heroine, rubbing a lamp to get a genie. This was the real world (or at least, this was a real world) where rubbing a lamp gave you nothing but a cleaner lamp.
Lilliat laughed – a laugh as silvery as her hair. ‘Sometimes,’ she said. ‘It depends on the wish – and the one who wishes. You are young for a witch, very young, but there is power in you. I can feel it. Green power, new and untried. Between us, we will try your power. What do you wish?’
‘There’s a boy,’ Hazel said, too quickly, rushing into the fairytale before it could evaporate. ‘I want him to – to notice me. To like me. Me and no one else.’
‘Yes …’ Lilliat closed her eyes, though it made little difference. The lids, too, were silver-blue. Sparkles danced on her eyelashes. ‘I see him. He is dark, very dark, with hair as black as a crow’s wing and –’
‘Wrong boy,’ Hazel said hastily. ‘That one.’ She pointed to the photograph which she had placed beside the candle.
Almost, Lilliat frowned. ‘Show him to me.’
Hazel picked up the photo and held it out in front of the mirror. As Lilliat studied it the flowers at her breast seemed to wither, and the blue shadows on her skin deepened, and her lips grew pale. But when she spoke again the fairy colours returned, and there were wild roses in her hair.
‘What is his name?’
‘Jonas Tyler,’ Hazel said, and somehow, saying his name made the magic real, and she knew she had taken an irrevocable step, though in what direction she couldn’t guess.
‘It shouldn’t be difficult for a girl like you to enchant him,’ Lilliat said sweetly. ‘A girl with youth in her eyes, and power in her blood … Look at yourself!’
Hazel’s face appeared beside her in the mirror – a different Hazel, beautiful and aloof, changed and yet the same, with her hair lifted off her face by Lilliat’s phantom breeze and silver shadows on her skin …
There was a long pause. Then Hazel said: ‘I found these potions –’ she indicated the bottles on the dressing table ‘– I thought they might help. What do I do?’
Her reflection faded.
‘What need of evil medicines?’ Lilliat said. ‘You have seen yourself – yourself as you truly are. I will do the rest.’
‘Thank you.’ Hazel felt grateful, hopeful, doubtful. Little showed in her face, but Lilliat saw it all.
‘A favour for a favour.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Don’t you know the stories?’ Her tone was still soft, still with an echo of silvery laughter. ‘There is always a price. The mermaid who sold her voice to turn her fishtail into legs, the prince who toiled seven years to break a witch’s spell … But what you ask is a little thing. The price will be small, no more than you can afford.’
‘Money?’ Hazel said. ‘I don’t have much money.’
Lilliat laughed again – laughed and laughed – and the flower-petals turned to bank notes which scattered around her like butterflies, and golden coins were shaken from the shower of her hair. ‘Not money,’ she said at last. ‘Money is a humbug. I am not human.’
Suddenly, Hazel felt cold.
‘What is the price?’
Nathan, back at school after the weekend, found himself wondering if his uncle’s interest in Damon Hackforth had been merely idle curiosity. He wasn’t sure – Bartlemy’s manner was too subtle for him to be sure – but he was a perceptive boy, and he knew Uncle Barty wasn’t idly curious by nature. When the opportunity presented itself, he encouraged Ned Gable to talk about his parents’ friends.
‘I really don’t like Damon,’ he said. ‘You can feel the violence coming off him, sort of in pulses. Like a dodgy electric current.’
‘He’s dodgy all right,’ Ned affirmed. ‘Stupid, too. I mean, why steal a car when they’ve got five in the garage? His dad’s got pots of money – he’d probably give him one for his eighteenth if he stayed out of trouble. He won’t now, though.’
‘What’s his sister like?’
‘Melly-Anne? I told you.’
‘Meliane?’ Nathan echoed.
‘Melanie-Anne. They shorten it.’
‘How old is she?’ It was a starting point.
‘She’s quite old. Twenty-one or two. She’s really nice. The Hackforths had a do there once, some charity thing, Mum made me go. Melly-Anne talked to me for ages – she was lovely. That was before she was in the wheelchair. At least a year ago.’
‘What did you say was wrong with her?’
‘Muscular dystrophy – multiple sclerosis – one of those diseases that’s slow and fatal and can’t be stopped. Beginning with M. Mum says old Hackforth’s so desperate, he’s trying potty cures now.’
‘Potty cures?’ Nathan said, bemused.
‘New Age stuff, weird herbs, acupuncture, that kind of thing.’ Ned was a shade impatient. ‘Potty, poor sod. Still, you can’t blame him. I mean, when you’re desperate, really desperate, I suppose anything’s worth a try.’
‘Are you sure Damon’s jealous of her?’ Nathan asked. ‘With her dying and all that.’
‘He’s warped,’ Ned explained. ‘You know? Warped inside. Like – like when you leave something out in the garden all winter, a rake or something, and the rain gets to it, and it goes all bendy, and you can’t straighten it up.’ It was a metaphor that might have surprised his English master, who rarely connected Ned with metaphors. ‘That’s Damon. He’s bendy. They won’t be able to straighten him. I expect he’ll go to prison in the end.’
Nathan didn’t say any more. The cricket season was under way, and there were important things to discuss. But he made up his mind he would tell his uncle what he had heard, just in case he wanted to know.
At night in the dormitory Nathan was torn between trying not to dream and the urge to revisit the dead city, to return to Osskva and say all that needed to be said, to see the princess again. (He didn’t even know her name.) Somehow, he sensed that if he resisted the dreams would not come, but if his curiosity became too much for him then the dreams would take over, and his sleep would be no longer his own. He wondered if particles in physics experienced these dilemmas, or if they simply popped in and out of the world as a matter of course, because it was their nature. And he remembered a saying he had heard or read somewhere: ‘Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.’ So he wasn’t really surprised, the next night, to find himself back in the dream.
Not Arkatron: the other city. The city on two hills (he must try to learn some names). His awareness skimmed over the marshland, glimpsing the cloud-shapes sliding across the broken pools, breathing the foul-smelling gases that rose here and there in slow bubbles. The reed-beds were as tall as a child, and although he saw no living thing he caught the occasional
