Dragon's Green

by Scarlett Thomas

  ‘Well, if you don’t come in now, we’re going to disappear, because I’m going to put the secrecy back on. Can’t say it more plainly than that. You have three seconds. Three, two . . .’

  Effie went in.

  Inside, Mrs Bottle’s Bun Shop was a café unlike any other Effie had ever seen. There were twelve small round tables, and no two were the same. Some were wooden, some were tiled, some had mirrors for tops. Each one had a silver napkin holder filled with pale blue paper napkins and silver salt and pepper pots that did not match. Each table was lit with a thin white candle stuck in an old green bottle. In one corner was a wood-burning stove in which some fragrant logs smouldered slowly. A black cat was asleep on its metal hood. A transistor radio was playing fast, complicated jazz and there was the faint murmur of conversation coming from the darkest corner.

  On the wall to the left of the door were several blackboards on which were chalked the menus. BUNS said one of them, at the top, then: All can be vegan (V), gluten-free (GF), or enchantment-free (EF). Then there was a list. Sausage bun, Currant bun, Chelsea bun, Steamed bun, Honey bun, Cheese bun, Lotus seed bun, Cream bun, Cinnamon bun, Hot cross bun, Fried bun, Soup of the Day (with bun).

  Beside this was a list of drinks, which included fourflower water (sparkling or non-sparkling), buttercup milk and four different types of hot chocolate. Then there was a whole other blackboard that had the word REMEDIES at the top. Underneath this was a list of things that Effie had never heard of, including Violet syrup (‘for the easily startled traveller’) and Threeweed tea (‘for the hex’).

  In front of Effie was a counter behind which Miss Bottle now stood, drying teacups with a blue and white striped tea-towel. On the counter was an old-fashioned till with big round ivory buttons. The last transaction showing on the display at the top of the till was, rather improbably, 18,954.64. Someone had had rather an expensive afternoon tea. Or perhaps the cat had just walked on the keys.

  ‘Well, sit down, sit down,’ said Miss Bottle, waving her tea-towel.

  Effie went and sat at the table closest to the wood-burner. Miss Bottle came over with a small blue pad and a thin black pencil.

  ‘So, can I get you a bun?’

  Effie’s stomach rumbled so loudly that she was sure Miss Bottle could hear it.

  ‘How much are they?’ asked Effie. There were no prices on any of the boards.

  ‘Oh yes, I forgot. A Neophyte.’ Miss Bottle scratched her head. ‘Is this the first time you’ve travelled, dearie? Apparently it can make you feel a bit sick the first time, but a bun will help. I think I’m not really supposed to let Neophytes through without a letter from the Guild, but if you’ve got your mark and your card I’m sure you’ll be OK. Anyway, I haven’t got time for all these questions! Let me scan you.’

  Miss Bottle took out a device that looked like one of those old credit card readers they had in shops before the worldquake. She waved it around in front of Effie.

  ‘Your M-currency stands at 34,578,’ she said. ‘Not bad for a Neophyte. That would buy you around four thousand buns or seven thousand cups of hot chocolate. The remedies are more, but not much more.’

  ‘So I can afford a bun and a cup of hot chocolate?’

  ‘You certainly can.’

  ‘Well, I’ll have a cinnamon bun and a hot chocolate with nutmeg. Thank you.’ Effie had never had nutmeg before, but it sounded interesting, like something from one of her grandfather’s books.

  ‘And do you want those enchantment-free? If you’re a newbie I would say a definite yes, although of course whatever you do is up to you. Mind you . . .’ She looked at her watch. ‘The girl who does the enchantments doesn’t come in until later and I think we might be out of enchanted cinnamons anyway.’

  ‘Oh. Well, thank you, yes – enchantment-free, please.’

  There was a door just off the bar area, which seemed to lead to a kitchen. This door now swung open as a girl of about Effie’s age appeared, with her hair in two plaits and a chef’s hat on her small head. She was walking a bit too fast, carrying a bright white iced cake on a metallic cake stand with a glass dome. She put this on the counter and moved it backwards and forwards until she seemed satisfied it was in the perfect position before going back into the kitchen. She returned with two more cakes – one brown and one red – and arranged them in a similar way before taking a bag of what seemed to be dried daisy heads out of a cupboard and going back, too quickly, towards the kitchen.

