It was a misty and still morning, with pink streaks across the sky. Effie followed the maid up some stone steps and past a pond and across some grass. There was the arena. It looked like a small Roman amphitheatre. There were weeds pushing up around the stone seats, however, and moss had grown over much of the round central area. It was clear that there had never been any fights here.
The dragon was pacing around the arena, mumbling to himself. He was holding a bright red cricket ball in one of his clawed hands, tossing it up and down. Oh no. Did he have the answer? But he wasn’t acting like a dragon with the answer. He was trembling and pacing and muttering and, occasionally, stamping his clawed foot. Fire shot from his nostrils a couple of times as he sighed and groaned.
‘Good morning, miss,’ said the butler.
‘Good morning,’ said Effie.
The dragon plodded over. ‘Your question is impossible,’ he said.
Effie took a deep breath. ‘I have an answer to yours,’ she said.
‘WHAT?’ boomed the dragon. More fire came out of his nostrils.
‘Calm yourself, sir,’ said the butler. ‘Let us commence.’
The butler repeated the rules that they had agreed the previous night, and then, after taking a sheet of blue paper from the inside pocket of his jacket, he read out the questions.
He looked at the dragon first. ‘Do you have an answer to Euphemia Truelove’s riddle?’ he asked.
The dragon sighed. Breathed out a little bit of fire. Frowned.
‘Dash it,’ he said. ‘No.’
‘And do you, Euphemia, have an answer to the dragon’s question?’
‘I do.’
‘State it.’
‘The answer is man,’ said Euphemia. ‘Well, humans. In the morning of their lives humans crawl, which is the four legs bit. At noon, in other words, in the middle of their lives, they walk on two legs. But in later life they often use a stick, which gives them three legs.’
The dragon growled.
‘Is that correct, sir?’
The dragon nodded his head. ‘Yes, dash it all. I should have picked a harder one. It was only the first round! We should start again. This isn’t fair.’
The butler cleared his throat.
‘I will ask again. Do you, Dragon, have an answer to Miss Euphemia Truelove’s riddle?’
‘No.’
‘Then we will declare Miss Euphemia Truelove the winner!’
‘Wait,’ said the dragon. ‘We should hear the answer first. This ball that is thrown and comes back without hitting any objects.’ He tossed the ball to Effie. ‘Show us how it’s done, then.’
‘All right,’ said Effie. She threw the ball into the air and caught it. ‘Like that,’ she said. ‘I have thrown it a distance and it has come back to me, without hitting any objects and without being attached to anything. I have not used magic. It’s just gravity. See?’ She threw the ball up and caught it again.
‘Oh, bravo,’ said the butler. Then, ‘Sorry, sir.’
The dragon didn’t say anything for a few moments. Effie wondered if he was going to eat her after all, or just roast her to death with the flames that were now steadily coming out of his nostrils. He tipped his head to one side. The flames stopped. He took a step towards Effie. Then another one.
He held out his clawed hand.
‘Very clever,’ he said. ‘You win. What is it about true heroes? They always find some way to defeat the dragon.’
‘So you promise you won’t eat any more people?’
‘If you insist,’ said the dragon.
The butler clapped, and so did the maid, and the cook, who had come to watch. And soon there was the sound of someone else clapping. It was Crescentia.
‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe it!’
‘Crescentia,’ said the dragon. ‘More beautiful even than your picture.’
‘Now I know I’m not going to be eaten, I thought I’d come and say hello,’ she said. ‘And to put our dinner date in my diary for . . . Let’s say three years’ time? If you’re still interested, that is.’
The dragon looked pleased but confused.
‘Oh, the maid told me everything,’ said Crescentia.
23
The sound of clapping grew dim and echoey and it suddenly seemed to Effie as if the sky were full of shooting stars. Was she collapsing from the excitement? No. She stayed upright, but the world began swirling gently around her. Soon there was only darkness, and then, for a moment, only light. Some words seemed to be forming in faint fireworks above her head.
THE END
The words were drawn in little puffs of light and smoke. The end. What did that mean? It was as if Effie had just finished reading a book. Perhaps it should have felt frightening, but it didn’t. It felt quite comfortable and satisfying. In fact, it felt almost exactly the way finishing a good book feels.
When things went back to normal, Effie found that she was standing outside the big ornate gates of Truelove House with a calling card in her hand. It read Clothilde and Rollo Truelove would be honoured to entertain Miss Euphemia Truelove at her convenience. There was no sign of the dragon, or Crescentia or anyone from the last few days. It was almost as if Effie was now in an entirely new world. Perhaps she was. Everything felt different, although she couldn’t have explained quite how. But the grass around her was a slightly different shade of green than it had been before. It was brighter. More vivid.
All was still and quiet, except for a robin singing loudly in the rowan tree. The sound was more clear and real than anything Effie had heard in days. Perhaps more than she’d ever heard. Beyond the rowan tree, the whole landscape had changed. All the grass was the new shade of green. The Princess School was no longer there on the hilltop, and the village had gone, too. Even the air around her felt different. It was a bit like when spring becomes summer, or when a flower opens.
‘Can I help you, miss?’ asked a guard.
Effie turned and handed him the calling card. He looked at it, smiled, nodded, gave it back to her, and opened the gates.
‘Straight up the driveway, Miss Truelove,’ said the guard. ‘Can’t miss it.’
Just inside the gates was a strange swirling mist that was cold and thick and smelled faintly metallic. Effie walked through it, hearing the robin’s song grow dim and then disappear entirely. After a few seconds, she emerged into the most beautiful garden she had ever seen, with a pathway leading through it and up to the big house with its smooth turrets and circular towers. It was warm and bright, and the sun was high in a perfect blue sky.
There were birds, bees and butterflies everywhere, and a smell of lavender, jasmine and rose. Dragonflies flitted here and there, along with some other creatures that Effie couldn’t name, little round glowing orbs that darted up and down. Were these fireflies? Mayflies? But they seemed like creatures from another universe. Where was she?
There was a young man standing by the door waiting for her. He was oddly beautiful in some way she couldn’t fathom. He had shoulder-length dark hair and glasses and was wearing a loose white silk shirt and long beige linen shorts.
‘Beautiful day,’ he said to Effie, smiling.
‘Am I in a dream?’ she asked him.
And then everything seemed to hit her all at once. Her grandfather’s death, followed by a long, horrible day with hardly any food, the argument with her father and Cait, Lexy’s tonic, and then trying to read the book Dragon’s Green. Then falling asleep in her bed, and the next day being brought to the place Dragon’s Green and finding she had been sold to the Princess School. And then discovering she was a true hero and finding a way to overcome a dragon and bring peace to a village and save a lot of girls from being eaten. It had been an intense few days. In fact, now that she was here in this relaxing place, with this calming person looking at her in quite a loving way, perhaps she could just . . . could just . . .
The next thing Effie knew she was waking up on a beautiful mauve velvet sofa in a large, light dra
wing room with delicate white curtains billowing softly in the warm breeze.
The young man was looking at her with concern. There was a young woman with him as well. They were both in their late teens or early twenties. The young woman had long blonde hair and was wearing a yellow silk dress. She was holding out a turquoise teacup and saucer.
‘Fourflower tea,’ she explained, handing the teacup to Effie. ‘It’ll restore you. I hear you’ve had quite a journey to get to us. My brother believes you came through a book.’ She sat on the edge of the sofa and gave Effie the most friendly, warm smile Effie had ever seen. ‘I’m Clothilde, and this is my brother Rollo. We’re your cousins, sort of. We’ll explain in a moment. But first, tell us everything,’ she said.
So Effie did. Right from the beginning. It took a long time, because her beautiful cousins kept oohing and aahing and asking her to repeat bits. They both expressed great sadness to hear of Griffin’s death, although what they said about it was very odd – ‘It will take a long time for him to reach us now.’ They had clearly known him very well. When Effie got to the parts about the Princess School the cousins became quite excited, laughing and clapping and asking her to repeat even more things.
