Page 34 of The Neverfear

‘Unselfishly?’ Christopher could not suppress a contraction of his eyebrows.

‘No, my child.’ Just a twitch of her claws gave warning. ‘Do not look at me as if I were some nursery teacher telling you to share. Listen. The great mystery of this world is the life of other living things; we never know what it is to be anything but our own selves. It is the hard work of great minds – to put themselves in a position to see for even one fleeting moment the true reality of another living soul, of the world that lies outside our own confines. You have been given an extraordinary way into that mystery. To connect. But this gift carries great dangers. If you use it to conquer, to dominate the minds you reach, it will in the end destroy you and all you touch. It will be a great temptation. I have heard stories that would fill your heart with dread. All power, no matter how good, carries the risk of evil.’

‘It wasn’t evil,’ he said stubbornly. He thought again of the great burst of joy the unicorn had telegraphed outwards.

He looked very young to the ancient sphinx: very young, and brave, and stubborn. She smiled at him. ‘Remember what I have told you. Do not allow what happened with the Cerberus to happen again. Anchor yourself.’

‘How?’

She looked hard at him and he could almost feel the waves of heat radiating from her glance. ‘By remembering what it is that makes you a person. What makes you yourself. Find your anchor.’

She said nothing more. She only nudged him with her vast head, and breathed on his face. Then she beat her wings and was gone. The night swallowed her so swiftly and so absolutely that he felt for a moment it might have been a dream. But the scent of her wings, animal and glimourie, still lingered on the deck.

He ran down to the sleeping quarters to tell Anya.

The Pirate Party

‘We will not docks at the quayside,’ said Ratwin. ‘It would be a foolio-stupidation to leaves the ships in a place it cans be easily found.’

Instead, they anchored in a cove and waded, their clothes held over their heads, to shore. From here the desert stretched on, a great wave of yellow ocean, bone dry and full of question marks.

Ratwin watched them glamorise themselves. Her mouth was set in a straight, sharp line. ‘It is already eight post meridiem o’clocks, and the walks is two hours at least,’ she said. ‘Walk fasts.’

‘Shall we go over the plan?’ said Anya.

‘It is scarcely a plan,’ said Jacques. ‘More an elaborate and well-dressed death wish. I advise you again to give it up!’

‘It is a plans,’ said Ratwin. ‘It’s justs … not a brilliant-genius one.’

Christopher privately agreed. It was basic, but it felt, as Ratwin said, just possible.

‘It’s one of the could-bes, maybe-ifs, rather than the absolutely-nots,’ Ratwin said.

They had found a packet of somulent leaves in the Neverfear’s medicine cabinet. Ratwin had pressed them into a mulch, and siphoned off the juice into a tiny vial.

‘We pretend we’ve come like he invited us, just for the party. We put the sleeping draught into his cup,’ said Christopher, as they set off striding across the sand dunes.

‘Right,’ said Anya. ‘And he’ll go to sleep and take off the belt, and we’ll find his sleeping tent and steal it.’

‘Would you like me to enumerate the ways it could go wrong,’ said Jacques, ‘thematically or alphabetically?’

‘Do you have a better idea?’ said Christopher.

‘Not necessarily. My job is more commentator than contributor. I never wanted to come on this absurd death drive of a mission.’

Ratwin, her mobile squirrel face set in a scowl, turned suddenly on Jacques. ‘Dragon! That is enoughs!’

Jacques looked taken aback. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Does you recollection when you had hiccups?’

Jacques stiffened. ‘I do.’ Hiccups are agonising for a dragon: they turn the fire inwards, and can go on for months.

‘And Irians Guinnes stayed awake until dawn, brewing up a cures.’

‘I do remember, yes.’ Jacques looked uncomfortable.

‘Does you remembers what you declarationed to her?’