Clearheart (2 page)

Transportics took the form of three separate training sessions: Aeronortics, Aquanortics and Loconortics. Which one you went to depended on what type of Flitterwig you were—one of flight, swimming or speed.

Ella, being a Flitterwig of flight, had to attend Aeronortics, which was held on a white cloud that hung above the elegant spires of Hedgeberry pretty much all the time. This sounds terribly peculiar and,
let's face it, it is. Every Wednesday, all potentially winged Flitterwigs (elves, imps, sprites, sylphs, nymphs, dryads, etc) were expected to take the old, dilapidated iron elevator in the school's entrance hall up to the fourth floor.

Now, Hedgeberry didn't have a fourth floor. It only had three floors. Which meant that Ella and her peers would shoot up through the roof of Hedgeberry into the air above. This, as anyone can imagine, makes the tummy churn and the head spin. But stranger still was the sensation of being deposited not on hard ground, but on the bouncy surface of this particular cloud! It defied logic. It defied everything, let's face it, but magic itself.

Samantha winked at Ella supportively as they were thrust up into the sky. Having been at Hedgeberry since she was four, Samantha was a brilliant flyer. Her feet had hardly touched the surface of the cloud before she was tweaking her ear and whispering the enchantment. Her wings appeared, unfurling easily through the back of Hedgeberry's standard-issue T-shirt for Flitterwigs of flight. Sparkling apparitions, they were; lacy fronds woven of what seemed the finest silk. She was up off into the sky before Ella had the chance to so much as sink into the marshmallow depths of the cloud and start suffocating.

Ella didn't begrudge Samantha this fact at all. Indeed, if she
ever managed to scramble back to the cloud-top and stay there for longer than ten seconds, she would watch Samantha swoop across the horizon with the elegance of a swallow and feel glad for the girl that there was somewhere she could exist where she wasn't as clumsy as she usually was on foot.

Miss Woofla-Daplida, the Aeronortics teacher, issued instructions as her tiny body, all aflutter in an assortment of tiedyed this and thats, hovered in the sky.

‘Tweak the left ear like so, children, in order to control the wings,' she twittered through a megaphone, tweaking her ear from so far away that Ella couldn't even see her.

Clambering up out of the puffs of the cloud, gasping for air, Ella tried to grab her left ear. In doing so, she lost her footing and disappeared back into the cloud's cotton folds.

‘You can do it. Do it. Do it. Rhymes with blew it,' Dixon sang encouragingly from his perch on her shoulder, mindful of staying carefully hidden in her long hair so as not to get spotted by Miss Woofla-Daplida. He handed Ella her inhaler. She suffered from asthma, as a result of her elven sensitivity to the pollution on Earth. She took a grateful puff, sinking back down into the cloud at once. ‘Come on, Ella, Bella,' Dixon urged, happy to help her try to fly now there was a teacher about and a cloud to catch her should she fall.

‘Stop going on in my ear,' said Ella, more annoyed with herself than the pixie. ‘Can't you see I'm trying?'

Dixon squished his hand over his mouth and nose so his face was just two big eyes poking out of two green sockets. He tried not to cry.

Ella waded back up through the cloud.

‘Think weightlessness, Ella,' Miss Woofla-Daplida twittered through her megaphone as she floated like a butterfly. ‘Remember, the magic is in you, you just have to find it.'

Ella scowled. ‘
Think weightlessness, Ella
,' she mimicked. ‘As if I'm not
trying
,' she said between gritted teeth, hauling herself onto the top of the cloud and trying to keep herself there. Dixon giggled, all thoughts of hurt feelings gone completely.

‘You're funny,' he snickered, planting a tiny wet kiss on her ear. It tickled. Ella smiled. Keeping her wits about her, she balanced on the top of the cloud, concentrating for all she was worth, trying to find the magic inside her.

Which she didn't get much of a chance to do, because a sudden push thrust her off the side of the cloud. She fell like a stone.

Samantha spotted Ella careering towards the ground. She swooped elegantly and yelled directions involving ear-tweaking and enchantments that Ella could barely hear over Dixon
screeching in her ear as he clung desperately to the strap of her dungarees.

‘Fly. Fly. Rhymes with rye. You can do it! Spew it! Blew it!' he hollered as his legs flew out behind him wildly and his green face wobbled in the wind.

The cloud dropped swiftly out of the sky, whipping Samantha out of the way and catching Ella in its gentle folds. Ella lay prostrate upon it. She turned on her back and looked up at the Flitterwigs hovering high above her. How embarrassing! Samantha, who had swooped back up into the air, was calling out for Miss Woofla-Daplida.

Out of nowhere, Gloria Ulnus appeared. She flew up so close that Ella could see the glint in Gloria's dark eyes. Her nose, which poked out like a sniffing rat's, almost touched Ella's own and her lank black hair fell on Ella's pale face.

‘I'm watching you,' Gloria snarled, poking a finger in Ella's chest. Ella noticed that where she should have had nails, there were claws. A terrible sense of something much more sinister than a school bully, the sense of something she had encountered before, made Ella's hair flare up and her ears itch fiercely.