‘You actually faced a dragon, alone!’ said Clothilde. ‘Trueloves are known for their bravery, of course, but did you have any idea how dangerous that was?’
Rollo shook his head, but looked quite admiring. ‘Insane,’ he concluded.
‘Pretty risky, if you ask me,’ Clothilde said to Rollo. ‘Getting her here through a book.’
‘Clever, though,’ said Rollo. ‘There’s no way she could have been followed.’
‘True. But if she hadn’t decided to take on the dragon, she could have been stuck in the book for ever. She could have been at the Princess School for years.’
‘Griffin must have known she’d come through. He taught her everything she needed to do so. And, of course, he knew that only a true hero could have made it through that particular story. It was certainly clever. After all, how many true heroes are there? None among the Diberi, certainly.’
‘But he didn’t teach her everything. She had to rely on her own knowledge as well.’
‘I suppose he couldn’t have known that she was going to need the book so soon . . . He probably meant to teach her the other things later. But any true hero would find a way through that book, I’m sure.’
Effie was now feeling quite well again, although some of the things Clothilde and Rollo were saying made it seem even more likely that she was in a very long and complicated dream. She pinched herself a couple of times – she’d read stories in which people do this to try to wake themselves up. Clothilde had been looking very serious as she talked to Rollo. But now she laughed.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked Effie.
‘Checking to see if this is a dream.’
‘Would you want to wake up, if it was?’
Effie smiled. ‘Maybe not. If this is a dream, then it’s the most interesting dream I’ve ever had. But if it’s not a dream, then where am I? And what do you mean when you keep talking about me coming “through a book”?’
‘Ah,’ said Rollo. ‘Yes. Where to begin.’
‘Do you know where you are now?’ said Clothilde.
‘Am I still in Dragon’s Green?’
‘Yes. Sort of. A different Dragon’s Green from the one you were driven to, though. But you do realise that you are now in the Otherworld?’
‘The Otherworld? But I couldn’t get through. I didn’t have the right papers.’
‘You came through the book.’
‘You keep saying that. What does it mean?’
Clothilde sighed. ‘There’s so much to tell you, I don’t even know where to begin,’ she said. ‘You don’t know much about the Diberi, clearly, and you don’t know about the great war with the Book Eaters and . . .’
‘When you started reading Dragon’s Green,’ Rollo said, ‘and you fell asleep . . . You remember that?’
‘Yes. I was in bed. I’d just had the tonic my friend made me.’
‘That tonic will have helped you a great deal. You should thank your friend when you see her.’
‘But it was supposed to keep me awake! I just fell asleep.’
‘You didn’t fall asleep,’ said Clothilde.
‘You fell into the book,’ said Rollo. ‘Well, in a manner of speaking.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Effie.
‘When you are the last person to read a book,’ began Clothilde. ‘Oh – but I’d better not start with that, because there’s a lot of explanation about being a Last Reader. But it was so clever of Griffin to think of that and find a last edition of a book that would bring you so close to here, that only someone like you could survive . . .’
‘For reasons we won’t go into now,’ said Rollo, smiling at his sister, ‘when you are the Last Reader of a book, lots of special magical things happen. The main one is that you enter the book. If it’s fiction, you experience it as a character, rather than reading it normally. You go inside the book and experience it from within.’
‘You live it,’ said Clothilde.
‘And at the end you usually come out somewhere interesting in the Otherworld. I’ve heard before how difficult it is to get from your world to the Otherworld, although it’s even harder to go the other way. Being a Last Reader gets you straight here. As well as a number of other things. But you have to get to the end of the book and out the other side.’
‘And when you say “Last Reader” you mean . . .?’
