Page 35 of The Neverfear

‘Am I supposed to remember everything I’ve ever said?’

‘You saids, My lady, I owe you a great service.’

Jacques tried to scoff. ‘But that was chivalry! It’s the done thing, to speak with a little flourish! She will have understood it as such. No person – human or dragon – expects to be asked to fulfil all their promises! They are merely pleasant to give!’

Ratwin looked long and hard at Jacques. ‘Remembers,’ she said. ‘Your biographers is here.’

Vigo’s camp came into sight as the sun was setting across the summer sky.

‘Theres it is!’ cried Ratwin. She gestured with her horn across the expanse of sand. ‘The piratical heart of the deserts! A secret strongholds. Everyones expects a pirates to live by the sea, but Vigo Nex has the cunning to floutulate expectations.’

The camp appeared to be flickering, as if it might be a mirage. There was a broad lake, and all around it great canvas pavilions. Crowds of gorgeously dressed men and women moved between the tents, talking, roaring, drinking, singing. One cluster of huge men, Christopher saw, wore nothing but diamanté pants and immense hats. All carried swords or cutlasses or crossbows. Silver hercinia birds flew overhead. The sun was dropping fast, and the place was lit by bonfires and by lights that hovered in the air and darted to and fro.

‘Fireflies?’ said Christopher.

‘What’s a firefly?’ said Anya. ‘A fly you set on fire?’

‘They’re insects! Don’t you have them in Glimouria?’

‘No. Weird.’

‘Then what are those?’

‘Fairies of course,’ said Anya.

‘Don’t goes too closes,’ said Ratwin. ‘They spits.’

‘They will have been paid an extraordinary amount of money,’ said Jacques. ‘No fairy would usually agree to such a job.’

‘Or blackmailed,’ said Ratwin. ‘Looks, Christopher – winged trees.’ All around the oasis were strange, leafless trees, their bodies like huge cactuses.

Christopher looked at the trees. There was a moment of silence.

‘Not to be rude,’ he said, ‘but I’ve seen few things in my life that look less like wings.’

‘Because it’s not full-sunsets yet,’ said Ratwin. ‘You’lls sees.’

‘OK. We find Vigo Nex. We offer him a drink.’ He hadn’t imagined such crowds; there must have been hundreds of people. ‘Do you have the vial?’ he said.

Anya nodded, her eyes on the crowd. There was an edge to the mood; many seemed to have consumed a lot of the rum being poured out by servers. A scuffle had broken out among the dancers and it was spreading through the crowd. ‘I don’t know if I like this place. They all look slightly unhinged.’

‘They is not slightly unhinged! They is drunk! Bums-out, full-steams, hyper-bonkers!’

‘Come on.’ He wished Anya’s fear was not so visible; it made his own harder to contain. But Christopher tried to summon up courage for the two of them. ‘Come on. The quicker we find him, the quicker it’ll be done.’ Then he stiffened. ‘What’s that noise?’

‘The wingses,’ said Ratwin. Over the horizon came a sudden flock of butterflies, a dozen colours, a cloud of beating wings as large as a bedroom.

‘What’s happening?’ He drew his sword.

Anya grinned. ‘Winged trees.’

The butterflies came to rest along the trees’ huge branches: all yellow on one tree, all blue on another, all red on a third. Christopher stood. They weren’t butterflies; they were petals, beating to and fro.

‘They come at sunset, after the heat of the day,’ said Jacques. ‘A canopy for the party.’

‘Are they alive?’

‘They are alive in the way a tree is alive,’ said Ratwin. ‘Yous humans makes too much of a demarcations between life and life. Come. A goods omens. Go forths.’