Lily and the Shining Dragons (14 page)

‘Do we have to do that every day?’ Lily whispered to the girl in front of her, as they marched back into the house.

‘Drill has been proven effective in occupying restless energies.’ Miss Merganser seemed to have appeared from nowhere. ‘Which you clearly have, Lily Powers. Your display was despicable. You had better miss breakfast. Go and stand outside the schoolroom.’

Lily sighed, and trudged away. She wasn’t used to that much breakfast at home anyway, even though the food at Aunt Clara’s had been a great deal more plentiful. She would manage.

She occupied the time trying to remember her dream, as she stared vaguely at the carved wooden staircase in front of her. She hadn’t noticed as she’d been hurrying up and down those stairs – usually with someone shouting at her – but there were creatures carved into the banisters here and there. Strange snakes or lizards hiding in the leafy branches that made up the main pattern.

Glancing quickly down the passage to the dining room, Lily stepped away from the schoolroom door to stroke the little wooden beasts, tracing her fingers over the carvings. They were definitely lizards, not snakes; they had legs. But there were odd bumps on their backs too. She’d taken them for part of the spray of carved flowers that curled above the creatures, but now she was closer, and it was clear that they were meant to be growing out of the scaly backs.

‘Wings,’ she muttered, and smiled to herself. ‘Dragons.’ Had no one else ever noticed them? The portraits of the magicians had been taken down, and the magical books removed. She would have expected that these sly little beasts would have been cut out – or at least had their telltale wings removed.

As she thought it, she heard a sharp, tapping tread further down the corridor, and she shot back to her place outside the door so quickly that the carvings seemed to move. She could have sworn the wings fluttered in dismay, stretching out as though their owners wanted to check they were still there. Had they heard what she was thinking? But she couldn’t look again to check. Miss Merganser was marching down the passage towards her, and even though Lily had never been to school, she knew enough to keep her head down, and look sorry.

‘Well, I hope missing your breakfast has shown you the error of your ways,’ the warden told her sweetly, and Lily shivered. Miss Merganser’s voice had no spells in it to make it so unnerving. It was just her, which made it almost worse.

She nodded.

‘Speak when you’re spoken to!’

‘Yes, Miss Merganser.’ Lily glanced up, carefully not looking at the banisters, in case they twitched again.

‘Very well. You may go and sit in your place, and wait for the others.’ Her sharp-heeled boots pattered away, and Lily chanced another look at the carvings. But they were still now, even when she touched them. She wondered how old they were. The tops of the banisters were worn into smooth waves with what must be hundreds of years of hands stroking down them. If the staircase was part of the original house, Lily was fairly sure it had been built in the 1500s. There had been a particularly famous Fell, who had been granted the land by the king. She had read about him, hiding from the sea wind behind a gorse bush on the cliffs, back at Merrythought. It had started to rain, though, and Lily wasn’t sure she had ever finished the book.

Her eyes widened as she remembered the illustrated heading of the chapter on the house of Fell. Richard Fell had been rumoured to own a dragon…

‘I thought you were going to lie low!’ A snarl sounded somewhere around Lily’s ankles. ‘We’re not supposed to be drawing attention to ourselves, remember? What are you doing getting yourself into trouble?’

Lily’s heart jumped inside her, half with fright and half with happiness, and she caught Henrietta up in her arms. ‘You got inside!’

‘Sshhh,’ Henrietta said disapprovingly, but she did lick Lily’s ears. ‘Someone left those doors to the terrace open. Now you’d better hide me in this schoolroom she was talking about.’

Lily nodded. ‘I will. I know a place, there’s a window seat, and wooden shutters you can sit behind. But Henrietta, look at these.’

She held the little pug up to the banisters, and Henrietta frowned. ‘Dragons. What of them?’

‘The Fells are supposed to have had real ones, aren’t they?’

Henrietta snorted. ‘That’s just a myth! No such thing.’

‘These ones moved,’ Lily muttered stubbornly. ‘I saw them.’

‘And that spell has addled your wits.’ Henrietta nudged her with a cold nose. ‘Hide me!’

Lily hurried into the schoolroom, tucked Henrietta at the back of the window seat, and sat down beside her. ‘Where did you sleep last night?’ she asked.

Henrietta assumed a mournful expression. ‘In a shed…’ she sighed. ‘Arabel
never
made me sleep in a shed, Lily.’

‘I know. I’m sorry,’ Lily told her humbly.

