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‘I’m really going to need those pipes,’ I said in a smouldering voice. I’m surprised I didn’t set fire to Wyr’s stupid hat.

‘Like I said,’ he answered. ‘I’ll trade you.’

‘You don’t understand. I can’t get her back without those pipes.’

Wyr, at last, stopped juggling. ‘You mean to say,’ he said slowly, ‘that these pipes can summon Majestics?’

‘No. Just one particular one, and only if I do it.’

‘How convenient.’ He patently did not believe me.

A flicker of colour caught my eye. Some small, darting thing dived down upon Wyr, and flashed away again.

And the Wand was gone from his grasp.

‘What?’ His head came up, the pipes momentarily forgotten. Eyes narrowed, he looked hard at me. ‘How did you do that?’

‘You figure it out,’ I said, with a smile. Let him chew on that.

Meanwhile, Miranda — for it had been she — whispered something to the bright blue bird in her grasp, and let it fly again.

This time, it returned with Orlando’s glassy-looking toy.

Wyr’s quick gaze caught some part of its return flight, for he whirled in Miranda’s direction. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ he spluttered. ‘A Majestic and a gods-blessed lirrabird?’

I turned a questioning gaze upon Miranda, for I’d heard that name before. Lirrabirds were listed in Dramary’s Bestiary. They were as fast as hummingbirds and not much larger, but remarkably strong for their diminutive size, and they responded well to training. They were sometimes referred to as the little winged wizards, because — as this one had just demonstrated — they were highly magickal, and difficult to deter by wizardly means. They’d made quite the pests of themselves among magickal communities, some few hundred years ago.

They were also extinct, at least on our Britain.

And now Miranda had a pet one.

‘Ancestria Magicka pays well, hm?’ I said.

‘You’re one to talk,’ said Miranda. ‘Do you know what I would have given for a tame unicorn?’

Ack. Had my friendship with Addie somehow fuelled Miranda’s dissatisfaction? Was I part of the reason why she’d jumped ship?

I shook off the thought. Now wasn’t the time to try to explain how Adeline and I had come about. ‘Handy,’ I offered instead, for to be fair, that lirrabird had just saved our hides.

Miranda gave a crooked smile, and tossed my pipes to me. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘you could ask Addie what she’d like done about Wyr.’

‘I reckon she wouldn’t like him much,’ I said, tightly clutching my pipes.

Miranda’s smile widened. ‘I reckon the same.’

So I lifted my precious pipes to my lips and I played Addie’s song.

And I waited.

She didn’t come.

‘So much for the pipes,’ muttered Wyr. He looked about at all of us with an expression much aggrieved, and added, ‘And so much for the easy mark.’ With which words, he stalked off, back towards the town.

‘Good riddance,’ I said, emulating Emellana’s inhuman calm, though my insides were tying themselves in knots. What had become of Addie? ‘Question,’ I said, as Miranda handed my Wand back to me. ‘What did he mean about horns, teeth and bones?’

‘Wondering the same thing,’ said Miranda laconically, and turned a worried gaze upon the herd of unicorns behind us. ‘You know, these… they’re odd, too. See how still they are?’

She was right; they were as placid as cows, if not more so. They had a listless look about them. ‘Wingless, all of them,’ I observed.

‘Makes sense if you want to hang onto them,’ said Miranda, her frown deepening.

‘Though we saw some winged ones, near the hill,’ I said. ‘Right?’ We hadn’t seen any since.

‘It looks like a farm,’ said Jay. ‘Unicorn… milk?’

‘Milk, and hairs from the manes and tails,’ I said, remembering snippets of lore from the days of yore, back when unicorns had been more common in our Britain, too. Though there’d never been enough of them for entire farming operations, nor had they ever been… tamed, enough.

This was something else.

‘Milk, hair,’ said Miranda darkly. ‘Horns, bones and teeth. Every part of a unicorn is magick-drenched, isn’t it?’

‘That’s why they’re so rare at home,’ Jay said. ‘Griffins, too — all the ancient mythicals, the deeply magickal creatures. Kings building thrones out of unicorn horns, people paying small fortunes for strands of unicorn hair or griffin claws or dragon’s teeth, blood, scales… a damned rotten trade.’

We looked in silence at the listless herds of unicorns locked into their little paddocks, and I began to wonder. Was the fifth Britain more intensely magickal because they hadn’t slaughtered all their most magickal creatures, the way we had? Or was it because they had taken the general idea, and run with it? Was it because they’d taken to farming their griffins and unicorns and dragons — not just for their potent bodily components, but also for their inherent magicks?

I began to find the wondrous Vale a fraction less charming.

Troubled about Addie, heartsick about the farms, I packed my purloined possessions back into my bag — and came up an item short. ‘Mir, the scroll-case?’

Miranda blinked, and glanced down at her own hands, as though she might find herself still carrying it. ‘Um, didn’t I already give that to you?’

I double-checked. ‘No. I’ve got the Wand, the panic button, Mauf, my pipes…’

‘It isn’t on me,’ said Miranda, looking stricken.

‘Your bird definitely got it back?’

‘Yes.’

I glanced at Emellana, and Jay. ‘Anybody else got it?’

They both shook their heads. ‘Wyr?’ Jay growled.

Doubtless. ‘Damn that little sneak,’ I sighed. ‘No wonder he wandered off.’

‘He’ll be on the other side of bloody Vale by now,’ said Jay.

Emellana looked more thoughtful than outraged. ‘Now, why did he take that one article, and not the others?’ she said.

‘Because it’s smothered in jewels?’ I offered.

‘Does that not seem mundane, as an attraction for a person like Wyr?’ said Em. ‘He struck me as consistently more interested in objects of magickal or arcane significance.’

Like “Majestic” unicorns, for example. ‘But the scroll-case hasn’t a scrap of magick about it,’ I said. ‘Has it?’

‘Not that I could discern,’ said Emellana. ‘Nor has it ever been the subject of any past magicks.’

‘That may not be true for much longer,’ said Jay.

I raised a brow in his general direction.

‘Well, what can Wyr want with it?’ he said. ‘It’s of no use as a map, and I don’t see why he would need one anyway. He’s obviously very familiar with Vale. It’s got to be something to do with its provenance. He played down the significance of Furgidan the Dispossessed, even in Vale, but he could’ve been lying.’

‘I’d say that one never told a word of truth in his life, if he could help it,’ I muttered, and gave a sigh. ‘So we need to get that back. Along with my poor lost Adeline, and then we can proceed with the mission.’ I had to think for a moment to remember what that even was.

Torvaston’s expedition to the Vales of Wonder. What, where, when, how, and why.

Right.

I shook my head to clear it, without much success. ‘How long do those potions last?’

Emellana looked at me. ‘Your hair’s growing flowers again.’

‘I was afraid of that.’ I hefted my shoulder bag. ‘Next stop, the potion shop,’ I said, and made it two steps before my darling pup came running up, ears perky, tail furiously a-wag.

She had a severed unicorn horn in her mouth.

‘Oh,’ I said upon a long sigh, and took it from her. ‘Thanks, pup.’

Little Goodie Goodfellow grinned a huge puppy grin at me, immensely pleased with herself.

The Potion Shop was actually called, with rather greater sophistication, Benbollen’s Elixir Emporium, and to call it eye-opening would be to sadly understate the case. I wondered how Emellana had kept her implacable cool, turned loose in the place by herself not long since, for it was like walking into a sweet-shop at the approximate age of five. What had that woman even seen, in her long, long life, to be so unimpressed? For the shop was vastly larger on the inside than it had any right to be, considering the very modest proportions we’d glimpsed from outside. It was also… taller. Far taller. The ceiling was up there somewhere, I could almost swear it. But, like the library at Mandridore, it was far distant, and obscured by floating wisps of cloud.

Every wall was crammed with shelves, and every shelf was crowded with elixirs. They were presented in bottles of every size, shape and material — not just glass, ladies and gents, because why stop there? These were amethyst and onyx and granite and silver and a host of substances I couldn’t identify. Those that were clear displayed potions of every possible colour, many of them unusually active. They swirled and rippled and bubbled and glittered and spun in their elegant bottles, and I could’ve cheerfully stayed all year until I’d had chance to try every single one of them. Or at least to learn what they did.

Seldom have I seen such a wealth of colour… and magickal possibility.

I inched nearer to Emellana, who stood with her usual poise in the centre of the shop floor, glancing occasionally at some potion or another with an expression of polite interest. She could not be so totally unmoved as she appeared. Surely.

‘Ever seen anything like this at home?’ I asked her.

‘No,’ she said, but then added, ‘Well. The markets at Cairo in the thirties were remarkable. More informally presented, of course, but full of marvels.’

‘Were?’ I echoed.

‘It’s all gone now.’ I thought I saw a trace of regret in her calm features, but couldn’t be sure.

For the first time, it occurred to me that Emellana was old enough to have seen some of our world’s magickal decline first hand. What had the world of her youth been like? I opened my mouth to ask, but shook my head. Not the time, Ves. Practical matters first. ‘Forgive me,’ I said, ‘but how did you pay for the first batch of potions?’

Her eyes gleamed with something like… amusement? A trace of smugness? But she only said: ‘The same way I paid for your pot. Your pup is an enterprising creature. She dug up a jewel not half an hour ago, which the shopkeeper appeared to consider valuable.’

I wondered briefly why pup had chosen to make Emellana the beneficiary of her peculiar brand of largesse, and let the thought go. If pup was as much inclined as I was to develop a mild crush on the magnificent older lady, I could hardly blame her.

And she had brought me the prize article, even if it was one I did not especially welcome. I retrieved the horn from my bag, trying not to look at its ragged, bloodied end. The damned thing was freshly harvested. ‘Do you think they’d accept a barter?’

A flicker of distaste crossed Emellana’s face as she looked at the horn. ‘Yes, let us dispose of it.’

I approached the proprietor, an elfin lady younger and shorter than myself, with the kind of bright, slightly fixed smile common to practiced shop assistants everywhere. ‘Welcome to Benbollen’s,’ she said cheerfully.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I gather you sold this lady a batch of potions earlier today.’ I indicated Emellana with a wave of my hand. Something had caught her attention and she’d wandered off.

‘Four doses of Tylerin’s Suppressants?’ she said promptly. Her gaze took in the flowers bobbing gently in my hair.

‘Right. Can I get a repeat order of that? Two, even, if this is sufficient to cover it.’ I displayed the severed horn.

‘Absolutely,’ she said, to my relief. ‘Did you want only the two? That’s enough alicorn to make four or five batches.’

 ‘How about unicorn trader, then griffins?’ growled Wyr.

‘Sorry,’ I said briefly. ‘No unicorn, no unicorn trader.’ Not that I wouldn’t have been happy to get rid of Wyr and his attitude, but he was useful. Sometimes.

And I wasn’t yet sure how to dispense with him without compromising Addie.

Wyr grumbled something incoherent, and jammed his hat further down on his head. ‘You’ve some nerve,’ he informed me.

‘What are you going to do, steal my shoes?’

‘How about that scroll-case you mentioned?’

‘Oh?’ I considered his carefully bland face. ‘Valuable, is it?’ I hadn’t mentioned the jewels. Only the fact that it was defaced by a map — drawn by Furgidan.

Wyr opened his mouth, and shut it again with a snap. ‘You I dislike,’ he said.

I ignored him. Jay had found his feet, and his regular height to boot. To my relief, he was looking somewhat recovered from his Wayfinding marathon, and less grey about the face. Hopefully he could tank five or six sandwiches without throwing up, but I kept a little distance between us just in case. ‘The, uh, object in Emellana’s possession might be of use,’ he said obliquely. ‘With the scroll.’

I nodded. I’d drawn the same conclusion from Emellana’s words. Could she find traces of Torvaston, with the use of a magick-drenched lyre, her talent for tracking old magick, and the scroll-case to help her? I hoped so.

But first, the griffins.

Finding Griffin Heights proved to be a lot easier than it had in Old Farringale, to my relief. This particular hill had no interest in playing coy, or concealing itself, at least not from a near distance; it loomed over Vale, suitably solid and stationary, and we slogged through the crooked streets of the town in pursuit. There really weren’t many people living there, I judged; Wyr was right. Few of the properties we passed had a residential air about them. Many were clearly commercial properties, with at least a minimal shopfront opening onto the street, and workshops or warehouses behind.

The streets had a way of moving about. They were not doing so either for our benefit or for our inconvenience, I thought, but rather according to some purpose of their own. Roads bulged under our feet, forming slopes and little hillocks, only to dip again farther along, dropping us down and down into impromptu valleys. Sometimes they writhed like snakes before us and reconfigured themselves, curving to this side or the other of a house, and racing around corners.

One imaginative street rerouted itself right through the middle of a tall, green-painted house — with the house’s assistance, I might add, for an arched walkway blossomed around us, complete with stocky pillars.

‘How does anybody find anything around here,’ I said after a while, when the street we were following took a sudden, gleeful curve and apparently doubled back on itself.

Wyr gave a low, rather smug chuckle. ‘You’ll see,’ he said, in a tone I did not at all like.

Emellana drew nearer to me. ‘I believe there’s mischief afoot,’ she said softly.

