by The last time I’d experienced one of Farringale’s magickal surges, the effects had been entertaining as much as they’d been alarming. Indira had flown, quite literally, like a bird. Rob had conjured creatures of scintillating light out of the tip of his Lapis Wand, and sent them soaring about the library. I’d turned myself into a pancake. The fact that we’d all been so totally out of control of ourselves hadn’t been great, with hindsight, but none of us had been inclined to do anything dangerous.
This, though. This was something else.
My lovely, flourishing trees, books hanging from their branches like streamers, roots tearing out of the earth with appalling rumbling, crashing, cracking sounds—those trees were angry.
‘Oh,’ I said numbly, spellbound with horror. I watched as several trees mustered themselves into formation and—eight thousand books screaming in cacophonous concert—ran at the hapless looters.
Not that so many of the latter had stuck around for it. About half had left the library after my impromptu intervention, probably to seek advice, and most of the rest had sensibly legged it the moment the first tree had torn itself loose.
George Mercer was among the foolhardy souls who remained. For a split second, I felt glad—let him pay for his many offences, a good skewering wouldn’t be undeserved—but I thought better of it almost immediately.
I was responsible for this. If I hadn’t interfered, there might have been no surge happening at all; and if there had, there’d have been no ornery oaks on the warpath, feeling a wee bit bitter about being hacked down and turned into shelves. I didn’t want to be the reason somebody died today.
An enraged oak thundered past far too close—Jay hauled me out of the way, thankfully before we could establish whether or not their fury extended all the way through the echoes of memory and time. I felt a strong whoosh of air as it passed; shock had me clinging, just for a moment, to Jay.
‘Thanks,’ I gasped, and took off running.
What I was planning to do, I couldn’t have said. I couldn’t hear Mauf anymore, not over the tumult of vituperative voices, but his indignant presence at my side was an extra spur as I shot into the heart of the library, dodging warring trees and fleeing agents of Ancestria Magicka. At least I had thoroughly disrupted their plundering party: nobody would be trying to touch those books anymore.
I ran through chambers that had once held thousands of books, several somnolent birch or elm or ash trees still slumbering in the corners. I was making for the room we’d come to think of as the museum: an unfathomably tall-ceilinged space filled with artefacts behind glass, the lost relics of a vanished Troll Court. There would be no trees in there, most likely, for there hadn’t been any bookcases: only starstone and glass.
I found it intact, and—relatively—peaceful. The cacophony of disaster went on beyond the rounded archways, all too audible; I winced at a particularly devastating crash. Small hope that the books weren’t coming to collective, and terrible, grief: my fault, too.
‘Mauf,’ I gasped, dropping to the floor, and hauling him out of my satchel.
‘I cannot sufficiently express the extent of my disappointment,’ shouted the book, and snapped—actually snapped—at my fingers.
‘I know, I know. I’m sorry. I intended none of this to happen, and you’ve got to help me stop it.’
‘It cannot be stopped!’ shrieked Mauf, rather hysterically. ‘These blundersome, quarrelsome creatures are beyond anyone’s control.’ He began, shockingly, to sob. ‘My books. My poor, poor books…’
‘Never mind the books right now,’ I snapped back. ‘We’ll mend them. Later. We need to focus on the trees.’ I thumped the heavy weight of him smartly against the floor: the equivalent of a ringing slap. ‘Focus, Mauf. I need your help here.’
The wrenching sobs stopped, to my relief. A long moment’s silence followed, before he said, much more coolly, ‘Logic suggests that, when the surging of magick in these environs should ebb, then the trees will settle.’
‘It does suggest that,’ I agreed, ‘but that may be some time in happening.’
‘Then the best thing to do would be to turn them back into bookcases—’ His words cut off as I abruptly slammed his covers closed again, struck with a piece of genius I hadn’t, in the end, needed Mauf for.
‘I could,’ I answered him rapidly, ‘I think. Maybe. But that would just put us right back where we were, wouldn’t it? This is Ancestria Magicka we’re dealing with. They aren’t going to slink away like whipped dogs just because a couple of trees tried to butcher them like pigs. The moment the trees are gone, the shelves are back, and the books are accessible, they’ll be out the door with the lot.’
Mauf uttered something, rather muffled. ‘—fear you are contemplating further madness—entreat you to see reason—’
‘You’re quite right,’ I told him, stuffing him back into my satchel. ‘I am contemplating madness.’ Possibly the magick was getting to my brain by then, for I was far too pleased with myself, grinning like an idiot, and nowhere near as sensible of the risks as I should have been.
I laid my palms against the buzzing starstone floor, felt the ripples and waves of burgeoning magick shocking the atmosphere. It was easy, in that environment: barely cost me a thought.
Poor Jay came haring into the museum just an instant too late. I was already growing taller—much, much taller—my trunk thickening, arms and tendrils of hair lengthening into lithe, supple boughs. My eaves bristled with a glittering crop of silver leaves, and as I shook myself a spray of purple fruits flew out and splattered across the walls.
‘VES!’ Jay bawled at me from a long way below. ‘You can’t do this—come back from there, this is insane, what are you thinking—’
I heard no more, for I picked up my winding roots and stomped off, causing only a little damage to an unoffending wall in the process.
I’d already noticed that these trees seemed to possess the capacity to order themselves. They’d formed up like a battalion, attacked in concert—and that meant they could be lead.
By, for example, me.
‘FORM. UP,’ I roared, though it wasn’t words that reached them. I rumbled and crashed in a cacophony of bough and branch, a roar of spraying earth and shaken, shattering leaves: and they heard.
