Clearheart Read online

  Clearheart

  a flitterwig tale

  by Edrei Cullen

  illustrated by Gregory Rogers

  For Maureen, Nigel, Kirsteen, Luisa & Geoffrey E.C.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  chapter 1: flight & frustration

  chapter 2: clouds & conspiracies

  chapter 3: spirits & space

  chapter 4: water & wanderings

  chapter 5: lessons & livewires

  chapter 6: bullies & branches

  chapter 7: thwarted & thoughtful

  chapter 8: dryads & duplicity

  chapter 9: dreams & dunkings

  chapter 10: prophecies & possibilities

  chapter 11: stories & sniggers

  chapter 12: losses & lunatics

  chapter 13: anxiety & anoraks

  chapter 14: giants & gum trees

  chapter 15: pleas & promises

  chapter 16: whispers & whatnots

  chapter 17: ice & incredulity

  chapter 18: tears & tingles

  chapter 19: lies & lethargy

  chapter 20: honking & halitosis

  chapter 21: penguins & puppies

  chapter 22: terns & tendrils

  chapter 23: calumny & cracks

  chapter 24: friendship & flight

  chapter 25: domes & destinations

  chapter 26: pixies & persuasion

  chapter 27: giants & grudges

  chapter 28: clearhearts & confrontation

  chapter 29: promises & poppycock

  chapter 30: sacrifices & shame

  chapter 31: mysteries & meanings

  chapter 32: races & redemption

  Copyright

  chapter 1

  flight & frustration

  ‘Don’t jump, Ella! Don’t jump, you silly lump!’ The pixie kicked his way through the undergrowth, past the invisible oak tree in the red poppy field, across the vegetable gardens and towards the abandoned outhouse, far beyond the main building of Hedgeberry School of Flitterwiggery. His big, blue, watery eyes streamed as his striped red top and green hat bounced up and down through the grass like a pepper pot in fancy dress.

  As the pixie came in sight of the outhouse, he spotted her. He stopped still and smacked his hands across his face.

  ‘Oh no! Blow. Hellooo,’ he squealed, wrestling himself to the ground. For there was Ella, her green eyes flashing, her long, honey-coloured hair flaring wildly about her pale face to reveal her perfectly sculpted and finely pointed ears. She had her scruffy dungarees hitched up to free her feet and her T-shirt pulled back to leave room for her yet-to-be-unfurled wings. As he had expected, she was dangling over the edge of the roof of the abandoned building, preparing to jump.

  Ella was a Flitterwig, you see, a human being with Magical blood. In her case, elf blood. The trouble was, unlike other Elven Flitterwigs her age, Ella couldn’t remember how to fly. She had done it once, in very special circumstances, but now she had no idea how to even get her wings to appear!

  Had the Troggle near the invisible oak been paying attention, he would have seen the pixie bounding across the grounds. Instead the Troggle muttered to himself as he struggled to unhook the hood of his black cloak from a small, protruding, unseeable branch. He had once been a pixie himself, but he had eaten so much sugar that he had Trogglified into a stinky, greasy-haired, moulding slime ball of a creature.

  The pixie grabbed himself by the throat and flung himself about as hard as he could. It was something the pixie did quite often. Attack himself, that is. When he got stuff wrong. Pointless, of course. But rather typical of this particular pixie.

  He couldn’t believe he’d let himself get distracted, AGAIN, instead of keeping an eye on Ella! Especially since he knew that Ella was determined to remember how to get her wings to unfurl before the Skateboarding Championships at the end of term, which was only a couple of weeks away.

  Hearing the sounds of a struggle in the grass, Ella’s new friend Samantha Wallow stopped instructing Ella and turned her face, its delicate features and slanting turquoise eyes framed by a halo of tight blond curls, to the noise.

  ‘Hello?’ Samantha called, tripping backwards over her spindly feet and landing flat on the ground.

  The Troggle, hearing the voice, froze and tried to blend into the shadows of the undergrowth.

  ‘Did you say GO?’ called Ella, unable to make out her friend’s words from her precarious spot on the top of the outhouse.

  Neither Samantha nor the pixie had time to right themselves before Ella launched herself into the air.

  ‘Nooooooo,’ they called in unison as she threw her waifish body over the side and dropped, like a hacky sack, into the bushes below.

