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  About an hour later they arrived at a gate. A nauseous Ella jumped out to open it. The air smelt of clover, and the sun’s heat rested on her like a warm hand, settling her stomach.

  The car bumped down a dirt track towards a mustard-coloured cottage set in a wild green valley. Flowers, bushes and ferns, wild and cultivated, grew everywhere in a multitude of colours. It looked as if a giant had spilled his paints there and forgotten to clean them up.

  As they stopped in front of the cottage, Ella noticed a goose staring at them from an islet in the middle of a small pond. Ella stared back. The goose cocked its head and then, to her great surprise, winked.

  Grandpa told Ella to wait in the car, and went to knock on the front door. A willowy woman in a long white dress answered. She flung her arms around Grandpa’s neck, and then stood back to look at him. Long, loose hair, lighter than Ella’s and not as messy, floated about her like a veil. Grandpa said something and the woman smiled. The smile sprang from her like fresh water, and Ella suddenly felt sad. She missed her mum.

  She put the spectacles on so she could find Dixon, and the valley lit up, sparkling even more brightly. The pixie was straddled across her shoulder again, swinging his legs. How peculiar that without the spectacles she could be so entirely unaware of him.

  ‘Don’t be sad, little Ella,’ he said gently. ‘Sad, bad, mad, glad.’

  Ella shrugged, and sighed.

  ‘Hello Ella.’ Manna peered through the car window, the smell of mint and lavender floating in with her.

  Ella pulled the spectacles off and tucked them back in her pocket. Manna smiled at her shoulder, but Ella couldn’t figure out how she could see Dixon. Even if she was a Flitterwig, she wasn’t wearing any spectacles.

  Suddenly shy, she got out of the car and looked up at her maternal grandmother. A light wind had risen and it sounded as if the trees were whispering to one another. The smell of magic, that mixture of cinnamon, oranges and rain, was clear and strong. She turned to Grandpa, who nodded to her and mouthed, ‘See you tomorrow.’

  Manna held out her hand. Ella looked at it nervously. Manna reached closer and tucked Ella’s hand into her outstretched one. Ella had no idea that she was supposed to hold it. She couldn’t remember ever holding someone’s hand. It felt warm and comforting.

  ‘I have double-fudge chocolate muffins and hot chocolate for lunch,’ said Manna, her free hand stroking the air. ‘Not your usual lunch, I know, and we shouldn’t really indulge our sweet teeth, but I got all excited about your visit and quite lost my head.’

  Ella felt a guilty thrill. Granny would have a fit if she knew they were eating chocolate with chocolate for lunch.

  Inside the cottage, sun streamed through the windows. Chopped herbs were scattered over an old pine table. Ella stood politely beside it, and when Manna left the room for a moment, she put her spectacles on. She wondered if Manna would notice them when she came back, but why should she? Manna wouldn’t know if Ella wore glasses or not. According to Grandpa, the last time Manna saw her, she was only three years old.

  Dixon suddenly launched himself off her shoulders and onto the table, a wild look in his eye, as Manna reappeared, carrying three plates.

  ‘Oh good, you’ve got a pair of magical spectacles,’ Manna said to Ella. ‘That makes things so much easier.’ She looked down at the pixie. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s been a long time since I’ve spoken to a Magical, I must say. Although I did save an imp a couple of weeks ago. He was stuck under a rock in the back garden. As the Ban decrees, I didn’t talk to him, though.’ She paused. ‘I suppose I will have to reconsider everything now,’ she said pensively, and then, shaking her head as if to dispel sad thoughts, she introduced herself to Dixon. ‘Manna Mallallooka Chetwode,’ she said, crouching down to look him in the eyes. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

  ‘Dixon Delightly Ever So Slightly,’ said Dixon timidly. His eyes darted about the room as if looking for something. Manna leaned forward, touched the tip of Dixon’s extended finger with her own, and blinked twice. Dixon blinked twice back. Ella wanted to laugh, but she was a well-mannered child, so she didn’t.

  ‘I don’t need spectacles to see him,’ Manna said to Ella, reading her mind in the same strange way Dixon could, ‘and nor will you, once you get the hang of it.’ She turned back to Dixon. ‘My chocolate muffins are safely locked away,’ she told him, ‘so you can’t get to them. I will give you a taste, but only a little one. You don’t have the resistance to sugar we Flitterwigs do, as you well know.’

