“Oh!” Rachel Griffin tumbled out of dreamland and landed on her derriere. “Ouch!”
With thumps and loud cries Joy, Valerie, and the princess rained down on the grass around her. Rachel could see her friends in the brilliant moonlight. Newly-fallen leaves crinkled as the girls moved, filling the air with their autumn scent.
The starry sky overhead was mirrored on the reflecting lake, a hundred yards to her left. Also shimmering on its surface were the spires and belfries of the castle-like Roanoke Hall. Along the water’s edge, college students, in their long dark robes, kept watch. Presumably—though, from where she sat wincing, it was too far away for Rachel to see—the glass cases suspended above the lake’s silvery bottom were filled with conjurations and alchemical talismans undergoing degossamerization under the light of the full moon. The rowboats that normally floated on the reflecting lake had been pulled up onto the grass; their painted eyes glinted brightly.
The blow to her backside did not sting as sharply as her disappointment. Rachel had been longing to visit the dreamlands again, ever since her first trip a month ago, during the second week of the school year. It was quite a let-down to be back in the world of the waking so soon. Today had been so disturbing. She had faced both a rogue jumbo jet that nearly crashed into Roanoke Hall and a demon bent on destroying the world. When she had finally returned to the safety and comfort of her dorm room, she had felt so very weary, but sleep had eluded her. Instead, she had lain awake, reliving in her perfect memory the most upsetting parts of her day.
When the opportunity presented itself for this nocturnal adventure, she had jumped at the chance. A trip into the land of dreams promised to be a distraction from reliving the day’s terrors. With high hopes, she had set off with the others. Then, someone had disregarded Zoë’s instructions to hold hands at all times, resulting in more than half of their party tumbling into the waking world again.
“Oooff!” exclaimed Nastasia Romanov, the Princess of Magical Australia. In her proper, Magical Australian accent she softly murmured, “That was…disturbing.”
“Ow! I landed on my camera! Ow!” Valerie Hunt’s voice rang out. “Boy, that hurt! I hope I didn’t break anything!”
“You mean like a rib?” Joy O’Keefe gasped breathlessly, as if the wind had been knocked out of her. “Ow! Oh!”
“No, ribs heal. I mean a lens,” Valerie replied, followed by some rustling. “I think it’s okay. My father gave me this camera only a week before he disapp…” Her voice wobbled only the tiniest bit. “I wouldn’t want anything to happen to it.”
“Glad it’s okay,” Rachel said softly, rubbing the part of her that ached the most.
“Princess, are you okay?” Joy crawled rapidly to Nastasia, who still lay supine, and hovered over her. “Is anything broken? Shall I fetch the nurse?”
“I am whole,” the princess replied, embarrassed as always by Joy’s ebullient fawning. “The only thing bruised is my dignity.”
“Shhhh!” Rachel peered around in the darkness, searching for movement. “We should keep our voices down. The proctors’ll hear us and send us back to bed.” She bit her lip against a wave of pain. Her eyes watered. “Oh. My tailbone smarts!”
Valerie rose to her feet, still fiddling with her camera. “You’re so British, Rachel. And I don’t just mean your accent! Who says ‘tailbone?’ Why don’t you just say…”
Lamps lit up along the west side of the Commons.
The motion of Valerie coming to her feet had caused the will-o-wisps to swarm out of their nighthoods and flit around inside the glass globe of the tall lamps. The soft wisp-light illuminated a hooded figure who had previously been hidden by the darkness.
A frisson of terror shot through Rachel. Was this another Veltdammerung follower come to abduct her and her friends again?
She whistled sharply.
Magical energy rushed through her body, tickling her lips as tiny blue sparks left her mouth. Accompanied by the scent of evergreens, the sparkles flew through the air to swirl around the hooded figure. The figure stopped moving, paralyzed.
“Who’s that?” cried Joy, frightened.
