Flitterwig Read online

  According to the Prophecy, which the Duke had hardly believed until a minute ago, the Dewdrops would now remain hidden. They would wait for the Clearhearted Flitterwig, a part-human Magical who was pure of thought and action, to restore them to whomsoever was the more trustworthy pure Magical. For now both Royals had broken their trust by leaving Magus unprotected.

  The Duke knew that he had to get to the Clearheart first. He had to convince her that he was the Magical who deserved the Dewdrops’ trust.

  He looked over at the boy. Perhaps he knew what time the Clearheart would be home?

  ‘I am the Grand Duke of the Magical Kingdom of Magus,’ said the Duke, keeping his voice calm and offering a taloned hand to the child.

  ‘Ch-ch-charlie Snoppit,’ the boy said. He was thrilled to the very core by the exciting events unfolding before him in his very own barn. Lightning bolts and monsters! This was much more appealing than animals with opinions. Charlie’s luck was turning around!

  ‘I assume you are one of Saul’s minions, yes? Where is the old boy, hey? Oh, and I don’t suppose you know what time Ella Montgomery will be getting home?’ asked the Duke, wasting no time.

  ‘Um, I-I-I don’t know who Saul is, I’m afraid,’ said Charlie. ‘And, um, Ella M-m-m-montgomery doesn’t live here. This is S-s-s-snoppit Farm. She lives across the valley at W-w-w-willow Farm.’

  The Duke could hardly believe his stretched ears. If he had come to the wrong place to meet the Clearheart on her return from London, it was no wonder the Dewdrops didn’t trust him!

  Through the barrage of insults with which the Duke berated himself inwardly for such stupidity, a thought stirred. If Charlie Snoppit didn’t know Saul of the Flitterwigs and wasn’t therefore one of his followers, then how come the boy could see him?

  And then reality dawned.

  The spectacles on the boy’s nose looked very much like the magical spectacles kept in the Treasury of Magus. He couldn’t possibly be wearing them, of course, but everyone knew there was more than one pair in existence.

  He plucked the spectacles off the boy’s nose and popped them on again.

  ‘Did I just disappear?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘Yes, you did,’ Charlie replied, shaken.

  How very extraordinary, the Duke thought to himself. Although he seems to be entirely unaware of it, the child must be a Flitterwig in his own right!

  chapter 4

  shaken & shrunk

  Ella, meanwhile, had been shrunk to the size of a pepper mill. And boy, did it hurt! (Imagine being squeezed into a sausage skin, and then squeezed some more. It was a little bit like that.)

  Her bed stretched out before her like a soccer pitch.

  ‘It wasn’t actually me who Shrinkified you,’ Dixon said to her, as the remains of a white mist swirled away to nothingness around them. He popped an empty vial into his backpack. ‘That was Her Royal Majesty’s elf dust I used, with a few of her own magical tears and a spell she herself gave to me, pee, hee hee.’ The pixie beamed with pride. ‘Personally!’ he added, when Ella didn’t look as impressed as he expected her to. ‘THE QUEEN,’ he went on, enunciating the words very carefully. ‘Our wonderful Ruler whom the Duke has deserted,’ he cried, throwing his hands up theatrically, ‘because she won’t let him bring machinery into Magus!’

  Ella put her fingers under the spectacles and rubbed her eyes. ‘Wake up Ella!’ she said. ‘WAKE UP!’

  ‘Don’t you see? We have to be fast,’ the pixie continued, ‘because Pollucification makes elf dust less powerful by the minute, see. See, see. Rhymes with flea.’

  ‘I think you might mean pollution,’ Ella corrected him.

  ‘Yes, exactly,’ said Dixon. ‘Pollucification, terribly dangerous for little Magical lungs. Oh terribly, dreadfully dangerous for elf lungs! Oh and terribly, dreadfully, horribly dangerous for a Royal elf’s lungs!’

  Somewhere deep in Ella’s mind the possibility that she might not be dreaming began to dawn, but it was quickly blocked out by another possibility that seemed to make much more sense. Perhaps she had spent so much time on her own that she’d gone completely mad? Her head felt floaty. She sneezed, once, twice, three times, as swirls of dust floated about her.

  ‘That happens to us on Earth,’ said Dixon.

  Ella looked puzzled.