  ‘Oh, do be careful, Lexy,’ said Miss Bottle. ‘Slow down.’

  Lexy? Effie looked properly and saw that the girl walking too fast between the kitchen and the shop was indeed her classmate Alexa Bottle. She must have been Miss Bottle’s daughter or niece. Lexy saw Effie too, and couldn’t have looked more taken aback if Effie had been a ghost or a dinosaur. She frowned, then half-smiled, then frowned again. She took off her hat and put it on the counter.

  ‘Can I go on my break, Aunt Octavia?’

  ‘Make it a quick one,’ said Miss Bottle, winking at Effie.

  Lexy came over. ‘Hi,’ she said, slightly shyly.

  ‘Hello,’ said Effie. ‘I’m . . .’ For some reason she wanted to say sorry, although she wasn’t sure what for. But she did feel awkward now that she realised that she’d accidentally stumbled into a classmate’s private life. This was an unspoken rule at the Tusitala School for the Gifted, Troubled and Strange (and probably at most other schools, too). Being invited round to your friend’s house for tea was one thing. Going and gawping at them doing their after-school job was something else entirely.

  And in any case, Lexy and Effie weren’t friends. They sometimes shared a protractor during maths, but had hardly ever spoken. Effie couldn’t have anyone round for tea for obvious reasons (imagine taking your friend home for a horrible milkshake with no milk in it). She’d been to Raven Wilde’s house in the countryside once, but that was it.

  But Lexy seemed not to mind at all. In fact, she seemed pleased to see Effie.

  ‘Well,’ said Lexy, sitting down. ‘I mean, it’s OK if I join you, right?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Well,’ said Lexy again. ‘Wow.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I had no idea you were one of us. Well, one of them. Or one of us. When did you epiphanise?’

  11

  ‘Epiffa-what?’ said Effie.

  ‘Epiphanise. Like when you have your epiphany? Some people call it “the change”. When you get your magic.’

  ‘My magic?’

  Just then, Effie’s bun arrived. It was large, soft and fluffy, with sticky swirls of cinnamon running all the way through it. She ate it in about three mouthfuls and found she was so hungry she could have eaten another one immediately. But then came her hot chocolate – and Miss Bottle had brought one for Lexy too. The hot chocolate had whipped cream on the top, and marshmallows that tasted of cinnamon and cardamom and other spices that Effie couldn’t possibly name. It was easily the most delicious thing she had ever tasted. Although not as delicious as what she had just heard. Magic. Her magic.

  ‘You wouldn’t have been able to see the signs for the shop unless you were at least a Neophyte,’ said Lexy.

  ‘What is a Neophyte exactly?’

  ‘OMG – don’t you know anything?’ said Lexy, smiling. ‘It’s the first grade of magic. What you become after you epiphanise. The top grade is wizard, although no one ever gets there. Well, some people do but it takes for ever and . . .’ She sipped her hot chocolate. ‘TBH, not everyone notices when they have their epiphany, so it’s not that weird. Sometimes people do some proper magic by accident and – bang! – their inner ability awakens. Or they touch something they didn’t know was magical. Most people get secretly taught by a relative, although since the worldquake the Guild has made it totally illegal to teach anyone anything about magic. Anyway, only people who have epiphanised can see places like this. And only serious travellers really come here anyway. We’re a one-way portal, after all. So I was a bi
t surprised to see you!’

  ‘Travellers? Like . . .?’

  Lexy grinned. ‘You know, travellers to the Otherworld.’

  The Otherworld. Where Pelham Longfellow supposedly was. Where Dr Black had tried to get Griffin. The place Effie’s father had said didn’t exist.

  ‘Is the Otherworld actually real?’

  ‘Oh yes. Of course.’

  ‘Have you been there?’

  Lexy shook her head. ‘Nope. I’m not allowed, because I work in a portal. The Guild frowns on that. But I couldn’t go anyway because I don’t have my mark, or any papers. Anyway, I’m concentrating on my M-grades at the moment. If you get to be a wizard you can live in the Otherworld for ever, but it takes most people hundreds of years, and apparently the Otherworld is really weird anyway and . . .’

