‘Put it on the desk,’ he said finally, turning around and scowling.
‘Sorry?’ said Effie.
‘Sorry, sir.’
Effie sighed again. ‘Sorry, sir.’
‘Put the ring on the desk, please.’
Oh no. Effie gulped silently.
‘What ring, sir?’
‘The ring you have hidden in the lining of your cape. The Ring of the True Hero, I believe. A forbidden boon. Hand it over.’
Effie gulped again. How did he know she had it? Lexy had told her not to bring any boons to this class – never mind that hers were unregistered and especially risky – and so yesterday Effie had hidden them all in her special box at home. All except for the Ring of the True Hero, which Effie had been wearing for tennis practice earlier.
Effie never wore the ring in actual matches, just in training. The first time she’d put it on it had almost killed her. But as long as she ate and drank enough to restore her energy, it made her strong and agile and all sorts of other things she couldn’t quite describe. And it made her feel more connected to the Otherworld. And . . .
‘I’m not going to wait all night,’ said Dr Green.
He was wearing a brown lounge suit, with flecks of green and orange now being picked out by the moonlight that shone through the window. His shirt was a peculiar shade of yellow. He glanced at his watch and then looked hard at Effie in the way the most horrible teachers tend to just before they haul you out of assembly and make you cry for something you didn’t even do.
‘Why exactly do you want my ring anyway?’ asked Effie.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Why do you want my ring?’
‘It is a boon, and you have brought it to my class. Therefore I must confiscate it.’
‘But—’
‘There’s no need to argue. Do as you’re told, please.’
‘What will you do with it?’
‘I will give it to the Guild. If it were a registered boon, I’d be able simply to give it back to you next Monday. But an unregistered boon . . .’ He shook his head. ‘You’ll have to write to the Guild and get an application form to register the item and, I believe, fill in another form to request an application to get it back. And—’
‘No,’ said Effie, surprising herself.
Dr Green’s eyes narrowed. ‘What did you say?’
‘No,’ she repeated. ‘I’m not going to give it to you. I’m sorry. I just can’t.’
‘I do have ways of making you,’ said Dr Green, taking a step towards Effie. ‘But of course it won’t come to that. Hand it over.’
Effie took the ring from where she’d hidden it in the lining of her bottle-green school cape. The ring was silver, with a dark red stone held in place by a number of tiny silver dragons. Her beloved grandfather Griffin had given it to her just before he died. There was no way Effie was handing it over to anybody. She put it on her left thumb, where it fitted best. A feeling of confidence and power rippled through her.
‘Stop messing around and give it to me,’ said Dr Green, taking another step forward and holding out his hand. ‘Now.’
Outside the high windows of the church hall an owl hooted. This owl had been watching what was going on and hadn’t liked the look of it. Its call was picked up by a friendly rabbit in a nearby garden, who passed the message on to a dormouse, who passed it to a bat, who told it to another owl who happened to be flying towards the moors. Soon all the animals in the area knew that Euphemia Truelove was in trouble. Perhaps someone would hear the distress call and respond; perhaps they would not. The Cosmic Web was a bit random like that.
Raven and her horse Echo crunched through the frost on the moors. The moon shone down on them, making Raven’s black, wavy hair look as if it was streaked with silver. Raven was a true witch and could therefore talk to animals. Ever since she’d epiphanised she had been able to have quite long conversations with Echo. Before, they had communicated only through their feelings. Echo ‘just knew’ when Raven wanted him to break into a canter, and Raven ‘just knew’ when Echo was feeling annoyed. But now Raven spoke fluent Caballo (the ancient language of horses) and everything was different.
Every day after supper Raven and Echo went out onto the moors, even though it now got dark so early. Much of the time they had to rely on Echo’s night-vision to get them home, but tonight the moon was waning gibbous (which meant it was just past full) and Raven could see quite clearly. Everything looked pale and magical when it was bathed in moonlight. And anything touched by moonlight felt happy and peaceful. Everyone knows that you get vitamin D from sunlight. But not very many people know that there is a special nutrient in moonlight that helps living things develop magical powers and cleanses them of any impurities.
The moorland around Raven and Echo was quite bare. No trees, no streams; not even any old fence-posts, as there were on some parts of the moor. The only modern-looking thing for miles was a pair of steel doors that someone had recently built into a mound near some old crofts.
Echo walked carefully through the barest parts of moorland, because there were bogs and rabbit holes that were difficult to see in the moonlight. Every so often a small meteor streaked across the vast night sky. There was something odd about these meteors, although Echo wasn’t sure what it was. Anyway, soon they would be on an ancient path, with its comforting imprints of bygone horses and their riders.
And then, after passing the ruined crofts, Raven was hoping to see the shimmering mystery again. For the last hour, she had been trying to explain to Echo in Caballo what she thought it was. This was almost impossible because not only was the shimmering mystery very difficult to describe, there were no words in Caballo for ‘shimmering’ or ‘mystery’. The closest Raven could get was ‘bog in the moonlight’, which was something deep and mysterious with a hint of unpredictability and danger. But Echo just snorted and asked why on earth they were looking for bogs in the moonlight. He didn’t like bogs; in fact, he went out of his way to avoid them. Bogs were dangerous. You could sink into them and never come out.
‘Not a bog, exactly,’ said Raven with her mind. Caballo was an unspoken language. ‘Maybe like a very high jump.’
Echo didn’t much like very high jumps either, and said so.
‘But not an actual high jump,’ Raven tried to say. ‘Just something that makes you feel like you’re approaching one. Or I suppose like the way I feel about approaching one. Or maybe the way you feel just before you do a vamos.’
Echo hardly ever ran away when Raven was riding him. But it did very occasionally happen that he would see a vast expanse of beautiful empty moorland in front of him and want to vamos through it. And so he would go, not thinking, galloping hard and fast. The way Raven felt about this was a bit like the way Echo felt about very high jumps. And each allowed the other their little indulgence from time to time. He let her jump, and she let him vamos. He never threw her. That was the main thing. And she always gave him such a nice mixture of oats and alfalfa at the end of the day. She even remembered to buy him Polo mints, which were his favourite thing in the whole world. They understood each other.
It had been after a vamos episode the previous Saturday that Raven had first seen the shimmering mystery. It had been as if the moorland in front of them was different in some way. Sort of greener, wilder, more vivid, more magical.