I’d popped out from between the echoes, I distantly realised—burst out of it, a shattering tide of magick too vast to be contained—swollen with Farringale’s own disordered currents, burgeoning into an unstoppable wave.
Nobody stopped me. Nobody could have, in that moment. I stomped out of the wreck of the library and away down the bright white boulevard, a pied piper of the forest, with a legion of irate trees stamping along in my wake.
What tales they might tell of this in days to come: the thought came to me dimly, prompted by the awed stares—nay, flabbergasted—I was receiving from Ancestria Magicka’s rotten agents as we passed (just before they scurried out of my path, like rats deserting the proverbial sinking ship).
The legend of Farringale, already a place of myth, story and song, had just grown a little larger and more improbable. I smiled to think of it, somewhere beneath leaf and bark, for as strange a story as they’d tell of this day, the truth was stranger still.
We were out of Farringale and halfway to Winchester before I faltered, paused, and, ultimately, stopped. Fields surrounded us, rippling with burgeoning wheat, or barley, perhaps: a verdant blanket of growth, dotted with copses of my fellow oaks and birches and yews. I turned about, spirits sinking with the velocity of a brick turfed off a tall building.
‘Um,’ I uttered in a rustle of silverish leaves. ‘Does anybody know the way to Mandridore?’
***
The day may yet come when I’ll be so used to Ves’s antics as to feel no surprise, however mad her methodology.
That day is a ways off, I reckon.
Yelling sense at Ves as she turns herself into a gods-forsaken tree and strides away: why did I imagine that would work? Off she went regardless, tossing her leafy canopy in a maddeningly Ves-like gesture despite the arboreal format and for a painfully long minute, Rob and I were left in frozen silence.
Rob permitted himself an audible sigh.
‘What’s interesting is,’ I said at length, ‘she seems to have taken most of the magick with her.’ The magickal surge that had been steadily building was ebbing away again, and perhaps that wasn’t so surprising. I couldn’t even dimly imagine the power it must have taken Ves to perform those several improbable feats in such quick succession.
‘She’s going to need help,’ said Rob.
I blinked, and straightened. Good point. Where in the name of her giddy gods did she imagine she was going with the library of Farringale? ‘Perhaps she can, I don’t know—’ I spread my hands in a hopeful gesture—‘Merlin her way to somewhere?’
Rob just looked at me.
‘Right. No, you’re right.’ Ves might be magickal beyond sense, marvellous beyond reason, and impossibly, dazzlingly competent, but she was still Ves. She’d be lost inside of half an hour.
I succumbed to a momentary burst of panic. I wanted to dash after her instantly—she needed me—but I couldn’t just abandon Farringale. Ves herself would kill me if we bombed out of there without completing the mission.
We’d have to get a move on.
‘Regulators first,’ I said. ‘Then Ves.’
‘Thought,’ said Rob. ‘Griffins.’
I nodded. The notable lack of them as we’d come in had struck me forcibly, only to be swept out of my mind by the chaos that had immediately ensued. There were several that lived atop Mount Farringale, not far beyond the borders of the city. They’d violently opposed our entry, the first time we’d stepped through the portal. Why hadn’t they dealt with Ancestria Magicka?
‘Oh no,’ said I, struck by a horrible thought. ‘You don’t suppose they used the regulators—?’
I couldn’t finish the thought in any detail: just what might they have used the regulators to do as regarded the griffins? Something, anyway: the likelihood that those regulators were here and the griffins unaccountably missing, purely by coincidence, was slim. They had to be related.
Rob nodded grimly. ‘Baroness? Do you know what’s become of the griffins?’
A long pause followed, and I began to fear we’d lost her somewhere. But then she spoke: ‘One is no more; two are captured. The rest bide yet in Farringale, but they are ensorcelled.’
I wished, fleetingly, that we had brought Indira after all: my sister would know at once how they had used Orlando’s regulators to ensorcel—or capture, or kill—a griffin. ‘Where are they?’ I asked.
‘Come,’ she said briefly, and the shadowed shape of her flickered into view, limned in pallid light. She led us away from the library, through streets largely deserted, now; wherever Ancestria Magicka had gone, their attempts to divest the city of its knowledge had been permanently foiled, to Ves’s credit.
We didn’t need to go far. A few minutes’ slinking around shadowed corners brought us to a kind of stables, or mews: rows of tall, handsome stone buildings arrayed around a square courtyard, grand in both size and style. Once upon a time, horses and perhaps even unicorns had resided here, I supposed, along with those who cared for them.
The stalls stood empty, as far as I could see, but the courtyard bustled with activity.
Three griffins crouched there, bound in a strange kind of lassitude: not asleep, quite, but fuddled, dreaming. So secure was their confinement that they were not even bound, save by a shackle chained around one furred leg, and attached to the stone walls.
Several people lingered near them, only a little wary of demeanour: with a wave of fury I recognised Fenella Beaumont. She was playing overseer, three of her henchmen engaged in the operation of one of Orlando’s regulators: I could feel the odd pulse of its magick thrumming through the floor.
It took me a moment longer to realise what else was so wrong with this scene. The griffins, hunched in their demi-slumber, lay inert: not so much as a flicker of lightning wreathed those handsome, feathered forms. That was what the regulators had done; of course it was. The griffins were the magickal heart of Farringale, the source—we surmised—of its deep, wild magick, and the regulators had—well—regulated them.
Helped along, doubtless, by Ancestria Magicka, with the specific aim of subduing them.
I took a long, slow breath, too consumed with fury to speak—at least for a moment.
‘Well,’ I said at last. ‘It’s maybe a good thing Ves isn’t here to see this.’
