‘NO!’
Thorn Lawless’s face changed. It was like the tide rolling sand smooth on a beach.
Thorn’s craggy features softened and grew youthful. Without her hat, she was barely older than Cordelia. Even her teeth became less jagged, though her growl was just as deadly as before and her eyes blazed.
She might be younger, but she was still as dangerous as wildfire.
‘I’ll make you sorry now, Maker!’ Thorn snarled, and tackled Cordelia in a tangle of hair and fists and fury.
Cordelia hit the ground, fighting, and managed to shove the girl off her. She scrambled, panting, to her feet, her mind whirling. Thorn Lawless had been in disguise all this time! She was really –
‘Prudence Oglethorne,’ Cordelia whispered. ‘It’s you!’
Thorn’s claim that Prudence was not dead but would never be seen again now made perfect sense. Because Thorn was Prudence.
‘You’ve discovered my secret,’ she hissed, voice harsh even though it had lost its gravelly rasp. ‘Pity you’ll never get off this island to tell everybody how clever you’ve been.’
‘Pru–’ Cordelia began.
‘Don’t call me that!’ Thorn interrupted viciously. ‘That’s not my name any more! My friends have always called me Thorn. It’s the only part of my real name that I like: Oglethorne. And now I’m an outlaw, Lawless is my surname.’
Cordelia nodded. ‘All right – Thorn. Your father is worried about you! He thinks you’ve been –’
‘My father!’ Thorn’s scornful bark didn’t match the sudden fear in her eyes. ‘My father has only ever worried that I’ll bring disgrace on the family! He can’t find me. He – he mustn’t.’
Cordelia shook her head, sure there were pieces missing from this puzzle. ‘But your father is the one who wants you to be found – when you were kidnapped by the Trouble–’ She hesitated, frowning. ‘Were you really kidnapped by the Troublemakers? Or …’
Cordelia trailed off as Thorn stared at her with wildfire eyes.
‘We’re not that different, are we, Hatmaker?’ Thorn murmured. ‘There’s just one thing that makes all the difference between us.’
Cordelia frowned. She could not guess what the one thing might be.
‘Permission,’ Thorn said, her voice quiet as a cut-throat’s knife. ‘You were born into a Maker family. You’re talented at it but – more importantly – you’re allowed to Make. I am not; I’ve never been allowed to Make. But I couldn’t help myself. From the day I could crawl, to pick daisies from the lawn, I’ve been a Maker.’
Cordelia must have stared for a moment too long, because Thorn suddenly snapped, ‘Rainbow! Dinner!’
The air became charged, the way it does before a lightning strike, and a piece of living darkness surged out of the cave.
It was as long as a warship, nose to tail, with jaws big enough to crunch the king’s carriage. Its tail, flicking menacingly behind it, was a fiery fork large enough to spear the king’s best horse. Cordelia had seen that tail flashing in the boiling water – this was the fearfully strong monster that had pulled the Trouble across the seas at lightning speed!
Leathery wings unfurled like black sails, and its eyes were dreadful dark pools, deep enough to drown in. It wore a jackanapes’ grin as it stalked forward, claws clicking like scimitars on the rock.
The Sea Dragon.
Cordelia knew she should run – but she was caught in those terrible whirlpool eyes.
‘Devour her!’ Thorn demanded.
Cordelia had found out too much: she knew Thorn’s secret and now she was going to be eaten.
The creature opened its jaws, revealing a row of glinting teeth, sharp as swords.
Cordelia couldn’t move. She couldn’t speak. She could only squeeze her eyes shut and hold her breath and think of her family, her father, her friends –
There was a hideous tearing sound: the sickening chomp and mash of jaws.
But Cordelia didn’t feel like she was being eaten.
She opened one eye. A tangle of green guts was jiggling in front of her face.
She opened the other eye and realized they weren’t guts at all.
The Sea Dragon was chomping Turbidus Vines with great relish. Apparently they were so delicious they were causing the Sea Dragon to change colour: its dark scales rippled from snout to tail, becoming a contented sort of lilac. Not the colour of imminent guzzling.
The Sea Dragon, entirely lilac now, swallowed its mouthful of vines, then nudged Cordelia aside with its wide snout to nibble a vine hanging behind her.
This nudge was enough to send the feeling surging back to Cordelia’s legs. She bounded away to the edge of the clearing – ready to flee into the jungle if the Sea Dragon changed its mind about eating her.
She heard Thorn mutter resentfully to the Sea Dragon: ‘Whoever heard of a vegetarian sea monster?’
‘A vegetarian!’ Cordelia burst out indignantly, whirling round. ‘You’ve threatened me with being eaten at least a dozen times!’
‘You’re braver than I thought you’d be,’ Thorn observed. ‘You didn’t even cry. Impressive for a wishy-washy Maker.’
‘I thought you said you were a Maker,’ countered Cordelia.
Thorn looked sharply at her. But the Sea Dragon turned its giant head to the pirate queen and gazed at her benignly, its scales changing from lilac to a friendly pink.
Cordelia was amazed as she took in the scaly creature that was turning rosy from its ridged snout to its splayed claws and flickering tail. It was indeed shaped like a miniature version of the island. Perhaps what Never had said was true: it was a descendant of the creature whose bones began this island. But that wasn’t the most wondrous thing about it. The Sea Dragon seemed to be encouraging Thorn to talk.
But what followed was a long moment of silence. Thorn’s face became a strange mixture of sun and cloud, like the sky deciding whether to storm.
‘I am a Maker. Or … I was,’ she whispered eventually. ‘I made all sorts of treasures, using things I found growing in the garden, or dusty scraps of light that gathered in corners around the house. Birds shed feathers for me, and I’d make bits of ribbon from grass and find special pearls dropped from ladies’ dresses. I made such wonderful things. I felt like I had magic living in my hands.’