‘The last person ever to read the book in the whole universe. Most books won’t have their Last Reader for centuries yet, or even millennia. Who knows when the last person will read Hamlet, or the Bible. But it will happen eventually.’ Rollo pushed his glasses up his nose and continued. ‘Reading a last edition is such a strange and singular thing that it awakens any magical abilities a person might have. And there are also great boons that they receive after completing their adventure and— ’
‘Or it’s all just a scam by the Diberi,’ said Clothilde. ‘And they invented the whole Last Reader thing for their own ends, as a way of giving themselves unlimited power.’
‘Let’s not confuse our young cousin,’ said Rollo. ‘If that did happen, it would have been centuries ago. The whole thing is true lore now, anyway.’
‘So, when I read Dragon’s Green,’ said Effie, ‘you’re saying that I entered its world somehow? So falling asleep wasn’t real, but just part of the story? And when I woke up and Cait and my father were nice to me, that was part of the story too, and being taken to Dragon’s Green in that car was all part of the beginning of the story?’
‘Exactly,’ said Rollo.
‘But how could a book buried under my grandfather’s floorboards know that I was going to have an argument with my father and Cait and work that into its story? It was already written. I mean, how . . .?’
‘All readers and books merge in various ways,’ said Rollo. ‘You know when you read a book that’s set in a big house, and you get a description of the house, but your imagination makes up its own description anyway? And if you think about it, the house you picture is actually somewhere you visited when you were five, or your neighbours’ place or something like that? Books are used to having their meanings shaped in these ways by readers. In fact, the most powerful ones find all sorts of ways of adjusting to accommodate you. And the more of your own self you put into a book – not just descriptions, but emotions, feelings, anger, sadness, love – the more you add to its magical charge, the thing you call M-currency. It’s one of very few things that have remained the same in both worlds since the Great Split. Oh dear. Of course you won’t know about the Great Split either . . . Anyway, if ten thousand people all read a book and love it, and add their own descriptions, locations and feelings and so on, the book absorbs all that energy and becomes extremely powerful. The Last Reader of that book will have a particularly strong experience of it, and at t
he end he or she will absorb all of that power . . .’
‘Which is exactly what the Diberi exploit for their own ends,’ said Clothilde.
‘Which we’ll come to later,’ said Rollo, pointedly. ‘Books mould themselves to you just as you shape them with your mind. If you are to become the main character of a book then it will shuffle a few meanings and details this way or that to accommodate you. It’s easy to slip into a character when reading a book – you must have experienced that anyway, even before you became a Last Reader.’
‘Yes,’ said Effie. ‘I suppose I have.’ She remembered reading that play of Mrs Beathag Hide’s, the one that helped her with the dragon’s riddle. She had imagined herself as Oedipus, that young would-be king, standing before the sphinx, faced with what seemed to be an impossible question. Only by imagining herself as him, as the poor tragic hero, had she been able to feel anything about the story at all – and remember the riddle.
‘How’s the tea?’ asked Clothilde.
‘Delicious,’ said Effie. ‘Thank you.’
‘We’ll have proper tea on the lawn later with cakes and little sandwiches and everything. Pelham Longfellow is coming. We told him you were here. But would you like any more tea, or anything to eat now?’
‘No, thanks,’ said Effie. ‘I’m still trying to understand all this. Where am I? I know this isn’t a dream exactly, and I’m in the Otherworld, but am I in some way still at home in bed?’
‘No. You’re really here. Later, Pelham will show you how to get home.’
‘And have I been here for days? Will everyone be searching for me at home?’ Effie quite liked the idea of this in some ways, although it would mean she’d be in even more trouble. ‘Or . . .’ She gulped. ‘I heard a story once where a man went to a magical land and when he got home hundreds of years had passed.’
Clothilde laughed. ‘Don’t worry. It’s actually very convenient for you Realworlders to come to the Otherworld. A day here – we call them moons, by the way – is equivalent to around 19.1 minutes of your time. An hour in the Realworld gives you just over three days here: 3.14, to be precise. A long weekend.’