  ‘It’s the pollucification, like I told you. Not good for Magicals. No, no. Rhymes with blow. Little lungs. Big dirts, flirts, squirts. I guess it’s bad for Flitterwigs too.’ The pixie chuckled to himself. ‘Well I never.’

  ‘I have asthma,’ said Ella, by way of explanation. And then she turned her back on this thing her crazy imagination had conjured up in order to STOP HERSELF TALKING TO IT!

  Dixon flipped over her head so that she was facing him again. ‘Don’t you like me?’ he asked, his face drooping.

  Ella felt completely confused. Now she was hurting the imaginary thing’s feelings! This was hopeless! The pixie gazed at her, and tears streamed down his green cheeks. His tears smelt of warm, fresh milk and honey. Something deep inside Ella stirred.

  ‘We need to go into the garden,’ Dixon whimpered, his confidence all but gone.

  Ella couldn’t bear it. Perhaps if she played along with him for a while, he would go away. And anyway, he smelt kind of right. Ella had always trusted her sense of smell, especially where honey was concerned. Furthermore (on the off chance that she wasn’t imagining all this), she’d been shrunk. So maybe upsetting the pixie, who might be the only person who could unshrink her, wasn’t such a good idea.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, with as much conviction as she could muster. ‘Well, if we’re going to the garden, we’ll need to put a pillow under the quilt to make it look like I’m in bed, or my governess will get suspicious.’ She thought for a moment. ‘I really should have done it before you made me so small.’ She looked across the bed to where the pillow loomed like a sleeping dinosaur.

  Dixon slapped himself on the forehead with frustration. ‘Oh, stupid twit, nit, bit,’ he cried, trying to pull his arms out of their sockets by standing on his hands.

  ‘Stop it!’ said Ella, alarmed. ‘You don’t have to hurt yourself!’

  ‘Can’t, shan’t,’ said Dixon, looking up at her through his legs. ‘Bad pixie, didn’t think. Got to be punished.’

  Ella realised that the pixie’s moods could swing in seconds. She spied a furled umbrella leaning against the wall, and pointed at it to distract him. ‘We’ll need that,’ she said.

  Immediately reading her mind, Dixon stood to attention. His arms retracted into their sockets. He clicked his heels and saluted Ella.

  ‘Right away, play, may, stay,’ he said, recovering fully and somersaulting right up over her head. With three grand roly-polies he jettisoned himself over the bed and onto the floor, and heaved the umbrella up with a grunt.

  ‘Very strong, us Magical folk,’ he puffed. ‘Pixies particularly. Elves are pretty weedy. Goblins are fast on their feet but nowhere near as strong as the likes of me.’ Using the umbrella as a vaulting pole, he launched himself back up onto the bed. Together, he and Ella scrambled under the covers, pulling the pillow and the brolly behind them.

  ‘Heave!’ Dixon called out.

  ‘Heave!’ Ella echoed, pulling with all her tiny might.

  They arranged the covers so that the pillow, with the closed umbrella serving as legs, really did look very much like a body curled up asleep.

  Dixon winked at Ella. ‘Nice work, berk,’ he said to her. ‘Now, are you ready for an adventure?’

  ‘Sure,’ Ella said. This pixie was one strange character, she thought. But dreaming or not, mad or sane, this was rather fun!

  Dixon’s eyes shone bright blue with pleasure. ‘Well then, come with me,’ he said, flipping up and over the edge of the bed and free-falling to the cream carpet. Ella slid down the bed leg and followed him across the carpet towards the window, hauling herself up a curtain and onto the windowsill. She was surprised and impressed by her own agility.
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  ‘It’s the magic,’ Dixon called out to her, and she wondered if she’d just said that thought out loud.

  Ella looked outside the half-open window, and her eyes bulged like marbles. For there, balancing in the breeze, in the light of the moon, fluttered more butterflies than she had ever seen in her entire life. Even in the dark their gauzy wings shivered emerald green, gold, poppy red, sun yellow. They hovered together in a silky sheet, splendid and still.

  Dixon turned to Ella and took her hand. She stepped after him

  onto the flying carpet. It was quite solid, but then, because she was so small, she probably didn’t weigh very much.

