Dragon's Green

  ‘Well, did it rain?’

  ‘No. At least, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Well, then you did magic. Bravo!’

  This was certainly not how magic worked in Laurel Wilde books. In Laurel Wilde books you had to say a particular spell if you wanted to stop it raining. You had to buy this spell in a shop, and then get someone to teach it to you. And . . .

  ‘What if it wasn’t going to rain anyway?’

  He sighed again. ‘Euphemia. I promised your father . . .’

  ‘Promised him what?’

  Griffin took off his glasses. The thin antique silver frames sparkled as they caught the light. He rubbed his eyes and then gazed at Effie as if he had just drawn aside a curtain to reveal a sunny garden that he had never seen before.

  ‘I promised your father I wouldn’t teach you any magic. Particularly after what happened with your mother. And I also promised some other people that I would not do any magic for five years, and indeed I have not done any magic for five years. Although . . .’ He looked at his watch. ‘The five years is due to run out next Tuesday. Things should get more interesting then.’ He chuckled, and lit his pipe.

  ‘Are you joking, Grandfather?’

  ‘Good heavens, child. No. Why would I do that?’

  ‘So will you teach me magic, then? Real magic? Next Tuesday?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I promised your father, and I do keep my promises. And besides that, there are some very influential people who frown on magic being taught to children – well, unless they do it themselves, that is. But I can teach you a language or two if you like. Some translation. You’re probably old enough for that now. And perhaps it’s time I showed you the library as well.’

  Griffin Truelove’s library was a square, high-ceilinged room with lots of polished dark wood. There was a small table with a green glass lamp that held a candle rather than a lightbulb. (Lots of people used candles to read by now that lightbulbs were so dim, and so expensive.) The room smelled faintly of leather, incense and candle-wax. The books were heavy, thick hardbacks bound in leather, velvet or a smooth cloth that came in different shades of red, purple and blue. Their pages were a creamy sort of colour, and when you opened them their printed letters were deep black and old-fashioned looking. The stories they told were of great adventures into unknown lands.

  ‘There is only one rule, Euphemia, and I want you to promise me you will always follow it.’

  Effie nodded.

  ‘You must only read one book at a time, and you must always leave the book on the desk. It is very important that I know which book you are reading. Do you understand? And you must never remove any books from this library.’

  ‘I promise,’ said Effie. ‘Are the books . . . Are they magic?’

  Her grandfather had frowned.

  ‘Child, all books are magic. Just think,’ he said, ‘about what books make people do. People go to war on the basis of what they read in books. They believe in “facts” just because they are written down. They decide to adopt political systems, to travel to one place rather than another, to give up their job and go on a great adventure, to love or to hate. All books have tremendous power. And power is magic.’

  ‘But are these books really magic . . .?’

  ‘They are all last editions,’ said Griffin. ‘Lots of people collect first editions of books, because they are very rare. Last editions are even rarer. When you are older you will find out why.’ And then he refused to say any more.

  The next few months went by a lot more quickly than the previous five years. Effie’s grandfather started going out again, on what he called his ‘adventures’. Sometimes she would arrive at his rooms after school to find him taking off his sturdy brown boots and putting away his battered leather bag and cloth money pouch. Once she saw him putting a strange-looking brown stick into a secret drawer of his big wooden desk, but when she asked him about it he told her to shoo and get on with her translation.

  She’d quickly mastered most of Rosian and was now working on a different language called Old Bastard English. She dreamed of adventures – like the ones she now read about in the books in her grandfather’s library – where she might have to ask someone in Rosian how much it would cost to stable her horse for the weekend, or, in Old Bastard English, what dangerous creatures were in the woods tonight. (‘What wylde bestes haunten the forest this nyght?’)

  She also kept dreaming of magic, but she had yet to see any. The next time she saw her grandfather put something in his secret drawer – this time a clear crystal – she asked him again.

  ‘Are the things in that drawer magic, Grandfather?’