“Possibly one of the cultists who kidnapped us earlier today,” exclaimed the princess. “They wore hoods.”
Valerie raised her camera and snapped a picture. In the brighter light of the flash, Rachel found an instant match in her memory for the feminine nose and mouth visible beneath the hood. The last time she had seen this particular hooded figure, there had been a little paper soda jerk’s cap perched atop her head. The paper hat was not currently in evidence.
Also, this hooded figure carried an oboe.
“Obé!” Chagrined at having frozen a fellow student, Rachel performed the Word of Ending cantrip by extending her index finger upward and moving it horizontally. “Ever so sorry, Miss Black! I mistook you for an evil Mortimer Egg follower.”
The young woman in the hood rolled her shoulders, as if to confirm that she was no longer paralyzed.
“Understandable, Griffin. You had a hard day.” Xandra Black’s normally dry sardonic tone had a touch of compassion. “Being kidnapped, nearly sacrificed, and all that.”
“You are one who warned me about touching Joshua March, are you not?” Nastasia stood up, brushing off the long black academic robes she wore over her pajamas, the legs of which stuck out at the very bottom. Her long flowing curls glinted golden in the wisp-light. Even having tumbled from dreamland, Rachel’s friend appeared as incomparably lovely as a magical princess should. “The one who works in the Storm King Café?”
“That’s me. Flops-Over-Dead-Chick.” Xandra Black nodded with wry moroseness. “Or perhaps, Constantly-Possessed-By-Annoying-Voices-Chick would be appropriate. Take your pick.” She paused. “Or you could be truly non-conventional and call me by my actual name.”
“What are you doing standing here…in the darkness…in the middle of the night?” Rachel asked, curiosity bubbling out of her.
Xandra gave an apologetic shrug. “Waiting for you.”
Before Rachel could express surprise, Xandra’s head snapped backward. Her lips opened, and a new, deeper voice came from her mouth. This new voice did not need to move Xandra’s jaw to speak. “In one minute and twenty seconds, the proctors will arrive. In thirty-two seconds, Zoë Forrest will reappear in the center of the commons. Run.”
Rachel ran. Valerie and Joy followed.
The princess called after them stiffly, “Why should we be afraid of the proctors?”
“It’s the middle of the night,” Rachel replied over her shoulder, holding up the skirts of her black academic robes as she sprinted, “and we’re not in bed!”
Behind her, she could hear the other girls, feet pelting and breath panting—except for the princess, who glided calmly. To their left, two dark-clad proctors left the doorway of Roanoke Hall to head their way: a slight figure with light-colored hair and a very tall figure wearing a cowboy hat. Neither one was her friend, Mr. Fuentes, who might possibly have turned a blind eye to their midnight activities.
Rachel ran faster—not that it helped. She pumped her legs as quickly as she could, her breath coming in short spurts, but Joy, Valerie, and Xandra all dashed past her. She was just too small to keep up with the longer legs of her friends.
A puff of mist appeared in the center of the commons. Zoë Forrest stepped out of it, holding the hand of Sigfried Smith. Wrapped around the orphan boy was the long, furry, serpentine length of his familiar and best friend, Lucky the Dragon.
“What part of ‘you must hold on’ did I not make clear?” Regarding the other girls with a mixture of annoyance and amusement, Zoë spoke in a voice that held faint traces of a New Zealand accent. She twirled her right forelock, which was long and braided, A dappled feather had been stuck into it. The rest of her hair was cut pixie-short. Tonight, her locks were pale pink and the feather was magenta with maroon spots.
Unlike the other girls, Zoë wore her street clothes, blue jeans and a sweater. On her feet were a pair of marvelous silver sandals. These allowed her to move in and out of the realm of dreams. They had been made for her by a relative who was a Maori shaman.
“In our defense,” Nastasia spoke graciously, as she joined them, “I do not believe any of us intended to let go. I tried to maneuver to lead us down the Way. But, as I was in the middle of the group, this proved impossible.”
