‘Speaking of Hostiles,’ she said. ‘Keira, is there any news from Elliot?’
Keira shook her head. ‘I haven’t been able to get through to them the last couple of days.’
Petra’s smile grew, then tightened. ‘But he’s okay, right?’
‘I’m sure he is. They’d find a way to let me know if anything was wrong. I grew up with those people—they’ll take care of him.’
‘I want to keep playing circle games,’ Shelby said.
‘LAST NIGHT!’ Abel shouted, like someone in a rockband announcing the next number. Everyone turned to him, impressed. His next words seemed spoken in the language of relief. ‘Last night, after that Blue was done, I travelled north. To an emergency meeting of the Loyalists. Now, you will have seen in the papers about Princess Ko facing execution? And the King having disappeared underground, once talks collapsed?’
There was a commotion of assurance that people had seen that, and wasn’t it unbelievable, and that’s why you called this meeting, is what I’ve been assuming all along, and . . .
‘Shush!’ Abel shouted, then more moderately, but still stern: ‘Hush. The Loyalists have plans and I intend to play an active part. As I said before, we want to restore the monarchy. Bring back the remaining members of the Royal Family. For now, the King needs somewhere to lay low. And we want to help Princess Ko escape.’
Again, the room erupted. Too dangerous! The Royals were fine in the World: leave them there. Princess Ko would never be executed, there would be outrage! It was all just talk. Leave her be, too.
‘Well, I agree with Abel,’ Hector said. The others turned to him. ‘Pfft,’ he said. ‘Not that he should get involved. You stay put, Abel. We’ve only just got you home. I only mean I agree that Princess Ko needs rescuing, I don’t trust that Elite bunch. They’re looking to make some kind of statement: let the public know that they’re the ones in charge.’
Agent Tovey gazed at Hector. ‘I think you’re right,’ he said.
Keira was twisting her ring again. Sometimes it would catch, then she’d force it on around. She had a dilemma. Later today, she’d find somewhere quiet and think it through. Weigh up the factors. Make a decision—and then she found herself speaking: ‘I can get a message to Princess Ko.’
So much for weighing factors. It was like with that scream last night: she was doing things without her own permission.
Now the room turned its skeptical gaze away from Hector and focused it, blazing, on Keira.
‘This ring?’ she told them. ‘It’s a transponder. Ko has one, too, and so do Sergio and Samuel, the others under arrest with her. So I can talk to them.’
‘The Elite would intercept transmissions,’ Agent Tovey said.
‘Not this one. Before he vanished, Abel was working on technology using particles smaller than magic. You know that, right?’
Abel stared, but Tovey and Kim both nodded. ‘A listening device. We found it in his shop. We gave a sample to Elliot.’
‘Well, Elliot showed it to me. And I reconfigured the technology to make a transponder.’
‘You’re not serious.’ Abel’s voice was hoarse. ‘Elliot gave my work to a Hostile?’
‘I’m not a Hostile,’ Keira said steadily. ‘My mother is a Hostile. Elliot didn’t know that when he gave this to me, but you know what? I think he’d have given it to me anyway. He trusted me.’ Her voice was speaking without her again, running along two melodies, one strident, the other almost weeping. She reached for the strident. ‘I spent my childhood making listening devices for the Hostiles. I will never forgive my mother for using me like that, and I will never work for the Hostiles again. So. No, the Hostiles don’t have this technology—not through me, anyway. But I’m giving it to you.’ She wrenched the ring from her finger and held it up to the room so it caught a triumphant flash of sunlight. Then she slid it back on. ‘Symbolically speaking, I mean. This actual ring, I’m keeping.’
The room had fallen silent. People were glancing at each other or keeping their eyes downcast. Then an awareness grew that someone was moving. It was Agent Tovey. He was jiggling his shoulders. It was so uncharacteristic that people switched their shock from Keira to him.
‘I knew there was something special about that ring,’ he grinned. ‘Nice speech, Keira. Also, sorry for jumping on you earlier. It’s just I knew there was something going on with that ring.’ He performed one more brief dance move, smoothed his trousers down and resumed his usual expression of cool reserve.