  ‘Magic,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Hmm. Yes, you do keep asking about magic, don’t you? Well, magic is overrated, in my opinion. You must understand that you can’t always – or even often – rely on magic, especially not in this world. Magic costs, and it’s difficult. Remember this, Effie, it’s important. If you want a plant to grow in this world, you put a seed in the earth and you water it and give it warmth and let the shoot see sunlight. You do not use magic, because to use magic to accomplish such a complicated task – the creation of life, no less – is not just wasteful, but unnecessary. Later in life I imagine you’ll see some strange and wondrous things, things you probably can’t even imagine now. But always remember that many things that happen in our everyday world – when a seed turns into a plant, for example – are stranger, and more complex, than the most difficult magic. You will use magic very rarely, which is why you need other skills first.’

  ‘What other skills?’

  ‘Your languages. And . . .’ He thought for a few moments and dipped his beard in the glass of water, even though it was not on fire. He then wrung it out slowly. ‘Perhaps it is time to start you on Magical Thinking. You need Magical Thinking before you can do magic. How old did you say you were now?’

  ‘Eleven.’

  ‘Good. We’ll begin tomorrow.’

  Effie’s first Magical Thinking task had been impossible. Griffin had taken her to the entrance hall of his apartment and shown her three electric light switches.

  ‘Each of these,’ he said, ‘operates a different light in the apartment. One operates the main light in the library, one operates the lamp by my armchair and one is the light in my wine cupboard. These are the lights I use most often, and the ones I always forget when I go out. Electricity is so expensive now, and of course there are hefty fines if there happens to be a greyout, so I had these switches put in, right by the door. You’ll notice that you can’t see from here which light is operated by what switch. Your task is to work out which switch operates each light. But here’s the difficult bit. You can do what you like with the light switches out here, but you are only allowed to go and look at the lights once, and you are only allowed to have one switch on when you do. And you can only do this when you’re sure you have the answer. You won’t get a second chance.’

  ‘So I can’t try a switch, go and see what light it operates, then come back and try another one and memorise them?’

  ‘No. That would be easy. When you give your answer you need to say how you came about it. It’s the “how” bit that’s most interesting anyway.’

  ‘So it isn’t just luck either.’

  ‘No. You have to use Magical Thinking.’

  ‘But how could I . . .?’

  ‘If you get it right, there’s a prize,’ said Griffin.

  ‘What’s the prize?’

  ‘Now, that would be telling.’

  From then on, every time Effie went to the Old Rectory she stood by the light switches and tried to work out the puzzle. The answer failed her. Effie hated giving up on anything. She would ask her grandfather for hints, but he would never give her any. Instead, in between her translations, he got her to practise on other Magical Thinking problems. Some of them were a bit like jokes or riddles. ‘For example,’ said Griffin, a couple of weeks before Effie started at the
Tusitala School, ‘imagine a man throws a ball a short distance, and then the ball reverses direction and travels back to the man. The ball does not bounce off any wall or other object, nor is it attached to any string or material. Without magic, how does this occur?’

  It took Effie the whole day, and in the end she had to give up.

  ‘What’s the answer, Grandfather?’ she begged, just before she went home for the night.

  ‘He threw it in the air, child.’

  Effie laughed at this. Of course he did! How funny.

  But her grandfather did not laugh. ‘You must grasp this process before you can even attempt the very basics of magic,’ he said. ‘You have to learn how to think. And it seems now that we may not have much longer.’

  ‘What do you mean? Why won’t we have much longer?’

  But he didn’t reply.

  3

  The reason Effie had not yet arrived at school that Monday morning in October was because of what had happened the previous Wednesday night. Her father, Orwell Bookend, had come to pick her up from her grandfather’s as usual, but instead of waiting in the car he had come up the two flights of stairs to Griffin’s rooms.

  Effie had been sent to the library ‘to study’, but she had hung around in the corridor to try to hear what her father said. She knew something was going on. The week before, Griffin had unexpectedly gone away for three days and she’d had to go straight home after school to help her step-mother Cait with her baby sister Luna instead of studying with her grandfather.

