CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Magic Word

Jail was the old-fashioned birdcage they had seen on arrival. It sat in the remotest corner of the square, half-buried in shadow. Its original noisy occupant had disappeared and the children joined Goblin Grouse instead, who was so sulky he did not even acknowledge their arrival.

Inside the birdcage, pipes ran along the bars of the roof and dripped a gummy liquid smelling of shoe polish onto the prisoners’ hair and clothes. There were cots with threadbare and moth-eaten mattresses. As the children watched, an earwig emerged from one of them waggling its pincers, to discourage any inclination they might have had to take a nap. The cell floor was patched with damp sawdust so there wasn’t even a place to sit down, and a flickering red light made even the rat scurrying across the floor appear more threatening than it probably was.

Goblin Grouse sat cross-legged on a cot, as far from the children as possible. He was engaged in a heated debate with himself about who should carry the blame for his current predicament, muttering fiercely and shaking his head.

Milli occupied herself by staring through the bars at the game board. Miss Pawpaw was being congratulated by a red-faced Mr Banker, who was pumping her paw enthusiastically. Surrounded by bulging sacks of money, Pawpaw bounded about in excitement like a pogo stick. It wasn’t fair, thought Milli, how could the shallow cat’s need to see Queen Fidelis possibly exceed their own? She watched miserably as the thimble began to spin in readiness to transport its avaricious passenger to the toadstool palace. But wait! The thimble was not heading towards the steps out of the ravine. It had rotated and was now moving away from them. Miss Pawpaw looked confused and waved her snowy paws at Mr Banker, but he merely tipped his hat courteously as the top half of the letter P in the centre of the board opened like a porthole and swallowed the thimble whole. It sealed again with a resolute crunch.

Hard as they tried, the children could make little sense of this unfolding of events. Miss Pawpaw had been the wealthiest player. She had won the Monopoly game hands down. Why would she now be turned away? Had the game seen something malicious inside her? If this was the cat’s reward for victory, what must the game think of them to throw them into prison? They looked across the cage where Finn was busy trying to engage the unresponsive Grouse in conversation in order to glean some information. The goblin remained engrossed in his own deliberations, which had become heated enough to include him wagging a crooked finger at his own nose and punching himself on the arm.

‘Everybody getting along okay?’ an agreeable voice asked. The children jumped to see Mr Banker peering at them through the bars of the jail.

Upon his arrival, Goblin Grouse promptly found his voice. ‘Let me out of here,’ he demanded threateningly. ‘I’ll set my flock of crows on you! They’ll peck your chubby cheeks off and use your whiskers as toothpicks!’

Mr Banker just rolled his eyes and smiled at the children.

‘Beds comfortable?’ he asked.

‘Actually, they’re a little—’ began Ernest before he was brusquely cut off.

‘I’ll give you all the gold I have,’ declared Grouse. ‘I have quite a hoard, you know. In fact, I have a gooseberry tree that bears golden fruit—pips, flesh and all. You can have it, or at least part of it. What do you say to your own orchard, eh? You’ll be the wealthiest man that ever lived.’

‘I hardly need more money,’ Mr Banker tutted before turning back to the children. ‘I suppose you’ve never been in prison before?’ he asked them.

Milli examined him carefully. If she wasn’t mistaken, there was a glimmer in his eyes and a note in his voice that encouraged them to do or say something in particular. But what?

Ernest, too, had caught Mr Banker’s signals. ‘How long do we have to stay here?’ he asked.

‘As long as it takes,’ came the reply.

‘For what?’

‘For you to learn your lesson. Otherwise, a lifetime on Burr Burr should suffice.’

‘I’ve learnt my lesson!’ piped up Grouse. ‘I’m a changed goblin; totally reformed. Can’t you see the difference?’ Everybody ignored him.

‘You can’t mean to banish us just for losing a silly game!’ Finn said in outrage.

‘There’s nothing silly about a game that sorts people out,’ Mr Banker replied. He began to drum his fingers on the bars and hummed a tune softly to himself. Clearly he was waiting for something.

The children looked at one another with frustration. Should they confide in this stranger the details of their escape from Battalion Minor and their quest to free the stolen children? There was nothing to indicate they could consider the man who had put them behind bars an ally and yet his continued presence suggested that he might be.

‘Will you deliver a letter to the Queen for us?’ Milli asked, but Mr Banker just clicked his tongue impatiently.

‘Why can’t you children say anything useful?’

‘What do you want us to say?’ Milli and Ernest cried in unison.

Shaking his head, Mr Banker—their only hope of release—began to walk away.

Milli was suddenly angry. If the game sorted people out, as Mr Banker claimed, then it had clearly failed in picking up their intentions.