“That was wicked awesome!” Sigfried shouted, his voice carrying through the night. He was tall and brawny for a fourteen-year-old, with short curly golden hair and handsome boyish features. He spoke with a British accent, gesturing expansively. “We walked in dreams! Did you see that, Lucky? Did you see that, cute girl members of the Dreadfully Violent Adventuring Club? We’re pioneers! Like astronauts going into space, only dreamier. We’re dream astronauts. What’s the Greek word for dream? Oneiros, or something, right? We’re oneironauts!” He jumped up and flashed his girlfriend a brilliant smile. “I hope you took lots of pictures, Goldilocks! We want to record this for posterity!”
“Oh, I’ve been taking pictures!” Valerie Hunt, Fearless Reporter Girl, held up her camera and flashed another picture. Rachel could not see her clearly, but she knew that the other girl had short flaxen hair, a squarish jaw, and an intelligent sparkle in her eyes. She had been in bed when Zoë brought the others out of dreamland into Dee Hall to pick her up, so she was still dressed in her bright yellow Hello Kitty pajamas. “But whether the photos will come out? That’s a different question.”
“Freaky, spooky-strange place!” Lucky the Dragon spoke in his gravelly dragon voice, as he unwrapped himself and flew upward. His long sinuous body stretched between ten and twenty feet, depending on his mood. Rachel could not see the colors in the darkness but knew that the fur covering his body and his four legs was golden, and his long whiskers, his back ridges, and the puff at the tip of his tail were a fiery red. His short curling horns were of a tawny ivory. “Let’s go back! I want to eat that dream chicken!”
“I…don’t think you should eat up there,” Joy O’Keefe said nervously, brushing her mousy brown hair from her heart-shaped face. A bulky, hand-knitted sweater covered the top of her baby blue pajamas. As a seventh daughter, Joy’s clothes consisted mainly of hand-me-downs. The sweater had been carefully darned in several places. “It might be like eating conjured food. The cramps, after it vanishes from your body twenty-four hours later, are terrible. Not that I would know, of course. But if you ever have a parcel of older sisters, and they dare you to eat the conjured sugar cubes and cupcakes at a children’s tea party, say ‘No!’”
Rachel glanced around. The tall figures of the proctors were halfway across the commons, moving purposefully in their direction. The shorter one broke into a jog. Her heart rate doubled. She so wanted something nice to happen to balance her horrid day. Getting caught for breaking curfew was not what she had in mind.
“Quick, the proctors are coming!” she spoke rapidly. “If we all hold hands, with Zoë on one side and the princess on the other, Zoë can lead us in. Then we can turn and follow the princess—without the huge rumpus caused by having the prin-cess in the middle.”
“But I need a hand free,” objected Valerie, “or I can’t use my camera.”
“That is what caused the trouble last time,” said the prin-cess.
“Maybe the people beside her can hold Valerie’s elbow,” offered Rachel, “Or Lucky could wrap around her and then hold onto two other people.”
Zoë shrugged. “That might work, Griffin. Let’s try it.”
The group grasped hands and ran, ignoring the proctors’ shouts. Mist rose around them, obscuring the campus and the running adults behind them. Rachel moved through the thick pearl-gray fog, unable to see anything except her friends. She held onto the princess with one hand and Xandra with the other. Xandra held Joy’s hand, who held Siggy’s. Lucky’s head and front claws rested on Sigfried’s shoulders. His long, sinewy body wrapped once around Sigfried and twice around Valerie, and the claws of his back feet held firmly to Zoë’s waist. His slender tail with its red-tasseled tip waved about freely.
Rachel breathed in the now-familiar dream-scent of lilacs and plaster-of-Paris. She gazed about alertly. Something about adventure, about learning new things, made her feel alive. She loved seeing previously unseen sights. It was as if her mind needed to drink in new knowledge for her mental gears to fully engage. She looked around eagerly, making certain that her eyes passed over everything. If she failed to notice something now, it would be preserved in her memory so that she could examine it later. Of course, surrounded by thick mist as they were, there was not much to see.