  Orwell Bookend had once worn gold silk bow ties and waltzed Effie’s mother around their small kitchen, singing her songs in the lost languages he used to teach. But less than two years after Aurelia’s disappearance, he had started seeing Cait. Then everything changed at the university and he got a promotion that meant he wore dark suits, often with a name badge, and had to go to conferences called things like ‘Offline Learning Environments’ and ‘Back to Pen and Paper’.

  ‘It’s happened again,’ he had said to Griffin on that Wednesday evening. ‘Your stupid Swords and Sorcery group has written to me. They say you are teaching her “forbidden things”. I don’t know what that even means, but whatever it is, I want you to stop.’

  Griffin was silent for a long time.

  ‘They are wrong,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t care,’ said Orwell. ‘I just want you to stop.’

  ‘You’ve never believed in the Otherworld,’ Griffin said. ‘And you think the Guild just administers something like an elaborate game. Fine. I accept that. So why do you care what I teach her? Why do you care what they say?’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be real to be dangerous,’ said Orwell.

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Griffin quietly. ‘But all I ask is that you trust me. I have not gone against the ruling of the Guild. Effie is quite safe. Or at least as safe as anyone else is in the world now.’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘I never knew where Aurelia had really gone when she said she’d been to the “Otherworld”,’ said Orwell. ‘But I’m sure it was all a lot more down-to-earth than she made out. In fact I’m certain it simply involved another man, probably from this ridiculous “Guild”. Yes, I know you believe in magic. And maybe some of it does work, because of the placebo effect, or . . . Look, I’m not completely cynical. Obviously Aurelia wanted me to believe in it all, but I just never could. Not on the scale she was talking about.’

  Effie could hear footsteps; probably her father pacing up and down. He continued speaking.

  ‘I don’t know where Aurelia is now. I’ve accepted that she’s gone. I assume she is dead, or with this other man. I don’t even know which I’d prefer, to be honest. But I am not having my daughter get involved with the people who corrupted her. It’s a world full of flakes and lunatics and dropouts. I don’t like it. Do you understand?’

  Griffin sighed so loudly Effie could hear it from the corridor.

  ‘Look,’ he began. ‘The Diberi . . . They . . .’

  Orwell swore loudly. There was the sound of him hitting something, perhaps the wall. There were then some quiet words Effie could not pick out. Then more shouting.

  ‘I don’t want to hear about the Diberi! They DO NOT exist in real life! I’ve already said that I . . .’

  ‘Well then, you won’t find out what is happening now,’ said Griffin, mildly.

  Later that night Griffin Truelove was found bleeding, unconscious and close to death in an alleyway on the very western edge of the Old Town near the Funtime Arcade. No one knew what he’d been doing in that part of town, or had any idea what had happened to him. Cait suggested that he had wandered off and perhaps been hit by a car. ‘That happens to elderly people with dementia,’ she had said. But Griffin didn’t have dementia.

  He was taken to a small hospital not far away. The next day, and the one after that, Effie had visited him instead of going to school. Each day he asked her to bring him something else from his rooms. One day it was the thin brown stick she had seen him putting in the secret drawer (which he now called a ‘wonde’, spelling it out so Effie realised it was a word she had never heard before); another day it was the clear crystal. She also had to bring him paper and ink, his spectacles and his letter opener with the bone handle.

  On Saturday, Effie had found him sitting up and writing something, or at least trying to. Nurse Underwood, who was the mother of Maximilian, one of Effie’s classmates, kept getting in the way, checking Griffin’s pulse and blood pressure and writing numbers on a clipboard at the end of the bed. Griffin was so weak that he could only manage a word every few minutes. He kept coughing, wheezing and wincing with pain whenever he moved.

