“Oh, you’ve brought an Asian friend!” Dora exclaimed.
A lot of people on Earth think I’m Indian, too, or Greek. It annoys me, but I’m used to it. Maxwell Hyde told Dora firmly that I was from another world, but she didn’t listen. She kept asking me about the exotic magic of the Orient. She was obsessed with Eastern magics.
“Don’t mind her,” Maxwell Hyde told me when Dora had gone off, talking loudly to herself, to find us some lunch. “She’s never got over being turned out of her mother’s house. Sad, really. Wasn’t equipped to cope.”
There wasn’t any lunch. Toby had to be sent out for what they call prettybread. Prettybread is a bit like a fat pizza with onions and things baked into it and frizzled cheese on top. Part of Dora’s dottiness was that she was always forgetting to buy food. She kept having to send Toby out—and me, too, once I got used to the way food was here—to buy cheese or cakes or tea for her. People in Blest drink tea all the time, and they eat cakes with it far more than I am used to. Half the shops are kept by people who look Chinese, selling fat brown packets of tea and sixty kinds of sticky cakes. Coffee has to come from a chocolate shop and is much more expensive.
Luckily, Maxwell Hyde grows vegetables in his back garden. Most people in London do, just as if they lived in the country. This meant that there was nearly always something to eat (though the night there was nothing but beetroot nearly kille
d me). And one of the first things Maxwell Hyde did was to rush out into his garden to see how things were coming on there. He grows dahlias in among other flowers around the lawn near the house and the veg down the other end. The dahlias weren’t up yet, just cabbagey clumps sitting in hard, dry earth, but you wouldn’t believe how proud he was of those clumps. He got a hose and watered them at once.
After lunch he took me into the main room, and with Toby leaning against him and peering under our elbows, he showed me a map of the Islands of Blest. These were—the way everything is in Blest—like and not like what I was used to. Their Islands are almost like the British Isles, but not really quite, as if someone had given the whole lot a big push from the direction of France and then stood on Ireland and pulled so that they stretched. Wales and Cornwall were a lot bigger, and Scotland was not nearly so frilly.
“You’ll find the eastern coast of England has straightened out from your point of view,” Maxwell Hyde remarked. “Higher above sea level here.”
There wasn’t much of Norfolk or Lincolnshire there actually, and Yorkshire seemed rather slender, too, but that was made up for by the south coast being much nearer France, so that the Isle of Wight was one of the Channel Islands. Then I spotted one big difference.
“Don’t you have any railways?” I said.
“What are railways?” Toby asked.
“Trains,” I said. “Chuff-chuff.”
“No, just roads and canals,” Maxwell Hyde said. “Our industrial history is quite different from yours. You never discovered cokale.”
“You what?” I said.
“Cokale. Chuff-chuff,” said Toby, and laughed. That was my fault for taking Toby for a fool. He wasn’t, not by any means, but I’m no good at telling, with people younger than me.
Maxwell Hyde told me all about their different history then, until my head went round. All I really remember is that their King never settled down in one place, but went round in an enormous Progress most of the year. I think this goes back to the fact that Blest has a hundred times more magic than we do. In the old days the King was supposed to keep the magic in the land healthy by visiting every corner of it. These days the Merlin and someone called the Lady of Governance look after the magic for him, but the King still travels.
I suppose I really remember this because Maxwell Hyde happened to say that Roddy traveled with the King, because her parents were part of the Progress, and I thought of what she had said about this Merlin of theirs. It was disappointing to hear that Maxwell Hyde didn’t even know where the King and the rest of them were at that moment.
“What’s the matter?” Maxwell Hyde asked me.
I didn’t want to go on about Roddy. I was embarrassed. So I said quickly, “Those mages. Arnold and them. I think I got them into bad trouble....”
“Oh, the Plantagenate Empire. I remember,” Maxwell Hyde said. “Good thing you reminded me. I’ll go and take a look in a couple of days when we’ve settled down here.”
We settled down almost at once, into a regular routine, and nobody talked about Roddy anymore. I think I was glad. After breakfast every day, as soon as I’d had enough coffee to get my eyes open, Maxwell Hyde gave me lessons in magic. That was terrific. I was really glad to be taught about magic at last, even though so much of it seemed to be just learning rules. I supposed there had to be rules or things wouldn’t work, but after that short talk I’d had with Romanov, I couldn’t help being a bit suspicious—you know, that the rules only applied to a small part of it all, and once I’d learned enough, I’d know that the rules wouldn’t work with the rest.
But I did try to learn the rules. And here was a strange thing about magic. Some things I could do standing on my head, and the other half I didn’t think I’d ever be able to do. There was never any middle ground, no things I could almost do. And it was the same with theory: some of it obvious and the other things I just couldn’t begin to understand. Maxwell Hyde set me exercises in theory to do for the rest of the day, while he went away to his study and rattled away at his laptop thingy, writing a new detective story. Very familiar. My dad does that, too.
I used to sit there chewing Blest’s version of a ballpoint pen and really envying Toby. His school was over for the year, and I could hear him playing outside with the other kids in the street. He was quiet as a mouse indoors, but outside you could hear him for miles. He used to come in all smoothly sweaty, laughing, while I got up from my theory feeling as if I’d put my head through Dora’s coffee mill.
The weather got hotter and hotter, which didn’t make theory any easier. And there was another difficulty, too, that made me wonder if I was as mad as Dora.
“This is becoming a regular drought,” Maxwell Hyde said, anxious about the precious dahlias. “I suppose Daniel knows what he’s doing. It made sense to have fine weather for the King’s meeting with the Pendragon, but if he doesn’t call it off soon, I shall have to have a word with him.”
I was very interested to learn that this Daniel was Maxwell Hyde’s son and Roddy’s father. He was chief weather wizard to the King. Magic ran in that family like anything.
Anyway, it got so hot and dry before long that the streets shimmered. Dora tried to do her father a favor and water the garden for him. She got out the hose and unrolled it. I saw her out of my window, standing pointing the nozzle at a flower bed and muttering away to herself. But no water came out because she’d forgotten to hitch it to a tap. Toby came in from the street and quietly fixed it and turned the tap on. Water came squirting out all over Dora’s shoes. She looked astonished.
That was typical. Toby was always quietly covering up for his mother’s dottiness.
By then my other problem was really bothering me. I kept seeing these transparent creature things drifting about. They were all sorts of shapes. It almost seemed as if the long, thin ones didn’t like the heat and came indoors to get cool. They floated around the bedroom while I was working, where I could only just see them, but there came to be more and more of them every time I looked. The rounder kind seemed to love the heat. They sat in the road in clusters, going gently up and down like people in a swimming pool. The ones with stranger shapes seemed to follow Dora around. This was what really bothered me. They were what she muttered to.
I didn’t dare say a word about them until the morning Maxwell Hyde made another attempt to teach me to raise witchlight. “Slowly,” he said. “Steady. Think of the energy under your breastbone filling your hands with light.”