During the night Mia returned to the map room, anxious to search it one more time. Bella had been so insistent that she should never again go in there, she believed that the room must hold some important secret!
The door was locked. She tried with all her might to open it. It wouldn’t budge. Not willing to give up, she decided to try one of the tricks she had learned from the Olde Magick book. She pulled a clip from her hair, and holding it in her hand stared hard at it. She must use the power of her thoughts to convince the old metal hair-clip that it was a key, the exact key for this lock, the key that would open this door and let her in.
Not relaxing her mind for a single second, she felt the clip grow heavy, its shape slowly changing as it became the key of the map room door. She put the key in the lock and almost whooped for joy when the door swung open before her.
It took her only a few minutes of rooting around to discover that the map room did not contain the flying coat. Disappointed, she looked around her, and was drawn once again to the glass ball on the table.
By the faint glow of candlelight, the glass looked dull and insignificant, nothing special at all. Maybe if she opened the drapes slightly? A crescent moon peeped in through the gap in the heavy, damask cloth. The glass ball slowly turned a pale cream colour. As Mia lifted it up to look at it, the liquid inside turned milky. All she could see in it was her own face, her large eyes and nervous mouth and loose, tumbling hair. She sighed with vexation and disappointment. The ball wasn’t magic at all!
She thought of home, a picture instantly filling her mind. The ball became warm in her hands, she could feel the liquid inside it moving. She almost dropped it with shock on seeing her house appear in its glassy curves. It was raining lightly and she could see the raindrops running down the window of her own bedroom. But the house looked dark and empty! Thoughts of the house next door, came, unbidden, into her mind and she was shocked to see Bella’s old house, covered in a rampant green and yellow ivy that almost covered the front of the house. Roses had appeared around the windows and doors, pink dusky blooms heavy with rain, while a huge daisy bush almost blocked the path to the porch.
What was the ball telling her? she wondered. In a panic she thought of her Mum and Dad. Please let me see them, she wished. The colour of the glass began to change, becoming almost clear as her mother’s puzzled face appeared. Mia could see her so clearly, the freckles on her forehead, the way she wrinkled her nose when she concentrated on something. She was sitting at a dining table, surrounded by people. The man next to her was trying to talk to her, but Mum was ignoring him. She looked up from the table, turning her head this way and that and then looked straight ahead, worried, frowning, before resuming conversation.
‘Mum, it’s me!’ sobbed Mia, as she watched her mother turn and make polite dinner conversation. Her Dad sat across from her. Matthew Murphy suddenly sat bolt upright as if seeing her, his eyes staring straight ahead of him. Mia concentrated on her Dad. ‘Mia’ – she could read his lips saying the word. Then the ball changed again, becoming a swirling mass of colours, the images disappearing. She took a deep breath – what about Rory and Granny Rose? The ball was useless, no help at all, showing her some kind of woods, the trees too thick for her to see anything in the darkness, and then just a rose. Annoyed, she put the glass ball back down, watching the liquid inside settle.
At least she had seen her parents, but as they seemed to be still in America, they must be unaware of her disappearance.
Mia felt utterly lost and alone. Without the flying coat, she would never be able to find her way home again, and in time her family would forget about her and get on with their own lives. She would spend the rest of her life imprisoned here in the castle with Bella, training to be an apprentice mage or wizard, or whatever the old woman wanted her to become, her only consolation the dragons whom she cared for.
Making sure the room looked untouched, she closed the drapes and locked the door behind her, slipping silently down the stairs and back to her room, where Trig waited patiently. The blue dragon nuzzled her with his snout and licked her with his rough, scratchy tongue.
‘Oh, Trig! What am I going to do?’ sighed Mia. ‘I just want to go back home!’