  Effie sipped her hot chocolate, the nutmeg making it taste earthy and comforting. Her head was swirling with new information. So she had epiphanised, whatever that meant, and become magical. It was all real, despite what her father had said. All those years of asking her grandfather to teach her magic, and now it turned out that he couldn’t anyway because this Guild wouldn’t allow it. This was, presumably, the same Guild that had banned him from practising magic for five whole years. And stopped him from becoming a wizard.

  ‘You can do your M-grades as well, now,’ said Lexy, excitedly. ‘Do you know what your ability is? I’m not sure about mine yet. I so wish I knew! If you can find someone to take you on, you can move up a grade from Neophyte to Apprentice. Aunt Octavia is a Proficient alchemist, which means she could take me on if I wanted to be an alchemist, but I really want to be a healer. I don’t know any healers, let alone Proficient or Adept ones, so I’m stuck. But I can still train as a non-ability Neophyte. It’s Monday nights in St George’s Hall, if you’re interested.’

  ‘So can you actually do magic?’ asked Effie.

  ‘Sort of. Not very much, yet. I’ve got no boon, no familiar, no mentor and hardly any M-currency. Which is pretty rubbish, really. But everyone’s the same since the Guild made it illegal to pass on boons or even talk about magic to anyone who hasn’t epiphanised. Everyone starts from nowhere, really.’

  Effie had heard that word recently. Boon. Wasn’t that what Maximilian had called the Sword of Orphennyus, and the Spectacles of Knowledge, and her ring? The things her grandfather had left for her? Yes, that’s right: and hadn’t Griffin in fact called them ‘boons’ as well? ‘Get as many boons as you can.’ That was what he’d said, wasn’t it? Effie wondered about showing Lexy the things in her bag, but she wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure about anything, all of a sudden.

  Effie remembered with a horrible pang the occasion when her grandfather had been angry with her for the first and only time. It had happened just over a year ago, on a stormy summer afternoon not long after she’d started using his library.

  She’d been exploring all the books, flicking each one open to a random page to see roughly what it was about, and whether there were any interesting pictures. Some of the books did have pictures – of tall mountains, deep wells, mythical beasts and strange toadstools. She hadn’t thought at all about the rule that she should leave out on the table the book she was reading, nor that she had promised to read one book at a time. She wasn’t really reading them, anyway. She was just flicking.

  Then Griffin had come in without Effie noticing and had shouted at her to put the book back on the shelf immediately. He’d used a horrible deep growly voice she had never heard before. ‘Calm down, Grandfather,’ Effie had said in reply. ‘It’s only a book.’ The memory of it made her wince now. She’d made it sound so haughty.

  ‘You silly, silly child,’ he had said, sounding sad and disappointed. ‘Some people think opening a book is a simple thing. It’s not. Most people don’t realise that you can get truly lost in a book. You can. Especially you. Do not open any of these books without my permission, Euphemia. If you can’t promise me that I’ll have to go back to locking the library door.’

  On the way home that night, Effie had asked her father why he was always so worried about magic. After all, if something didn’t exist, surely it could not hurt you. But Orwell had just started going on and on about how lots of things that are untrue nevertheless become dangerous when people believe in them. In this category he had included all major world religions, all alternative medicines, all theories about what caused the worldquake, all forms of folklore, all Laurel Wilde books, any research produced by the Department of Subterranean Geography at the university and . . . Somewhere in the middle of his lecture he had paused.

  ‘Your grandfather hasn’t been filling your head with nonsense again, has he?’ Orwell had said. ‘I don’t want you brainwashed with any of the rubbish that corrupted your mother.’

  Effie sighed now in Mrs Bottle’s Bun Shop as she realised how little she had in fact been ‘brainwashed’, and how much she did not know. Her father seemed to think that Griffin had been talking about magic all the time. She had no idea what Orwell had meant about ‘the rubbish’ that had ‘corrupted’ Aurelia Truelove. No one had ever really explained properly to Effie what had happened to her mother, or how magic might have been involved.

  ‘What’s it like?’ Effie asked Lexy now. ‘Doing magic, I mean.’

