3. Inside the Punishment Cupboard

Two weeks after Xar made his spectacular escape from Gormincrag, a young Warrior princess called Wish was sitting inside a locked cupboard in the Tower of Education in Queen Sychorax’s iron Warrior fort, when she made an important, and perhaps unfortunate, discovery.

Iron Warrior fort was the largest hill-fort you could possibly imagine, protected by seven great ditches cut into the hill, and the Great Wall Sychorax had recently rebuilt. It was constantly patrolled by Warriors looking out for Witches, who would shoot anything Magic that they saw on sight.

Like Xar, Wish was having imprisonment problems.

That’s right.

I did say she was sitting inside a locked cupboard.

Queen Sychorax, Wish’s terrifying mother, was expecting visitors, and whenever Queen Sychorax had visitors she got Madam Dreadlock, Wish’s tutor, to lock Wish and her bodyguard in the Punishment Cupboard of the schoolroom until after the visitors had left.

So Wish and her bodyguard had already been sitting in this locked, cramped cupboard for hours and hours and hours, and Wish had been whiling away the time by reading and writing stories.

Wish didn’t really like small spaces, so she was keeping her spirits up by singing softly to herself as she read and wrote.

“NO FEAR! That’s the Warrior’s marching song! NO FEAR! We sing it as we march along! NO FEAR! ’Cause the Warriors’ hearts are strong! Is a Warrior heart a-wailing, is a Warrior heart a-failing, is a Warrior heart a-railing? NO FEAR!”

Now, Wish wasn’t entirely what you might expect from a Warrior princess. Warrior princesses were supposed to be like Wish’s six older stepsisters, tall and tough and good at things like archery and shooting ogres with their arrows from a distance of thirty paces.

But Wish was small and sweet-natured and determined, with an eyepatch over one eye, and hair so disobediently flyaway that it looked as if it were being blown about by some personal independent wind.

But worse than that, she was MAGIC.

Wish had always been a little clumsy and forgetful, but when she turned thirteen her Magic had come in, and the problem had gotten worse. Objects she touched slipped through her hands like water or tingled with electricity when she put her fingers on them, clothes ripping, shoes coming loose, keys missing, needles wriggling to life in her hands, rugs inexplicably moving beneath her feet or curled up at the edges when she stepped on them…

Goodness knows HOW she was Magic, as she was a Warrior, but the fact remained that her eyepatch was hiding a Magic eye, and it wasn’t any ordinary kind of Magic, it was Magic-that-works-on-iron.

And up until now, iron had been the only thing that Magic could not work on.

There was a spoon standing upright on one of Wish’s shoulders.

It was a perfectly ordinary iron dinner spoon…

Except that he was alive.

Alive, and bending this way and that, and dancing to the sound of Wish’s singing, along with about thirty or so little iron pins, which were also swaying and jumping and regrouping to the rhythm. The spoon had a gentle glow coming from the bowl of his head that lit up the cupboard and the iron pins, and the book Wish was reading.

This was a Wizard’s Spelling Book, and it was yet another enchanted object that Wish really, really should not have owned. It had once belonged to Xar, but Caliburn had given it to Wish in case Witches came after her in the future.

The Spelling Book is a complete guide to the entire magical world, so it is filled with recipes, potions, fairy stories, everything you might need to cope in a world of Magic.

It was in this book that Wish made her important, and perhaps unfortunate, discovery.

“Bodkin!” Wish exclaimed excitedly. “Look! I’ve found a SPELL TO GET RID OF WITCHES!”

Bodkin was an anxious, skinny boy about the same age as Wish. He was finding being the Assistant Bodyguard to the princess really rather testing, because he didn’t like fighting very much, he had an unfortunate tendency to fall asleep in situations of physical danger, and trying to control the uncontrollable little princess was an impossible task, because she seemed to have absolutely no idea what rules were at all.

He too was reading—a book called The Rules of Warrior Bodyguarding: THE NEXT LEVEL—but he put the book aside, excited but a little wary, to look over Wish’s shoulder.

And there it was, in a section of the book entitled “Write Your Own Story.”

On the left-hand side of the page, Wish had written down her New Year’s Resolutions: “Noo Year’s Ressolushuns: 1. I wull work hard at my reeding and riteing and arithmatick so I can be topp of the klass. 2. I wull mak a gud impresshun on the teecher. 3. I wull impress my muther so she dus not think I am a Dissapointment.”

And on the right-hand side of the page, Wish had written down in completely different beautiful curly writing, the words of a spell.

A Spell to Get Rid of Witches

Gather all ingredients and STIR with a living spoon.

Ingredients

One: Giant’s Last Breath from Castle Death.

Two: Feathers from a Witch.

Three: Tears from a Frozen Queen.

But after “Three” the writing got a bit smudgy, as if the writer had suddenly been surprised in the middle of doing something.

“And do you want to know something truly extraordinary?” said Wish, eyes shining like stars.

Not really, thought Bodkin, who was beginning to get a very, very bad feeling about this.

“I wasn’t even looking for it! I was just starting to write a story in this section of the book, because Caliburn gave me one of his feathers to do that with, and suddenly the feather started writing all by itself!!!”

“Oh dear…” said Bodkin, whose bad feeling was getting worse. “Are you sure it wasn’t just you writing it? That’s a bit spooky…”

“I’m certain!” said Wish. “It’s not my writing, and it definitely isn’t my spelling.”

It was true.

Wish was very clever, but she had certain difficulties in the “reeding and riteing and arithmatick” departments. It may have been something to do with being Magic, but somehow all the letters and the numbers wandered about doing complicated alphabet dance exercises in her head, and they wouldn’t stay still however hard she concentrated. It was very wearing.

Only that morning, her teacher, Madam Dreadlock, had been so exasperated with Wish’s spelling that she had made Wish write “I am a Fule” on a piece of paper and hang it around her neck as a punishment.

But every single word on the page Wish was showing Bodkin was spelled absolutely correctly.

“You’re right,” Bodkin confirmed. “That doesn’t look anything like your spelling…”

“Don’t you see what this means?” said Wish, excitedly waving her arms around. “The Witches have come back, but now we have a spell to get rid of them! We HAVE to get this spell to Xar, so he can give it to his father, and then the Wizards can fight back against the Witches…”

Bodkin looked at her in horror. There were so many things wrong with this plan that he didn’t know where to start.

“Princess,” said Bodkin, carefully, as if talking to a dangerous lunatic. “I hate to mention this, but we are sitting inside a locked cupboard, in a Warrior fort encircled by seven ditches, each one protected by your mother’s guards, and Xar is somewhere out there, we have no idea where, on the other side of your mother’s Great Wall. How are we going to get out of the cupboard? How will we get over the Wall? How would we find Xar?”

Wish frowned, thinking for a second. “We will go to my mother,” said Wish, “and explain everything and ask for her help.”

“Everything?” squeaked Bodkin. “We can’t explain everything! What about your Magic, and the spoon and the pins and the Spelling Book? Look!”

There was a large notice attached to the inside of the cupboard door.

The notice read: