Читать книгу The Chosen Ones - Scarlett Thomas - Страница 9

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Euphemia Sixten Bookend Truelove, known as Effie, was regretting ever coming to this class. No one had been forced to come, after all. It was optional. A bit like going to school when you didn’t have to. And what kind of idiot did that? Effie’s friend Wolf Reed, with whom she’d been playing tennis for most of the afternoon, had gone on to rugby practice instead, and her other good friend Raven Wilde had gone home straight after school to feed her horse. So why had Effie come?

For one simple reason. Because Lexy had told her it was the only way she could go up the magic grades and become a wizard and live in the Otherworld for ever.

Effie loved the Otherworld. If only she could find some way of living there all the time, she’d be happy. She had to get better at magic first, though, which was another reason for taking this class. According to Lexy, Dr Green was the very best magical teacher in the whole country. He was a genius, even if he sometimes came across as a little slow and boring. Lexy knew all about Dr Green because he had so far been on three dates with her Aunt Octavia.

Dr Green now had his back to Effie. He was wiping the blackboard with jerky little movements. His long list of forbidden things was dissolving into particles of chalk and falling to the floor, where Effie definitely thought it belonged. She sighed. How long was she going to have to stand here waiting to find out what she’d done? She knew she had done something. Dr Green had that air about him.

‘Put it on the desk,’ he said finally, turning around and scowling.

‘Sorry?’ said Effie.

‘Sorry, sir.’

Effie sighed again. ‘Sorry, sir.’

‘Put the ring on the desk, please.’

Oh no. Effie gulped silently.

‘What ring, sir?’

‘The ring you have hidden in the lining of your cape. The Ring of the True Hero, I believe. A forbidden boon. Hand it over.’

Effie gulped again. How did he know she had it? Lexy had told her not to bring any boons to this class – never mind that hers were unregistered and especially risky – and so yesterday Effie had hidden them all in her special box at home. All except for the Ring of the True Hero, which Effie had been wearing for tennis practice earlier.

Effie never wore the ring in actual matches, just in training. The first time she’d put it on it had almost killed her. But as long as she ate and drank enough to restore her energy, it made her strong and agile and all sorts of other things she couldn’t quite describe. And it made her feel more connected to the Otherworld. And . . .

‘I’m not going to wait all night,’ said Dr Green.

He was wearing a brown lounge suit, with flecks of green and orange now being picked out by the moonlight that shone through the window. His shirt was a peculiar shade of yellow. He glanced at his watch and then looked hard at Effie in the way the most horrible teachers tend to just before they haul you out of assembly and make you cry for something you didn’t even do.

‘Why exactly do you want my ring anyway?’ asked Effie.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Why do you want my ring?’

‘It is a boon, and you have brought it to my class. Therefore I must confiscate it.’

‘But—’

‘There’s no need to argue. Do as you’re told, please.’

‘What will you do with it?’

‘I will give it to the Guild. If it were a registered boon, I’d be able simply to give it back to you next Monday. But an unregistered boon . . .’ He shook his head. ‘You’ll have to write to the Guild and get an application form to register the item and, I believe, fill in another form to request an application to get it back. And—’

‘No,’ said Effie, surprising herself.

Dr Green’s eyes narrowed. ‘What did you say?’

‘No,’ she repeated. ‘I’m not going to give it to you. I’m sorry. I just can’t.’

‘I do have ways of making you,’ said Dr Green, taking a step towards Effie. ‘But of course it won’t come to that. Hand it over.’

Effie took the ring from where she’d hidden it in the lining of her bottle-green school cape. The ring was silver, with a dark red stone held in place by a number of tiny silver dragons. Her beloved grandfather Griffin had given it to her just before he died. There was no way Effie was handing it over to anybody. She put it on her left thumb, where it fitted best. A feeling of confidence and power rippled through her.

‘Stop messing around and give it to me,’ said Dr Green, taking another step forward and holding out his hand. ‘Now.’

Outside the high windows of the church hall an owl hooted. This owl had been watching what was going on and hadn’t liked the look of it. Its call was picked up by a friendly rabbit in a nearby garden, who passed the message on to a dormouse, who passed it to a bat, who told it to another owl who happened to be flying towards the moors. Soon all the animals in the area knew that Euphemia Truelove was in trouble. Perhaps someone would hear the distress call and respond; perhaps they would not. The Cosmic Web was a bit random like that.

Raven and her horse Echo crunched through the frost on the moors. The moon shone down on them, making Raven’s black, wavy hair look as if it was streaked with silver. Raven was a true witch and could therefore talk to animals. Ever since she’d epiphanised she had been able to have quite long conversations with Echo. Before, they had communicated only through their feelings. Echo ‘just knew’ when Raven wanted him to break into a canter, and Raven ‘just knew’ when Echo was feeling annoyed. But now Raven spoke fluent Caballo (the ancient language of horses) and everything was different.

Every day after supper Raven and Echo went out onto the moors, even though it now got dark so early. Much of the time they had to rely on Echo’s night-vision to get them home, but tonight the moon was waning gibbous (which meant it was just past full) and Raven could see quite clearly. Everything looked pale and magical when it was bathed in moonlight. And anything touched by moonlight felt happy and peaceful. Everyone knows that you get vitamin D from sunlight. But not very many people know that there is a special nutrient in moonlight that helps living things develop magical powers and cleanses them of any impurities.

The moorland around Raven and Echo was quite bare. No trees, no streams; not even any old fence-posts, as there were on some parts of the moor. The only modern-looking thing for miles was a pair of steel doors that someone had recently built into a mound near some old crofts.

Echo walked carefully through the barest parts of moorland, because there were bogs and rabbit holes that were difficult to see in the moonlight. Every so often a small meteor streaked across the vast night sky. There was something odd about these meteors, although Echo wasn’t sure what it was. Anyway, soon they would be on an ancient path, with its comforting imprints of bygone horses and their riders.

And then, after passing the ruined crofts, Raven was hoping to see the shimmering mystery again. For the last hour, she had been trying to explain to Echo in Caballo what she thought it was. This was almost impossible because not only was the shimmering mystery very difficult to describe, there were no words in Caballo for ‘shimmering’ or ‘mystery’. The closest Raven could get was ‘bog in the moonlight’, which was something deep and mysterious with a hint of unpredictability and danger. But Echo just snorted and asked why on earth they were looking for bogs in the moonlight. He didn’t like bogs; in fact, he went out of his way to avoid them. Bogs were dangerous. You could sink into them and never come out.

‘Not a bog, exactly,’ said Raven with her mind. Caballo was an unspoken language. ‘Maybe like a very high jump.’

Echo didn’t much like very high jumps either, and said so.

‘But not an actual high jump,’ Raven tried to say. ‘Just something that makes you feel like you’re approaching one. Or I suppose like the way I feel about approaching one. Or maybe the way you feel just before you do a vamos.’

Echo hardly ever ran away when Raven was riding him. But it did very occasionally happen that he would see a vast expanse of beautiful empty moorland in front of him and want to vamos through it. And so he would go, not thinking, galloping hard and fast. The way Raven felt about this was a bit like the way Echo felt about very high jumps. And each allowed the other their little indulgence from time to time. He let her jump, and she let him vamos. He never threw her. That was the main thing. And she always gave him such a nice mixture of oats and alfalfa at the end of the day. She even remembered to buy him Polo mints, which were his favourite thing in the whole world. They understood each other.

It had been after a vamos episode the previous Saturday that Raven had first seen the shimmering mystery. It had been as if the moorland in front of them was different in some way. Sort of greener, wilder, more vivid, more magical. The more Raven had asked Echo to walk towards it, the further away it had seemed. That day it had taken almost four hours to get back to the folly – a sort of pretend castle where Raven lived with her mother.

Laurel Wilde hadn’t even noticed that her daughter had been missing, of course. She had been too busy drinking expensive sparkling wine and talking about the latest money-making scheme invented by her glamorous publisher, Skylurian Midzhar.

‘The first billion-pound book in the world,’ Skylurian had said to Laurel Wilde over tea that Saturday afternoon. ‘Imagine.’

Raven had been eating her sandwiches and cake quickly so that she could go out on Echo, and had pretended not to be listening. Skylurian and Raven ignored one another most of the time anyway. Laurel Wilde wrote about witches (and warlocks) who went to a magical school, but she didn’t believe they truly existed. She was half right because there really was no such thing as a warlock. But Laurel Wilde would have been very surprised to learn that both her daughter and her publisher were powerful witches, and, what’s more, that they had recently been on different sides in the same battle. Skylurian had never actually done anything bad to Raven, though. Indeed, she still occasionally tried to befriend her. It was all rather creepy.

‘Imagine, darling,’ Skylurian had gone on. ‘And a whole 7 percent of it will be yours.’