‘Undoubtedly, with that one,’ I sighed, regretting my decision of half an hour before. Was Wyr useful, or a liability? ‘That hill really isn’t getting any closer, is it?’

‘No.’

‘It’s not getting farther away, maybe?’ I said, thinking again of Farringale.

‘No.’

Miranda was so busy studying the distant griffins’ flight patterns, I doubted whether she had noticed our navigational difficulties. Jay, though, had developed that dark frown of his, the one that means someone’s in trouble.

After a couple more minutes, he stopped in the middle of a prettily dappled cobblestone street and said: ‘Wyr.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Where are we going?’

Wyr thought about that. ‘Wherever Vale wants to take you,’ he answered, which sounded to have more truth in it than I’d expected.

‘And is that more or less where we want to go?’ asked Jay.

‘You find that out when you get there.’

Jay looked around. To our left rose a leggy cottage with a towering brown roof and great windows like eyes in its front. To our right stood a more compact building made from blue bricks, with a sign up front reading “R. B. Wimberley, Charmwright.”

‘This isn’t it,’ said Jay.

‘Then I’d suggest you keep walking,’ said Wyr.

What could we do but comply? Though it did not inconvenience us for very much longer, for after another three minutes of discontented trudging, the town melted away around us, leaving open meadow in its wake. Neatly fenced meadow, to be specific, and each enclosure was crowded with unicorns.

‘Oh, look,’ said Wyr, with a smile of pure malice. ‘The unicorn traders.’

‘And how did you achieve that?’ said Emellana, stone-faced.

‘Didn’t you hear me?’ he said, beaming. ‘This town has a mind of its own.’

‘But it can be influenced, no? Or is that not what you were doing?’

Wyr’s smile faded. ‘How is it that you—’

‘Newcomers we may be, but we are not wholly without arts. I am sometimes aware of the traces magick leaves behind, and yours has been leaving a fresh trail for the past half-hour.’

‘Well then, you figure it out,’ said Wyr. ‘In the meantime, I’ll thank you to produce that unicorn, please.’

‘There is no knowing where she’s got to,’ I said blandly.

‘Find her, then.’ He pulled something long and twinkling from a pocket and began to juggle with it.

I recognised the jewel-encrusted shapes of Torvaston’s scroll-case.

‘I knew you were a thief!’ I said.

Wyr added a second object into his juggling, which to my horror proved to be my Sunstone Wand. ‘Didn’t do much about it, did you? That’s the problem with you soft-hearted types. Too trusting by half.’ To top it all off, Orlando’s prized new invention went into rotation above his infuriating head. Jay made a grab for the nearest object — pretty nimble, I thought — but Wyr danced backwards several steps, somehow pulling his ill-gotten hoard with him.

I found myself almost as intrigued as I was furious. ‘But you—’ I said. ‘You were nowhere near me!’ How had he taken anything from my bag, not only without my noticing but without being within ten feet of me?

‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘Give me the unicorn. I’ll not only let you have all these back, I’ll show you how I purloined them in the first place. You could use a few survival skills.’

‘I can’t give you the unicorn,’ I grated. ‘She isn’t for sale.’

‘You mean… you lied?’ Wyr turned a shocked countenance upon me. ‘But at least you aren’t a thief or something. That would be really bad.’

I groped in my shoulder-bag. To my relief, Mauf was still in there; too big and heavy to steal, perhaps. But the sleep-spheres I’d cadged from Orlando were not.

Hm.

Lucky that Jay and Emellana had kept the lyre out of Wyr’s sight.

And I still had my pipes. Next time Jay was inclined to mock me for my choice of storage space, I’d thank him to remember this day. I had them out in a trice, but before I could play more than three notes, Emellana charged in, her mouth set in a thin, furious line, and levelled a crashing punch at Wyr’s face.

It bounced off… something. Jay’s attempt to grab the little creep fared much the same.

‘Nice try,’ Wyr grinned. ‘But when you’re this short, you learn a trick or two.’

I had to admit to a grudging respect for his shielding abilities. I wasn’t bad at wards, but I couldn’t have stopped that punch.

‘Nice pipes,’ said Wyr — and then, in the blink of an eye, they too were circling over Wyr’s head in sequence with the scroll-case, the Wand, and Orlando’s unnameable thing.

‘Wha—’ I spluttered. ‘Give. Those. Back.’

My advance upon Wyr, violence filling my heart, was as ill-fated as Emellana’s. But it was satisfying to try.

‘Listen,’ Wyr said. ‘It’s been blindingly obvious from the moment I met you that you lot are… something else. I don’t know where you’re from, but you’re far out of your depth in Vale. I could run rings around you all day long. Not only that, but so could every single person here, so if you’d kindly get me that unicorn, you can have your stuff back, and I’ll be on my way.’

I didn’t love the feeling of helplessness those words created. He was right, and we knew it. I had only to think back to our utter incapacity to cope with the magickal surges of Old Farringale; if it weren’t for the potions Emellana had procured, we’d be in a similar state now.

That said, perhaps we weren’t far off it. Our wits must have been asleep ever since we’d set foot in the so-called Vales of Wonder, or we’d have got rid of Wyr already.

Even now, I couldn’t seem to think how to proceed. My brain whirled in fuzzy circles and nothing came up.

‘If you want the unicorn,’ said Jay, ‘she’ll need those pipes back.’

Wyr’s head tilted, and one brow went up. ‘Oh?’

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Why do you want that particular unicorn anyway? I mean, look.’ I made a sweeping gesture, which took in all the paddocks before us. ‘You want a unicorn, take your pick.’ We stood not six feet away from a long, silvery fence which shimmered with magick, and behind it there must have been fifty unicorns at least. What a glorious sight they made, too, for they came in every imaginable colour. So much ancient magick was compressed into that small space, the air itself pulsed and glimmered with it.

And that was just one of the many paddocks. The horizon was a mass of colour and magick.

I spotted Miranda, hanging half over the fence, her fingers entangled in the mane of a lavender-and-white unicorn, and sighed. Thanks for the help.

That look of utter disbelief was back on Wyr’s face. ‘Do you not even know that much?’ he said incredulously. ‘Honestly, where did you dig yourselves up from?’

‘Far, far away,’ I said impatiently. ‘Someone said something about royal lines—’

‘Yes,’ Wyr all but shouted. ‘Unicorns there are aplenty, but this lot’s common as muck. Great for horns, teeth, bones, and so on, but I can’t remember the last time anybody saw a pure-bred Majestic!’ He was yelling now, but even at top volume, the word “Majestic” emerged with particular emphasis. ‘And you were just wandering around with it. I’m amazed you kept it for as long as you did.’

His words ignited a miniature panic somewhere in my belly, for he was speaking past tense, and considering how long it was since any of us had caught a glimpse of Addie, perhaps he had a point. I’d assumed she was safer out of sight, and that I could call her back with a blast of my pretty pipes. But what if I couldn’t?

What if someone had made off with her?

‘Again?’ echoed Miranda, as a brisk wind tore yet more of her flyaway blonde hair out of its ponytail.

‘Jay has a bad habit of disappearing.’

‘Also for turning up again, yes?’

‘It’s more that I have a decent track record for tracking him down. There was that time when he was hauled off by your charming new employers, because apparently kidnapping is a valid headhunting technique. And that time Millie swallowed him up and spat him out on Whitmore. This time… Jay could have gone through any of these henges, and taken Emellana with him. But why would he? And besides, he was exhausted. I don’t know if he was capable of another jaunt through the Ways yet. So, it has to be Wyr’s doing.’ I set off down the hill, leading Addie, until I arrived at the approximate spot in which I had last caught sight of our shifty guide.

I found bottle-green grass riddled with rabbit burrows — or, something burrows. Did they have anything so mundane as a rabbit in these parts? That was it, really. A daisy or two made its presence known, smiling cheerily at me from among flourishing tufts, and the long slope of the hill rose behind me, discouragingly featureless.

‘Here,’ called Miranda, from some distance away.

I turned, and sloped off after her. She had wandered off around the other side, which made little sense to me since no one had been going that way.

But she had found something. A jutting piece of cloudy stone erupted from the grass, tucked right into the base of the hillside. At its top, a large jewel was inset. This one was green, not blue, but the general arrangement looked familiar enough.

‘Probably goes into Vale,’ Miranda suggested.

I realised that she was waiting for my approval before she tried it.

‘Surely they’d wait for us,’ I said doubtfully.

‘Not if they had a reason to hurry.’

Like Jay in a state of collapse and in urgent need of food. I looked at Addie. ‘Can we take a unicorn through that way?’

Miranda shrugged. ‘Try it.’

I tried it. Taking hold of Addie’s neck with one hand, I touched the green jewel with the other.

The world tipped and spun around me, and away I went, soaring over the deep green grass in bubble form. Probably. It isn’t easy to tell in that state.

But soon enough a second bubble came swishing up beside me, which sort of answered my question, although was this Adeline or Miranda? I couldn’t tell. I had only to wait, while I hurtled at insane speed over hill and dale, my stomach (did I still have a stomach?) turning itself inside out as we bobbed and spun in the wind.

Something changed. The bubble beside me sprouted wings, and antennae, and legs, becoming (in short) a butterfly. Its hue altered gradually from bluish to purplish and then it was a winged lemon with overlarge eyes and a tuft upon its head, sailing through the air just as though it had every right to fly.

After that it became a hedgehog, a cigar, and what looked to me like a cheese sandwich in quick succession.

‘Oof,’ I said soon afterwards, finding myself deposited with unceremonious abruptness upon a disappointingly solid floor.

I performed a brief check of my four limbs to ascertain that they were a) present, and b) suitably proportioned. They were.

‘Was it my imagination,’ I said to Miranda, who’d appeared beside me, ‘or was I not entirely bubble-shaped for some of that?’

‘You were a red cabbage first,’ said she, stretching, her eyes rather wild. ‘Then a purple potion bottle, and a dragonfly, and a golden flaming arrow.’

‘How imaginative of me,’ I murmured, looking around. ‘I’m getting the feeling this is going to be an… interesting stay… Jay!’

He sat three feet behind me, his back against the brick wall of some kind of shop, judging from the sign that hung from its eaves, though I couldn’t decipher the symbols that were painted upon it. We had fetched up in a town square, albeit an unusually circular one, and all around us were stone or brick-built shops with tall, tapering roofs and inconsistently sized windows. As I watched, the blue-slate roof of a nearby structure leisurely grew two or three feet taller, as though stretching itself, and then settled back down.

Jay was in one piece, which was nice. ‘Have you… shrunk?’ I said.

He gestured at himself with his free hand. The other held something breadish that oozed cheese, and he spoke with his mouth full of the stuff. ‘What do you think.’

He was three feet tall.

‘I may get to like being the taller of us, for a change,’ said I.

‘Wait till you see yourself.’

‘…Have you shrunk, or have I grown?!’

‘It’s more your hair.’

I checked it. ‘I have grass growing from my head,’ I said, in a very calm voice.

‘I’d classify it more nearly as hay, but yes.’

I took a deep, deep breath. ‘Right. Priorities. Where’s Adeline.’

As I spoke, a tiny unicorn zipped past my nose. Her pale coat and silvery rope harness looked familiar.

I captured her in my two hands, and sighed. ‘Emellana?’

‘She and Wyr went shopping.’

‘Wyr! I thought he had made off with you.’

‘Sorry,’ said Jay. ‘We—’

Wyr’s dusty voice interrupted. ‘You thought what? I am outraged.’

‘Sure you are.’ I watched him narrowly as he skulked into view, expecting to see some sign of alterations in him. There were none.

‘How are you unscathed,’ muttered Miranda, echoing my own thoughts. Her ratty old jumper had found a new lease of life as a gown, which would have pleased me immensely, especially since it was made of fiery autumn leaves and what looked like velvet. Or clouds. I couldn’t altogether say. Though, I couldn’t blame her for being displeased about her nose, which now more nearly resembled a beak.

Perhaps she hadn’t noticed.

‘You get used to it,’ said Wyr. ‘Your first dose of pure, prime-grade magick tends to have side effects.’ He saluted me. ‘Don’t mind the bees,’ he said. ‘They’ll leave you alone when your hair changes again.’

So that was the buzzing sound I’d been half aware of. I put up a hand to check my haystack, and found it merrily sprouting flowers.

‘I dread to ask,’ I said, letting this pass. ‘What’s become of my pup?’

Wyr pointed at a sparkly, polychromatic brick that lay in the middle of the square. As I watched, all the cobblestones around it pulsed, washing over with shifting colours.

‘She’s a brick,’ I said, keeping it together somehow. I don’t deny that I was beginning to feel just a touch… high.

‘For now. She was an alikat ten minutes ago, if an unusually small specimen. In a minute she’ll be a balloon, perhaps, or herself again.’ He wandered over, and put a glass bottle into my hand. It felt positively chilly to the touch, a quantity of amber-coloured liquid sloshing about inside it. ‘Drink that,’ he instructed.

I must have looked doubtful; I certainly felt it. He gave me a wounded look. ‘What, don’t you trust me?’

I watched in fascination as his wide-angled hat slowly sprouted an exquisite, miniature lily. ‘No,’ I said bluntly, as the world swam before my eyes.

