Lily and the Prisoner of Magic (18 page)
Read Lily and the Prisoner of Magic Online
Authors: Holly Webb
‘Ah. Good. A successful mission then. Though I should have come with you to start with, Lily, quite clearly. But luckily the boy could tell me where to go. Too many twisty little streets for me to follow you. The boy was quite determined that he should come too, and he draws a good map, I’ll give him that. Shall we go, then? Is everyone here?’
Lily turned round to see. Her father. Georgie. Rose. The princess. Henrietta and Gus, who’d ended up next to each other, and were pretending that they weren’t. And in front of her, his eyes brighter than she’d seen them in weeks, Peter, crooning wordless encouragement to the enormous dragon. ‘Yes.’ She smiled, feeling her father’s arm around her waist. ‘We are. We’re all here.’
T
he bullet buried itself in the canvas backdrop with a solid thud. Henrietta let out a yelp of surprise, flattening herself against the floor of the stage, with her black eyes bulging.
‘It’s not meant to have proper bullets in it!’ Lily gasped, turning to stare at Daniel, her fingernails digging into her palms.
It had been so quick. If the bullet had been about to hit one of her friends, she wasn’t sure she would have been fast enough to stop it.
Argent, who had been sleeping draped across the back of the stage, shook out his wings a little, and blew out a thin, coiling breath of smoke. ‘I have little experience with firearms,’ he said, in a low, rumbling murmur. ‘But that seemed quite real to me.’
Daniel was looking at the pistol, with a faintly puzzled expression on his face. ‘It can’t have been…’
‘I hate this trick,’ Nicholas muttered. He and Mary had only been working as Daniel’s assistants in the illusionist’s act for a few weeks, since they all returned from Fell Hall, but Nicholas swore to Lily that he had nearly died twice. Lily thought he was exaggerating, but perhaps not very much. Nicholas was ideal for the assistant’s role, being very skinny and good at getting into tight places, but he had an awful memory, and that mattered when one had to be sure in which order very sharp knives were going to be stabbed through the cabinet one was hiding in. Nicholas had been trying to magic himself a sort of metal vest. He said it wasn’t cheating, as the magic wasn’t part of the trick, but no one else was convinced. Mary found it particularly irritating, as she had no magic of her own, and had to rely on getting it right the first time.
‘Have you been messing with the pistol?’ Lily asked Nicholas suspiciously.
Mary glared at him. ‘I bet you have!’
‘I didn’t!’ Nicholas protested indignantly. ‘I honestly didn’t! It isn’t fair. Just because of that accidental green rabbit-creature, everyone always blames me.’
Daniel sat down rather shakily on the edge of the stage, laying the ornate enamelled pistol down next to him. ‘The rabbit still has a green tinge, Nicholas. And she’s really gone off carrots. I don’t like putting my hand in that hat any more, she bites.’ He sighed. ‘That wasn’t a wax bullet, was it? What happened?’
Lily came and sat down by him, and Henrietta climbed shakily into her lap, one paw stretched across to Daniel’s leg.
‘I don’t think this trick is a good idea,’ Lily muttered. ‘This time you were only testing the gun, but what if it happens again?’
‘It won’t.’ Daniel tried to sound reassuring, but it didn’t work very well. ‘There must have been some sort of mix-up.’
Mary crouched down next to them. ‘If that happened when I was firing it at you, I’d never forgive myself. And I don’t see why this trick is so special anyway. It’s stupid! Who would actually
want
to catch a bullet in their teeth?’
‘But if it worked…’ Daniel murmured wistfully. ‘It’s so dramatic…’
‘It is quite dramatic when the back of your head is spread all over the stage, yes,’ Henrietta growled.
Daniel got up, fetching the shallow box from the top of one of the cabinets. He lifted the lid with shaky fingers, and nudged the glistening black bullets, nicking them with his fingernails. ‘These are real. All of them, apart from this one at the end.’ He lifted it out, rolling it between his fingers. Then he pressed his forefinger to his lips. ‘Sweet. And it isn’t as heavy as the others. This is a sugar one, as they all should be.’
‘Mystery solved, then,’ Henrietta snapped. ‘Someone ate your sugar-coated bullets. One of the children.’ She glared around at Nicholas suspiciously.
Daniel frowned. ‘They aren’t all sugar. Just a sugar coat over the wax – baked sugar, to look like metal, you know.’
Argent shook his wings with an anxious rattling sound, and came a little closer, stepping sinuously across the stage. ‘Ah… The silvery-black things? The odd sweets, with the rather dull centre?’