  The Troggle, believing himself to have been spotted spying on Ella, panicked. Tearing the hood of his cloak from the invisible something he was stuck to, the Troggle took off across the grounds of Hedgeberry as fast as his short legs in their hobnailed boots could carry him. The Grand Duke’s instructions had been to keep a vigilant eye on Ella at all times, but most importantly to not get caught.

  Ella was not just a Flitterwig, you see. She was much, much more than that. She was the most important Flitterwig alive. The Clearheart. A Flitterwig so pure of thought and action that she could perform and command magic in a way that no other Flitterwig could. And it was precisely these qualities that the exiled Grand Elf Duke of the Magical Kingdom of Magus was after.

  The pixie, too perturbed by his friend’s fall to notice the Troggle, stood up, detached his hands from his throat, and ran in the direction of the bushes that had broken Ella’s fall.

  By the time he reached her, Samantha was already by her side, rubbing a bump on Ella’s forehead with her fine fingers. The bump began to disappear. Being a Sprite Flitterwig meant that Samantha was particularly adept at healing. Ella touched her friend’s hand gratefully.

  Flinging himself up onto her chest, the pixie looked down at Ella, his eyes so wide with concern that they almost overtook his green visage entirely.

  ‘Are you all right? Fright. Rhymes with flight?’ he asked gently.

  Ella’s eyes had gone all fuzzy with the fall and she could feel an asthma attack coming on. She lifted her head out of the bushes.

  ‘Hello, Dixon,’ she mumbled to the pixie peering at her. ‘Did my wings appear?’ she asked Samantha, before her head lolled back and she collapsed in a faint.

  Dixon put his hands on his hips and frowned at Samantha as ferociously as he could, which wasn’t very ferociously at all, being a pixie and all.

  Samantha peered at him guiltily and set about examining Ella’s body, in order to heal her. She whispered magical words as she tweaked her ear with one slim hand and laid the other upon Ella.

  ‘How many times have I told you she can’t remember how to fly? Fly. Fly. Rhymes with eye,’ the pixie remonstrated. ‘Can’t even make her wings appear. Dear.’

  ‘I know,’ said Samantha, her voice humming with guilt. ‘But the Skateboarding Championships are only two weeks away, and without her wings she doesn’t have a chance.’

  Dixon looked about for Charlie Snoppit. Charlie knew very well that, as Ella’s Goblin Flitterwig Protector, it was his job in life to protect the Elven Flitterwig from danger at all times but, as usual, the boy was nowhere to be seen. Dillydallying about with his froggy friend, no doubt. How in Magic’s name was Dixon ever going to get back to work, if no-one on Earth seemed to know how to behave?

  As Ella came to, Dixon smiled at her indulgently, unable to hide his affection for her.

  ‘Well, at least you’re okay,’ he said, spreading his body across her face in a pixie embrace. ‘Phew, phew. Rhymes with flew,’ he sighed as his friend r
olled her eyes and plopped her head back into the soft mattress of the bushes in defeat.

  Bells rang in the distance. Bluebells, as a matter of fact. It was time for class.

  ‘Better get off to Transportics,’ said Samantha, grateful for the distraction. Smiling as ingratiatingly as she could at the pixie, she hauled Ella up out of the bushes, trying hard not to trip over. Dixon clung tight to the straps of Ella’s dungarees and tucked himself into her front pocket.

  It was always the same, Dixon thought as the three of them crossed the lawn and made their way to class. If he left her for a moment, Ella would try to fly. It frustrated the pixie no end. When would she realise that she was the most important Flitterwig on Earth? The one who had bridged the divide between pure Magicals like himself (real, tiny pixies, elves, sylphs, sprites, brownies and the like) and human-sized Flitterwigs. It was because of her, after all, that the Queen of Magus had lifted the Ban on contact between Magicals and Flitterwigs. They both knew this was a secret they were bound to keep now that Ella was at school with other Flitterwigs. So why, oh why did the child think that being able to enter the Skateboarding Championships was so much more important than keeping herself safe?

  Gloria Ulnus, Hedgeberry Lower School’s reigning Skateboarding Champion, watched from the shadows of the invisible oak, leaning against it, for it was visible to her. Her dark eyes peered snootily down her pointy-up nose as Samantha helped Ella hobble back across the grounds. She sniggered to herself.