He grinned. ‘It has your troll friend’s approval, if that helps. It’s a… let’s call it a dampener. It will moderate the effects of Vale, at least for a little while.’

The hat grew a tiny dragon, which swallowed the lily, and then disintegrated in a puff of red dust.

‘Uh huh,’ I said, dazed. A giggle escaped.

Opening the bottle, I quaffed the contents.

Emellana herself reappeared moments later. She, to my confusion, looked but little affected by the chaos; even less so than Wyr, considering his bizarre hatly antics. She saw the question in my face, for she winked at me, and briefly mimed a strumming motion.

The lyre! Did she still have it? If it absorbed magick, according to Orlando’s theory, then perhaps it was acting as an effective dampener by itself.

I wondered what configuration that much “prime-grade” magick might leave the instrument in. What might a magick-drunk lyre look like?

Anything, I supposed. Anything at all.

‘I hope we did not unduly inconvenience you,’ said Emellana. ‘Jay was in urgent need of sustenance.’

Considering Emellana’s unshakeably laid-back nature, when she said “urgent” I judged she truly meant it. ‘Thanks for feeding him,’ I said.

She smiled. ‘Wayfinding can be hungry work, and I fancy the effects in these parts are more profound.’ She surveyed Jay critically. ‘His fourth sandwich,’ she added. ‘He will be able to stand again after one or two more.’

‘How did you get him here if he couldn’t walk?’

Emellana’s response consisted primarily of an amused look. ‘How do you think?’

I remembered her height, bulk and general attitude of implacable competence, and promptly withdrew the question.

‘So,’ I said, checking my hair. Still hay. ‘What do you mean by prime-grade magick?’ I addressed this question to Wyr, who was still ambling about with a sackful of goodies.

Wyr handed a bottle of green liquid to Jay. It was supremely weird to see those two about the same height. ‘Lectures cost extra.’

‘I will kick you for free,’ I offered.

He scowled at me. ‘Why did you want to come here if you don’t know anything about Vale?’

‘To learn about Vale,’ I said.

‘Obviously,’ Jay added.

Wyr declined to follow Miranda to the other side of the square, and merely lobbed a bottle of something-blue at her instead. Thankfully, she caught it. ‘It’s a place of cultivated magick,’ he said. ‘Said to be the purest and most potent, hence grade-A.’

‘Why’s it so quiet?’ said Jay, glancing meaningfully at the empty square.

‘Considering the state of yourself,’ said Wyr, ‘Do you really need to ask.’

Jay’s smile was crooked. ‘Fair point.’

‘Most people can’t cope with it, or they choose not to. It’s not for the masses.’

‘Then who is it for?’ I asked.

Wyr shrugged. ‘It’s more of a… supplier. Most of the best magickal produce is made and packaged and shipped from here.’

‘And beasts?’ put in Miranda. ‘You implied there’s a buyer for unicorns here.’

‘Yup,’ said Wyr.

His sudden laconic fit made me suspicious. ‘What kind of buyer?’

‘Why don’t we deal with that now?’ said Wyr, his charming smile back in place. ‘Then I can get out of your hair.’

‘Absolutely,’ I said.

‘Great.’

‘But first I’m going to need to know more about the history of Vale.’

He stared at me in disbelief. ‘What do you think I am, a history professor?’

‘There must be a library, hereabouts?’ I suggested.

‘No.’

‘Local history society?’

‘No.’

‘Venerable crone of great wisdom, dispensing nuggets of magickal lore for a fee?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Internet café?’

He blinked. ‘What?’

‘Never mind.’ Being out of ideas, I looked Emellana’s way. ‘It’s Torvaston. How do we find out if he was here?’

Wyr rubbed at his eyes. ‘Who the blazes is Torvaston.’

‘Um. You might know him as…’ I’d forgotten the name.

‘Furgidan the Dispossessed,’ Jay supplied.

‘That’s it!’

Emellana said, ‘A great troll king, said to have settled in what were once called the Vales of Wonder.’

‘And according to the storytellers of Whitmore,’ I added, ‘he just might possibly still be alive somewhere.’

‘In a manner of speaking,’ said Jay. ‘Might be a bit ghostish around the edges.’

Wyr cleared his throat. ‘The lot of you are insane, but you probably know that, don’t you?’

My heart sank. ‘So you don’t know anything about Furgidan?’

‘It’s a known name in some circles.’

‘Ah!’

‘But if you thought you were going to pop up here and have a nice chat with him, I’ll have to disappoint you. He died hundreds of years ago.’

‘Ghost?’ I said hopefully. I felt a touch of something warm against my leg, and looked down to find pup (thankfully hound-shaped) nosing at my shin.

‘Like I said,’ Wyr answered. ‘Insane.’

‘Fine, forget the ghost.’ My pup had something in her mouth. I bent down to wrestle it off her. It was a stick… probably.

‘What’s known about him?’ said Jay.

‘Not much.’ Wyr shrugged. ‘Claimed to be some kind of a king, went off to found a new kingdom with a bunch of cronies… the details escape me. Why are we caring about him when we’ve a unicorn to dispose of?’ He looked around. ‘Or we… did.’

I’d been obliged to let go of Addie some minutes earlier, when she’d developed something spiky which stung my hands. Where (and what) she was right now was beyond my knowledge, but I was not unduly worried. With Wyr on the lookout, she was probably safer as a mayfly or a waterlily than a standard-issue-sized unicorn. And I could always fall back on the pipes.

‘She’ll turn up,’ I said, and smiled. ‘Listen, what if we had something of Furgidan’s? Do you think we could find out what became of him?’

‘What, his handkerchief or his chamber pot?’ Wyr smirked. ‘Don’t be absurd.’

I was beginning to get tired of the thief.

‘That’s a lie,’ said Emellana calmly. ‘Isn’t it?’

Wyr gave her a bland stare. ‘I guarantee, Furgidan the Dispossessed’s chamber pot will get you nowhere.’

‘But something more personal might,’ said Em. ‘Mightn’t it?’

‘Like a scroll-case,’ I said. ‘With a map on it, drawn by his own hand.’

‘The unicorn trader’s this way.’ Wyr jerked his thumb in the direction of a narrow, crooked street that meandered away to my left.

‘Ves,’ said Miranda suddenly. Her tone held a note of some urgency, and I looked sharply at her. She hadn’t spoken for some minutes.

‘Yes?’

‘Those griffins.’ She pointed in the direction of the tall hill we had glimpsed an hour or two before, on Addie’s back. I followed her gaze, shading my eyes against the strong sun. ‘They’re behaving oddly.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘They’re… their flight’s too regular. It’s as though they are following some kind of circuit.’

‘That isn’t normal?’

She hesitated. ‘I haven’t had much chance to study live griffins, understand. But it doesn’t look right.’

Vague, but I’d take it. Milady was right about Miranda: few people were more to be relied upon when it came to magickal beasts. If she had a hunch… ‘What might be causing that?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know, but I want to find out.’

In the end, we passed through five henge complexes. Jay, of course, went through each set twice in order to ferry the lot of us across. By the time Wyr stopped and said, ‘Well, here we are,’ Jay was reduced to a legless mess.

I gathered this from his recumbent posture upon the floor, limbs akimbo, his face bathed in sweat. He was breathing far too fast, and — to my mingled amusement and concern — laughing.

Wyr stood over him with his hands in the pockets of his long coat, and slowly shook his head. ‘So many reasons to use tokens like a normal person.’

‘I’m using the Ways like a normal person,’ said Jay, laughing, and then he began to cough.

‘Oops.’ I ran to help him sit up. ‘Jay, we’re going to take a little break right here. All right?’

‘I’m fine.’ He beamed sunnily up at me, and sagged in my arms like a sack of potatoes.

I let him slither back to the ground.

‘Well.’ I looked around. ‘Let’s use this time for a little reconnaissance, hm? Is this… Vale?’

I said it doubtfully, because to my admittedly inexperienced eye, there wasn’t much about the place to suggest that we had arrived anywhere significant. We had emerged at a small complex comprising only three henges, none of them large. The trio of stone circles sat atop a grassy hill in the midst of a rolling, airy plain. In one direction I could see, distantly, the edge of an evergreen forest; everywhere else was simply more grass. A desultory drizzle of rain fell from a grey sky.

‘Vale’s that way.’ Wyr pointed out at some of the grass.

‘It’s a ways off, by the looks of it,’ I said.

‘They gave up trying to put a henge complex in there,’ said Wyr. ‘Never worked.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s… well, you’ll see.’ Wyr set off down the hill, hands in his pockets, whistling a jaunty tune.

I made to follow him.

And stopped, because down there in the grass, over towards the forest, I saw a string of what looked like wild horses racing by. They weren’t, of course. Even from this distance, I could see the far-off glint of the graceful horn each bore upon their forehead.

Adeline had stopped, too, and stood staring in their direction, her head high.

‘Unicorns,’ I said.

Miranda breathed something unintelligible but no doubt awed, and started down the hill at once.

‘No, wait!’ I said, cursing myself for an idiot. ‘Mir, hang on a second. We shouldn’t just blindly follow Wyr. Em, will you take care of Jay and pup for a bit while I check things out?’ And keep an eye on Miranda, I wanted to add, but didn’t.

Emellana nodded. ‘I think it wise.’

Jay had stopped laughing or coughing. He lay silent, ostensibly dazed, though his eyes opened at my words and he looked intently at me. ‘I should go with you,’ he said.

‘Nope.’

‘But—’

‘If you can prove you can stand up straight for more than twenty seconds, then you can come with me.’

It took Jay about ten to demonstrate his total incapacity for vertical posture.

‘I’ll be back soon,’ I promised.

‘I’m coming with you,’ said Miranda.

‘What?’ I said, idiotically.

She did not deign to repeat what she’d said, but instead strode towards Adeline, one hand outstretched. Addie, the traitor, permitted herself to be petted, and when Miranda swung herself up onto her back, she made no objection.

I knew Addie could carry two passengers at once; she’d done it before. I was left, then, to fume impotently, having no reasonable grounds upon which to object to Miranda’s company.

Ah, screw reasonable. ‘The fact is, Mir, I don’t trust you,’ I said.

She thought about that. ‘I can understand why you wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘Nonetheless.’ She sat there atop Addie’s back, unmoved.

I folded my arms, equally unmoved.

‘I swear you will come to no harm at my hands?’ Miranda tried, and gave me a Brownie’s Honour salute with her right hand.

‘Why are you so determined to come along?’

‘Because,’ said Miranda, with exaggerated patience, ‘if Vale proves to be as awash with griffins as you imagine, you might need me. Isn’t that why Milady wanted me along?’

‘Not untrue,’ I conceded.

‘And because I left for Ancestria Magicka in the first place because they promised me significantly enhanced access to magickal beasts of all species, both extant and extinct, and to be honest this is the first real chance I’ve had at anything of the kind. I’m not sitting up here waiting while you have all the fun.’

‘Ancestria Magicka lie, what a shocker,’ I muttered, but I stopped arguing. ‘You’re sitting behind,’ I said, in a no-nonsense tone, and joined her atop Addie’s back. ‘Right. Em, we’ll come straight back as soon as we know it’s safe. If our creepy little thief comes back… truss him up or something.’

‘The thief is at the bottom of the hill,’ said Emellana.

‘Fine. He can stay there. Hup.’ I gave Addie the signal to fly, and she extended her beautiful wings as she took off at a trot, and then a canter. I urged her in the same approximate direction Wyr had been heading in, and soon we were airborne, a strong wind blowing drizzle into our faces.

I saw Wyr as we rose into the air, watching our upward progress with an expression of mild chagrin. Did he think we were running out on our deal? I hoped he wouldn’t give Jay a hard time over it, but if he did, Emellana could handle him.

We flew for perhaps five minutes, over uninterrupted grassy hills. Then, I caught a glimpse of a cluster of buildings upon the horizon, and my heart quickened with excitement. ‘There it is!’ I shouted, and pointed.

‘I see it,’ yelled Miranda in my ear.

The town quickly grew in our vision as we raced towards it, soon proving to be quite large. Surprisingly so. Why should I be surprised? Perhaps because Torvaston’s hand-drawn map on the back of his scroll-case hadn’t suggested anything of the kind. But, it was four hundred years old. The town of Vale spread out before us, composed of an expanse of mostly low-rise buildings. There seemed to be a trend for blue paint, for some reason, for the town was predominantly cerulean and periwinkle, with white ornaments. The grey-blue waters of a wide river snaked through the settlement, glinting in lacklustre fashion in the muted light, and a network of smaller waterways wound their way through the streets.

But our attention was soon distracted from this sight, however agreeable, for right in the middle of the town rose a hill so tall it could almost be classified as a mountain. We’d seen nothing of it from a distance, which argued for its enjoying some kind of magickal camouflage; only once we were almost on top of it did it abruptly loom out of the misty skies. Its sides were unusually smooth, and thickly clad in velvety greenery. It was liberally veined with gemstones, or so I judged from the periodic flashes of colour and reflected light that caught my eye as we flew nearer.

‘Look,’ said Miranda. ‘Look!’

Her arm stretched past my nose, pointing up and up. I looked.