  Dixon looked crestfallen.

  Manna chuckled. ‘My, it’s been a long time,’ she said to herself.

  After lunch, which involved a bit of a battle with Dixon over how much chocolate muffin he was allowed, Manna took Ella for a walk in the garden. There was a skip in her grandmother’s step that made it hard for Ella to keep up with her.

  ‘We have a lot to talk about,’ said Manna.

  Ella nodded.

  ‘I’m not sure where to start,’ Manna said, letting out a sigh. ‘The robin redbreast Mr Wrinkles sent told me that you know about your heritage and have been given some basic background on what it means to be a Flitterwig. So all that’s left for me, I suppose, is to show you how your magic works. Although I can only teach you a little. It takes years to learn it all. How is your father?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Ella. ‘He doesn’t like to see me.’

  ‘I thought you were going to travel with him?’ Manna stopped walking and stood with her face to the sun, looking very serious. ‘At least, that’s what he told me last time I saw him at the funer…’ Her voice trailed off. She sat down and patted the grass, beckoning Ella to join her.

  ‘I haven’t seen you for a long time, have I, Ella?’ she said. ‘I’m afraid I’m not very popular with your granny, and probably for good reason.’ She took a deep breath and tucked her hair behind her ears. As Ella had suspected, they were exactly like her own.

  ‘Your grandmother holds me responsible for the death of your mother – my daughter – and your brothers,’ Manna said. She was silent for an uncomfortably long while. ‘As she should,’ she added. A tear slipped down her cheek. It was much larger than the average tear, and shone like a diamond.

  ‘What happened to them?’ Ella asked.

  ‘You don’t remember, do you?’ Manna said softly. ‘And no one has told you anything, have they?’

  Ella shook her head.

  ‘There was a terrible accident, Ella,’ Manna said, looking away from her. ‘And only you and I survived.’

  Dixon, who had been surprisingly quiet for a surprisingly long time, let his mouth drop open and widened his eyes in despair. However, sensing that this was not a moment for a pixie to interrupt, he pinned his mouth shut between his thumb and forefinger.

  Why, Ella wondered, was everyone always so secretive about the accident, even after so many years?

  ‘I suppose you do deserve to know the truth,’ Manna said. She was speaking more to herself than to Ella, but Ella was still impressed by the way Manna seemed to know her thoughts.

  Manna took a deep breath. ‘You were three,’ she began. ‘We were all on holiday together in the Scottish Highlands. You and your brothers, your mother and father, me and Mr P, your granny and grandpa, and Mrs Dribbleton-Faucet. Your mother was driving one car with me and you and your brothers in it. We were taking a much-needed rest from that bossy old Dribbles. And the lovely Mr P was driving the other.’ Manna closed her eyes and smiled as she remembered. ‘It was a glorious summer’s day, with a clear blue sky. The countryside was a wonderful rich, rainy green. Your mother was describing the life cycle of the dandelion…’

  Ella let herself be lulled by the story. She tried to imagine the sound of her mother’s voice. Something stirred inside her. She could almost remember it. Its gentle rise and fall.

  ‘And then,’ Manna continued, her voice thick with emotion, ‘as we were crossing a bridge approaching a tunnel, something happened.’

&
nbsp; Ella’s heart started thumping against her chest. Her hair began to fan out about her and she had to concentrate hard to keep her breathing steady.

  ‘It was as if –’ said Manna, turning away again, ‘it was as if a great fog or something came out of nowhere and barred our way, and then your mother was swerving to avoid it and we were smashing through the bridge wall and the car was flying out over the road and down into the crevasse below.’

  Manna turned back to her granddaughter. ‘Do you remember anything yet?’ she asked urgently.

  Ella shook her head.

  A slight wind had whipped up in the trees, the sky had changed colour and the air felt thinner, as if it might rain. Manna started talking hurriedly now. ‘The moment the car left the road, your mother yelled at me to get you out, so I grabbed you by the hand and pulled you with me out of the window. We flew, or at least, I did, pulling you behind me, back up onto the bridge.’ Manna shook her head in distress and then, remembering, added, ‘We Elven Flitterwigs can fly, in case you didn’t know.’