“Where…are we?” Xandra’s jaw, the only part of her visible beneath her hood, gaped. Beneath her school robes, she wore a navy blue nightgown and pink bunny slippers. Rachel had no idea what had become of her oboe. “Where did the school go? What is all this mist? I’ve been swallowed by a mist whale, haven’t I? Tell me the truth. I can bear it!”
“We’re in dreamland,” Zoë replied casually, as if people stepped into dreams every day, “where people go at night when they sleep.”
“That’s a…place?” The normally unflappable Xandra’s voice squeaked in astonishment.
The mist parted around them, and Joy screamed.
Ahead of them, two bodies dangled in the air. Each hung from a hangman’s noose. Black cloth bags covered their heads. From the neck down, they wore black trousers, black vests, and fresh clean white shirts with enormous sleeves pleated like the bellows of an accordion. These traditional Hungarian garments might have been humorous had their surroundings not been so grisly.
Their feet swung back and forth, the rope creaking. Some-where, crows cawed.
At least, Rachel thought it was crows.
“That’s just…a dream, right?” gasped Joy, her face pale. Rachel swallowed and grasped the princess’s hand more tightly. Nastasia gave her fingers a reassuring squeeze.
“Someone’s been watching too many horror flicks,” Zoë smirked. “Don’t get your panties in a bunch, girls.”
“I’m not a girl,” objected Siggy.
Joy elbowed him, giggling.
“Do you wear panties?” asked Zoë. “Hmm? I thought not. The point is: here in dreams, we see weird and horrible stuff all the time. Get used to it.”
“Like naked people.” Rachel shuddered, recalling her first visit to dreamland.
She tried not to stare at the dangling bodies, but there was something hypnotizing about their motion, as they swung back and forth from their scaffolding. Was some poor student at the school really dreaming about this? She felt sorry for whomever was having this nightmare. With a second shudder, she wondered if she, too, would now dream about this.
Turning away from the execution dream, she looked around. Long curtains of mist, much taller than the students, undulated around them. Each curve held a different living diorama, which Rachel knew, from her previous excursion to dreamland, was the dream of a single individual. Behind them, in a different curve of the mist curtain, a boy ran endlessly uphill. Around the next bend, Rachel glimpsed a red-headed girl and her father building a go-cart.
Valerie lifted her camera. The blinding flash lit the gallows and its unlucky burden.
The scene of the hanging in the town square changed to a rocky peak in bright sunlight. Mountain goats leapt from rock to rock. Across the way, the boy now ran uphill under a glaring sun. The girl’s father held a camera. He took pictures of the go-cart using a bright flash.
“Look, Goldilocks,” Siggy grinned enthusiastically at his girlfriend, “you changed people’s dreams.”
“So, I did,” mused Valerie, her reporter-girl instincts intri-gued.
“If you can get everyone to dream about going to Mars, the space program will become popular again,” crowed Siggy. “Then, all we need is to turn invisible and sneak aboard the Mars ship. If we turn the crewmen into ferrets, it will compensate for the change in mass.”
Lucky said hopefully, “Could we turn the astronauts into chickens? That would be tastier!”
“Okay, enough of this.” Zoë glared at Lucky. “Now it’s your turn, Princess. Lead on, Fearless Leader! We follow.”
“Very well.” Nastasia cleared her throat. “We shall now depart for Magical Australia.”
“We’re going to Magical Australia?” The words burst from Rachel in an explosion of pure joy.
“Ace!” shouted Siggy, punching the air with his free hand. Lucky’s head bounced up and down on his shoulder, but the length of his body was wrapped around Sigfried, so he did not let go. His great jade eyes glinted with eagerness, too.