‘I thought we agreed on 7.5 percent,’ Laurel Wilde had said.

‘Whatever,’ breathed Skylurian dismissively. ‘It hardly matters. After all, what’s 0.5 percent of one billion?’

It was actually five million, but no one did the sum.

‘We will be rich beyond our wildest dreams, darling. And all because you were so clever and wrote such a beautiful book.’

Raven had never completely understood why her mother’s first book, The Chosen Ones, had done so well. It had sold over ten million copies worldwide, and been made into a film and a board-game. It was about magic, of course, but not the real magic that Raven did. In the normal world, the one Raven lived in, anyone could awaken their magical powers if they tried hard enough (or if, as in Raven’s case, someone had given them a precious boon from the Otherworld). But in Laurel Wilde’s books only a few people were magical.

The Chosen Ones, as they were called, were all born with a strange rash behind their left knee. If you’d been born with the rash, you had almost unlimited supernatural powers. If not, well, bad luck. You were one of the ‘Unchosen’: unpopular, ugly, often fat, and doomed to a life of having spells cast on you by the Chosen Ones, who were not just beautiful and powerful but quite smug, too.

In the real world, Raven’s world, magical power was limited. In Laurel Wilde’s books, anyone born with the rash behind their knee could do pretty much anything they wanted with simply a flick of their thin, white wrist (they were all white). Despite all the magical power at their disposal, the Chosen Ones actually spent much of their time having midnight feasts and worrying about their lost homework. If any of the Unchosen bothered them, they got turned into frogs.

The Chosen Ones was set a very long time ago when people wore frilly bonnets, went on steam trains to boarding school and spent their summer holidays being locked in the cabins of ships or kidnapped by gypsies. Raven had given up halfway through the first one, but most children had read all six in the series.

‘And you’re sure Albion Freake will buy it?’ Laurel had asked Skylurian that previous Saturday afternoon over tea.

‘Of course, darling. I have his word. If we can create a limited-edition single volume of The Chosen Ones, bound in calf leather with real gold leaf on the page edges, he will give us a billion pounds for it.’

‘But every other copy of the book in the world will have to be destroyed first?’ Laurel Wilde had looked a bit sad at the thought of that.

‘As already discussed, that is indeed what we mean by “limited-edition single volume”.’

‘But . . .’

‘Everyone’s read it, darling. Who needs to keep a copy of a book they’ve already read? And for 7 percent of a billion pounds . . .’

‘Or 7.5,’ said Laurel.

‘With 7 percent, you’ll be rich, darling, and that’s all that really matters.’

Echo snorted. His breath froze into tiny crystals in the mid-November air. Raven put all thoughts of her mother’s books out of her mind. Out here on the moor she felt free of all those unimportant worldly things. Out here she felt closer to nature. Closer to her true spirit. And closer to something she didn’t recognise or understand, but was definitely there.

Echo snorted again. ‘Is that it?’ he asked Raven, nodding to the left. ‘Your bog in the moonlight?’

And sure enough, up ahead, slightly to the left, was the shimmering mystery.

‘Give me the ring,’ said Dr Green again.

‘No,’ said Effie.

Feelings of courage, strength and daring were rippling through her. This always happened when she was wearing the ring, and now even sometimes when she wasn’t. She could feel power in her shoulders, down her back, through all the muscles of her legs. Effie was only eleven years old, but she would always fight for what she thought was right and true.

‘You are going to regret this, young lady,’ said Dr Green, who began to turn a shade of purple that looked quite wrong set against his brown suit and yellow shirt.

Effie took one step towards the door, but Dr Green took a step in the same direction, blocking her.

‘Don’t you dare defy me! I have never—’

‘Please let me pass,’ said Effie.

‘Give me the ring first.’

‘I thought you said you could make me give it to you,’ said Effie. ‘You obviously can’t. Now please would you get out of my way?’

‘I have never heard such utter rudeness,’ said Dr Green. ‘Unless you give me that ring right now, you are expelled from this class. Do you hear me? Expelled.’

‘Fine,’ said Effie. ‘Expel me. I don’t care. I don’t think you know anything worth learning anyway.’

‘You impudent little . . . I have never, in all my years of teaching this class – which I do for free, mind you, out of the goodness of my heart – heard such rudeness from a child. You, young lady, will be hearing more about this from the Guild of Craftspeople. Threatening a teacher. It won’t do. Never in all my years . . .’

‘But I didn’t threaten you. I—’

‘You are expelled. Didn’t you hear me? Now get out.’