‘If it wasn’t for the good of the family, I wouldn’t be doing it.’ Henrietta eyed her sternly. ‘I shall expect to be very thoroughly thanked, when we eventually sort all this nonsense out. Maybe even a statue.’ She shifted her paws, and tilted her head a little, and Lily could see that she was practising her statue pose.

‘Henrietta, we’ve been shut up in a reform school. We’ve got nowhere finding Peter. Father’s in prison, and everyone in the country either thinks magic is evil, or else they
are
magical, and they’re plotting to overthrow the government, as far as I can see.’ Lily drew her knees up and tucked them under her pinafore. ‘I’m not saying you can’t have a statue,’ she added. ‘I just think it might take a while…’

Henrietta sniffed. ‘I can wait. But I shall hold you to it, Lily, mind. Have you managed to do any spells here yet? Is your magic working?’

‘I think it will, but there’s a spell that’s meant to stop us doing any,’ Lily explained. ‘It’s old though, almost worn out. If we go exploring up to the top of the house, I think it’ll be even thinner. I’ll be able to get out of it.’

Henrietta nodded approvingly. ‘Good. This afternoon, then. You’d better go and sit in your place, Lily, I can hear people coming.’

‘Be good.’ Lily eyed her anxiously. ‘I don’t think you’ll like Mr Fanshawe; he’s supposed to be teaching us how awful magic is. He might say things you don’t agree with…’

‘You do that all the time,’ Henrietta told her, curling up in a smooth little ball. ‘And I simply ignore you. Don’t fuss, Lily. I can manage to keep myself quiet.’

Lily spent Mr Fanshawe’s lesson trying to watch Henrietta’s window without being too obvious about it, and flinching every time he said something that she knew the dog would disagree with. Henrietta did manage to control herself, but Lily noticed the shutters shaking a couple of times, particularly when Mr Fanshawe was talking about tainted families, and degenerate magicians.

She lingered in the classroom as the others hurried outside. Georgie nudged her as the last of the girls raced out of the doorway. ‘Was that Henrietta?’

‘Did you see her?’

‘No! I saw you! Twitching and jumping all the time. You really couldn’t have looked any more suspicious. We have to be careful, Lily. I’m going to talk to Sarah.’ Georgie sighed crossly, and stalked out of the room, leaving Lily gaping after her. She was sure she hadn’t been that obvious. And why was Georgie so angry?

Henrietta nosed her way out from behind the shutter, and gazed at Lily, with glinting eyes. ‘This place is working on her already.’

‘It can’t be. We’ve only been here a day and a bit! She knows how important it is that we find Peter, and then rescue Father and get those spells out of her.’

Henrietta stretched out her front paws luxuriously, and yawned. ‘But you’re forgetting, she’s already weakened by the very spells you want her to get rid of. Your mother half-broke Georgie, setting them inside her. I’ve teased her unfairly, I think.’ Henrietta glanced up wickedly. ‘Not that I intend to stop, it’s far too much fun.’

‘We really need to get away,’ Lily muttered.

‘I shall go exploring upstairs.’ Henrietta jumped down from the window seat. ‘I shall wait for you, somewhere near the top of the third-floor stairs, after your lessons.’ She nudged Lily’s ankle affectionately. ‘I’ll smell you coming, don’t worry.’ She trotted to the door, peered round it, and shot away up the stairs.

Lily was shaking later, as she climbed the same staircase. Miss Merganser had got round to her needlework – or lack of it – and had ripped it apart in disgust. Her hand had been hovering over the pocket hanging from her waist where she kept the spell bottles, but in the end she had settled merely for shouting. But she had separated Lily from her sister, sending her to sit alone on the window seat where Henrietta had been hiding earlier. Georgie kept darting her furious glances, and Lily’s eyes were so blurred with crying that she stabbed her fingers over and over, staining her sampler with a mixture of blood and tears.

‘What have they done to you?’ Henrietta growled, as Lily climbed the third staircase on trembling legs. The black pug circled around her feet worriedly, almost tripping Lily up.

‘Nothing. Only shouted. I’d forgotten what it was like. No one ever shouted at us at the theatre, or only to say I had my dress sticking out of one of the hidden panels, or something like that. They weren’t mean. And Mama was always meaner to Georgie than me.’ Lily stumbled to the top of the steps, and sat down, wrapping her arms around her middle. ‘It’s stupid. It doesn’t really matter.’