“We’re…going to Magical Australia tonight? We’re leaving school grounds?” murmured Xandra. “Oh. Just great.”
Rachel gave Xandra’s hand an encouraging squeeze. The older girl had not signed up for this, the way the rest of them had. She had been sent by her Voices. Xandra gave a very quick squeeze back. The upperclassman towered above Rachel, which was not difficult, as Rachel was particularly short. She shared her diminutive size with her part-Korean mother. She had also inherited her mother’s Asian eyes and her power of perfect recall.
Unfortunately, she had not inherited her mother’s beautiful, thick locks. Strands of Rachel’s fine, black hair had escaped her hair clip and now tickled her face. Unable to use her hands to brush it away, she had to settle for twitching her nose and blowing.
“Zoë and I went two days ago,” Nastasia continued. “We visited a dream version of the castle where I live when I am not at school. Zoë says she could take us down into the real castle—the waking world version—but it might be hard to explain to my parents how we came to be there.” She paused. “Hard to explain to Mother. Father…would, no doubt, understand. Though by the time he was done, the explanation would invariably include wombats and emu.” The princess sighed.
The others laughed, but a sharp pain stabbed through Rachel.
Nastasia and Zoë had gone to Magical Australia without her? They had experimented with Nastasia’s secret gift without her? Zoë was supposed to be her friend. Rachel was the one who had insisted on including her in their group, and the princess was Rachel’s best friend.
How could they have gone without her?
“We were at a castle earlier today,” Sigfried volunteered. “An evil creature called a D-bone tried to sacrifice us to destroy the world. Glad we avoided that. It would have been messy, not to mention inconvenient. If the world were destroyed, where would Lucky and I keep all our gold? Not to mention that being sacrificed might have ruined our entire day! Fortunately, we were saved by some bloke named Finn. Probably a big fish or a shark or something.”
Rachel’s body tensed, but she managed not to blurt out: No, you were saved by me!
“That was demon, not debone,” stated the princess. “Our rescuer was our math tutor’s husband, Finn MacDannan.”
“Finn MacDannan? You mean the rock star, Red Ryder?” Zoë sounded truly impressed for the first time since Rachel had met the laid-back girl.
Xandra mused, “He’s thought to be the best enchanter alive today.”
“He was amazing,” Rachel admitted.
The MacDannans were family friends, and it was right to give credit where credit was due. Still, she could not help adding sadly to herself: even if he wasn’t the one who saved the world. I did that, and my uncle, Myrddin the Ghost Boy.
Suddenly, her lips curved upward. She always felt uncomfortable when she ended up in the limelight or people made too much of her. She should be grateful no one knew of her part in the previous evening’s activities.
“What castle was that,” Valerie asked, snapping another picture. “The one where the demon nearly sacrificed you?” She sounded as if she did not quite believe Sigfried.
“Beaumont,” said Rachel. “It’s in Transylvania.”
“Oooh, scary,” laughed Joy.
The dreamscape changed. A huge gray castle draped in ivy rose above them.
“That’s Beaumont!” Rachel craned her head to look up at the vast basalt walls.
A violent longing seized her.
All her life, she had wanted to visit this castle. Her hero, librarian-adventurer Darius Northwest had disappeared there in 1868, presumably slain by some monster he had been investigating. It was so frustrating to have been so close and not have had the opportunity to go inside. She wanted to explore it now but wisely restrained the impulse to pull her friends headlong toward the vast edifice.
If any clues to Northwest’s final fate remained, they would not be in this dream Beaumont.
Siggy gawked up at the towering basalt walls. “Where’d this castle come from?”
Zoë peered downward, one hand resting on Lucky’s sinuous tail where it slipped under her arm and around her waist. “Harder for me to look out of dreams than to look in. Still. Pretty sure we’re in the dream of a Starkadder prince.”
“Those are the princes of Magical Bavaria, right?” asked Sig-fried.