  ‘What’s it like?’ said Lexy. ‘It’s really, really, really hard. It’s different in here than it is out there,’ Lexy nodded her head in the direction of the door to the street, ‘and over there,’ she nodded in the opposite direction, ‘in the Otherworld. Magic is much, much stronger in the Otherworld, because that’s the Otherworld’s main driving force. It basically runs on magic. Electricity and other stuff like that does work there apparently, but it’s all a lot weaker. Only the most powerful wizards have electric lights, for example; the rest of them still use candles. And magic does work in our world, the Realworld, just about, but you need a lot of M-currency to do it. And you have to really concentrate. It’s like meditation but a lot more so. That’s what Dr Green says, anyway. He’s the teacher on a Monday night.’

  ‘And do people actually go to the Otherworld?’

  ‘Of course. And you’re going, surely? I mean, I thought that’s why you were here.’

  ‘I don’t really know why I’m here,’ said Effie, sighing. ‘I’ve had a very confusing day.’

  She started to tell Lexy about everything that had happened, but when Lexy heard the name ‘Griffin Truelove’ she widened her eyes.

  ‘OMG,’ she said. ‘I’d totally forgotten your surname was Truelove. Are you seriously related to The Griffin Truelove? I’m going to have to get Aunt Octavia out to hear this. She won’t believe that you’re Griffin Truelove’s granddaughter.’

  Octavia Bottle came out, wiping her hands on her apron.

  ‘What’s all this?’ she said. And Lexy began to tell her.

  ‘If you’d only said you were a Truelove,’ she said to Effie, smiling. ‘Well, your bun’s on the house for a start. Poor old Griffin.’ She sighed. ‘You’d better start from the beginning again.’ And she smiled encouragingly, as Effie started her story again and told all about her grandfather’s death, and the things she’d inherited, and the charity man and how horrible it had been watching her grandfather’s books being taken away by the horrible, shrivelled Leonard Levar.

  ‘Diberi,’ said Lexy. ‘He must be.’

  Octavia frowned. ‘Probably best not to say that word, lovey.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘You know what the Guild thinks about the Diberi.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘What a lucky girl you are,’ said Octavia to Effie, ‘coming by all those boons, just like that. You be careful with the ones you’ve got. Especially that ring. That sounds rare. And how amazing to find a true warrior and a true scholar just like that! Although they do say that boons attract those with abilities that match them. If a boon doesn’t match your ability it won’t want to stay with you, so they say. Then again, it’s much harder to pass on boo
ns nowadays. You used to see them for sale in The Liminal for hundreds of thousands of krubles. But the Guild has cracked down on all that since the worldquake.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Effie began. ‘If Wolf is a true warrior and Maximilian is a true scholar, then what am I? What does my ring mean?’

  Lexy shrugged and looked at her aunt. Octavia frowned again.

  ‘I’ve no idea. You’re not a healer, or a witch, I don’t think. Pretty sure you’re not a bard or an alchemist or a mage. Maybe a druid, but it doesn’t fit, somehow. The ring’s an unusual item for sure. Your grandfather must have kept it for you, or obtained it specially, probably when he realised that you weren’t going to be a scholar like he was. You’ll probably find someone to ask on the other side. They have big books there to help you, apparently. The Repertory of Kharakter, Art & Shade is the main one. Get someone with that to give you a consultation.’

  ‘OK. Um . . . What “other side”?’

  ‘The Otherworld. That’s what you’re here for, surely.’

  At that moment, the whispering in the corner stopped and a man stood up. He was wearing black jeans, cowboy boots and a leather jacket. His hair was white-blond and stuck up in clumps all over his head.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Octavia, and got up from the table.

  She went over to the man and exchanged a few words with him, before scanning him with the same device she’d used on Effie. Then she walked with him to another door just beyond the bar. Effie hadn’t noticed it before. Instead of having a sign saying something like EXIT or TOILETS it simply said OTHERWORLD. At least you couldn’t get lost.

  Octavia Bottle and the man in the leather jacket paused before the door. There was a little lectern there, Effie realised. It looked like the kind of counter you might go to if you were checking in for an international train journey or a flight. Octavia stood behind it and the man presented her with some documents and she scanned them before stamping something that looked like a passport. He then rolled up his sleeve and showed Octavia something on his arm. Only then did Octavia click the button that made the door open. Effie could see something like a blue mist beyond it. The man walked through.