  ‘This is an M-codicil,’ he said weakly to Effie. ‘It is for you. I need to finish it, and then . . . You must give it to Pelham Longfellow. He is my solicitor. You will find him, you will find him, in . . .’ Poor Griffin was gasping for breath. ‘It is very important . . .’ He coughed quite a lot. ‘I have lost my power, Euphemia. I have lost everything, because . . . Rescue the library, if you can. All my books are yours. All my things. The wonde. The crystal. Anything that remains after . . . It says so in my will. I didn’t mean this to happen now. And find Dra . . .’

  The door opened and Orwell came in and asked his father-in-law how he was.

  ‘We’d better go,’ Orwell said to his daughter, after a few minutes. ‘The greyout’s going to start soon.’

  Every week there were a number of ‘greyouts’ when people were forbidden to use electricity. There were also whole weeks when the creaky old phone network was switched off entirely, to give it a chance to rest. This was why most people now had pagers, which worked with radio waves.

  ‘OK, just . . .’ began Effie. ‘Hang on.’

  Orwell walked over and patted Griffin awkwardly on the shoulder.

  ‘Good luck with the op tomorrow,’ he said. And then to his daughter, ‘I’ll wait for you outside. You have three minutes.’

  Effie looked at her grandfather, knowing he had been trying to tell her something important. She willed him to try again.

  ‘Ro . . . Rollo,’ said Griffin, once Orwell had left. There was a long pause, during which he seemed to summon all his strength. He pulled Effie close to him, so only she could hear what he said next.

  ‘Find Dragon’s Green,’ he said, in a low whisper. Then he said it again in Rosian. Well, sort of. Parfen Druic – the green of the dragon. What did this mean?

  ‘Do not go without the ring,’ said Griffin. He looked down at his trembling hands. On his little finger was a silver ring that Effie had never seen before. ‘I got this for you, Euphemia,’ said Griffin, ‘when I realised that you were a true . . . a true . . .’ He coughed so much the word was lost. ‘I would give it to you now, but I am going to use it and all the other boons I have to try to . . . to try to . . .’ More coughing. ‘Oh dear. This is useless. The codicil . . . Pelham Longfellow will explain. Trust Longfellow. And get as many boons as you can.’

>   ‘I don’t understand,’ said Effie, starting to cry. ‘Don’t leave me.’

  ‘Do not let the Diberi win, Euphemia, however hard it gets. You have the potential, more, even, than I ever did . . . I should have explained everything when I could, but I thought you were too young, and I’d made a promise, and the stupid Guild made sure that . . . Look after my books. I left them all to you. The rest of my things don’t matter much. Save only the things you brought to me here, and the books. Find Dra . . . Oh dear. The magic is too strong. It’s still preventing me from . . .’

  ‘What magic? What do you mean?’

  But all her grandfather could do for a whole minute was cough and groan.

  ‘I’m not coming back, dear child, not this time. But I’m sure we will meet again. The last thing you have to remember . . .’ said Griffin, finally, again dropping his voice to a whisper. ‘The answer,’ he said, after a long pause, ‘is heat.’

  When Effie woke up on Monday morning she had the feeling something terrible had happened. Her father had contacted the hospital late the night before and had then gone there in his car. Effie had begged to go with him, but he had told her to stay at home and wait for news there. No news had come. And to make a bad day even worse, Effie’s step-mother Cait had got up at five o’clock in the morning and, before doing her exercise video, had thrown every edible piece of food in the house into the outside bin. Not even in the kitchen bin – ‘We might be tempted,’ Cait had said darkly, to Luna, the baby, who was not old enough to say anything back – but the actual outside bin.

  Everything was gone. All the bread, oats and cereals. All the jam. The sausages. The eggs. All the cheese. The last of the marmalade that Miss Dora Wright (Effie’s old teacher whom Effie had even been allowed to call Dora out of school, and who, before she disappeared, had lived in the apartment beneath Griffin’s in the Old Rectory) had made for them at Christmas. There were no crisps or chocolate – not that you would eat crisps or chocolate for breakfast unless you were really desperate, of course. Nothing.