said.
‘You can’t not have a father.’
‘I know. It was . . . I suppose I do have a father, but I just don’t know who he is.’
Maximilian had often dreamed that his father was a great space-traveller or millionaire or inventor, but he really didn’t know.
‘I think it was basically a sort of brief love affair,’ he said. ‘My mum has never even admitted it. I thought my mum’s ex-husband was my dad for years even after they divorced, but then I overheard them rowing and, well, you know. It sort of became clear that they split up because she was pregnant with me and that my dad was someone else entirely . . .’
‘Pretty rough,’ said Wolf.
‘Please don’t tell anyone.’
Just then there was the sound of a car pulling up outside, the heavy thrum of the engine indicating that this wasn’t one of the neighbours arriving home from their yoga class or the Women’s Institute in their sensible, quiet hatchback, but a boy racer from – horrors – Middle Town in his low-slung antique car with huge speakers and an old-fashioned cassette deck that everyone agreed produced a better bass sound than digital music ever had. This cassette deck was currently playing a recent Borders hip-hop tape with a lot of swearing in it.
‘Oh God,’ said Wolf. ‘It’s Carl. He’s never quiet.’
Maximilian turned towards the window, where he saw a young blond man sitting in a souped-up VW of a sort they definitely did not make any more. The spectacles told him that Wolf’s brother Carl was twenty-three years old and currently suffered from lower back pain and an injured Achilles tendon. His energy was relatively high. He didn’t have anything magical about him at all, not even a flicker of M-currency or the potential to carry any.
Wolf was indicating out of the window for him to quieten down, while Maximilian stuffed his bed with the spare pillow.
‘It probably won’t work,’ he said. ‘But who cares?’
‘Cool,’ said Wolf. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Are you sure you’ve thought this through?’ said Carl, once they’d filled him in on their plan and were driving towards the Old Town. He’d accepted ten pounds as payment for helping his brother and the nerd with the weird glasses.
‘Why?’ said Wolf.
‘Well, don’t you think this Levar geezer is going to work out where his books have gone and come and get them back? Or he’ll just get the Old Bill to, I don’t know, look up Max’s address or whatever and probably arrest him too.’
Maximilian had not introduced himself as Max, and wasn’t sure he liked it. He also didn’t like the idea of being arrested. This plan had been all very well when it was just a plan. As a reality it lacked something. In fact, it lacked several things. It lacked safety and security and the warm feeling of being at home just thinking.
‘Yes,’ said Wolf, ‘but they’re not going to think Maximilian’s involved, are they? The prime suspect’ll be Effie. And since she doesn’t even know we’re getting the books, we’ll all be in the clear. We can tell her at school tomorrow and . . .’
‘I could store them for you,’ said Carl.
‘Yeah, right,’ said Wolf. ‘You’d sell them back to this Levar bloke before we can even blink. No thanks. And you’d better not tell him where Maximilian lives, either.’
Carl grinned. ‘You know I sell my services to the highest bidder.’
‘But I’m your brother. That should count for something.’
‘He’s not.’ Carl gestured at Maximilian.
‘All right, what if we give you twenty quid?’
‘Done.’
‘Really, Carl, you can’t tell anyone where we take the books.’
‘Yeah, well, you’ve got to get them first.’
Carl parked the car at the bottom of the steep cobbled alley leading up to Leonard Levar’s Antiquarian Bookshop. The caves under the shop also had some kind of exit just beyond – Maximilian had found this on some old plans he’d looked at with the Spectacles of Knowledge. But when the boys looked now, they could see that this exit was heavily boarded up and covered with posters for last year’s circus and this year’s book festival. They would have to go in through the shop, as Maximilian had originally thought. But how were they going to get the books out without anyone noticing?
‘How did you load them in earlier?’ asked Maximilian.
‘We parked up there outside the shop entrance in the loading bay.’
Maximilian frowned. ‘Well, we can’t do that now.’ He started scuffing his shoe against the kerb, something he did when
he was thinking by a roadside (which admittedly wasn’t often). After a few moments he became aware of a grille in the wall just below knee height.
‘What’s that?’ he asked.
‘What’s what?’ said Carl.
‘There . . .’ Maximilian looked with the spectacles and saw that the grille was part of a ventilation system from when the caves had been used to store ammunition in one of the old wars. ‘Where does that lead?’
He brought up a selection of historical maps on his spectacles until he found the right one.
‘Aha,’ he said. ‘Right. Carl, you break us in through the main bookshop door and then wait for us out here. We’ll go in and use the key to get to the storeroom. We should be able to get back to this hatch and then pass the books through to Carl. All you need to . . . Carl?’
A woman with very high-heeled boots was negotiating the cobbles. Carl watched her curvy body as it bobbed up and down. Then she disappeared around the corner into a smaller alleyway. The only thing there was the Funtime Arcade. She didn’t look like the sort of person who’d go to an arcade, but . . .
‘Carl?’ said Maximilian again.
‘Sorry, mate.’
‘Have you got a screwdriver?’
‘Flat-head or Phillips?’
‘I don’t know. But can you get this grille off?’
‘Yes, mate.’
‘Brilliant.’
‘And you won’t just drive off with the books?’ said Wolf.
‘Not sure,’ said Carl, scratching his head. ‘Got any more money?’
This was ridiculous. The only person Wolf knew with a car was also completely unreliable. There was only one thing for it. Maximilian scanned himself. His M-currency stood at 468. It seemed that he had been given around five hundred in M-currency when he had first put on the spectacles and epiphanised, but since then using the spectacles was slowly draining his power away. Once it was gone, what then? The dim web wasn’t completely clear on how you increased your M-currency. It certainly wasn’t like buying new batteries for a radio. In those Laurel Wilde books he’d read when he was younger, the ‘chosen ones’ had seemed to have unlimited power to do whatever they liked. But in real life his power seemed to be running out, and he needed more.
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