  Dixon lay down across the butterflies, and Ella followed suit. She stroked a velvet wing. Was this really happening? She didn’t care. She was about to fly to the garden on a butterfly carpet! The butterflies fluttered slowly downwards, leaving a scent of jasmine in their wake, and landed gently on the lawn.

  Sensing Ella’s emotion, the pixie squeezed her hand and did a flip of pleasure.

  ‘Careful,’ hummed the butterfly at the head of the fluttering net. Of course, neither you nor I would have understood this, and Ella certainly didn’t either.

  ‘So sorry. Sorry, sorry. Oh dear me, sorry, sorry,’ Dixon said to the butterfly. He made a stretchy face at Ella. ‘Naughty pixie,’ he said, kissing the butterfly’s wing.

  Standing hip-deep in damp grass, Ella shivered. An evening dewdrop rolled across the petal of a blue iris. It slid over the tip of the petal and fell, plop, into a green bag held by a leafy-looking creature with softly slanted eyes and sharp features.

  ‘That’s a grass imp,’ Dixon whispered in Ella’s ear. ‘We call them Jack-in-the-Greens. Green, green, rhymes with bean. He’s collecting water for polishing the lawn. Ever wondered why grass always looks so clean, gleam, beam? Well, it’s the Jack-in-the-Greens keeping them so. Ever so busy they are, far, tar.’

  Ella could see a number of the creatures catching dewdrops from the flowers. A couple stood under blades of grass and showered in the sprinkles of water that fell on their heads, chatting to one another in a chorus of rustles and swishes. Another, lighter in colour and wearing a bold coloured smock, balanced on a petal, wiping it down with the care of a mother for her child. Ella smelled cinnamon and rain in the air.

  Her eyes were as bright and wide as they would be if someone were ever to buy her a new skateboard.

  Dixon skipped about, delighted. He clutched at his sides and kicked his legs up in the air. ‘They’re petal imps, cleaning the flowers,’ he called out to her. ‘That’s what we Magicals do. We clean stuff, see. I’m a mountain pixie myself. I look after rocks. It’s fun. Fun, fun, fun,’ he sang. ‘Rhymes with sun!’

  Suddenly he remembered. Slapping himself across the face and clicking his boots together, he stood to attention. ‘Serious Elf Business,’ he said in a very serious voice, although a very serious voice on a pixie sounds like the sprinkling of sugar on cornflakes. ‘Follow me please, trees, sneeze.’

  Mrs Dribbleton-Faucet thrust her head into Ella’s room. The light was off, but she could see a mound under the quilt. Satisfied that the child was sleeping, she wiped a bit of dribble from her chin and trundled off to bed.

  chapter 5

  fanciful folk & flitterwigs

  Ella sat on her heels at the back of the garden shed, awestruck, listening to a talkative goblin seated on a spotty mushroom. Dixon stood beside her, fingers in his braces, watching in excited silence. Behind the goblin, tucked among cobwebs and dry leaves and safely enclosed within a ring of mushrooms, lay the Royal Court of the Magical Kingdom of Magus.

  In the centre of the ring, nestled under a silk blanket upon a maple leaf, lay the frail, wispy, incandescent figure of the sleeping Elf Queen, her perfectly sculpted ears with their delicate tips the spitting image of Ella’s own. A silkworm slept on the ground beside her. Eight elves-in-waiting, the girls dressed in a puff of smoky silver and the boys in dusty blue, stood to attention. A little further away, seated around a stub of wood, sat three gnomes, the members of the House of Gnomes. To their right, ten white elves leaned against the legs of a wheelbarrow. Each had a bow strapped to his back and a quiver of arrows hanging elegantly from his shoulders.

  On the other side of the leaf, at a respectful distance from the Queen, a number of sprites mixed ingredients in a makeshift laboratory. These physicians were working as hard as they could to find a potion that might protect the Queen from the dangerous effects of Earthly pollution. Hazelnut pots hung over twig fires, and long, reedy tubes dripped ochre globules into acorn beakers.

  The goblin on the mushroom, whose name was Mr Elton Wrinkles (and who was none other than the Queen’s Goblin Protector, or personal bodyguard), stopped talking and paused for breath. He folded his hands on his lap. Lines furrowed the brow of his monkey-like face which, unless Ella was much mistaken, was covered in makeup to hide an abundance of freckles. He leaned forward, accentuating the electric-blue cravat worn beneath his silver-sequined waistcoat. A large hooped earring hung from his left ear, and the spiky silver streaks in his white hair indicated a goblinman with a deep interest in personal toilette.