And could almost have imagined myself back at Farringale, for whirling with majestic grace around the summit of that hill was a trio of griffins. They were high up, so high as to appear minuscule. But there was no mistaking the crackle of magickal lightning that wreathed their powerful wings.

I fumbled for the scroll-case, and pulled it open. There, in fading ink, was a shaky network of rivers generally matching those I saw before me, and a shape that could reasonably indicate the hill.

‘Rivers,’ I said. ‘Mountain. Griffins. Right.’ I put the case away again, and permitted myself one more long, greedy stare at those griffins far above. There were five by then — no, six — and they were coming down. ‘I think we’re in the right place,’ I said to Miranda.

‘Unicorn,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Look to your left, and down.’

She was right. Way down there, just taking to the skies, was a winged horse as ethereal and lovely as my Adeline. Well, almost. Addie is, after all, the best.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Let’s fetch the others.’

Unfortunately for us, we arrived back at the hilltop henges to find that the others were no longer there.

I stood in the centre of the three stone circles, turning about in the futile hope that I’d catch sight of Jay somewhere on the horizon. Or Emellana, eighteen feet tall and dressed in purple.

Nope.

‘For heaven’s sake,’ I muttered. ‘Not again.’

‘Hey!’ I yelled, and launched myself in Addie’s direction.

Addie had spotted him by then, too, and did her level best to take a bite out of his black, wide-brimmed hat. He jumped back, hands up in a gesture of innocence I did not at all believe.

‘Sorry,’ he said, with a bright, charming smile. ‘I couldn’t help admiring your unicorn. I’ve never seen such a perfect specimen.’

I narrowed my eyes, unimpressed. He hadn’t just been admiring Adeline, he had most definitely been creeping up on her. And who with decent intentions called a living creature a “specimen”? ‘What do you want?’ I said, taking hold of Addie’s silvery harness.

‘Where did you get her?’ said the man. Well, was he a man? He was about four feet tall, with a brownish complexion and a lean, rather haggard face. Probably not human, but whatever he might be I could not guess.

‘I didn’t “get” her anywhere because she isn’t precisely mine,’ I replied, and immediately regretted it, for his greenish eyes lit up at my final words.

‘Wild? My, my! What a piece of luck for you.’

I didn’t like the way he said that, nor the speculative way he looked at me.

‘She’s with us,’ I said firmly.

Jay joined me. I couldn’t have said why, but I appreciated his presence at my shoulder, especially when he drew himself up to his full height, arms folded, and stared hard at our unwelcome visitor.

It’s tricky to be properly formidable when you’re scarcely over five feet tall, and sporting pink hair to boot. Nice choice, Ves.

Anyway, our creepy little intruder raised his hands again and backed up a step. ‘I’m just saying. That kind of luck… she’d fetch a premium price up at Vale.’

‘Vale?’ I said sharply. ‘Do you mean the Vales of Wonder?’

He laughed. ‘Nice. And this is a cute children’s story, right?’

‘Is it the same place?’

He shrugged. ‘Probably. Are you interested or not?’

I blinked. ‘Are you actually offering us some kind of partnership?’

‘Why not? The price she’ll fetch will split several ways, no problem.’ He beamed.

Jay shifted a fraction closer, which I interpreted as a warning gesture. He needn’t have worried. I could swallow my rage when I needed to. ‘You offer us a partnership, having just tried to steal her?’ I said.

He opened wide, wide eyes. ‘Steal? Would I?’

‘I strongly suspect so, given half a chance.’

‘Well, take me up on my offer and I won’t need to.’

I glanced at Emellana. Her appearance on the scene hadn’t fazed the little creep, despite her being the best part of twice his height. She returned my look, with her odd quirk of a half-smile, and gave a tiny shrug of one shoulder.

I took that as concurrence. And if the great and mighty Em thought it a decent plan, well, okay then.

‘We accept,’ I said crisply. ‘But if you so much as lay a finger on Adeline, I’ll feed you to the dog.’

He looked in silence at pup. She’d ceased barking some minutes before, but continued to growl, showing all her tiny teeth. ‘It would take her all year,’ he said, ungenerously, but with some truth.

‘Fine. I’ll feed you to him.’ I indicated Jay with a jerk of my chin.

I don’t know what expression Jay was wearing just then, but it impressed our new partner rather more than the pup’s minuscule rage. He subjected Jay to a long, measuring look, then nodded once and held out his hand. ‘Done.’ The smile came back. ‘I’m Wyr.’

I shook the proffered hand, albeit warily. Jay didn’t. ‘Ves,’ I said. ‘Jay, Mir and Em.’ I wasn’t especially interested in handing over everyone’s full names to a thief, though I don’t know why I imagined it would matter. Our lives and identities were a world away.

Wyr looked quizzically from face to face. ‘Forgive me for asking, but, if you weren’t taking that thing up to Vale, what were you doing?’

‘Ves,’ hissed Miranda in my ear. ‘I need to talk to you.’ Since this demand came paired with a thunderous look, I didn’t feel much inclined to comply.

‘Later,’ I muttered.

‘I mean,’ Wyr continued, without waiting for a reply, ‘Scarborough’s not really the place to be if you’re looking for a big payoff.’ His eyes strayed back to Addie and he added, ‘At least, that’s what I would’ve said ten minutes ago. But luck happens, yes?’

‘A payoff?’ echoed Jay with a frown.

‘Now,’ said Miranda, and hauled me away by the arm.

‘What?’ I said. ‘For goodness’ sake, Miranda, if you think you have the right to—’

‘It doesn’t matter what I’ve done,’ she hissed, and I could almost feel the fury radiating off her. ‘I’ve never sunk so low as to sell a unicorn! What is wrong with you?’

I could only stare, speechless.

‘Say something!’ she all but shrieked.

‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ I said. ‘You don’t really imagine I’m going to sell Adeline?’

‘That’s literally what you’ve just agreed to do.’ She folded her maroon-knit-clad arms over her chest and glared at me.

‘Right!’ I said. ‘And Wyr over there has just agreed to be totally saintly and not try to screw us over the first chance he gets. I’m sure he meant every word of that, too.’

Some of Miranda’s certainty faded. ‘He’ll expect you to follow through. What are you going to do when you get to Vale, then?’

I didn’t like that you, so much. After all, we were supposed to be a we for the (hopefully short-term) foreseeable future, and that made us a team.

Then again, I hadn’t been doing a great job of treating her like a team mate, and however justified my wrath, that was hardly helpful either.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Look, this is how the Ves-plan-of-action thing works. One obstacle at a time. All other bridges to be crossed when we get there. Once we’ve reached Vale and ascertained whether or not it is the same Vales of Wonder that we’re looking for, then we figure out how to proceed. Okay?’

‘That’s crazy.’

‘So’s borrowing trouble. There’s six of us against one of Wyr, so can we stop worrying about this and get on with it?’

‘Six?’ Miranda repeated.

‘I’m counting pup and Addie. Aren’t you?’

I think that alone of everything I’d said actually mollified Miranda, for she very almost smiled. ‘Fine,’ she said, and stalked back to Jay, Emellana and Wyr.

Wyr was talking. ‘So you just happen to have a nose-for-gold on hand and you’ve stumbled over a rare wild unicorn by some happenstance, but you’re not thieves? Sure.’

‘Thieves?!’ I stuttered. ‘What?’

‘Travellers,’ said Jay. ‘Voyagers. Explorers. Take your pick, if you like, but we aren’t thieves.’

Wyr shook his head in disbelief. ‘Do you have any idea how many opportunities you’re missing.’

‘To steal other people’s stuff? It’s not really something I think about much,’ Jay retorted.

Wyr responded with a look of frank dislike. ‘You aren’t going to be much fun, are you?’

‘Not even a little bit.’

‘Hey-ho, then,’ said Wyr, adjusting his hat, and grinned. ‘More loot for me. Shall we go?’

‘Let’s,’ I agreed.

Wyr looked at us. I realised after a second that he was waiting.

‘Oh, lead on,’ I said, smiling.

He held out his hand. ‘Token.’

‘No tokens yet. We’ve no idea where we’re going, recall?’

He didn’t withdraw his hand. ‘Money, then.’

‘We’re a bit short on that,’ I admitted.

Wyr just blinked at me.

‘But,’ I hastened to add, ‘we do have a Waymaster.’

‘And?’

‘So, we don’t need tokens.’

‘The fact that tokenless travel is against the law makes no never-mind to you, but you’re not thieves.’ Wyr smirked.

‘It… is?’ I said uncertainly.

‘There’s a tax on… where the blazes are you lot from? How can you not know this?’

‘We’re from overseas,’ I said smoothly. Well, it was technically true.

‘Uh huh.’ Wyr went to the kiosk, which waited patiently beside us, and acquired a token within approximately four and a half seconds. To my annoyance, I couldn’t tell what he’d done to accomplish that.

He saw me watching, though, and waved the token at me: a small object that shone. ‘Some of us are law-abiding citizens.’

‘I’m sure.’

He grinned, and walked off towards the henges, whistling. ‘Come along, then, children. We want the amber henge, first.’

First? I hoped we wouldn’t have too many henges to travel between. Poor Jay would be jelly by the time we made it to Vale.

Miranda took charge of Addie, which might have worried me if it were any creature but my unicorn. Adeline could take care of herself, if necessary; I didn’t give much for Wyr’s chances had he got much nearer to her.

But Emellana fell in beside me, and spoke in a low tone. ‘That person,’ she said, nodding her head at Wyr some little way ahead, ‘used some kind of a charm back there, on Adeline. Potent, too. The air is still thrumming with it.’

‘Oh,’ I said, and looked swiftly at Addie. Was she her normal self? ‘What kind of a charm was it?’

‘Nothing I have ever encountered before.’

‘Hardly surprising,’ I offered. ‘Everything here is so different.’

She nodded. ‘I do not criticise your decision to bargain with that one, but I do urge you to be wary. He has powerful arts at his disposal, and I cannot guess at his intentions.’

I’d been privately wondering something similar. ‘If he’s a thief he’s an inept one,’ I agreed. ‘Spotted before he got within three feet of his target.’

‘He may not have anticipated the loyalty or alertness of your pup.’

I drifted in Jay’s direction. ‘Keep that lyre out of sight,’ I whispered.

‘You think?’

I rolled my eyes. ‘Fine. Sorry.’ But I couldn’t resist adding, ‘And the scroll-case, too.’ It was, after all, crusted with jewels worth a fortune.

‘Got it, Ves. Stop.’

I gave him a tiny salute. ‘Yessir.’

Wyr did not deign to wait for us. He walked straight into the circle of amber and disappeared in a shower of light.  

‘Helpful,’ muttered Jay.

In Wyr’s defence, he probably had no way of knowing that Jay could access multiple locations from these henges. ‘One of the routes is probably more… well-travelled,’ I suggested. Like a well-beaten track, but the magickal equivalent… could Jay tell? Why was I trying to help when I had no idea what I was talking about?

I shut up.

Jay said nothing for a while, but stood with closed eyes, one hand laid atop the nearest stone.

His eyes opened.

‘Em and Miranda first,’ he said. ‘Please. Ves, hang onto Adeline and pup. I’ll be coming back for you in a moment.’

I waited while Jay took hold of our two companions and stepped into the henge. All three of them vanished from sight.

By the time Jay reappeared, I had pup tucked under one arm, my other hand clutching Addie’s rope.

‘Ready to go?’ he said. His eyes were a bit wild again, but otherwise he looked — so far — normal.

‘All set,’ I said.

He held out his hands for pup, and then took my hand. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I’ve never taken a unicorn through the Ways before. If she comes out with her head on backwards or something—’

‘I will never let you hear the end of it,’ I promised.

‘That’s what I thought.’

We stepped between the stones, and when my feet hit the centre of the amber circle, the Winds rushed up to claim us and we were gone.

‘Jay, you total idiot!’ I kicked at the nearest stone. He could’ve ended up anywhere. Canterbury. Edinburgh. Prague. Burundi.

He reappeared two minutes later, just as Miranda and Emellana caught up with me. ‘Hah!’ he said, with gusto, and vanished again.

This process was repeated twice more before he consented to pause in the centre of the turquoise henge, trembling violently and visibly out of breath.

I looked him over carefully. He had an elated look about him that seemed out of character, and his eyes were too wide. ‘You okay?’

‘I have no idea where I just went to,’ he said, beaming at me. ‘But it was amazing.’

‘You’re pumped up,’ I said. ‘Bordering upon high. Let’s have a little sit down for a second, okay?’ I towed him back towards his rock of a seat, but he drew his arm out of my grasp.

‘No way. I need to go again.’

‘Jay, do you recall how Farringale affected most of us?’

He nodded enthusiastically. ‘You were all bonkers.’

‘Totally intoxicated.’

I waited for the penny to drop.

And it did, after a few seconds. ‘Oh,’ said Jay, with a laugh, and ran a hand through his hair.

‘We appear to have found your poison.’

He physically shook himself. ‘It’s a pretty good feeling,’ he admitted.

‘I can see that. But we need you sane.’

‘Hey, listen to Ves, talking sense with the best of them.’ He beamed at me. ‘I’m proud of you.’

I found myself casting a sideways look at Emellana, whom I would not have suspect me of foolhardiness.

She smirked at me.