‘He misses intelligence work,’ Kim explained.
‘But does Elliot have this ring?’ Petra asked. ‘Can you contact him with this?’
Keira shook her head. ‘It’s on his bedroom floor. I saw it there when I was staying here. Anyway, I wouldn’t have wanted—’
There was a sharp burst of sound from across the room. The sliding doors sprang open. A figure emerged from the space between the doors.
‘I couldn’t wait any longer for Abel to introduce me,’ the figure said. ‘Pleased to meet you. I’m the King of Cello.’
The figure seemed too slight to live up to those words. Then it stepped into the light, and they saw the zing of the man. It was something to do with the white of his teeth, the gleam in his eyes, the turn of his shoulders, and the general pulsating intensity of him.
Agent Kim stilled his pencil, murmured, ‘High drama,’ then resumed sketching.
‘Oh, yeah,’ Shelby remembered. ‘Abel kept going on about wanting us to meet someone. Is this who you meant, Abel? Why’d you leave him sitting there in the dark all this time?’
Abel slumped. ‘The King is going to stay with Petra and me for a while. I thought I should sound you out before I brought him in. If y’all had given me a chance to get a word in . . .’
Everyone was looking at the King. His eyes brightened further as they ran around the room from face to face. ‘I’ve been listening to your conversation from behind those doors,’ he said. ‘And I heard words like the Royal Family. Listen to me now. Those are my wife, my sons and my daughters. I’m getting them home, all of them, from the World, from prison, from anywhere they are, with or without your help, my friends. But which of you is it who just now claimed she could talk to Princess Ko using a ring?’
Keira raised her hand like a Farms schoolgirl.
‘I know you!’ said King Cetus. ‘You helped rescue me from the World! And now you can contact my daughter? You are my favourite person in this room.’
Keira stared.
‘Now,’ said the King. ‘I understand there’s a crack in the high school grounds here which leads to the World?’
‘Yes.’
‘And somebody here can see it, open it and send messages through it to a girl in the World?’
Keira raised her hand.
‘You again! Who is this girl in the World?’
‘Her name is Madeleine.’
‘Will you send her a note right now? Will you ask her to help us bring my family home?’
The Sheriff coughed. ‘Well, see now, it’s best to deal with the crack late at night. When nobody’s around.’
‘Why?’ said the King. ‘It’s Saturday. No school.’
‘I guess,’ Keira offered, ‘I could just send one note through now, asking Madeleine to meet us later tonight to talk.’
‘I’m crazy about you,’ the King said.
Keira tried to get her head around the idea that she, Keira, a girl raised by Hostiles in Jagged Edge, was sitting in a farmhouse in the province of the Farms, a plate of cherry pie on her knee, while the King of Cello gazed at her adoringly.
Nope. Her head couldn’t do it. ‘Thanks,’ she said faintly, instead.
1
Madeleine, are you there? It’s Keira.
Yeah, I’m here. But just so you know, it’s only luck that I am. This parking meter is not exactly standing in my living room. Even when I do come down this lane, I don’t always look at it. So you can’t assume I’ll get your note the same day that you send it. How are Elliot and A
bel?
You go by the parking meter without looking at it? Weird. Can you check it regularly from now on? (Abel and Elliot got thru fine. Abel’s here; Elliot’s in hiding with Hostiles.)
Madeleine stamped her foot so hard the muscle in her right shoulder spasmed. She was standing in the midnight of a cold winter night. Her pen slipped in her gloved hands. She wrote in a shivering scrawl.
Weirder if I’d been looking at the meter. You locked up the crack, remember? What’s the story? Why do you need my help?
The King is here in Bonfire. He wants to get his family home & he thinks he can use old contacts to get the guards away from the crackpoints. Can you get URGENT word to the Queen, Prince Chyba and Princess Jupiter that they MUST get to the crackpoints at the time and date we tell them? Emphasise that timing is crucial and it’s high risk—they should disguise themselves as much as possible—things are in crisis here and likely to get worse, so this could be their last chance.
This note Madeleine read against the rhythm of her chattering teeth. It seemed she had spent most of her life standing at this parking meter either cold or outraged or both.
