Lily and the Shining Dragons (16 page)

She would just have to leave the dragons behind.

L
ily could see that Miss Merganser was watching her closely, just waiting for her to make a mistake – to swing her arm left instead of right, for instance, as though the world would end if she did.

Lily concentrated. She didn’t have time to go and stand outside the schoolroom – although she would like to look at the wooden dragons again. Were all the pictures and carvings round the house one dragon? Or if she woke them up, would she be talking to a different creature?

Suddenly she snapped back to the drill class, just in time to change to raising her left foot to knee height – and not an inch higher, as that would be indelicate.

Miss Merganser looked quite disappointed, she thought.

Lily hung back as the others went into breakfast, waiting to catch Peter as the boys streamed across from their Indian club-waving. As she’d expected, he was following on behind – the other boys had no idea how to talk to him, and so they left him alone.

She’d hidden herself behind one of the doors, so that she could grab him as he went past. Luckily he was far enough after the other boys that no one would see them talking. As he came in from the garden, blinking in the gloom, she stepped out eagerly.

But he shrank back from her, a look of horrified surprise on his face.

‘What’s the matter?’ Lily asked, feeling hurt. She put her hands on his shoulders, turning him to face her properly, so he could read her lips.

He pulled away from her sharply, leaving her staggering, and she stared at him.

‘What is it?’ she murmured helplessly.

Peter reached into his pocket, drawing out a small slate, which Mr Fanshawe must have given him. He scratched on to it with sharp, anxious strokes of the pencil.

Who are you?

‘It’s the cocoa.’ Henrietta nodded gloomily. ‘It can’t be anything else. The spell on the house isn’t strong enough to make him forget who you are.’

‘Is it drugged?’ Lily whispered. She couldn’t do much more than whisper. She’d been crying so hard that her voice hurt, and her eyes were swollen. Somehow she had managed to last through lessons, and lunch, and even needlework, but the moment they had been dismissed, she had fled upstairs to find Henrietta, so they could grieve together for the friend who had disappeared. She had lost Peter and Georgie was almost gone. They were all alone now.

‘Spelled.’ Henrietta sniffed. ‘I shall see if I can get a taste of it tonight. Some of them leave their cups on the floor – I’ve seen them do it when I’ve been hiding behind that locker of yours.’

‘Don’t!’ Lily gasped.

‘It won’t work on me, stupid girl. Not if I only have a lick. But I might be able to tell what it is.’

Lily sighed, and pulled a dustsheet from an ancient-looking claw-footed armchair. She wrapped it around herself, and curled up in the chair, burying her face in the cushioned pink velvet. Crying had left her shivery and aching. Henrietta scrabbled her way on to the chair, and burrowed between Lily and the arm, where she promptly went to sleep. Worn out by crying, Lily soon followed her.

She woke some time later, confused by the strange light in the room as she half-opened her eyes. It was early evening, and the sky had been overcast all day. But now the room was bright. She sat up suddenly, her heart thudding. If someone had brought a lantern, then they had been discovered.

There was no lantern. Instead, seated in front of the fireplace, sitting up on its hindquarters rather like a dog, was an enormous, winged creature. The soft white light was coming from its silvery scales.

Lily swallowed. ‘I told Henrietta you were real,’ she found herself saying.

‘I am not quite real yet…’ the dragon told her thoughtfully. ‘I shall be soon, though, I think.’

A muffled whine sounded from beside Lily, as Henrietta woke up, and saw who she was talking to.

‘What a curious little creature.’ The dragon lowered its muzzle – which was now about the size of a tea tray – to inspect Henrietta. ‘Is it a dog?’

‘Of course I’m a dog!’ Henrietta snapped. The easiest way to distract her from anything was to insult her, as Lily well knew. ‘What are you?’

‘The oldest of the Fell Hall dragons.’ The dragon settled back on to its haunches, still eyeing Henrietta in fascination. ‘You do not look like a dog. I know dogs. You are too small.’

‘Too small!’

Lily seized Henrietta by the collar before she flung herself at the dragon. He was a hundred times larger than she was, but Henrietta tended to lose all common sense when she was infuriated.

‘She’s a pug. They were bred in China.’ Lily gazed thoughtfully at the dragon. ‘Have you really never seen a dog like her?’

The dragon shook its enormous head. ‘Wolfhounds, I know. Gazehounds. Mastiffs.’

‘I’m not actually sure what a gazehound is,’ Lily admitted. ‘Have you been not real for a long while?’

The dragon looked uncomfortable for the first time. Its dark, glittering eyes shifted away from Lily, as it tried to think. ‘It may be so,’ it admitted finally. ‘What year is this?’

‘Eighteen ninety-one,’ Lily told him, curiously.

The dragon’s claws scraped across the floorboards convulsively, but there were no marks. It was still only half real. ‘Three hundred years, then.’

‘Why?’ Lily whispered. ‘What happened?’

The dragon twitched its tail, and Lily flinched, as it seemed to be about to destroy several lumps of dustsheeted furniture. But the tail went straight through, as if it wasn’t really there. ‘Things changed,’ it murmured vaguely. ‘There was not as much magic in the earth and the air. It made it harder to fly. We were tired…’

‘Long sleep,’ Henrietta muttered, just loud enough to hear.

The dragon’s eyes glittered, and then it laughed, that same rumbling laugh Lily had heard in the night. ‘Indeed, little dog.’

‘Are you real somewhere, now?’ Lily asked. ‘It’s hard to explain. Is there, I don’t know, a cave? Where you’re all sleeping?’