Everyone turned to stare up at him, and he ducked his head, looking as embarrassed as a house-sized dragon possibly could. ‘I do so like sweet things,’ he murmured. ‘So much nicer now than marchpane, and liquorice root… I could smell them – so delicious, and the colour so nice. I did put some of the others back in the little box; there was a bag, full of them…’
‘Yes,’ Daniel agreed grimly. ‘The real bullets, for showing to the audience.’
‘Ah…’
‘I should have noticed, when I loaded it,’ Daniel muttered to himself. ‘Perhaps we aren’t ready for the gun trick – but it would get us so much publicity.’
‘Banner headline. Tragic death of foolish illusionist,’ Henrietta muttered.
‘I really do apologise,’ the dragon said, a flutey, breathless note sounding in his deep voice. ‘I shouldn’t have taken them. At least it was me that the bullet almost hit, in the end,’ he added, snaking his neck down so that he could look up into Daniel’s face. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again, breathing out a gentle cloud of sparkling, filmy magic that wreathed itself around Daniel’s face and shoulders like smoke.
Daniel sighed, and then took a breath in, shivering slightly as the magic shimmered through him, sending a silvery sheen across his skin. ‘What did you do?’ he murmured. He shook his too-long dark hair a little, as though he were shaking it out of his eyes, and it glittered. ‘I feel stronger.’
‘Mmm,’ Argent agreed. ‘It should last a while. I wanted to make it up to you. I should never have eaten them. But I have my doubts about this illusion, Daniel, my friend. Those thugs in the Queen’s Men will never believe it’s only a trick. Who could catch a bullet in their teeth
without
magic? They’ll haul you off to prison – or they would if they had one, anyway.’
He allowed himself a smug little puff of smoke there. Lily and Georgie had broken into Archgate, the magicians’ prison, with help from Princess Jane, whose royal blood could open the locks, and Rose, one of the magicians who had set the original guardian spells. But the Queen’s Men had caught them, just as they had managed to rescue their father from the cell he’d been shut in for nearly ten years. Queen Adelaide, the dowager queen, hated all magic and magicians, after a magician had murdered her husband. She had been so determined to see them caught that she’d accompanied the guards to the prison, and she’d ordered her men to kill them all. When she woke in the night, Lily could still hear the old queen’s hoarse, delighted voice, screaming gleeful orders as she saw what she had caught.
But Argent had clawed and wrestled his way down the narrow passages and into the heart of the prison to rescue them. The guard spells had no effect on him at all – in fact Lily thought they’d made him stronger. She was almost certain that somehow he ate magic. Which was good, as she wasn’t sure what else he ate, and she didn’t really want to know.
The prison had been left less than secure. The Queen’s Men had put it about that a gang of renegade magicians had attacked the palace, as Archgate was hidden under the ceremonial arch that led into the palace courtyards. Lily had read out the newspaper articles about it to Argent, with disgusted comments, until he had pointed out that actually, she was a renegade magician, and now that she had Rose, and her father, as well as Georgie and himself, and Nicholas, however accident-prone his magic was, they were almost a gang.
Lily quite liked the idea.
Lily peered around the door, trying to see into the dark little room. Her father was asleep in there, on a pile of quilts and blankets. Or she’d thought he was. If she hadn’t known, she would have sworn the room was empty.
She took a step backwards. The room was empty. She shouldn’t be there, anyway… Blindly, she turned away from the door, and tripped over Henrietta, who was sitting in the middle of the passageway, shaking her head crossly, as though her ears were itching.
Lily yelped and stumbled, putting her hands out to try to keep from falling onto the dusty floor, and then let out a little gasp of relief as someone caught her with a grunt.
‘Peter!’
He shoved her back onto her feet, holding her arms above the elbows and frowning, as though he wasn’t sure what had happened.
‘I just stumbled – I tripped over Henrietta,’ Lily said slowly, but she was staring at the dark doorway as she spoke. That wasn’t right… And where had Peter come from, just at the right time to catch her?
Moving in a sort of daze, she turned back to peer at the darkened doorway, stretching an arm across the opening.
Empty. Empty. Empty.
But it
wasn’t.
She knew it wasn’t. Slowly, as if she was swimming through a golden, sticky syrup, Lily raised the back of her hand to her mouth and bit down hard on her knuckle. The sharp little pain cleared the sticky honey trails out of her head, enough to make her see what was happening.
‘You were in there!’ she told Peter accusingly, speaking loudly, her face pressed close up against his so he couldn’t fail to understand her. ‘What were you doing? That’s my father’s room!’