I coughed. ‘Um, so, did you go to the same place each time?’

‘The first two times, yes,’ Jay said, and sat down suddenly on the grass. ‘Oops. I popped up smack in the middle of the same henge, looked like bloodstone or something like that. One of many, many. Bigger henge complex than this one, at a glance.’

Miranda nodded. ‘Most of them work like doors, or so I gather. Like, each henge goes to a specific designated partner henge in some other complex.’

‘Right,’ Jay said. ‘But I could feel more potential than that, so the third time I tried to end up someplace else. And I did. Same complex, different henge. And then the fourth time I was somewhere else altogether, no idea where, except I think it wasn’t Britain.’ He looked around hungrily at all the other henges on the site, and scrambled to his feet. ‘I need to try them all.’

I grabbed him by the sleeve. ‘Jay. Some other time, all right? You try all of these now, you’ll lose your marbles in record time.’

‘You think?’ Jay paused.

‘We’ll be scraping your sanity off the moon.’

‘But,’ he said.

I waited, but that was it.

‘Let’s stick to the task at hand, can we?’ I said. ‘We need to find a way through to the Vales of Wonder. You can play with the rest some other time.’

He grinned at me. ‘Thanks, Mum.’

‘You’re welcome. So, the Vales?’

I was looking at Miranda, but she shrugged. ‘I haven’t heard of it.’

‘Anywhere we could find, say, a map or something?’

‘There’s a tourist information office back in town?’ she offered.

‘How about a library with a computer?’

She stared at me. ‘No computers here, Ves. Remember? No planes, no cars, no tech.’

I stared back. ‘No internet?’

Miranda shook her head.

‘What dark nightmare is this?’

She awkwardly patted my arm. ‘It’ll be okay.’

I gave myself a shake. ‘Fine. Let’s try the tourist office, or failing that there must be a library somewhere.’

Jay was drifting away. To my alarm, he was making a beeline straight for the spiralling agate structure near the centre of the henge complex. If one of the lesser ones had scrambled his wits, what would the mother of all empowered henges do to him? ‘Jay,’ I said, and grabbed him. ‘We’re going to need to get you some coffee, and a truckload of food.’

‘I’m not hungry,’ Jay said, but then stopped. ‘Actually, no. I’m starving.’

I nodded. I’d felt the same way after my near-drowning in magick back at Farringale. ‘Do they have pancakes in this Britain?’ I asked Miranda. ‘Please say yes. I have a never-ending chocolate pot, but I don’t think that’s going to cut it.’

‘No idea. Let’s find out.’

But when I looked around for Emellana, I didn’t see her. ‘Wha—’ I began, and turned in a circle.

Fortunately, it isn’t too hard to spot a seven-foot-and-something-tall troll woman dressed in purple. She was on the far side of the complex, communing with the foremost stone of the amethyst henge. Communing’s the only possible word for it. We went after her, and found her with both hands set to the smooth stone and her eyes closed. She looked mesmerised.

‘Em?’ I said softly after a minute.

She didn’t open her eyes. ‘Can I borrow that lyre?’ she asked.

Jay gave me a shifty-eyed look. ‘Turn your back, Ves.’

‘What? No! I can be trusted.’

He gave me a look that said, are you kidding me?

I sighed, and turned around. ‘Unfair.’ I leaned against Addie’s soft flank, and watched pup gambolling happily in the sunshine. She stopped, nose to the earth, and began to dig furiously. Another nugget of loose change about to come a-cropper, no doubt.

‘Why is Ves backwards?’ I heard Emellana say, absently, and then came the dulcet tones of the lyre as she strummed a brief melody.

‘Because she wants to meld with the lyre and must therefore avert her eyes,’ said Jay.

‘Meld?’

‘It has a strange effect on her.’

‘Hmm.’ There was no more talk after that, for a while, but quite a lot more music, and I ached to turn around and watch what was happening. I knew Jay would scalp me if I did, though, and moreover he wouldn’t be wrong.

‘Are you finding much?’ said Jay eventually.

‘Not being a Waymaster any more than Ves is,’ said Emellana, ‘I feel very little of anything that is happening here. Until, that is, I pick up the lyre. I suppose what I am now sensing is not current activity but past, and there is a great deal of it. Very potent.’

‘It’s probably been an active complex for some time,’ Jay agreed.

‘Yes.’

I couldn’t stand it anymore. ‘What is it that you’re trying to do?’ I said. Hey, I hadn’t turned around. I was still toeing the line of good sense.

‘Gathering information,’ said Emellana.

I was hoping for something jazzier, but all right. Emellana was the expert on world exploration. She knew what she was doing.

‘Did you know your lyre absorbs magick?’ she added.

I whirled around. ‘Does it! Orlando said it might, but I think he wasn’t sure. What is it—’

I was intercepted at this point by Jay, firmly turned about, and left facing the other way. At least this time he was nice enough to stand in front of me, so I had a face to look at while I was talking. ‘Tut,’ he said.

‘It was only a little glimpse.’ Even that was enough to make my heart ache. In Emellana’s hands, the lyre had been blazing with magick and beauty. I could still feel it. ‘Moonsilver and rosewater,’ I added, unnecessarily.

‘Wasn’t it skysilver?’ said Jay, folding his arms.

‘I actually think skysilver is an inaccurate name. It’s more moon-coloured.’

‘I’ll let the Yllanfalen know your thoughts.’

‘It’s okay, I’ll just call my loving mother.’ I cracked myself up with that one. When I was still laughing twenty seconds later, I had to wonder whether Jay was the only one whose senses were a trifle disordered.

Actually he looked stone-cold sane in that moment, staring at me with one brow raised.

‘Sorry,’ I said, and swallowed my gigglefit. ‘Erm. What’s she doing now?’

‘Ms. Rogan has moved off to another couple of henges. Oh, she’s coming back. Second.’ Jay disappeared from my field of vision.

Two minutes later he said, ‘Okay Ves, you can turn around again.’

I did, to find three empty-handed people and no sign of the lyre. ‘Where are you keeping that thing?’ I demanded.

‘You are the last person I am telling.’

‘Damnit.’

Emellana wore that faint smirk again, and it was definitely directed at me. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘Give me another sixty years and I’ll be every bit as imperturbable as you.’

‘I do not doubt it,’ she said graciously. ‘Though if it helps, I do not believe the lyre’s effect on you to be particularly your fault.’

‘Particularly my fault?’ I echoed. ‘It’s only a bit my fault?’

‘Perhaps.’

I decided not to rise to that. ‘What did we find out?’ I said instead.

‘I believe I have learned which of these henges goes the farthest,’ said Emellana. ‘There are clear differences in the potency of the magickal traces left behind at various sites. Though it is possible that the more potent henges lead to places of more intense magick, and the difference is unrelated to distance. The one Jay used is only of moderate power.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Keeping Jay well away from the stronger ones.’

‘Hey,’ said Jay.

‘Give me that lyre, and you can use any henge you like with my blessing. I’ll even scrape you off the ceiling again afterwards.’

‘There is no ceiling,’ he muttered, which I took to mean he had no reasonable response to offer.

Win.

‘You didn’t find one conveniently marked “this way to the Vales of Wonder” I suppose?’ I asked of Em.

‘It’s not quite that simple.’

‘No,’ I sighed. ‘It couldn’t be, could it? We need a map.’

‘Or an obliging and knowledgeable passerby,’ suggested she.

‘I don’t see why there isn’t some kind of a map here already,’ I said. ‘Or sign posts, or… something. How do people know which henge to use?’

‘That… is actually a very good point, Ves,’ said Jay.

I looked at Miranda. So did everyone else.

She opened her mouth, paused, and closed it again. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I haven’t used the henges myself.’

‘So how do you come to know so much about how they work?’

‘I asked around. I thought I might need them sometime.’

‘Nobody mentioned a handy map or something? Like the tube map. Something.’

‘No. Look, I’m thinking, but I don’t remember anything like that. It’s like… that question never came up, like no one would need to have that spelled out for them.’

‘They’re doing something we aren’t,’ I said, and stared hard at the henges as though that would help. ‘Jay?’

He shook his head. ‘If you can use these without being a Waymaster, then it can’t be a Waymaster trick they’re using.’

‘Fair.’

‘It’s my belief,’ said Emellana mildly, ‘we may be looking too hard for an unusual solution.’

‘Meaning?’ said Jay.

‘Meaning that, while many things about this Britain are indeed wondrous, not quite everything needs to be. In this instance, the fact that we have a Waymaster with us is undoubtedly an advantage, but we need not make use of your talents on this occasion if it proves inconvenient. Miranda, you spoke of travel tokens. Do you happen to know where those are sold?’

I struggled with myself. It almost hurt, to gaze at the array of magickal glory before us and interpret it as something no more miraculous than a train service; but to those who used it every day, that’s all it was.

And therefore, of course there’d be a ticket office somewhere.

‘Do we have money for that?’ I said, considering pup doubtfully. I had endless faith in her talents, but how much discarded currency could there possibly be?

‘That is a problem for later,’ said Em.

A woman after my own heart.

I collared an elderly man who was making his slow way past the gates to the henge complex and pumped him for information. He may have looked at me like I was crazy or stupid or both (debatable) but he did point out the token vendor: a short, blue-painted kiosk situated about fifty feet from the gate. All right, so it was floating two feet off the floor and didn’t seem to be manned by anybody, but it nonetheless couldn’t more obviously be a ticket office.

And we’d walked right past it.

‘Worst explorers ever,’ I sighed, and started towards it.

Then stopped. ‘Wait. Why is it floating?’

There came a snort from our helpful passerby. Thankfully for my dignity, he did not choose to comment on our utter ineptitude (this time), but merely raised a hand and whistled two notes.

I paid close attention to the tone, for the air thrummed in response, and the kiosk instantly sailed in our direction.

‘Thanks,’ I said, with a bright smile for our helpful, if taciturn, interlocutor.

He only gave me a puzzled look, and moved off.

Ah well. Can’t win everyone’s admiration quite all the time, or at least not if your name isn’t Baron Alban.

The kiosk took its sweet time crossing the short space between us, but while slow it was jaunty. It bobbed cheerfully up to where we stood before it settled down, and a light went on inside.

Er.

‘Hi?’ I said. ‘We need to go to the Vales of Wonder.’

Nothing happened.

‘Um, can we see a list of destinations?’ Jay tried.

Silence.

In fact, the thing stubbornly refused to respond to anything that we said. After a string of uninterrupted failures, we were left stymied.

‘Damnit,’ I said. ‘Voice-operated magick isn’t a thing?’

There must be a charm or something that applied here, but how to guess it? I attempted some one or two encouraging little spells, with a similar lack of effect, but as I prepared a third option my concentration was shattered by an unexpected sound: a frenzied, high-pitched barking.

‘Pup?’ I said, and spun.

She stood twenty feet away, paws dug into the earth, her whole body jerking as she roared her fury at… what? I could see nothing amiss. Addie was right behind me, peacefully turning her nose up at the bright green grass beneath our feet, one eye half-closed in stupefying boredom. Emellana and Miranda and Jay puzzled still over the kiosk, deep in debate about something I hadn’t the leisure to listen to. And while if someone wanted to relieve us of Miranda I wouldn’t have objected too much, she was kind of my responsibility, so I had to be thankful for her continued presence.

No one else was near us.

‘Pup, what—’ I began, and started in her direction.

Then I saw it. A small, sneaking, hatted little person creeping up on my Adeline.

‘I can’t feel any of that,’ I reminded him, not being a Waymaster and all.

‘Right.’ Jay looked at Emellana.

She shook her head. ‘I have no Waymaster’s arts either.’

‘One of the very few things you lack, from what I hear,’ he said.

She grinned at that, seemingly a rare expression with her. ‘Believe me, I would have rectified that lack if I could.’

‘Wouldn’t we all,’ I muttered.

‘All right,’ said Jay. ‘So this is all Waymastery, all the time. I’ve been here for twenty minutes or so and eight people have come through in that time. Three arrived here by bubble-express; of those, one disappeared through the main henge, and two through the jade one there.’ He pointed. ‘Two came down on some kind of flying carpet, I’m not even kidding, and took the one with the milky crystal stones. And the other three were coming through the other way. They all appeared together at that one that looks like lapis lazuli, and walked out of here on foot.’ He paused. ‘Six looked human. The other two were, I think, a spriggan and a… I don’t know, but he looked a fair bit like the Yllanfalen.’

‘I know!’ I enthused. ‘They’re just openly walking about among humankind. No glamours. We passed all kinds back in the streets — trolls, brownies, even a giant. And there was this woman who — I can’t be sure, but I’d almost swear she was a selkie.’

‘I’m unused to walking openly through the streets of human towns,’ said Emellana, with a faint smile. ‘At least, not without a fair amount of pointing and shrieking.’

‘Right,’ said Jay. ‘There’s no segregation here at all.’

‘No hiding,’ said Emellana. ‘It’s refreshing.’

‘I think it’s wonderful,’ I said fervently. ‘And unicorns aren’t rare at all, Jay!’ I told him about our encounter with the chip-chomping gent back in town.

He nodded. ‘Royal lines?’

‘I don’t know, but I figure they’re being bred. The way horses are back home, you know.’