  They sat in silence for a few seconds while Ella absorbed this fact. A drop of rain landed on her nose. She wiped it away.

  ‘Moments later the car hit the rocks below,’ Manna continued, her voice barely a whisper. ‘It was smashed, crushed, destroyed on impact.’ She was crying now, big round tears like marbles that fell on the grass. The rain came in spatters. Ella’s heart thudded.

  ‘Your father arrived in the other car soon afterwards. It took quite a while for him and Mr P to climb down to the crash,’ Manna said. ‘When they reached the wreckage, the car was on fire, and there was nothing they could do. Up on the bridge, your hair was billowing out just as it is beginning to do now. Granny and Grandpa approached you, but although they could come close, they couldn’t touch you. And when Dribbles tried, you simply stared at her, and the power in your eyes flung her backwards. She was thrown against the bridge wall so violently that her leg was twisted beyond repair.’ Manna seized Ella’s arm. ‘When at last your father climbed back up to us, he was white with shock. He tried to take you in his arms, but he couldn’t touch you either. It was as if there was a magnetic force-field around you. Your eyes were glowing with such light that he had to shade his own eyes from them. There was a most powerful magic in the air. A magic even I didn’t understand.’

  Manna put her hand up to her mouth. ‘It was terrible. I could touch you and comfort you, but your own father couldn’t.’ Another tear slipped down her cheek. ‘It was almost ten minutes before the energy about you subsided. Even I was afraid of you in that state. Your poor father, who had always known his wife was different, special in some way, and that you shared similar traits, was horrified. I think that was the beginning of the end for him.

  ‘He asked me time and again how it was that we had escaped the crash when the others perished, but I couldn’t make him understand. He couldn’t believe that your mother would put our lives, yours and mine, above her own life and the lives of the two boys. I don’t think he has ever forgiven us for surviving.’

  The blood in Ella’s brain pumped so hard that she thought her temples might explode. She covered her face with her hands. A mixture of relief and horror spread through her body. To understand why her father rejected her, why Dribbles hated her, to be able to appreciate it even slightly, made her feel the way she felt when the air came back into her lungs after an asthma attack. But the weight of knowing that she had survived when her own mother and brothers had been lost, and that her mother had chosen to save her over her siblings, was almost too much to bear.

  They sat in the gentle rain, and Ella watched as the tears rolled down her grandmother’s face.

  ‘Our tears are very powerful,’ said Manna after a time, sensing her granddaughter watching. She blew a loose strand of hair out of her face. ‘I used to collect mine for magical use, but I try to have nothing to do with magic now. Sometimes my ears itch terribly. But I simply can’t do it anymore. I mustn’t.’ Manna took Ella’s hands in her own and squeezed them tightly.

  Ella wasn’t used to being touched so intimately, and the sensation made her tingle. She would have pulled away had Manna not jumped to her feet, swirling her dress out behind her and tipping her face up to the sky. The falling rain didn’t seem to bother her a bit. Ella loved sitting in the rain too, but Granny would never allow it.

  Manna sighed deeply. ‘I should have been able to do something to save your mother and your brothers,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t. I couldn’t. There just wasn’t time.’

  No one noticed how quiet Dixon had been this whole time. No one indeed had noticed him at all. And they certainly didn’t notice him now, out of hearing distance, lying face down, beating his legs and arms on the wet grass, crying his little heart out.

  chapter 11

  lessons & laughter

  That afternoon, after the rain had cleared, Ella began her training in magic. She had never been to school, so there was nothing new to her about learning outside a classroom. The nature of the lessons, however, was novel in the extreme.

  First, Manna showed her how to tweak her ear in a special way so that she could see Magicals without her spectacles. Ella wasn’t very good at this. She tried a few times, but all she could see was Dixon’s left foot.

  ‘Most basic magic,’ said Manna, ‘can be performed by certain ear tweaks. It looks easy, but it isn’t.’