Keira, before I run around commanding people to put their lives at risk, can you guarantee they’ll be safe? What do you mean Cello is in crisis?
A long silence and then Keira’s reply.
Not sure you need to know this but basically the Jagged Edge Elite are in control, Hostiles gone silent, Colours intensifying and the W.S.U. more powerful than ever. So, no, we can’t guarantee anything, but aren’t you the one who went on about how we shouldn’t abandon the Royals in the World? Now we’re bringing them home and you’re still not happy?
Madeleine was wearing her mother’s coat under her own. This seemed to be making her even colder. Each coat assumed the other would do the work of warming her, so both just hung there thinly, filling up with cold. She wrote a reply.
I’ll get word to the Royals, but I can’t promise they’ll go. They have amnesia, remember? I tried writing to them after Elliot left, and never heard back from the Queen or Prince Chyba. Princess Jupiter’s been emailing me, but she still has no memories of Cello, and she said she’d never go back to that crackpoint—she almost lost her job waiting to be collected last time.
Why are you in contact with the Royals now? We haven’t asked you to do that.
A blast of ice-cold wind tried to tear this note from Madeleine’s hand. She crumpled it tightly and wrote.
You know the crazy thing, Keira? I DON’T JUST DO THINGS BECAUSE CELLIANS TELL ME TO. I DON’T SPEND MY LIFE SITTING BESIDE A PARKING METER WAITING FOR YOUR SUMMONS. NOT THAT IT’S ANY OF YOUR BUSINESS, BUT I GOT IN CONTACT WITH THE ROYALS BECAUSE I KNEW YOU GUYS HAD ABANDONED THEM AND I CARED. I’M THE ONE WHO FOUND THEM ALL FOR YOU IN THE FIRST PLACE!!!
Keira’s answer arrived quickly and scribbled.
Actually, it was me and Elliot and the others who found the Royals. We fished at the Lake of Spells until we caught a Locator Spell and we used that to get their current addresses. You just posted some letters for us. Thanks for that, but seriously? Anyhow, this is unproductive and it’s too hot to keep arguing with you. Also, I have other things to do e.g. we need to rescue Princess Ko—she’s scheduled to be executed same day we want to bring the others across.
Madeleine wanted to reply with, ‘WHAT? Scheduled to be executed?!’ or ‘How can I tell the other Royals to go home if that’s what’s happening to Royals in your Kingdom?!’ or ‘What do you MEAN it’s too hot there?!’ (She knew about the drifting seasons in Cello, but heat seemed conceptually impossible tonight.)
But she was suddenly exhausted. She wrote four words.
Tell me the details.
2
Dear Princess Jupiter,
I haven’t heard from you for a few days so I hope you’re ok. I have news.
Your dad, the King, wants to bring you home. He’s arranging a transfer. So, if you go to that same street corner at 10 am, Thursday next week, someone will collect you. Wear a disguise—I guess like a wig? I’ve couriered letters to the Queen and Prince Chyba (your mother and brother) too. So hopefully it’ll be a family reunion.
Before you yell at me, I KNOW you said you’d never try that again. But they tell me this could be your last chance. And I think it’ll be great. In Cello, you will probably bathe in your heated palace moat! With mermaids! (Not sure. Nobody’s ever told me if the moats are heated. Or if there are mermaids, but I don’t see how they could justify having dragons and NOT mermaids. Inconsistent.) And you mentioned you have eczema? Well, in Cello, there’ll be a Royal Surgeon (probably) who will treat you with the milk of the elderflower (not sure what that is) while silver fairies kiss your skin better (re fairies, see my comment about mermaids). So, that sounds better, right?
Anyway, if you do go to that street corner, promise me two things:
Don’t wait for six hours again. If they don’t come at 10 am, go home. You could give them ten minutes I guess, allowing for Cellian traffic jams etc, but seriously, if nothing happens, just go home, email me, and I’ll sort it out with Keira.