The Sea Dragon arced its huge body round Thorn as she gazed at her palms. Its scales rippled from pink to red, giving her strength.
‘But my father told me that Making was not allowed,’ Thorn murmured. ‘He said: Oglethornes are respectable! We don’t dabble in criminal magic! One day he found all my treasures hidden in a chest in the attic and burned them. He – he made me watch. It made the most horrible smoke that filled the whole room …’
Cordelia shuddered; she knew too well the hopeless, acrid stink of burnt magic.
‘I thought if he would just understand how important Making was to me that he’d let me carry on. Making was in my soul; I couldn’t help it. Stopping would have been like snuffing out the sun.’
Thorn stared defiantly at Cordelia, as though daring her to say otherwise. Cordelia returned her stare steadily, waiting for her to go on.
‘So, I set to work secretly making my father an Understanding Hat,’ Thorn continued. ‘I gathered long sticky grass and corkscrew-shaped twigs and Moon Phlox flowers that I thought would help increase his understanding. I even got indigo-coloured conches when we went to the seaside. It took months, and all the while I was pretending to have forgotten Making and be an obedient daughter and a good girl.’
The Sea Dragon’s red scales rippled, turning forget-me-not blue, the colour of good memories.
Cordelia was silently impressed. It sounded as though Thorn had gathered Grasping Grass, Drift Twigs and Conscious Conches without even knowing what they were. But each of those ingredients was perfect for a hat to help a person understand something. Thorn clearly had a natural talent for Making.
‘The night I finally finished the hat, my father was home practising a speech he was going to give to Parliament. My mother died when I was a baby, so it was just him and me in that big, dark house. I carried the hat down to the drawing room and asked him just to put it on for a minute while I explained what Making meant to me.’
Thorn held her hands up, imagining a hat balanced there. Cordelia could almost see an ingenious, madcap confection of woven grass and twigs and creamy yellow Moon Phlox flowers dotted among the shining nuggets of Conscious Conches.
Thorn snatched at the empty air, as though something was being torn from her.
‘But Father wouldn’t listen! He grabbed the hat and stamped on it. Shells shattered, twigs snapped. My Understanding Hat that I’d taken months to make was ruined in moments. Father threw it on the fire.’
The Sea Dragon raised its head to Thorn’s outstretched hands. Its scales glowed peach and creamy, the colour of rain clouds at sunrise, a comforting presence.
‘As my hat burned, Father screamed at me. Making was dangerous, he said, and it must be stopped by any means necessary. He locked me in my room and sent for Doctor Leech.’
Cordelia found she was digging her nails into her hands, her heart breaking like the shells that had been crushed beneath Sir Piers’s boots.
Thorn sighed. ‘The doctor said there was a place I could be sent: a place that took wayward children and turned them good. It was an old castle, perched on Gaunthead Cliffs: Miss Prim’s Academy for the Improvement of Small Minds. They took me there that night.’
‘But Miss Prim’s Academy … it’s just a finishing school, isn’t it?’ Cordelia asked.
Thorn snorted angrily. ‘My father pretended it was a finishing school, and told people I was learning how to embroider and curtsey and make mildly interesting small talk. But it’s not a school; it’s a prison. A prison for children who were born Makers but who aren’t allowed to use their magical gifts. I met other kids there who’d also been sent there to be “cured” of their rebellious magical tendencies. Lots of them were the children of people my father had persuaded to join the Sensible Party: powerful people terrified of the shame their wayward children might bring on their families.
‘Miss Prim might look like a neat, sweet little china doll, but she’s as heartless as one too. Anything that encouraged imagination was banned. All rebellion was punished. We were allowed an excursion to St James’s Park, but only so that our parents could come and check how well behaved and obedient we were becoming.’
Cordelia remembered those rows of solemn children marching through the park in their dark grey uniforms, their noses pointing straight ahead. She, Sam and Goose had always been awestruck, watching such impeccable behaviour. But she realized now that what they had actually been witnessing was prisoners on display. She remembered how, when Miss Prim was overcome by the Trouble Clothes, her pupils had fallen back in frightened silence. They must have been terrified of being punished for laughing, or even blamed for the clothes themselves.
‘The attack on Miss Prim in St James’s Park – was that revenge?’ Cordelia asked. ‘You made those clothes and somehow sent them to her … all for revenge?’
In answer, Thorn held up her hands. Her palms were striped with shimmering white lines as though she was holding slivers of moonbeam.
‘Miss Prim used a cane made of Malwood to hit our hands if we made anything magical. It hurt horribly and left us with a feeling of shame long after she stopped. But I didn’t care. Nothing and nobody could stop me Making.
‘I’d make hats from dried leaves that blew into the yard, or pebbles I found on the ground. I got countless strikes and lost track of my scars. Some kids lost the light in their eyes – when that happened, they were considered “cured”, and they were allowed to go home. But I didn’t. I checked my eyes every night in the dark window reflection. I knew that if I kept my light I could keep Making, no matter how many times Miss Prim used the Malwood cane on me.’
The light in Thorn’s eyes blazed.
‘I carved the word Troublemaker beside my bed. So I’d see it every morning and be reminded to fight another day.’
The Sea Dragon gazed at the pirate queen steadily, its tail rippling, as she turned a tortured face to her palms. Cordelia looked at the pale scars, the marks left from the Malwood cane.
‘I refused to let go of my Making, but Miss Prim’s cruelty changed it,’ Thorn muttered. ‘It got noxious inside me somehow. And now … I’m cursed. The word I carved beside my bed came true. Now I can only make one thing, whether I want to or not. Now I can only make trouble.’