  ‘In summary, my dear,’ he said, coughing politely in reaction to an overly large intake of breath, ‘the Duke has stolen the Sacred Dewdrops and we have come to Earth with the Queen in order to try to get them back.’ He pursed his lips. ‘They should never have been moved from Magus. Unless, of course, there were a major natural catastrophe to combat. To have brought them to Earth risks the very balance of the natural universe as we know it. They are usually locked in the Treasury vault, where we thought they were as safe as it was possible for them to be, for only the Queen and the Duke know the spell to open it. The Dewdrops hold much of the very essence of our natures. They are everything that is magical, natural and pure.’

  He paused and looked at Ella quizzically. ‘According to what the gnomes tell us of the Magusian Tomes, we are entering the Last Days of the Ban and the beginning of the Prophecy of the Clearheart. The Ban respects the Natural Order of Things, and messing with the Natural Order of Things, as the Duke has so perilously done – forcing the Queen to do so too – means that the Dewdrops’ trust in the Rulers of Magus has been broken.

  And now’ (he was talking terribly fast at this point), ‘only what we in Magus know as the Clearheart, a part-human Magical, can repair that broken trust by revealing her Clearheartedness to the Dewdrops, thus restoring to Magus everything that is precious.’

  Wrinkles took a deep breath and had a bit of a coughing fit. ‘Because if the Clearheart doesn’t make contact with the Dewdrops and return them to the Queen,’ he continued, a little more slowly now, ‘we will lose an essential part of the core of Magus, the thing that makes it the most natural, unspoilt, magical sanctuary in the Universe. And if we lose that – then we are all doomed.’

  Ella looked like someone who doesn’t get a joke.

  Wrinkles closed his eyes theatrically and then opened them. ‘And we believe that you, my dear Ella,’ he said, taking another deep breath, which meant he had to cough again, ‘we believe that you just happen to be the Clearheart to whom the Prophecy in the Tomes refers.’ He pulled gently at the hoop in his ear. ‘And you must beware. For the Duke will want to capture you in order to control the Dewdrops himself. And he could appear to you in many different guises.’

  Ella’s felt her head turning to scrambled eggs, and it hurt. She blinked.

  Wrinkles spoke to her slowly, as if she were a bit dim. ‘A Clearheart is a part-human of Royal Magical lineage and pure intention who can perform magic no other part-human Magical has ever performed before,’ he explained.

  Ella continued to stare, as vacant as the hole in a doughnut.

  ‘Part-human Magicals are known as Flitterwigs,’ Wrinkles said, realising she still had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. ‘Flitterwigs are humans with Magical blood running through their veins. Haven’t you noticed how hard you find it to br
eathe? How your hair grows too fast? How your eyes stare too much? How you smell everything before you can trust it? How your feet are too big? Your distinctive ears? All very clear Elven Flitterwig symptoms. Your maternal grandmother is a Flitterwig. Your mother was a Flitterwig. And so are you.’

  Ella looked positively stupid by now. She did know she had another grandmother, but she couldn’t remember her at all because Granny and Grandpa wouldn’t let her visit. Not since Ella’s mother and both her brothers were killed in a motoring accident.

  Wrinkles continued, unperturbed. ‘We had hoped that this time, the Last Days of the Ban, would never come, but it has, I’m afraid. The Magusian Tomes don’t lie. It was written that a Royal would fall. And the Duke has fallen far indeed.’

  Ella’s brain ached.

  Wrinkles’ soft brown eyes gazed deeply into Ella’s. She could smell the cinnamon smell again, wafting from his body. It smelt safe. He reached out his hand and touched the tip of her nose. Ella felt a burning sensation in her ears, and a fierce heat ran down the back of her neck, making her shoulderblades itch. Her hair began to fan out around her as if she was close to something electric. It was hard to breathe. She turned and ran out of the shed into the moonlit garden, her bones aching oddly from having been small for so long. Her hands and feet felt numb. She took the spectacles off, reached into her dungarees pocket for her asthma inhaler, and took a long, deep puff.