‘Wait!’ she called after him, deciding that truth was their only option. ‘Don’t you understand that the lives of hundreds of children depend on our seeing the Queen? We have reason to believe that an attack against Mirth is being plotted and the Fada are in grave danger. We must warn Queen Fidelis before it’s too late. We’ve risked a lot to come this far and could end up as fish food if we’re caught. If you set us free, a war might be prevented. You must help us—please!’

Mr Banker jumped a foot in the air, his porky face swelling with pleasure.

‘The magic word!’ he cried in relief. ‘You finally used the magic word! I was beginning to doubt that you children had any breeding at all.’

The others stared at him, unable to recall a single instance where words like ‘Abracadabra’ or ‘Zippity Zap Zoo’ or ‘Bonko Binonko’ had been used.

‘Please, please, please,’ gabbled an inspired Grouse, but Mr Banker took no notice. Removing a key from around his neck, he unlocked the cage and the children were free. Grouse was left calling out ‘please’ in as many languages as he could remember: ‘S’il vous plaît? Per favore? Bitte? Prosze?’ (Educated goblins are usually multi-lingual, for those of you who didn’t know.)

The children were making their way out of the square and leaving the fickle board game behind when the sound of an engine drew their attention. They turned to see their token, the shiny silver motorcar, chugging reliably behind them. Its doors opened invitingly.

‘Need a lift?’ Mr Banker said.

Safely seated and buckled in, the children wondered how the vehicle was going to navigate the steep steps. But they needn’t have worried: with a little phut the car sprouted…not a pair of wings as you avid fantasy readers were probably expecting, but a pair of old-fashioned egg-beaters. Ernest gave a shout and would have leapt straight out of his seat had Mr Banker not restrained him. The car trundled along, steadily gaining speed, until the spinning egg-beaters acted as propellers and lifted it into the air.

Before long the chalky exterior of the toadstool palace floated before them like something from a dream. Milli cheered in delight and threw her arms wide over the side of the car. A horrified Ernest pulled her back.

‘Never put your limbs outside a moving vehicle,’ he scolded. ‘You never know what might fly past and take them off!’

Milli doubted the likelihood of any such disaster but nodded gratefully all the same before turning to Mr Banker.

‘I still don’t understand how we passed the test,’ she said. Mr Banker averted his eyes from the path ahead and then, to Ernest’s growing discomfort, turned his whole body to reply.

‘The mean-spirited would never think to use the magic word,’ he replied as if it were the simplest matter in the world. ‘Manners are becoming as rare as babies’ beards these days as consumers demand more for less.’

‘Are you saying the entire game was to prove we have manners? We only needed to say “please”?’

‘Not at all. There were various tests along the way.’

Milli’s confusion remained unabated. ‘But we didn’t just lose, we were thrashed.’

‘Ah, but that would only be relevant if the objective was to win,’ he answered with an enigmatic smile. ‘The objective, as it happens, was to overcome—a much worthier trait.’

When this last remark was met with blank faces, Mr Banker elaborated.

‘A true friend of Mirth, you see, would never compromise his or her principles for a wad of cash. After all, it isn’t even real money.’ He nodded sagely. ‘A wicked person is always thinking about themselves no matter what the cost.’ He looked directly at Ernest. ‘You showed admirable restraint back at Notables’ Nest.’

Ernest flushed with a mixture of pride and embarrassment.

‘And you were right about Pawpaw: she would never have returned the favour—which is why she is hurtling back to Rune at this very moment.’

At the thick base of the giant toadstool, the motorcar landed with a soft thud and the children climbed out.

‘The only way now is up,’ said Mr Banker. With a grin and a rev of the engine he was gone.

They saw what he meant when they found a flight of steps notched into the side of the toadstool that curved right up to its roof. Just inside the doors, the horned bull-sentinel waited to escort them.

‘Well done,’ he said, and bowed so deeply they had to step back for fear ofbeing accidentally disembowelled. ‘We may now proceed.’

The steps wound upwards as tightly as a corkscrew. Although Milli craned her neck at various angles, she could not see an end in sight. Such a prospect would surely have daunted the most intrepid of travellers, but the children (despite being tired and hungry by now) had seen too much and overcome too many impediments to be put off by a little physical exertion. In the face of their journey so far, this climb seemed almost insignificant. Even the normally plaintive Ernest had been silenced.

The stair railings were dusted with a sparkling white powder that rubbed off on the children’s hands as they made their slow ascent. They did not need a psychic to tell them that Queen Fidelis’s quarters would be at the very top of the toadstool. Through the little windows in the trunk they caught glimpses of glittering sea, chunks of sky and craggy hills with cottages jammed into them like sweets in a hedgehog cake. Fennel inhaled deeply and closed her eyes. The air in Mirth tingled with the crispness of apples.

