Modern Magick

The Fifth Britain: 6

All right, usually I love travelling by unicorn.

I tend to assume that Addie knows her way from everywhere to anywhere, which, as it turns out, is far too much to expect of the poor girl. Also, as anyone who's ever taken more than an occasional leisurely hack across the countryside will tell you, the delights of being on horseback tend to wane after a certain point. Zareen and I made the long journey to Norfolk in a state of increasingly grim determination, wrestling with mobile navigation systems which had no idea that Nautilus Cove even existed.

I might have been ungenerous enough to curse Jay and his inconvenient absence, but that was only while I was still airborne, gritting my teeth against the surprisingly cold wind while my hair blew into my mouth and my derriere voiced vociferous complaints about its treatment at my uncaring hands. Once Addie brought us down on a quiet little slip of a beach along the Norfolk coast and we were able to dismount — and once the warmer air down there had somewhat thawed out my face — I lost all desire to eviscerate Jay and was able to remember that I was worried about him.

I checked my phone. Nothing.

Patting Addie's steaming neck, I whispered foolish compliments into her ears and promised her the biggest bag of chips she had ever seen in her life, just as soon as I made it to a chippie. She rolled her eyes at me and wandered off, her shadowy friend trotting amiably in her wake.

'Right, then,' I said, looking up and down the deserted beach. The greyish sea lapped apathetically at the rocky sand, a few clouds hung listlessly in a patchy blue sky, and behind us a cliff rose vertically to an unscaleable height. 'Addie?' I called. 'You wouldn't happen to know how to get in?' I cursed myself for not having paid more attention on the way out, a few days before. Riding with the baron had proved to be a distracting experience.

I had not really expected a response, but a moment later Zareen said: 'Up there!' and pointed a ways back along the beach.

Something was glittering upon the sheer cliff face. Fittingly, it shone in rainbow colours.

We went that way.

The glow was coming from a sliver of jagged crystal embedded into the otherwise drab rock. When I touched it, the colours faded, leaving it an unremarkable chunk of opaque white stone. But the world shifted around me and dissolved, and when everything stopped spinning I was on another, whiter, pearlier beach, and the sea had gone all iridescent. Nautilus Cove.

I mentally doubled Addie's upcoming chip rations.

Zareen materialised a moment later and stood smiling for a moment, taking great inhalations of the balmy air. It did smell rather heavenly, come to think of it — like the brightest, freshest sea air mingled with something flowery. I couldn't see any flowers, but one doesn't question things like that when one is prancing through a magickal dell. It's the way they are.

I'd had a private, lingering fear that we might return to find the Striding Spire had, somehow, gone. Stridden Off, in the way that it used to, or perhaps been somehow relocated by an indignant Ministry. But it hadn't. The clear, white beach gave way to an expanse of sleek, jade-coloured grass dotted with frondy bits (botany is not among my specialities). In the near distance the ground began a steep climb up into some rolly hills, and halfway up those was the spire. I hadn't previously had occasion to see it from this perspective, and the sight was breath-taking. So graceful a building! Tall and slender, crowned with an elegantly sloping roof (I'd seen as much as I wanted to of that part), its windows glinted gently in the sunlight and its pale walls displayed a hint of the bluish radiance that would come in with the twilight.