  Then Manna explained to Ella that her big feet meant she had great balancing skills. (Ella had often wondered why she found skateboarding so easy.) It also meant that with practice she could jump almost two metres into the air, and if the wind caught her hair in the proper way, so it became a kind of parachute, she could stay up there for a little while. Manna demonstrated this to Ella herself, jumping with such elegance that she seemed to fly.

  Ella couldn’t suppress a laugh. A grown woman hovering in the air is a very odd sight to see.

  ‘Eventually, you might even find your wings,’ Manna said, enjoying Ella’s amusement. ‘Look, I’ll show you mine.’ Turning her back to her granddaughter, she tweaked her ear, and, what do you know, a pair of fragile wings, clear as dawn and intricate as the finest lace, unfurled themselves first from one shoulder-blade and then the other. Manna flipped up into the air and flew off across the valley, pirouetting, spinning, soaring like a bird. She settled on the roof of the cottage and waved to Ella before launching herself in a grand loop-the-loop and flying up the valley to join her again.

  Ella’s face was awash with disbelief. She had never seen anything like it in her life. She had never even imagined anything like it in her life. No wonder Granny kept her hidden from the world!

  Next, Manna introduced Ella to the Ponkaluckas.

  ‘Ponkaluckas,’ she explained, ‘come from your tear ducts. They carry spells for you if you don’t want to be seen shooting elf dust out of your finger. They hypnotise whoever or whatever you feed them to, and make them do your bidding. Elven Ponkaluckas are more powerful than those of other Magicals, but all Magicals and most trained Flitterwigs can make them.’

  Manna made Ella squeeze her eyes shut until she could see gold dots through the blackness. She gave Ella the words she needed to call up the Ponkaluckas. Nothing happened.

  Manna demonstrated. She shut her eyes, and within seconds little golden bubbles swirled around her head, just like the ones Wrinkles had conjured up in the car on the way from London to Willow Farm. ‘Ponkaluckas,’ she said, smiling graciously at the bubbles. ‘Elf dust is much more powerful, however. If you have the right skills you can perform almost any magic with just a shoot of elf dust from your forefinger, but it takes quite a while to learn how to do this. One day you will learn to mix your tears with elf dust to perform even greater magic, but that is a long way away yet.’

  Ella squeezed her eyes shut again. She saw the dots in the dark. She thought the words in her mind. She opened her eyes. One solitary bubble wavered in the air for an instant before disappearing into the ether with a pop! Ella blush
ed, embarrassed.

  ‘It will come, darling,’ Manna said reassuringly. ‘It will come.’

  On the walk home Manna explained that all animals can see Magicals too. She introduced Ella to Jemima the goose and taught her a few words of Animumble, basic phrases like ‘Good morning’ and ‘Did you sleep well last night?’ Jemima, unimpressed by her mistress’s poor command of Animumble, looked at Dixon and the two of them burst out laughing.

  ‘We Elven Flitterwigs, and indeed elves in general, are not very competent in Animumble,’ Manna said, playfully tuttutting Dixon and Jemima. ‘I guess that’s one of the benefits of having a Goblin Protector. They are brilliant at it.’

  Ella frowned. Dixon and Wrinkles had mentioned Goblin Protectors, but she had only a vague idea what the point of them really was.

  So Manna explained to her that at the moment of birth, when a Royal elf sprouted from his or her mushroom in Magus, a special goblin sprouted from another mushroom at exactly the same time. These goblins were destined to protect their elven counterparts for the rest of their lives. In the human world, because Flitterwigs were born of other Flitterwigs and not straight out of mushrooms, things were less straightforward. But Manna herself had a Protector, she explained, and she suspected that Ella would have one too.

  There was more, so much more that Manna told her granddaughter that day. By the time they got back to the cottage, night was drawing in, and Ella was almost asleep on her feet. Manna lit a fire, and they ate omelettes with parsley (a very nutritious Flitterwig meal) by the hearth.

  Dixon, meanwhile, had been unable to break into the larder where the remains of the double-fudge chocolate muffins had been safely locked up, and so had befriended Jemima the goose instead. The two of them were deeply involved in a game of chess in the living room.

  Ella told Manna how she had met Dixon. She described the plight of the Royal Court and said that the Dewdrops stolen from Magus had vanished, and the Queen wanted her, Ella, to prove herself the Clearheart and get them back.