The dragon swung his head round to her in surprise, and Lily pressed herself back into the chair instinctively. She suspected that when he was properly real, he would be very much larger – too large to fit in this room, perhaps. But he was big enough now. His eyes were like great, glittering, faceted apples, so close to hers. Lily was sure he was a he, now, she realised.

‘We are here.’

‘In the carvings?’ Lily asked doubtfully, peering round the back of the chair at the fireplace.

The dragon snorted a laugh. ‘No. No, I felt you through the stone, that was all. Your strong, delicious magic. You wanted us to be real so very much.’

‘Then where?’

‘You were almost right. Underneath. The deepest cellars. There are natural hollows and caves all through our territory. Limestone, you see. The house is built on top of a whole lacework of caves. My old self is stretched out by an underground river that comes to the surface further down this valley. Or it did, at least,’ he added. ‘So much has changed. There seems to be a great deal more of the house than there was.’

‘Why have you woken up now? It isn’t just because we tried to wake you. I saw you twitching the wings of the dragons on the banisters, and I heard you talking to me. And that was before we tried to bring the carving to life.’

The dragon half-stretched out its wings, so that they scraped the ceiling. Then he tested his claws against the floorboards again. This time, Lily thought there might be the faintest of scratches.

‘The magic has come back,’ he told her at last. ‘I feel strong again.’

‘But that doesn’t make sense,’ Lily told him helplessly. ‘No one’s doing any magic. It’s not allowed. That’s why we’re here, because we were breaking the law.’

‘Think, Lily!’ Henrietta growled, leaping on to the arm of the chair. ‘No one is doing magic! No spells are using up the magic in the air. That’s what he needs to fly, he said so! No one has been doing magic for about twenty years. It’s all there, still, sloshing around.’ She shivered. ‘Who knows what else is going to wake up.’

The dragon nodded. ‘It has been happening for a while,’ he agreed. ‘I have been waking slowly. And then the children came, and there was so much magic, seeping down to us, through the floors, through the stone. Delicious, strong, young magic filling up the Hall again.’

‘Magic that no one’s allowed to use,’ Lily snarled. ‘They don’t even want to. They think it’s evil.’

The dragon blinked slowly. ‘Magic is neither good nor evil,’ he pointed out, his voice gentle, as though he was teaching a rather stupid child. ‘How could it be? It just is. Like wind, or water.’

‘Your wings are fading.’ Henrietta leaned forward, staring at them closely.

‘I am tired again,’ the dragon agreed. ‘Soon I shall be altogether real, but not yet. Your strong magic is waking me, cousin. These last few days, the blood has quickened in me. It won’t be much longer.’

‘Then what will you do?’ Lily asked, but the dragon was fading faster and faster. If he answered, they could not hear him.

L
ily and Henrietta tried again and again to find the dragon over the next few days. But he never returned to the room with the marble overmantel. Lily decided that they must have worn him out, talking to him for so long. She longed to call him back, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to summon a three-hundred-year-old legend. It would be presumptuous.

Every so often the dragons around the house fluttered their wings at her, or stretched out their tiny necks to stare at her as she went past. Little serpentine figures seemed to shine out of the carvings, glittering and blinking as she came by. Lily seemed to see more of them whenever she looked. She wasn’t sure how. Unless it meant that the other dragons were waking now too.

It wasn’t only the carvings. Wherever she went, strange flickering shapes whisked around corners ahead of her. A spiky head even seemed to dart out of the fireplace in the schoolroom once. It eyed the class thoughtfully, stared in fascination at Lily, and wreathed itself around the class as a dragon made of blueish woodsmoke. Everyone coughed, and it reared back in alarm, and then disappeared into the dull glow of the embers.

‘They’re everywhere,’ Lily murmured to Henrietta that night. The pug was hidden under her blankets, half-asleep, and she only grunted in answer.

‘They must all be waking up. Don’t you see them?’ Lily prodded Henrietta’s plump side, and she wheezed crossly.

‘Of course I do. But they’ve been haunting this place for centuries, Lily. We’re only seeing them now because we know what to look for.’

‘You don’t think there are more of them?’ Lily asked her disappointedly.

‘Maybe, maybe not. Tricksy little things. Now be quiet and let me sleep.’

But Lily lay awake. She was sure Henrietta was wrong, there were more dragons now. She could imagine the cavern, deep underneath the house. There had been an old book of engravings of the
Natural Beauties of England
at Merrythought, an improving volume that had been abandoned in the dusty schoolroom. It had several colour plates of amazing limestone caves, dripping with stalactites. There could have been dragons in those pictures too. The great mounds of glistening rock curled and draped over each other in strangely living shapes.

The dragon upstairs had told them that the caves under Fell Hall were limestone. Sleepily, Lily peopled the caves she remembered from the pictures with huge beasts, their shining bodies still for three hundred years, as they slumbered beside an underground river. That ragged fringe of greenish stalagmites marked the spiked spine of a sleeping dragon. She smiled dreamily to herself. It would be much easier to fight for magic if she knew a flock of friendly dragons.

But they still weren’t moving, she realised sadly, as she drifted into a deeper sleep.

The dull routine of Fell Hall was broken the next morning. Lily was half-asleep, and hardly saw what happened. After a night spent dreaming of dragon caverns, waving her arms exactly as Miss Merganser wanted them waved was taking up all her attention. But the girls around her, more awake, and so practised at drill that they didn’t have to think, were whispering and scuffling at something down by the lake. Lily blinked, and waited for the next head-turn so that she could peer across to the water.