  ‘She doesn’t have a chance,’ said Gloria to the tree, for she was a Dryad Flitterwig and therefore had a deep affinity with all things treelike. ‘What was that nasty little black creature that just got caught on you?’ she asked the tree. The leaves of the tree whispered their rustling answer to the child, obliged as it was to always tell Dryad Flitterwigs the truth.

  ‘A Troggle?’ said Gloria. ‘What on Earth is that?’

  chapter 2

  clouds & conspiracies

  Transportics took the form of three separate training sessions: Aeronortics, Aquanortics and Loconortics. Which one you went to depended on what type of Flitterwig you were—one of flight, swimming or speed.

  Ella, being a Flitterwig of flight, had to attend Aeronortics, which was held on a white cloud that hung above the elegant spires of Hedgeberry pretty much all the time. This sounds terribly peculiar and, let’s face it, it is. Every Wednesday, all potentially winged Flitterwigs (elves, imps, sprites, sylphs, nymphs, dryads, etc) were expected to take the old, dilapidated iron elevator in the school’s entrance hall up to the fourth floor.

  Now, Hedgeberry didn’t have a fourth floor. It only had three floors. Which meant that Ella and her peers would shoot up through the roof of Hedgeberry into the air above. This, as anyone can imagine, makes the tummy churn and the head spin. But stranger still was the sensation of being deposited not on hard ground, but on the bouncy surface of this particular cloud! It defied logic. It defied everything, let’s face it, but magic itself.

  Samantha winked at Ella supportively as they were thrust up into the sky. Having been at Hedgeberry since she was four, Samantha was a brilliant flyer. Her feet had hardly touched the surface of the cloud before she was tweaking her ear and whispering the enchantment. Her wings appeared, unfurling easily through the back of Hedgeberry’s standard-issue T-shirt for Flitterwigs of flight. Sparkling apparitions, they were; lacy fronds woven of what seemed the finest silk. She was up off into the sky before Ella had the chance to so much as sink into the marshmallow depths of the cloud and start suffocating.

  Ella didn’t begrudge Samantha this fact at all. Indeed, if she ever managed to scramble back to the cloud-top and stay there for longer than ten seconds, she would watch Samantha swoop across the horizon with the elegance of a swallow and feel glad for the girl that there was somewhere she could exist where she wasn’t as clumsy as she usually was on foot.

  Miss Woofla-Daplida, the Aeronortics teacher, issued instructions as her tiny body, all aflutter in an assortment of tiedyed this and thats, hovered in the sky.

  ‘Tweak the left ear like so, children, in order to control the wings,’ she twittered through a megaphone, tweaking her ear from so far away that Ella couldn’t even see her.

  Clambering up out of the puffs of the cloud, gasping for air, Ella tried to grab her left ear. In doing so, she lost her footing and disappeared back into the cloud’s cotton folds.

  ‘You can do it. Do it. Do it. Rhymes with blew it,’ Dixon sang encouragingly from his perch on her shoulder, mindful of staying carefully hidden in her long hair so as not to get spotted by Miss Woofla-Daplida. He handed Ella her inhaler. She suffered from asthma, as a result of her elven sensitivity to the pollution on Earth. She took a grateful puff, sinking back down into the cloud at once. ‘Come on, Ella, Bella,’ Dixon urged, happy to help her try to fly now there was a teacher about and a cloud to catch her should she fall.

  ‘Stop going on in my ear,’ said Ella, more annoyed with herself than the pixie. ‘Can’t you see I’m trying?’

  Dixon squished his hand over his mouth and nose so his face was just two big eyes poking out of two green sockets. He tried not to cry.

  Ella waded back up through the cloud.

  ‘Think weightlessness, Ella,’ Miss Woofla-Daplida twittered through her megaphone as she floated like a butterfly. ‘Remember, the magic is in you, you just have to find it.’

  Ella scowled. ‘Think weightlessness, Ella,’ she mimicked. ‘As if I’m not trying,’ she said between gritted teeth, hauling herself onto the top of the cloud and trying to keep herself there. Dixon giggled, all thoughts of hurt feelings gone completely.

  ‘You’re funny,’ he snickered, planting a tiny wet kiss on her ear. It tickled. Ella smiled. Keeping her wits about her, she balanced on the top of the cloud, concentrating for all she was worth, trying to find the magic inside her.

  Which she didn’t get much of a chance to do, because a sudden push thrust her off the side of the cloud. She fell like a stone.