‘For what?’

‘I… don’t know. Are there unicorn races?’ I shrugged.

Jay pointed towards one of the henges with a jerk of his chin. ‘There, look. Someone just came through.’

The someone in question could only be a giant. She came striding through a set of ethereally-pale stones, the henge looking dangerously delicate next to her towering bulk and height. It’s something to see an entire giant appear out of thin air, I tell you. It’s something else to watch that same giant amble through two or three of the henges, her steps shaking the earth, and then transform into a butterfly and sail airily away.

‘Where the hell are we,’ I said in awe.

‘Ain’t seen nothing yet,’ said Jay with a grin. ‘We haven’t even got to the Vales of Wonder.’

Lawks. If these weren’t wonders enough to deserve the name, what could we expect to find at the Vales?

‘I’m never leaving,’ I decided.

‘Have to,’ said Jay laconically, standing up from his rock of a seat. ‘Work to do back home.’

‘It cost you a lot to say that, didn’t it?’

‘My heart, and about half my soul.’ He set off towards the rock crystal henge, and I followed with Addie. Emellana was already twenty feet away, inspecting a large, pinkish stone. Rose quartz? Morganite?

‘What I can’t figure out about all this is… well, everything,’ he said. ‘Why so many henges? What’s the difference between them, other than the materials they’re made from? Do they go to different places? If so, why? How does that work?’

‘Do they feel different?’ I took off a shoe and set my bare foot to the earth, in hopes that might help. It didn’t. I felt nothing.

Jay shook his head. ‘Not significantly. Maybe as to degree, though it’s not as simple as the larger ones being the more powerful. The most potent one so far is actually that little spiral with the agates.’

‘Potent?’

‘Yeah. As in, I feel like I could take us to the moon out of that one.’

‘Hold that thought for my next birthday.’

‘There’s nothing up there, Ves.’

‘On the moon? How do you know?’

‘I have it on good authority that it’s a unicorn-free zone.’

Came then a flicker of maroon, out of the corner of my eye. I whirled.

Someone was disappearing behind a huge pillar of purple iolite.

‘Miranda!’ I shouted. ‘I see you.’

Nothing moved, and there came no reply.

I took off at a run. ‘I saw you back in town,’ I yelled. ‘Your stealth is about as good as your loyalty— there. See, I knew it was you.’

Miranda stood with studied nonchalance in the shadow of the huge, gloriously purple crystal; light shone through it, casting purplish shadows across her face. She looked exactly as I remembered: messy, disorganised, intense. Same old Miranda. Only she’d grown haggard over the weeks of her absence, and while she met my gaze with a show of bravado, she couldn’t hide the guilt behind her eyes. ‘Hi, Ves.’

‘Hi?’ I sputtered. ‘Hi? What are you doing following us around?’

‘Well—’ she said, and stopped.

‘Well?’

‘Ves, you do know you can’t just walk off with unicorns around here?’

‘I didn’t walk off with a unicorn.’

She looked over at Adeline, who was hot on Jay’s heels as he came after us.

‘Not a native. We brought her with us.’

That earned me a look of pure disbelief. ‘You brought one of the unicorns from back home? Here? You do know how incredibly endangered they are on the sixth, I suppose?’

‘Milady’s idea,’ I said quickly.

She scowled. ‘Hello, Jay,’ she said as he came up.

He responded only with a curt nod.

‘So,’ I said pleasantly. ‘How can we help you, Miranda?’

‘How did you find us?’ Jay interrupted.

‘I saw you come through from Whitmore.’

‘You’ve been following us all morning?’ I said. ‘Couldn’t you have just said hi?’

‘Was I welcome to?’ That came with a challenging look.

I sighed. ‘I won’t lie, I’d prefer not to talk to you. But it does happen that we were looking for you.’

She blinked. ‘Looking for me?’

‘Aye, thee. The thing is—’

Miranda was backing away. ‘Look, I’m sorry about everything that happened. I really am. I’ll make amends if I can, but you don’t need to…’

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ I snapped. ‘We aren’t here to hurt you.’

‘I don’t know, Ves,’ she said, eyeing me uncertainly. ‘Last time we talked, you looked about ready to kill me. Still do.’

‘Ves is a violence-free area unless severely provoked,’ I said.

Jay said, ‘Does abandoning the Society and betraying our movements to Ancestria Magicka count as severe provocation?’ He sounded mildly interested.

I glowered, not because I wanted to kill Miranda but because I realised I didn’t. Not really. She looked so damned hang-dog, with her hair falling down, her jumper unravelling at the elbows, and those shadows under her eyes. ‘No,’ I grouched.

Then again, when I saw pup race into view and hurl herself at Miranda like she was her best and long-lost friend, I considered revising that decision.

‘Don’t touch the pup,’ I said warningly.

I was rewarded for my lack of generosity by two pairs of wounded eyes, fixed upon me in joint dismay.

Pup’s won me over.

‘Fine, fine,’ I said with a wave of my hand. Since Emellana had showed up along with Goodie, I made introductions. ‘Emellana’s here to help us with—’

‘Emellana Rogan?’ said Miranda, staring at Em with the same kind of awe Jay and I had felt. Then she covered her eyes. ‘Oh, lords. The worst possible time to meet your heroes.’

Emellana, serene in purple, merely lifted one brow a fraction of an inch. ‘Why is that?’

‘Because of—’ she stopped, and looked an enquiry at me.

I understood the unspoken question. Yes, I had given Emellana the story of Miranda’s defection from the Society. No, I didn’t want to say that to Miranda just then. I ignored the question in her eyes, and said: ‘Miranda’s the former expert on magickal beasts with the Society. She’s to join us on this assignment.’

Miranda stared. ‘I am?’

‘Milady’s orders.’

‘Milady?’

‘None other than.’

Miranda looked from me to Jay in disbelief. ‘I thought you two were no longer with the Society either.’

‘Erm. Well, it’s true that we’re technically working for the Royal Court at Mandridore right now. They’re partnered with the Society.’

Miranda’s eyes grew even wider. ‘What’s going on here, Ves?’

‘Something pretty big.’

‘I see that.’  

I decided not to share all the details. Miranda was still a traitor. ‘We’re looking for griffins,’ I told her. ‘Among other such creatures.’

‘Such creatures?’

‘Beasts of myth and legend. Oozing magick from every pore. That kind of thing.’

‘We’re heading for the Vales of Wonder,’ said Jay. ‘Soon as we figure out how.’

‘And what am I for?’ said Miranda.

‘You probably know more about griffins than anybody else, more or less,’ I said. ‘Right?’

‘That isn’t saying much. To the best of my knowledge, you two are the only people who’ve seen a live one in recent memory.’

‘And charmingly clueless about it we were. Are you with us or not?’

Miranda appeared uncertain, to my indignation. Honestly, how much more of an olive branch did the woman expect?

‘Are you still with Ancestria Magicka?’ said Jay suddenly, with a narrow look.

‘Technically,’ said Miranda.

‘What I’m getting at is: are you here with or without their leave?’

She grinned. ‘Without their knowledge, I think. I hope.’ The grin faded. ‘I don’t want to go back home. If I go with you, that has to be clear.’

‘The beasts back home need you far more than these do,’ I said, frowning.

Miranda just looked at me. ‘How do you know?’

Fair point.

‘Right, well, if that’s settled,’ said Jay. ‘I need to crack on with this little collection of mysteries.’ He sauntered off towards the nearest henge, hands in the pockets of his jacket, face thoughtful.

Emellana held out her hand to Miranda, who took it uncertainly. There was a handshake. ‘Good to have you with us,’ said Emellana.

‘Is it?’ said Miranda softly.

Em gave an affirmative nod, and grinned. ‘I’ve been reading your essays for years. My favourite was the one about firelight moths as familiars.’

Miranda’s eyes widened. ‘Well, this is surreal.’

‘Miranda,’ I said. ‘We need some help here. Have you learned anything about this place?’ I indicated the henges with a sweep of my arm.

Her eyes lit up. ‘Ves, this world is amazing. Amazing. You know they never had aeroplanes, or cars? Never needed them. Everything’s magick. Short-distance travel is all about the bubbles and lights — you saw that already. Long-distance journeys are taken by henge, and as far as I can figure, there’s an entire world-wide infrastructure.’

‘Uh huh, and how does that work?’

‘Like, you don’t need to be a Waymaster to use these empowered henges, necessarily. You buy travel tokens which seem to act as ticket, passport and charm in one. Take your token, step into the right henge and away you go, and the token’s used up. It’s marvellous. There’s a Union of Waymasters — big organisation — who set up and maintain these henge complexes, and keep them powered up.’

‘Jay,’ I called. ‘You need to hear all this.’

Jay had already wandered out of earshot. I started after him, calling his name — and was just in time to hear him say, with something peculiarly like a giggle, ‘Oops.’

And he vanished.

‘Oops?’ I yelled. ‘Oops?’ I set off at a run towards the henge that had taken him away, a turquoise structure whose stones crackled with a kind of lightning. As I approached, the lightning faded, leaving inert stones and no sign of Jay.

It turns out that the ancient isle of Whitmore is no real guide for the rest of the fifth Britain.

Whitmore has an old-fashioned air about it, to say the least. Most of its buildings are a few hundred years old, by the looks of them, and there isn’t much there to remind a person that the 21st century has indeed dawned. I suppose it’s because it’s still very much dominated by the Redclover brothers, who collectively haven’t quite left a seventeenth century that wasn’t so different from our world.

The Britain beyond the shores of Whitmore is something else.

Wandering through the winding streets of Scarborough, I saw little to remind me of my own Britain save for some elements of a shared history. Here was the same, general progression from timber-framed and white-washed houses into brickwork and sash windows; here were lordly stone-built properties in granite or lime; and here and there, a move into glass and something resembling concrete was also discernible, rather to my regret.

Of cars, though, there was no sign. No buses, no train stations, no phone boxes. I searched in vain for any trace of vehicles whatsoever; there were none.

But the streets were unusually full of bubbles and floating lights.

‘Ah,’ said Emellana, looking keenly at a stream of them sailing in orderly fashion along the high street, a couple of feet over our heads (mine and Jay’s, anyway). ‘In the early nineteen-hundreds, an essay was published entitled On Harnessing the Magickal Properties of Light and Air, by Adelaide Amber. She was ridiculed, which now seems a shame, considering that the paper proposed just such a potential form of transport as we see here in common use.’

‘Pity, too,’ I said, following the passage of a passing orb of light with wistful eyes. ‘How neat and clean they are.’

‘And environmentally friendly,’ said Jay, with a quirk of a smile.

Strange it was, to see magick in all its forms on such prominent display. Strange, and wondrous. We passed beauty parlours and pet shops, cafeterias and banks; but interspersed with these recognisable establishments were shops selling magickal curios and treasures, a patisserie advertising “Floataway Fancies” and “Never-ending Chocolate Pots”, and a bookshop, its window filled with a display of spell-tomes and grimoires.

‘Nope,’ said Jay, literally hooking me by the collar as I attempted to swerve into the aforementioned patisserie.

‘Jay. I need a never-ending chocolate pot.’

‘No. You need air, water and food, and that’s it.’

‘Chocolate is food! Jay!’

Jay hung grimly on.

Emellana watched us with an unreadable expression, her large arms folded over her purple cotton shirt. Then, as I writhed impotently in Jay’s infuriatingly secure grip, she silently entered the shop.

Three minutes later she emerged with a gilded pot the approximate size of my closed fist, an ornate lid hiding its contents. This she presented to me without a word, then strolled away up the street. ‘Henge complex,’ she called, pointing to a large sign adorning a nearby crossroads.

I lifted the lid of my shiny new pot, and got a strong whiff of chocolate.

‘I love her,’ I said.

Jay rolled his eyes. ‘You’ll regret it.’

‘When?’

‘When you’ve imbibed ten kilos of chocolate in two hours and start throwing up liquid cocoa.’

‘But it would be the best two hours of my entire life.’

‘Really?’

‘Okay, not. But close…’ I put the pot into my satchel. ‘Guard that with your life, Mauf. If Jay tries to swipe it, bite his fingers off.’

‘I regret, madam, that I am not in possession of any teeth,’ said Mauf.

‘I don’t take issue with how you choose to ruin his day, provided that you do.’

‘Understood, madam.’ Mauf’s tone had developed a flinty quality.

‘Henge complex,’ said Jay, ignoring me with perfect grace. He stood directly under the sign, which pointed to the right. ‘Complex?’

‘Must be the development Melmidoc mentioned?’ I said.

‘How do you develop a heng— never mind. We’ll find out.’ Jay went right.

I looked at Emellana. ‘Thank you, for the pot.’

She inclined her head. ‘Mr. Patel is… forgive me, but I had understood you to be his mentor?’

‘Not the other way around? Well, yes, but to be honest he’s got a much more developed sense of responsibility than I do.’

‘A very controlled man.’

‘Not controlling,’ I said. ‘He discourages, but I don’t think he’d ever try to dictate.’

She smiled faintly. ‘I said controlled, not controlling.’

Oh. Yes, Jay did have the air of a man exerting a rigid control over himself at all times. ‘Makes him sensible,’ I offered. ‘And hard-working. And he rarely makes mistakes.’

