Starfell: Willow Moss and the Lost Day. Dominique Valente

said Willow with a frown. ‘How are we going to find one, then, if they’re impossible to find?’

      ‘Tricky, I said,’ grinned Moreg. ‘But not impossible, if you know where to start.’

      ‘And you do?’

      ‘Oh yes. I’ve found in life that sometimes it’s useful to look back a little, to see when you need to go forward.’

      ‘Huh?’

      ‘We’re going to visit his last known address.’

      ‘Oh,’ said Willow, blinking at the ominous use of ‘we’.

      ‘I think you may need to pack a bag.’

      ‘Oh dear,’ Willow whispered.

       Meanwhile, far away in a hidden stone fortress, where no magic had been able to penetrate for a thousand years, a figure stood alone in the tower and waited.

       Waited for the raven, and the message that could lead to his downfall, betraying his plans before he was ready to seize power.

       There were shadows beneath his eyes; sleep was a tonic he could ill afford.

       But no raven came this day. Just as it hadn’t come the day before.

      At last he allowed himself to breathe a sigh of relief; at last he allowed himself to believe. It had worked.

      He put the box inside his robes, keeping it close to his heart. It had done its job well. Never again would he let the witch get the better of him.

       He left the tower, and found his faithful followers waiting on the winding stone staircase for the news. ‘She can’t remember?’ asked one, his face dark, hidden behind the hood of his robe. ‘Does that mean she won’t be coming?’

       He gave a low, mirthless laugh. ‘Oh, she will. I have no doubt of that. But this time I will be ready.’

      

       3

       The Monster from Under the Bed

      Willow spent the next quarter of an hour trying not to picture the look on her father’s face when he got home from his job as a farm manager for Leighton Apples and found her gone. Moreg, meanwhile, explored the Mosses’ ‘fascinating cottage garden’ in an attempt to give Willow a moment to pack in privacy.

      In her small bedroom, which she shared with Camille, Willow took down Granny Flossy’s old green shaggy-hair carpetbag from atop the cupboard; it was made from the long hairs of a Nach mountain goat. Willow had often wondered if it was age that had turned it green, or if there really were green mountain goats …

      Willow tried to think of what she might need.

      She’d never spent the night away from the cottage before, not even to go to one of her mother’s travelling fairs. She’d somehow always been too young or, when she was old enough, too established as the ‘sensible one’ – which translated as ‘the one who was better suited to look after her father and Granny Flossy’.

      Not that she minded looking after Granny. They looked after each other really. The two had been a pair since she’d come to live with them the year Willow turned five. Willow’s father was sometimes a bit embarrassed by his formerly famous mother, whose potions had once been highly sought commodities, but which now mostly exploded in clouds of coloured smoke that left rat tails on the ceiling.

      He tried to forbid her from making them, and tried locking away her supplies. He didn’t seem to notice how Granny Flossy’s shoulders slumped whenever he reprimanded her, or how much it hurt her when he treated her like a child. Willow knew, though, just like she knew where he hid the key. It was why Granny brewed most of her potions in secret in the attic when he was gone. Willow and Granny spent most of their days there together, with Willow trying her best to ensure that Granny’s potions didn’t blow up the roof again. And even though Camille said that the pair were perfectly matched because Willow’s magic was rather humdrum and Granny’s was rather disastrous, she didn’t mind. Somehow that made things better, not worse.

      But now, as a result of being at home with Granny Flossy all these years, her ‘worldly’ experience was rather limited, to say the least, and she had absolutely no idea what someone was supposed to take on a potentially dangerous adventure. Moreg had told her that they might be gone for a week, or two, if everything went according to plan, and that it was best for the moment not to say anything about what they were really doing in case her parents came tearing after them (which might make saving the world harder than it needed to be).

      Willow’s sensible side had come up with a few objections. Like, why, for instance, she had the questionable luck of being home alone when the most feared witch in all of Starfell came knocking? Or the fact that this plan meant that no one knew where she was going, or, more importantly, who she was with …? A rather fearsome who as it turned out.

      But ‘no’ didn’t seem a word Moreg Vaine often heard. So Willow had said yes, partly because she was a bit too afraid to say no, but also because it sounded like a pretty serious problem, so shouldn’t she try to help … if she could? But mainly she’d said yes because hadn’t she always secretly wished for something like this? Even that morning while she was hanging up her sisters’ underwear on the line she had wished that she could go somewhere exciting just once, somewhere beyond the Mosses’ cottage walls, and do something that didn’t involve finding Jeremiah Crotchett’s teeth. But, as Granny Flossy always said, wishes are dangerous things, especially when they come true. Which was why, now, she was a bit worried that this was a bit more adventure than she’d bargained for …

      Willow looked at her belongings and frowned. She probably needed more than just an extra pair of socks?

      It took her another five minutes to gather everything she might need, which coincidentally amounted to everything she owned:

       Her second dress, pond green – previously belonging to Juniper and taken up rather haphazardly by her Granny Flossy, so that it bubbled around her feet like a balloon

       Three pairs of thick bottle-green wool socks

       A large, rather lumpy fisherman’s jersey of indeterminate colour, mostly pea green – a hand-me-down from her father

       An enormous, and very old, slightly mouldy-looking khaki-green nightdress – once belonging to Granny Flossy

       One pale-blue scarf dotted throughout with small white horseshoes – still belonging to her sister Camille

      Briefly she wondered why almost everything she owned was a rather unfortunate shade of green. She then stood thinking for a minute, her fingers drumming her chin, trying to make up her mind: should she, or shouldn’t she? Then she knelt down, and after a bit of scrambling she pulled out the monster who lived under the bed, clasping him firmly by his long tail. This was to his absolute horror, which sounded like this: ‘Oh no! Oh, me greedy aunt!