Once you do get back to Cello, be VERY careful. I don’t mean to disrespect your Kingdom, but it sounds like a total disaster zone. I think you deserve to know: your sister, Princess Ko, is ‘scheduled to be executed’. They’re planning to rescue her, so hopefully it’ll be okay, and I’m sorry if this news is like a punch in the face. Maybe not, cause you don’t remember her, or maybe it’ll be the emotional jolt that brings your memory back. But I wish I could’ve told you more gently. Like poured the news into your ear very slowly, in the form of elderflower milk.
So, you’re going home. I’ll miss you.
Love,
Madeleine
3
‘Was it a vision, or a waking dream,
Fled is that music; do I wake, or sleep?’
They looked at Holly.
‘It’s Keats,’ she said defensively. ‘We’re doing poetry.’
Holly had brought them to the 2nd View Coffee Shop in Waterstones for their English class. Madeleine, Belle and Jack had been chatting, for the last ten minutes, about Belle’s plan to get an eyebrow piercing. Now they regarded Holly for a moment, then turned back to their conversation.
Holly chimed in again.
‘I dream’d that as I wander’d by the way
Bare winter suddenly was changed to spring . . .’
‘Did you?’ Jack asked.
‘No. Shelley did. The poet. That’s Shelley.’
‘That’d be all right,’ Belle said. ‘Whoosh. There goes winter. Oh, look, it’s spring, that was sudden.’
They all turned to the window and watched the dark rush of rain.
‘Poets often write about dreams,’ Holly said. ‘That’s what I want to talk about today. Tell me: in what way is a poem like a dream?’
‘Neither make sense,’ Jack said.
Madeleine held her coffee close to her cheek, warming her face. ‘Poems try to get under the surface of things,’ she said slowly. ‘They move close or circle from a distance. Dreams do that as well.’
‘That’s excellent,’ Belle said. ‘That’s like a poem right there. Holly, give Madeleine a sticker for class participation.’
‘I’ve been thinking about dreams a lot lately,’ Madeleine explained.
‘Oh, well, you can stop now.’
‘Dreams are the darkness inside people,’ Jack said, ‘and so is poetry.’
‘No, poetry’s about rainbows and butterflies and that,’ Belle argued. ‘You’ve got things upside down.’
‘Wait.’ Jack held up a hand as he reached for his backpack. He pulled out rain-soggy papers. The others waited.
‘Shhh,’ he said.
‘In what way,’ said Madeleine, ‘could we shhh any more than we already are?’
He peeled off a single sheet and held it up. ‘This is Byron.’
‘Of course it is,’ Belle said.
‘It’s dead unbelievable how relevant it
is,’ Jack said. ‘Holly’s going to give me all the stickers.’
Holly looked concerned. ‘I haven’t got any stickers.’
‘I’m going to read it out,’ Jack announced.
‘You don’t have to read the whole thing,’ Madeleine suggested.
‘I had a dream.’ Jack stopped, and looked around triumphantly.
They waited.
‘That’s a short poem,’ Belle said. ‘I like them short. They often go on too long, which is another thing the same about dreams.’
Jack shook his head, weary with disappointment.
‘Keep reading,’ Holly told him, and he did.
‘I had a dream, which was not all a dream,
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.’
‘You see?’ Jack said. ‘That’s dreams and darkness. In a poem.’
‘Depressing start,’ Belle said.
‘Doesn’t end well either,’ Jack agreed. ‘It’s not like the mum comes in and goes, April fool’s! and switches on the light. It’s more they eat each other and their dogs.’
‘I don’t want to hear about people eating dogs,’ Belle said.
‘Too late,’ Jack said. ‘You just heard.’
‘The Royal Society once cut open a living dog to see its beating heart,’ Madeleine said. ‘And they used a bellows to inflate its lungs.’
‘Bollocks,’ Belle said. ‘The Royal Family are nice. They’d never do that. They just eat sandwiches, mostly.’
‘Not the Royal Family. The Royal Society. They were scientists in the seventeenth century.’
‘Oh, well, that doesn’t count. That’s history.’
Holly set down her coffee mug, leaned her chin into her hand and looked at Jack. ‘You carry copies of Byron’s poetry around all the time?’
‘Why would anybody not?’
‘Jack,’ Holly said, ‘what do you think it is about Byron that draws you to him so much?’
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