Emellana accepted this without comment, only a flicker of her eyebrow suggesting she might find fault with some part of my argument. But she walked on without further conversation, and I fell in beside her.

‘Wait,’ I said, and came to a stop. ‘How did you pay for the pot? We have no money.’

‘No, but your nose-for-gold has been collecting quite the hoard. I’ve been watching her.’

I hadn’t, or at least, only closely enough to make sure she didn’t wander too far. In my defence, I had to watch Adeline and Jay, too; who knew what kinds of mischief those two might get up to if I didn’t keep an eye on them.

‘I was… distracted,’ I admitted, with a sheepish grin, and gestured around at all the magickal wonder on display. ‘This is the stuff of dreams.’

Emellana didn’t smile. ‘So it is. But dreams can all too easily turn to nightmares.’

I blinked. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean… keep a watch on your unicorn.’

Upon this point she would not elaborate, however much I pressed, so I abandoned the attempt — and looked around for Addie.

There she was — drifting after a man holding a wrapped parcel which, I strongly suspected, held a portion of fried potato.

I hastily retrieved her. ‘Adeline, darling—’ I began, when, to my surprise, the chip-bearer caught sight of his pursuer and cheerfully offered her a handful of potato wedges. Then he proceeded to stroke her nose, smiling.

‘Yours?’ he asked of me as I came up. He was barely taller than me, with pale, curling hair and a wide smile. Something about him suggested he might not be human.

‘Something like that,’ I said, taking hold of Adeline’s silvery rope harness. He seemed wholly unsurprised to find a unicorn lusting after his lunch, like it was as common as being trailed by somebody’s pet dog.

‘What a beaut,’ he said, eyeing Adeline appreciatively.

‘Thank you.’

‘No, I mean, really. You must’ve paid a fortune for her. She looks like royal lines.’

Royal lines? ‘She isn’t really mine in that sense,’ I said. ‘She just… goes where I go.’

‘Wild?’ For some reason, that startled him as nothing else had. ‘I didn’t think there were still any wild ones left. I mean, not around here.’

With which statement he offered Addie one last chip, gave a careless wave, and ambled away up the street.

I looked at Emellana, who had quietly joined us about halfway through this peculiar conversation. ‘What do you make of that?’

‘Think about it,’ she said. ‘If unicorns are as common in this Britain as horses are on our own?’

‘Got it.’ No more letting Addie wander off; not if she was “royal lines”. ‘Where’s Jay?’

‘He went after the henges.’ Emellana gestured, and we set off in that general direction, me leading Addie carefully through the clusters of shoppers. None of them seemed much surprised to see her, either, or no more so than you might be at seeing someone leading a race-horse down the high street.

‘Wait,’ I said abruptly, and stopped. ‘Is that—?’ A familiar messy blonde ponytail had caught my eye. ‘Hold Addie for me,’ I said, and took off after the figure. Unless I was mistaken, there’d been a glimpse of a shabby maroon-coloured jumper too…

I caught up to where I’d seen the ponytail and found no one nearby who resembled Miranda at all. Had I imagined it? Probably.

But perhaps not.

‘Listen,’ I said as I rejoined Emellana and Adeline. ‘If you  see a woman maybe a few inches taller than me, messy dark blonde ponytail, chunky knitted jumper, late thirties or so in age, let me know?’

‘Certainly,’ said Emellana.

‘Might conceivably be found skulking along behind us.’

Emellana’s brows went up. ‘Dangerous?’

‘No. Or at least, not to us. She might be inclined to wander off with Addie, though.’ Was I doing Miranda an injustice in saying as much? She might be a betrayer, but that didn’t necessarily make her a thief.

Nonetheless.

‘Human?’ asked Emellana.

‘As it gets.’

She nodded. ‘Right.’

The “henge complex” turned out to be at the city’s highest point, not far from the castle I had admired from the shore.

Jay had found a seat upon a chunk of limestone on the edges of the grassy glade which hosted both structures, and sat watching the henges intently.

It really was a henge complex. The centrepiece was a stone circle to rival Stonehenge; in fact, it surpassed it. Tall slabs of limestone stabbed at the sky, arranged in a perfect circle. Each one had to be at least thirty feet tall.

Arrayed around this stupendous array was a series of lesser circles, all constructed from differing types of stone. The one nearest us looked like chunks of clear quartz, except I’d never previously been outdone in height by a slab of rock crystal.

‘This,’ said Jay without looking at us, ‘is amazing.’

‘Oh?’ I sat down beside him. ‘Tell me why.’

‘For a start, I’ve never seen more than one henge in the same place, let alone… what, ten? Twelve?’ He indicated the entire, majestic panorama with a sweep of his arm. ‘Just look at that.’

‘They’re beautiful,’ I agreed. And they really were. Clear quartz, deep grey granite laced with something green, amethyst, beryl, something sunset-coloured—

‘They’re more than just pretty.’ Jay might have rolled his eyes, though I couldn’t be sure. ‘The currents here are… I’ve never felt anything so powerful in my life.’

Jay coughed. I suspicioned it might have been a strangled laugh. ‘Torvaston is an interesting figure,’ Jay quickly put in, before Melmidoc could blow his proverbial stack. ‘He had some theories about the sources of magick, which are of considerable significance to us. His disappearance into your Britain is a mystery we’d like to solve.’

Why? demanded Melmidoc, all bluntness. You were well rid of him.

‘Were we?’

Melmidoc made no answer.

‘Because we want to restore Farringale,’ I said. ‘And that is because the decline of magick in our — and your — Britain can, debatably, be traced back to that approximate era. It’s been withering away for four centuries and we’d like to stop it.’

I paused for breath, feeling peculiarly as though I’d just said something momentous. I hadn’t really… had I?

Jay, though, was staring at me. ‘Is that what we’re really doing, Ves?’

‘What?’

‘Bringing magick back.’

I blinked, and thought. ‘Yes,’ I decided at last. ‘Of course it is.’

Of course it was. It could never be enough simply to halt the decline of magick, though that would be a good place to begin. If there was the faintest chance we could reverse the trend entirely, and set it burgeoning again — why wouldn’t we go after that? How could we resist?

Melmidoc was uncharacteristically quiet. ‘Mel?’ I said after a while.

You do not know where it will end, he said. He sounded, for some reason, subdued.

‘Be careful what you wish for, etc. We know.’

 I do not think you do.

‘Then, tell us.’

But Melmidoc was silent.

‘Show us, then,’ said Emellana. ‘The Court at Mandridore is committed to this goal. As their representative, I am scarcely less so.  Why should we hesitate?’

Go, said Melmidoc.

I sighed, wearied with his obstreperous attitude. ‘Fine.’

To the Vales of Wonder, Melmidoc continued. Go there if you must. You will see for yourselves.

As Torvaston had, I wondered? An excess of magick had made short work of old Farringale, that was for sure. But Torvaston would have taken those lessons away with him, when he left for the fifth Britain. He wouldn’t permit such mistakes to be repeated.

Neither would we.

Jay had Torvaston’s scroll-case in his hands and was staring at it, frowning deeply. ‘Now that I come to think of it,’ he said. ‘How do we find these Vales of Wonder?’

I peeped over his shoulder. At a brief glance, which was all either of us had had opportunity for when we’d swiped it out of Farringale, it looked detailed enough. Upon closer scrutiny, though, the map proved to be hand-drawn, and inconveniently devoid of context. Or text, besides those few printed words: The Vales of Wonder on one half, and the Hyndorin Mountains on the other. These were maps of those two places, not to them.

You will find it simply enough, Waymaster, said Melmidoc. In Scarborough there is a developed henge you may use.

‘Developed…?’ said Jay.

Melmidoc offered nothing more.

‘Right. Thanks, then.’ Jay put away the scroll-case.

‘One last thing,’ I said suddenly. ‘Melmidoc. You don’t have any idea where Zareen and…’ I stopped. He would have little idea who Zareen, George and Miranda were, and would in all likelihood care rather less. ‘Are there any outsiders left on Whitmore? Anyone from our Britain?’

No, he said, with evident satisfaction.

‘Well, damn and blast.’

I waited in hopes that either Jay or Emellana might have some bright suggestion to offer — or that Melmidoc might recover from his fit of the sulks and help us out. Literally, even.

You are still here?

I rolled my eyes. ‘Going.’

Not that I was sorry to be on our way out. Ever since our first visit to Whitmore, I had been itching to cross the water, and see what the rest of this hyper-magickal Britain was like. Opportunities had been consistently lacking, thanks in large part to distractions courtesy of Fenella Beaumont and her miserable crew.

Well, Melmidoc might be a grouchy old donkey but at least he’d got rid of her. And for all his ungraciousness, he hadn’t subjected us to the same fate.

I suppose that made us, sort of, favourites. I’d take it.

‘Where do we go!’ I said, once fairly beyond the door of the Spire. ‘Jay! Make it happen!’

He gave me a rather helpless look, then gazed out over the town. ‘Well. Somewhere down on the shore there must be a crossing of some kind.’

So there must, but now that he mentioned it… had I ever noticed such a thing before? ‘A ferry?’ I suggested. ‘A bridge?’

Jay shrugged. ‘Either would be good.’

Emellana’s perfect serenity gave way to a degree of puzzlement. There was even a slight frown discernible upon her agéd brow. ‘The two of you have been here before, yes? Did I correctly understand that?’

‘We have!’ I said, making up in chirpiness for what I lacked in certainty.

‘Multiple times,’ said Jay drily. ‘We were a bit distracted at those times.’

‘I could fly over, and send Addie back for you,’ I suggested.

‘We’ll consider that as a last resort,’ said Jay.

‘Oh, come on. Air Unicorn hasn’t killed you yet.’

‘There must be a more sensible way across, and we will find it,’ said Jay loftily. ‘After all, those story-tellers came across from the mainland last time we were here. There has to be a crossing somewhere.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Emellana mildly, ‘it is nothing so obvious as a bridge, or a ferry.’

‘Why would it be, indeed?’ I said with a groan. ‘Nothing else about this place is ordinary.’ I set off down the sloping hill into the town, scooping up pup along the way. ‘I’m going to ask someone.’

‘You don’t think that will sound a bit… weird?’ said Jay, striding after me. ‘Hey, I know we’re on an island and surrounded by water we ought to have crossed in order to get here in the first place, but where’s the ferry?’

I shrugged. ‘What’s wrong with sounding weird once in a while? Who’s going to care?’

Jay growled something, but he made no further objections.

Emellana soon outstripped me, her legs being about six times as long as mine. ‘There are assorted magickal means of crossing water,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘Some of which would not be nearly so eye-catching as a ferry terminal.’

‘Such as what?’ I called.

‘In parts of Morocco they use a species of levitation charm. I crossed the Lukkus in ‘78 in a laundry tub. Uncomfortable, but effective. In Persia in ‘49 I was taken over a lake by a great bird — I never did discover whether it was a simorq or a rukh, but something of that nature. Then in, oh, ‘60, or ‘61, I galloped across the Danube on horseback. How they contrived to keep the animals afloat, I don’t know, but quite the marvel.’ As she spoke, Emellana kept up a brisk stride down and down the hill, ever on towards the shore. We passed a number of Whitmore’s citizens, few of whom were used to seeing trolls much, I concluded, from the way they stared at Emellana. Or was it the group effect of a gigantic troll, two oddly-dressed humans (by their standards) and a unicorn clattering behind that got their attention? Maybe that.

If I stopped to talk to any of them, she would soon leave us behind, so I hastened on.

‘Why don’t they just have a henge here?’ I wondered aloud. ‘That would make everything easy.’

Jay shrugged. ‘It doesn’t necessarily follow that, because magick is more plentiful here then Waymasters must be common as muck.’

‘How disappointing.’

‘Nonsense, rarity confers value.’

‘Says the Waymaster.’

‘Maybe I like being sought-after.’

‘They only love you for your ancestral magicks.’

Jay grinned. ‘Whereas you love me for my…?’

How did I answer that? I could come up with a decent list, if I thought about it for a minute.

I decided not to.

‘Excellent hair,’ I said instead. ‘And bordering-on-bad-boy dress sense.’

Jay casually popped the collar of his jacket. ‘I knew it.’

Emellana was fading into the distance. ‘Crap,’ I said. ‘Better run for it.’

We caught up with our Court representative on the shoreline. Pup was squeaking in protest at being so jostled about, so I set her down near Adeline.

‘I believe this is it,’ said Emellana.

What? I looked up and down the beach. We’d taken the cliff path downwards at a run, and I’d kept my eyes open all the way down for a sign of something promising on the horizon. Nothing.

All I saw now was unbroken sand, save for an occasional stray figure wandering upon some distant part of it, and no sign whatsoever of a way over. No ferry terminal, no bridge, no boats.

Only a wooden post, in front of which Emellana had stopped. It was an attractive post, I had to give it that much. Someone had made it out of a length of naturally twisting elm, perhaps, or walnut, and had cheerfully ornamented its knots and gnarls with embedded gems of an appealing blue colour.

‘It’s a post,’ I said.

Emellana smiled at it, reached out a hand, and brushed a finger against the largest of the blue stones.

And promptly vanished.