On and on the children went and still their journey showed no sign of coming to an end. By now they expected to feel their muscles cramping and their chests heaving, but the climb was surprisingly effortless. It was as if their limbs weighed nothing at all. Milli suspected the white powder had something to do with the floating feeling that seemed to carry them upwards.

Every now and then they passed a chamber and could not resist stopping to look in. One in particular that captivated them appeared to be a nursery. Cribs carved from acorn shells sat in neat rows, painted vines crept along the ceiling and images of the sun and moon rotated from wall to wall. Dimmed fairy lights twinkled around the window frames. Musicians played lullabies on heart-shaped harps whilst soberly dressed nannies rocked the cribs silently. The infants themselves were cocooned in white silk and looked like glow-worms. Only their minute faces were visible; faces so pure that gazing at them for too long was almost painful. Even the usually hard-edged Finn allowed himself a smile.

‘Dream babies,’ the sentinel whispered, seeing their looks of wonder. ‘They are the guardians of imagination; it is because of them that children in your world can imagine and dream. They must never wake. Every time one of them does, a child somewhere abandons his or her book in favour of an electronic game.’

The four children held their breath when one of the infants stirred and gurgled, but exhaled when it settled back into repose.

A little further on, they came upon a very different sight that made them giggle. It was a classroom filled with school-aged Fada children learning their lessons—or at least that was what they were meant to be doing. The young fairies seemed to be causing havoc as they danced across crooked desks, splashed one another with their watercolour paints and laughed in delight as they took turns spinning on the overhead fan. Although they had lost their wings, the children were so light on their feet they seemed to defy the laws of gravity.

Ernest watched one girl spinning on the globe of the Conjurors’ Realm that stood in the corner before flopping to the ground from dizziness. She sat up and sneezed and a little cloud of gold mist erupted from her mouth. A more industrious group was engaged in sewing broken leaves back together, whilst others tested one other from a book of incantations. The schoolmaster was a flustered-looking gnome wearing a monocle. He was standing at a blackboard trying in vain to explain the meteorological conditions conducive to pots of gold appearing at the end of rainbows. He was distracted by a small male Fada with a mop of yellow curls who took him by the hand and drew him into a circle of children preparing to play Duck Duck Goose. After an unconvincing show of objection, the gnome joined in with as much enthusiasm as his pupils.

Tearing themselves from this spectacle, the four travellers continued their climb, only to be distracted by another room, this one containing a four-poster bed with a coverlet of red brocade. Asleep in the bed was the most ravishing princess they had ever seen. Her gown was made of blue velvet, her flaxen hair flowed around her, and gilded roses were scattered around her head. Milli and Fennel could not resist ducking their heads further into the room to gaze at this real-life fairy-tale heroine.

‘Can’t you climb more quietly?’ said a flustered voice behind them. It belonged to a squirrel who was guarding the shutters of a cuckoo clock.

Milli was about to reply that he was making more noise than they were when the squirrel threw his entire weight against the clock which was beginning to open. He huffed and strained as he battled to keep it closed. Seeing his difficulty, Milli reached out and prodded the doors with a finger. They snapped closed and the wheezing squirrel was able to relax.

‘Thank you,’ he puffed. ‘The princess must not be woken before her prince arrives or the story will be ruined. It is my job to stop the cuckoo clock from heralding the hour. Doesn’t sound like hard work but you have to be on call twenty-four-seven.’

‘It isn’t healthy for a person to snooze all day long,’ Ernest commented.

‘Health isn’t the issue when you’re almost a hundred years old. Doesn’t look her age, does she?’

Again their climb was interrupted, this time by a fieldmouse in an apron insisting they join him for afternoon tea. They would have done so happily had they not been several sizes too large to fit through his front door. They had to be content with putting their eyes to the keyhole to view a dining table laid out with a sumptuous tea of shortbreads, jam sponges and vanilla tarts. There was also a knobbly bed and chest of drawers beside a little stove and dresser. The fieldmouse had laid out his best china and was quite upset to have no company to share it with. He cheered up considerably when Mrs Snail called and graciously accepted the offer to join him.

With so many distractions, the children were surprised to find they had reached the top of the toadstool. They emerged onto a balcony made out of wrought iron twisted in the shape of ivy tendrils and berries. Far below them lay the city of Mirth. They could just make out a dishevelled Goblin Grouse being ushered out of the city gates by the jail wardens and looking like he was demanding legal representation.

At the end of the balcony stood an archway swathed in white. The sentinel who had escorted them came to a halt. He raised a golden hoof in farewell and indicated that they should proceed alone.

‘The Queen is expecting you,’ he said.