Joy elbowed the handsome boy again, blushing and loudly giggling. “No, silly, that’s Vladimir Von Dread. And besides, it’s just Bavaria. Not Magical Bavaria. The Unwary know about it, too.”
“Stop jabbing me, Joy,” scowled Sigfried.
Joy wilted like a plucked flower. Rachel’s heart went out to her. She knew from books that girls who fancied boys they were not dating often poked and hit them. Joy had a huge crush on Sigfried, but her love was unrequited. He was completely devoted to Valerie.
“Okay, people!” Zoë addressed the group. “This trip off into the wop-wops requires us to walk along some kooky rail that the princess creates. It’s not very wide. But so far, we haven’t fallen off.”
A silvery beam like liquid moonlight, about as wide as a train rail, appeared before Nastasia. She stepped gingerly forward onto the narrow moonlight track.
“Wow!” Rachel breathed. She leaned toward the princess and whispered very softly, “Is this what our Elf taught you?” Nastasia nodded and squeezed her hand.
Rachel took a step forward. The silver track gave slightly beneath her foot. Her excitement swelled. Pushing aside the faint ache left by the knowledge that Nastasia had done this two days ago without her—nothing should interfere with the joy of the coming adventure—she stepped forward.
Sternly, she also tamped down her tremendous desire to possess this traveling talent of the princess’s. It was not seemly to envy a friend’s gift.
They were going to travel!
Rachel Griffin wanted to travel more than she could say—literally, for words could not express the depth of her wanderlust nor the breadth of her longing to see faraway places. Perhaps it was because she had spent so much of her life at so few places: Gryphon Park and its attached town of Gryphon-on-Dart, Hot Springs Beach at Thulehavn, occasionally London, and now here in New York State at Roanoke Academy. Perhaps it was because she had spent so many hours curled up in the library at the top of Grandfather’s tower, reading fanciful tales; perhaps because she had spent so much time immersed in Daring Northwest’s works of discovery and adventure.
She wanted to stand upon high peaks and catch glimpses of distant sapphire seas. She wanted to drink from “yet untasted wells.” She wanted to meet fairy creatures that she had read about in books. She wanted to kick sand on the beaches of Neverland, to pick a ripe volume from the book trees of Oz, to drink the Mad Hatter’s tea in Wonderland.
At the very least, she wanted to feel the hot desert winds of Magical Australia!
Rachel Griffin wanted to know everything.
But everything was a big subject, and even she had to occasionally admit that some things were more interesting than others. What she wanted, most of all, was to know secrets, things unseen by eyes other than hers.
Besides, a little voice whispered very quietly in the back of her mind, if she did not discover more, if she did not learn about the greater world and the threats it represented, how could she protect her loved ones from coming dangers?
Behind her, the others had stepped onto the silvery beam. Rachel gave the impressive edifice of Dream Beaumont one last wistful glance. As she turned her head, she caught a glimpse of the same wanderlust that burned within her reflected in the face of Sigfried Smith.
Their gazes met, and they grinned at each other.
“The Starkadders are the princes of Transylvania,” she kindly answered Sigfried’s previous question. “One of them must have heard us say the name of the castle, the way the dreamers saw Valerie’s flash.”
“Transylvania, Bavaria,” Sigfried shrugged, “what’s the dif-ference? They’re both made-up places, right?”
“No, you goofball! They’re real!” Joy snickered, poking him again with her elbow.
“Don’t do that!” Sigfried jerked away from Joy.
He jerked too hard.
Siggy and Joy lost their balance and tumbled off the silvery Way, dragging the others after them. Rachel fell knees-first onto the soft cloudy stuff of dreamland. Despite the wrenching to her shoulders, she managed to keep hold on the princess and Xan-dra.
Joy was not so lucky. Her hand slipped out of Sigfried’s.
“Oops!” Joy cried, grabbing for Siggy again, but it was too late.