‘What the—’ I said, turning in circles. No sign of her.

‘There,’ said Jay, pointing.

I saw a clear bubble rise, and drift dreamily out over the sea.

‘A bubble.’ I folded my arms and watched, supremely unimpressed, as it disappeared from view. ‘A bubble.’

‘I thought you’d be delighted.’

‘Me?’

‘I am still speaking to the woman who spent, and I believe I quote, three glorious minutes as a pancake not too long ago?’

‘I was high at the time.’

‘Point taken.’

‘She’ll pop.’

‘Magick is vast and wondrous,’ said Jay rather pompously.

‘And?’

‘So, probably she won’t pop. Neither will you.’

‘We’ll be swept out to sea and never seen again.’

‘Chicken.’ Jay stooped, casually kidnapped my pup, and before I could stop him he’d touched his fingers to the eerie blue gem and turned into a bubble, too.

‘Hey!’ I yelled as he drifted away. ‘That’s my pup!’

I wasted a few seconds on pointless fuming. Low-down, dirty trick! I mentally took back about the half of the reasons I might recently have volunteered for generally approving of Jay. ‘Filthy Waymasters,’ I muttered.

Adeline nibbled upon my sleeve.

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘We could just fly over, and skip the whole cast-helpless-upon-the-breeze-as-a-bubble-of-air bit altogether. But. He called me a chicken.’

And he wasn’t actually wrong.

Furthermore, there was the matter of Emellana. One did not wish to be humbled before one’s heroes.

‘Meet me on the other side, Addie,’ I sighed, and before I could talk myself out of it, I touched the blue stone — cool under my fingers, and curiously watery — and that was that.

‘That,’ I said, a short time later, ‘was awesome beyond all reason.’

Jay stared at me. ‘No. No, you were right before. That was awful.’

‘What? No! I’ve never felt so carefree in my life.’ That was the literal truth. How exactly my doubts had so entirely vanished I couldn’t say, but the moment I’d transformed I’d felt like a wholly different person. I’d sailed over the blue-grey waters like a leaf on the wind, singing in my mind the whole way.

Jay looked as though he’d been dragged backwards through a hurricane. It didn’t seem fair.

I couldn’t tell how Emellana felt about the process. She was, as ever, serene.

‘Incoming unicorn,’ said Jay, and we waited while Adeline came soaring over the waves and landed with a thump.

I patted her nose. ‘Excellent creature.’

We had ended up on another beach; Scarborough’s, I hoped. Unlike Whitmore, no cliffs stood between us and the settlement. The buildings started where the beach ended, and rose in a majestic gaggle up a gentle slope. At the top, surrounded by deep green oak trees, was a castle — looking, as far as I could judge from this vantage, more intact than most such examples in our Britain.

I was beginning to sense a pattern, there.

‘Time to—’ I began, but Emellana was already off, striding purposefully up the beach. You’d think she was twenty-five, not one hundred and…whatever.

‘It’s all kinds of humbling, being around her,’ I muttered.

Jay grinned. ‘Call it inspiring, and let’s go.’

Ashdown Castle was gone.

Believe me, I checked thoroughly. I don’t know where I thought Zareen might have managed to hide a huge medieval castle-manor on an open beach, but I trawled up and down the sand anyway, twice over, before I was prepared to concede that it really wasn’t there.

This was good, for it meant (hopefully) that Zareen had succeeded in finding a better, permanent home for the place. Considering its weight, it really shouldn’t have been left any longer on sandy ground.

It was bad because that meant Zareen and George were nowhere within reach.

So much for our easy (maybe) link to Miranda.

We made a slightly forlorn group for a moment there, Emellana and Jay and Adeline and I, faced with the utter absence of an entire castle, and our friends with it.

Well, Jay and I did. Adeline attempted to eat a crab, and swiftly regretted it. Emellana maintained an enigmatic silence.

‘I suppose Melmidoc might know something,’ I offered, half-heartedly.

‘Do you think Zareen was much in contact with him?’ said Jay.

‘Not really.’ Zar wasn’t the type for dutiful check-ins, especially with someone she would consider wholly uninvolved with her business, and therefore irrelevant. ‘But it’s somewhere to start. Even if he doesn’t know, he can help. I mean, where would Miranda go, if she’d stayed here?’

‘Wherever the rarest magickal beasts are,’ said Jay promptly.

‘Right. And Melmidoc would know that, for sure.’

‘You are trying to find a colleague?’ said Emellana.

 I grimaced. ‘Ex-colleague.’

Emellana’s raised brow invited elucidation, which I provided. It made for a surprisingly brief story.

‘Why do you need her?’ said Emellana, gazing thoughtfully over the sea.

‘We don’t,’ I said, with a ferocity that surprised even me.

Jay gave a slight cough. ‘Milady insisted upon it.’

‘And you always do what Milady requires.’

‘Not… always,’ honesty compelled me to admit. ‘But mostly. And she is right about Miranda’s expertise. If we find griffins or unicorns, we may be glad of her presence.’ Maybe.

Emellana said nothing. Her silence proved more eloquent than any counter-argument might have been.

I watched her for a moment. Her serenity was… slightly unnerving. I mean, here we were on the mythical fifth Britain, a place even the Court at Mandridore had known nothing about until recently. A place overflowing with magick, brimming with all the lost arts and artefacts and beasts we could only dream of. I was itching to get off the isle of Whitmore, at last, and explore what lay on the mainland beyond the sea. Jay, I knew, was feeling the same.

Emellana Rogan, however, was… unimpressed. She stared out over the sea as though it were just a sea, any sea, and not teeming with magick and probably full of selkies and mermaids and naiads and… ooh, what if there were mermaids down there?

There could be.

‘Jay! Do you think there are mermaids in those waters?’ I said.

He gave me the side-eye. ‘No idea. Let’s pop down and check.’ He started to remove his boots.

I grabbed his arm. ‘Not now. Later.’

His eyes grew wide. ‘You’re actually serious.’

‘Weren’t you? Oh.’ Abashed, I folded my arms, and attempted to mimic Emellana’s cool, wordless stare over the water. A balmy sea-breeze blew back my hair. ‘I knew that.’

Jay grinned. ‘Do you want to try the stocking trick or not?’

‘The wha— oh.’ In the bustle and confusion of departure, I’d managed to forget about Miranda’s stocking. I dragged it out of my pocket, and cast about for the pup.

She was thirty metres up the beach, snout down in the sand, digging furiously.

‘Hey, she’s found something,’ I said, and set off after her at a trot.

Jay followed after. ‘Imagine what it could be. A gold crown studded with jewels. A priceless gemstone Wand. A cache of selkie’s pearls.’

‘Now you’re teasing me,’ I said with dignity.

He laughed. ‘Someday, one of your wild ideas will turn out to be true, and you’ll have the last laugh.’

‘Not this time,’ I said mournfully, for having scooped up the pup (to her loudly-voiced dissatisfaction) I discovered her unearthed treasure to be… a coin.

I picked it up. ‘They’re still using shillings,’ I said, showing it to Jay. It was bright and new, and obviously had not spent long buried in the sand.

‘No new money? Interesting.’ Jay stuck it in his pocket. ‘About ten thousand more of those and we’ll be rich. Good job, Goodie.’

I attempted to interest my writhing little friend in Miranda’s stocking, but her response to it was to sneeze heartily, three times in quick succession. I set her down in the sand, hoping she might take off in pursuit of our missing ex-colleague, but she only sat on her haunches, ears drooping.

‘To be honest, I’d probably react the same way,’ said Jay.

‘Her pure little heart beats only for filthy lucre,’ I said with a sigh, and put the stocking away again.

Emellana joined us at a casual stroll, her large hands pushed into her coat pockets. It was a little nippy on the beach. ‘We appear to have an imminent visitor,’ she said, and pointed up the cliff.

Poised upon the edge was a familiar, pale spire, its walls twinkling faintly blue. ‘I suppose it was too much to expect we could show up here without Melmidoc finding out about it,’ I said.

‘Especially if we park the car right next door,’ said Jay.

‘There is that.’ The spire loomed far up there, an obvious summons. Was he coming down, or were we expected to go up?

I waited, but the spire did not move again.

‘Righto, then,’ I said, and trudged off in the direction of the winding path upwards. ‘Let’s find out what Melmidoc knows about the Vales of Wonder and the Something Mountains.’

The spire’s heavy door swung slowly inwards as we approached, with an ominous creaking noise.

I don’t know why I found this essentially inviting gesture intimidating.

‘Good morning, Mr. Redclover,’ I said, extra brightly to cover my unease. ‘We—’

You took them all away, Melmidoc thundered, cutting me off. Is that not what you promised?

‘What?’ I blurted, taken aback. ‘Who? You don’t mean… Ancestria Magicka?’

The interlopers, and their inappropriately sized conveyance.

‘The castle’s gone now,’ said Jay helpfully. ‘We checked.’

And its occupants? said Melmidoc.

‘Do you mean George?’ I suggested. ‘He stuck with Zareen, but only to get the castle moved. They should both be—’

Who in the blazes is George? thundered Melmidoc.

I suppose that answered my question as to whether Melmidoc knew what had become of Zareen.

‘Who have you seen?’ I said.

That woman.

‘More specifically?’ My thoughts went to Zareen first, then Miranda. Neither seemed to deserve such an epithet.

About her, there is the arrogance of a born leader.

Definitely not Zareen or Miranda. ‘You cannot mean… Fenella Beaumont?’ I said.

Emellana stiffened beside me. ‘That woman.’

My thoughts whirled. We had heard of her only once, since we’d turfed the lot of them off Whitmore. On that one occasion, she had recently made a wreck of poor Millie Makepeace.

Since then, nothing. She’d vanished. If I had given the matter much thought, I’d probably assumed she and her rotten followers were busy finding a new base of operations.

Perhaps not.

‘Just when did the castle disappear?’ I said around a growing feeling of foreboding.

Ten days ago, said Melmidoc. And you have not yet answered my question.

‘I didn’t hear a question, I heard a deal of shouting.’

Why are they returned? You claimed we were rid of them!

‘I doubt I said anything so foolish, considering we are in no way in control of their actions.’ I spoke rather absently, my mind turned upon Zareen and George and Ashdown Castle. Had they removed it, or had Fenella somehow reclaimed it? ‘Where was Fenella, when you saw her? What was she doing? Who did she have with her?’

She and three souls, Melmidoc began.

‘Oh, so only four of them, that isn’t bad—’

Four is four too many! he snapped.

‘Sorry.’

She and three souls, he said again. Skulking about the beach at night, as though we would not know!

‘What did you do?’ said Jay.

Repelled them.

I did not like the way in which he said this, suddenly cool where before he’d been ablaze with wrath. ‘Um,’ I put in. ‘What does repelling Ancestria Magicka involve?’

They are in one of the other Britains now.

‘One of them? You don’t know which?’

It is immaterial.

I swallowed. ‘Right. And was this before or after the castle vanished from the beach?’

After.

So it could still have been either Fenella or Zareen who was behind that little event. I was prepared to hope it was Zareen. What was Fenella doing “skulking” around on the beach, if she’d already retrieved her castle?

I made a mental note not to get on Melmidoc’s very bad side. We were on his somewhat bad side already; any more, and we’d be expelled to some other Britain in Fenella’s wake. Which one was she on? Was it one that had banned all magick, or one of the ruined ones?

‘We are very sorry,’ I said hastily. ‘We did not imagine she would find the means to return so soon.’

So soon? You knew it was likely to occur eventually?

‘She’s tenacious. It would take more than an ignominious banishment and a dose of amnesia to put her off.’

Perhaps a second ignominious banishment will be sufficient.

I privately thought not, supposing she managed to return from whichever Britain she was now skulking about on.

‘Do you know how she got here?’ said Emellana.

Madam, I believe we are unacquainted.

I sighed inwardly. Melmidoc was ever irascible.

‘So we are,’ said Emellana mildly. ‘I am Emellana Rogan, scholar and Lady of the Court on the sixth Britain.’

‘New Court,’ I put in quickly. ‘Not Farringale.’

Emellana raised a brow at me.

‘Melmidoc has a few issues with the Old Court,’ I supplied.

I felt him glower. I cannot bid you welcome, madam, said he waspishly. You are uninvited.

‘It was quite rude of me,’ Emellana agreed. ‘There is some urgency about our errand.’

I rubbed at my eyes. Was that a headache coming on, already? ‘Em, Melmidoc Redclover died about four centuries ago. Before that, he was one of the most visionary magickers of his age. He and his brother built this place, and pioneered the kind of advanced Waymastery that permits travel back and forth between Britains.’

Emellana made a kind of bow. ‘An honour.’

Your errand? said Melmidoc. Still waspish, but, perhaps, slightly mollified.

‘We seek the Vales of Wonder,’ said Emellana.

There was a pause. To what end? said Melmidoc at length.

Emellana looked at me.

Here was the tricky part. How to tell Melmidoc that we were in pursuit of the last king of Farringale? He could hardly welcome such news. He’d spit, and snarl, and refuse to help. I’d have to handle him delicately, manage him very carefully, turn a deaf ear to his sarcastic commentary…

Ah, screw it.

‘We’re looking for the last king of Farringale,’ I said.

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