Miss Woofla-Daplida appeared at Ella's side. ‘Oh dear, Ella,' she twittered, ‘you're not having much luck at this flying caper, are you?' Ella looked at the tie-dyed teacher and back at Gloria,
who had settled on the cloud. The girl's nails had returned to normal and her eyes, while still dark, were more brown, like the bark of a tree, than black anymore.

‘Thank you, Gloria dear, for checking on your classmate,' said Miss Woofla-Daplida. ‘It is always good to know that we Flitterwigs are looking out for one another.'

Gloria stared at Miss Woofla-Daplida blankly, looking as startled and confused as Ella.

‘She will do perfectly!' the Elf Duke declared, thrusting into the air as his wings shot him up out of a great bowl of water set upon a dais in a glacial drawing room. He set himself nimbly on the ground beside it. His eyes sparkled with the thrill of having Possessified the Ulnus child and his skin gleamed from the exertion. The exiled Duke of the Magical Kingdom of Magus shook his Stretchified neck, magnificent still, in spite of the monster he had become. He rubbed his shoulders, his clawed hands passing over the black velvet of his cloak with ease.

Only months ago he had been no bigger than a human hand. The most elegant and powerful elf in Magus, other than his wife the Queen. But now, having Stretchified himself to the size of a short grown-up, his nose lay flat against his face, his eyes bulged
wildly, his skin throbbed blue and red over veins pulled tight against his overextended skin. Claws had replaced his hands, and a slithering tail (an afterthought the Duke had added, just for effect) sliced out the back of his black velvet cloak, oozing slime.

‘Bring me some Antidote, Ragwald,' he demanded.

His Goblin Protector, all freckles and white hair (the parts of him that hadn't been Trogglified, that is), rushed up and handed his master a goblet of thick, blood-coloured liquid. The Duke took a long drink, and sighed deeply as the anti-pollutant effects of the draught restored him. Earth was a filthy place. Not here in his new hideaway, of course, but humans had polluted most of their planet with little concern for the consequences.

He turned to a group of Troggles feasting on a bowl of sweets in the corner. One of them was the same Troggle who had fled from Hedgeberry School of Flitterwiggery barely an hour earlier. Not that it was easy to tell them apart these days. For the Duke's loyal Magicals, who he had managed to lure from Magus with promises of infinite access to sweeties, had eaten so much sugar now that they were blackened and
pickled and rotten beyond recognition, even in the cleanliness of their new lair.

Trogglitis is a terrible affliction. If pure Magicals eat too much sugar, first they just get stupid and lose their balance. But then, after a while, they get jittery and impatient and stressed out. After that they start to rot and smell revolting. The Duke's army of Magicals, however, were almost past this point. Soon their eyes would turn red and they would swell to five times their tiny Magical size. Their extremities would melt into nasty pincer-like contraptions, and then they would become mean and angry and dangerous, just as the Duke wanted them. However, if the Duke was not careful with their rations, they would disintegrate altogether. And if they weren't strong, they were of no use to him. He pointed a claw at the failed spy. ‘Who needs you?' he hissed. A shot of elf dust flew from his forefinger and struck the Troggle. The demented Magical turned to sludge at once.

‘The Clearheart will be mine within the week,' the Duke said to no-one in particular, stepping across a brilliant white floor covered in richly hand-woven rugs. The clean, crisp whiteness beneath him stretched up to walls of similar hue, decorated with the darker paintings of the masters. Bosch, Brueghel, Goya, Picasso. They were on loan from his new allies. In alcoves carved into the crystalline surface between the paintings sat bowls of
sugary delicacies. Delicacies that the Duke commended himself on being able to resist. Wine gums. Pastilles. Chewy mints. Turkish delight. Chocolate drops. ‘Fear will keep her in check meanwhile,' he said, peering into the great wooden bowl of water out of which he had appeared. It was set upon a sculptured dais that rose out of the floor beside two other daises. One of these held a large wooden bowl of water, just like the first. Upon the other rested a translucent bubble.

The Duke tapped his finger on the water's silvery skin. The round face of Saul, ex-Co-Chairman of the Flitterwig Rooniun, appeared. He raised a bushy eyebrow, a facial movement that made one of his protruding cauliflower ears waggle and the deep clefts in his forehead disappear into the nest upon his head. The Gnome Flitterwig tugged at one of the many hairs growing out of his nostrils.

‘Yes?' he said gruffly. ‘What do you want?'

‘I want to thank you,' said the Duke, tapping his claws on the sides of the wooden bowl. ‘The child you suggested was an easy victim. Most receptive to Possessification. I shall use her again while I am building my strength back up, enjoy a few practice runs before I make my move.'

‘Well, be careful,' said Saul. ‘There are white elves from your wife's personal army stationed about the school guarding
Ella. And Ella's Protector is with her too. That Charlie Snoppit boy. Not that he is much use—too busy talking to the animals. Samuel Happenstance, my former co-Chair at the Rooniun, and the headmistress are on full alert also. Until the Magicals or the Flitterwigs find you, they are keeping Ella under watch at all times. Although I think we are managing to keep the white elves sufficiently Trogglified to ensure they aren't doing a terribly good job of it. Not easy to do, as they are fairly wary. But we have our ways. Naturally, our people are not feeding them enough sugar for the evidence to be obvious. No physical symptoms as yet. But enough for them to be less than alert.'