  Samantha spotted Ella careering towards the ground. She swooped elegantly and yelled directions involving ear-tweaking and enchantments that Ella could barely hear over Dixon screeching in her ear as he clung desperately to the strap of her dungarees.

  ‘Fly. Fly. Rhymes with rye. You can do it! Spew it! Blew it!’ he hollered as his legs flew out behind him wildly and his green face wobbled in the wind.

  The cloud dropped swiftly out of the sky, whipping Samantha out of the way and catching Ella in its gentle folds. Ella lay prostrate upon it. She turned on her back and looked up at the Flitterwigs hovering high above her. How embarrassing! Samantha, who had swooped back up into the air, was calling out for Miss Woofla-Daplida.

  Out of nowhere, Gloria Ulnus appeared. She flew up so close that Ella could see the glint in Gloria’s dark eyes. Her nose, which poked out like a sniffing rat’s, almost touched Ella’s own and her lank black hair fell on Ella’s pale face.

  ‘I’m watching you,’ Gloria snarled, poking a finger in Ella’s chest. Ella noticed that where she should have had nails, there were claws. A terrible sense of something much more sinister than a school bully, the sense of something she had encountered before, made Ella’s hair flare up and her ears itch fiercely.

  Miss Woofla-Daplida appeared at Ella’s side. ‘Oh dear, Ella,’ she twittered, ‘you’re not having much luck at this flying caper, are you?’ Ella looked at the tie-dyed teacher and back at Gloria, who had settled on the cloud. The girl’s nails had returned to normal and her eyes, while still dark, were more brown, like the bark of a tree, than black anymore.

  ‘Thank you, Gloria dear, for checking on your classmate,’ said Miss Woofla-Daplida. ‘It is always good to know that we Flitterwigs are looking out for one another.’

  Gloria stared at Miss Woofla-Daplida blankly, looking as startled and confused as Ella.

  ‘She will do perfectly!’ the Elf Duke declared, thrusting into the air as his wings shot him up out of a great bowl of water
set upon a dais in a glacial drawing room. He set himself nimbly on the ground beside it. His eyes sparkled with the thrill of having Possessified the Ulnus child and his skin gleamed from the exertion. The exiled Duke of the Magical Kingdom of Magus shook his Stretchified neck, magnificent still, in spite of the monster he had become. He rubbed his shoulders, his clawed hands passing over the black velvet of his cloak with ease.

  Only months ago he had been no bigger than a human hand. The most elegant and powerful elf in Magus, other than his wife the Queen. But now, having Stretchified himself to the size of a short grown-up, his nose lay flat against his face, his eyes bulged wildly, his skin throbbed blue and red over veins pulled tight against his overextended skin. Claws had replaced his hands, and a slithering tail (an afterthought the Duke had added, just for effect) sliced out the back of his black velvet cloak, oozing slime.

  ‘Bring me some Antidote, Ragwald,’ he demanded.

  His Goblin Protector, all freckles and white hair (the parts of him that hadn’t been Trogglified, that is), rushed up and handed his master a goblet of thick, blood-coloured liquid. The Duke took a long drink, and sighed deeply as the anti-pollutant effects of the draught restored him. Earth was a filthy place. Not here in his new hideaway, of course, but humans had polluted most of their planet with little concern for the consequences.

  He turned to a group of Troggles feasting on a bowl of sweets in the corner. One of them was the same Troggle who had fled from Hedgeberry School of Flitterwiggery barely an hour earlier. Not that it was easy to tell them apart these days. For the Duke’s loyal Magicals, who he had managed to lure from Magus with promises of infinite access to sweeties, had eaten so much sugar now that they were blackened and pickled and rotten beyond recognition, even in the cleanliness of their new lair.

  Trogglitis is a terrible affliction. If pure Magicals eat too much sugar, first they just get stupid and lose their balance. But then, after a while, they get jittery and impatient and stressed out. After that they start to rot and smell revolting. The Duke’s army of Magicals, however, were almost past this point. Soon their eyes would turn red and they would swell to five times their tiny Magical size. Their extremities would melt into nasty pincer-like contraptions, and then they would become mean and angry and dangerous, just as the Duke wanted them. However, if the Duke was not careful with their rations, they would disintegrate altogether. And if they weren’t strong, they were of no use to him. He pointed a claw at the failed spy. ‘Who needs you?’ he hissed. A shot of elf dust flew from his forefinger and struck the Troggle. The demented Magical turned to sludge at once.