‘I don’t have much to share,’ I say, looking down at my meagre spread. I wish I’d thought to bring more. I could have made a cake . . . or brought some of the good cheese.
Zara shakes her head and charges off, returning quickly with a knife. She smooths out my paper bag and lays everything out, sausage and pear neatly divided. The pastries collapse into layers of buttery goodness in my mouth, and Zara’s salty crisps are delicious, too. The pear from our orchard is smooth and tastes of summer. One of Nan’s favourite stories is the one where her human grandfather built our home and planted the orchard, and of how he’d trade with the creatures in Winterspell Forest: golden pears for the rich, dark berries that made his favourite wine.
Of course, that was before he met the fae queen and became a part of their world. Long before even Nan was born, and an age before the Shadow King – my father – began to destroy all the goodness there . . .
I stare at Yanny. His food tastes incredible, but the way it dissolves makes me wonder if there’s magic in it. If he lives in Winterspell, he must know all of its secrets. He doesn’t look much like a fae warrior to me. Especially not with pear juice all over his chin.
‘So,’ begins Zara, scrunching up the crumb-festooned bag and throwing it with an expert flick of her wrist into the nearest bin. ‘Are you going to tell Stella about your secret lessons?’ She grins as she says it, but there’s an edge to her voice, and Yanny’s dark eyes glint.
‘They’re not secret,’ he says. ‘Just extra languages – that sort of thing.’
I think it’s meant to fend me off, but it doesn’t, because a lot of magic is about language. Many spells are written in Latin or Ancient Elvish, and there are books full of Greek and Norse in our library. One of Nan’s favourite lectures is about the study of language being the most powerful there is.
‘I like languages,’ I say. ‘Who’s your teacher?’
‘Miss Capaldi,’ he says. He closes his lunch tin and shoves it back in his bag, just as the bell rings. ‘Come on. We have art together.’
‘If you find out,’ hisses Zara as we head off through the corridors in his wake, ‘you will tell me, right? I’ve been trying to get it out of him for weeks, but he’s immune to my questions. You already have him rattled. Maybe he can see you’re on to him. Are you on to him? Do you know what’s going on?’
‘No idea!’ I manage. And it’s true, but this whole thing is disconcerting. If Yanny is a creature from the forest, if there’s some kind of magic going on up there, I can’t share that with her. The fae and the human worlds don’t mix. Or at least, I didn’t think they did. Here, anything seems possible, and it’s not what I wanted on my first day. I wanted a normal school, not one with magic on the top floor, and secrets that seem to make awkward spaces between friends.
Even as I think it, I smile. Because however complicated today might have been, it’s been a day. A day of school. Of lessons, and lunch, and new friends who talk and share, even though they hardly know me at all.
No matter what Nan might say, I know I won’t regret that.
6
Nan is furious. I round the corner to our house, and she is billowing out of the chimney in a great dark cloud of worry and fear. All the lines I’ve been rehearsing, the stories I’ve held in my head to tell her, vanish completely. I loiter, walking slowly down the lane. I need time to work out how to talk my way around her, and my mind is still working through everything that happened today.
It was chaos. Loud, and hot and completely bewildering. I hardly remembered to breathe for much of it, and I still don’t know anything about any of the lessons, or how to read the flipping timetable. The smells and the sounds still clamour in my mind, and that fizzing feeling of nervous excitement I had this morning is still there in the pit of my belly.
But.
I grin. It was fun. And I made friends.
Peg darts up to me as I bend down to pick up an acorn, searching through dried amber leaves for its cup.
‘Well, I hope it was worth it,’ he says, whirring about my head.
I sigh and plonk myself on to the ground, cross-legged, catching him in my hands and holding him up to eye level. He blinks. His presence is so small, and yet it fills me up. He’s been with me for as long as I can remember; there is no part of my life that he couldn’t sing.
Except today.
‘Peg, I think it was,’ I say through a sudden lump in my throat. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry that it upset Nan, and if it caused trouble for you, but I wouldn’t change it. I won’t change it!’
‘You’ll go back?’ He tilts his head.
‘Tomorrow.’ I look at the dark earth, packed and dry beneath the leaves. Peg flutters to my knee as I start my search once more. ‘And all the days after that.’
‘Every day?’
‘Not weekends. Just Monday to Friday. Nan will get used to it,’ I say, finding the pitted acorn cup and holding it up with a grin. It’s bigger than the silver one around my neck, but even so . . . they’re such small things that the great oaks grow from. ‘She will, Peg. She loves me. She’ll see that it makes me happy . . .’
Funny how such a tiny creature can make such a sound of deep disapproval. Peg manages it, and then he launches off and away into the forest.
He keeps secrets. All the time, off in the forest, and he’ll never tell me anything about what’s really in there. I want to hear news of the centaurides and the sprites, and the mirror lake where golden fish speak bewitching tales to unsuspecting passers-by, just as they do in all Nan’s best stories. I want to know of the shadows, of my father. But all Peg ever says is that the forest is fair, and frightful wild besides.
I tuck the acorn into the earth by the side of the path with a little wish, touching my own silver acorn and hearing Nan’s voice, years ago, on one of the days I yearned for more. ‘It is here,’ she’d said, reaching out and touching it with pale fingers. ‘It is not whole, and it is not the shape we may have hoped for, but there is family here, and if you hold it tight, Stella, you cannot lose it. It will grow . . .’
‘I said no!’ Nan howls when I finally gather up the courage to walk through the back door. She’s writhing around the kitchen table, clasping her mist-thin hands together.
I dump my bag and lean up against the table.
‘How could you, Stella? After all these years of you and me, all the trust, all the lessons . . . How could you just abandon it all?’
‘I haven’t! I can still do lessons here. You can’t just keep me locked up forever. What happens when I’m older? Did you even think of what would happen when I grew up? Am I supposed to live my whole life here alone?’
‘Of course not,’ she snaps, coalescing into her true shape. Nan shape. She reaches out to me, and I feel the chill of her touch, see the regret on her face when it makes me flinch. ‘I wanted to keep you . . . keep you safe for a while longer. That’s all.’
‘I am safe,’ I tell her. ‘There are hundreds of kids there. It’s a normal school!’ I push away the thoughts of magic and secret lessons. ‘I did maths, and English, and PE, and I shared my lunch with some of my classmates. How can that be wrong?’
‘It is wrong if you go against the wishes of your family. I am not holding you to others’ standards – I am holding you to ours! We are the keepers of this house, the only ones who stand between the shadow forest and the human world. The time will come when that will mean everything. Isn’t that enough excitement for you?’