Henrietta leaned heavily against Lily’s knee, and whirled her tail. ‘You need to do some magic. You’re missing it, I can tell.’ She tugged Lily’s pinafore with her teeth. ‘I think you’re right about the dampening spell up here. I can’t feel it at all, and the air seems fresher.’ She looked up at Lily hopefully, but Lily was staring at the faded wallpaper, frowning.

‘What’s the matter?’ Henrietta peered at it too.

‘It moved! Like the banisters! I was just looking at the pattern – it’s so faded, I was trying to see what it was – and it moved.’

‘Looks like the family coat of arms to me,’ Henrietta mused, jamming her nose up against the wall. ‘That’s very smart. A little showy, though, I think. It’s hardly discreet, is it, slapping your family emblems all over the wallpaper?’

‘So the Fell crest has a dragon?’ Lily asked, tracing the faded, greyish figure coiling across the paper.’

‘Yes. But they’re still a myth.’

The worn old dragon seemed to wind itself around Lily’s fingers, and someone laughed. Lily jumped back, pressing herself against the banisters.

Henrietta sneezed with surprise, and then stared suspiciously at the wallpaper.

‘You heard that too, didn’t you?’ Lily whispered.

‘Mmm,’ Henrietta admitted. ‘I might have done. No one followed you, did they?’

‘No.’ Lily ran her fingers gently across the paper again. ‘Someone was already here.’

They hid themselves in one of the abandoned rooms, swathed in dustsheets. They had turned left at the top of the stairs. The right-hand passage seemed less dusty, as though some of the rooms might still be used. One of them, the first door down the passage, was locked, and Lily had started to call for Peter. Then she’d sighed at her own stupidity. He couldn’t hear her. And if she tried to push a note under the door, Miss Merganser or one of the other staff might find it. She listened for a while, with her ear to the keyhole, but she couldn’t hear anyone inside.

‘He isn’t there, Lily,’ Henrietta told her impatiently. ‘If he were, I would have smelled him. I know his scent.’ She snuffled along the bottom of the door. ‘I won’t say there isn’t someone in there, mind you. But it’s not him.’

The left-hand passage looked safer, for a hidey-hole, as though they were less likely to be found.

Lily chose the room because of the overmantel, a fantastical white wooden explosion of swirls and scrolls. It matched the white dustsheets, and lent the whole room a curious dreamlike feel. Once she brushed away the dust furring over the curlicues, the carvings could have been snow, or even sugar.

‘There’s another one down here,’ Henrietta muttered, almost reluctantly, nosing the marble mantelpiece surrounding the fire. ‘Bigger than those others.’

Lily laughed when she saw him first – he looked like a dragon made of icing, something from a smart pastrycook’s shop. She wanted to lick her finger, when she’d dusted him, to see if it had come away sweet. ‘He’s beautiful,’ she murmured, dusting him a little more with her grey dress – and the outstretched wings seemed to shimmer gratefully. ‘Let’s practise here.’

Lily wedged herself between the grate and the carving of the mantelpiece, and Henrietta climbed possessively into her lap.

‘What shall I do?’ Lily asked, rather helplessly. She didn’t usually practise her magic – it just happened, when she needed it to. Now it seemed terribly important to choose the right spell. Something that would reawaken her damaged powers, and turn her back into the sort of person who could rescue friends. And fathers.

‘Anything!’ Henrietta snapped impatiently. ‘You could rustle me up a nice ham sandwich. I tried to go ratting in the stables last night, and the rats were rather larger than I was.’

‘Food’s difficult,’ Lily muttered. ‘Especially when there isn’t anything to start with. I’m sorry.’ She stroked Henrietta’s ears. ‘Miss Merganser was watching me all through lunch. I couldn’t steal anything for you. Not even crumbs.’

‘Mice taste most unpleasant, did you know that?’ Henrietta told her gloomily. ‘Especially raw.’

Someone chuckled behind them, and Henrietta turned round to glare at the marble mantel. ‘It’s very rude to break into a conversation when you haven’t been properly introduced.’

A sense of apology seemed to hover in the air, and Lily stared hopefully at the stone dragon. It didn’t move. But the apology died away, replaced with a glow of excitement that seemed to shimmer all through Lily too, warming her. It shifted the hard little stone of fright that had grown inside her, fright and worry and despair, and she smiled gratefully. Even Henrietta almost purred.

The marble dragon was shining, Lily realised, as she stroked it lovingly, the stone translucent, and almost soft.

‘It’s real,’ she murmured.

‘How can it be?’ Henrietta sounded confused, and quite annoyed. ‘It’s a stone!’