by ‘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.’
