Helen Speaks

Olive Framley Entry 21 3^rd September

Dear Talia,

Your daughter has been keeping me busy. I don’t know how I didn’t realise she was related to you. There’s a fierce way she looks at me when I try to give an excuse. With two of us cleaning and tidying Crag Cottage, the place is starting to smarten up. She is helping me to repair some loose fittings and even make some soft furnishings. The thought of how horrified Daddy would be powers me through the tougher jobs.

I visited Lucy Skylark. We try to speak to each other whenever there are magical incidents, but with feeling so sorry for myself, I haven’t properly spoken to her in a couple of weeks. But Aunty E said she wasn’t at Dune House and had done something irregular to her room. I went up to check and there was some kind of magical forcefield on it. More than just irregular!

You were saying about your scrying technique using dog hair. It is not one of my favourite of your ideas, Talia, but I wanted to find Lucy.

Tea leaves had helped me find Lucy before – though I hadn’t known it at the time. Tea leaves and – well, I’d been practising calmness and focus to make a bubble of light. I opened out my old map of Barkmouth, put some clingfilm over the top, and then channeled the calmness and focus for a bubble of light over my cup of tea.

I didn’t know if it had worked or if I’d just spilled my tea, but the leaves seemed to make a circle around the corner of a little street near the pebble beach.

And walking there, I decided to tell her everything. About Maksym, about you, about Hatty.

It was a little ice cream parlour – and it was closed, as it was early, but I thought I saw Lucy working behind the counter. It turns out she’s friends with the owners, and had stayed overnight in a tiny room they’d somehow fit a bed in.

Lucy has a non-magical friend, Suniya, who came to see her while I was there. I say friend, but I had a future flash when I shook her hand which put everything in an interesting light.

Between us, we managed to help Lucy with her problem – there were pixies in her room. I used the freezing rune I’d used in the garden to catch my own “intruder” and came up with the idea of tempting the pixies with glitter to entice them into the trap.

It was good to be out and about and solving someone else’s problem. I had made all those business cards – “Witch and problem solver” – but with the whole Green Dragon “haunting” I hadn’t had much chance to solve any problems.

I got back in time for Hatty to give me my oven cleaning lesson – just as I’d guessed, with no need for a future flash! And then after she’d gone, I heard the letterbox rattle.

It was a note, Talia. A note written on what looked like papyrus?

By the flowers in bloom
By the sun’s rays
By field and fen
By hot summer days
Call, and I will answer

I made another cup of tea – with a tea bag this time – and considered this. I tried reading it aloud.

I heard a creak and felt a warm scented breeze.

The creature had bark-like skin and eyes as blue as the sky.

“Hello – you’re a Summer Sprite, aren’t you?”

It rustled nervously. “I came but you sent me away.”

I never mentioned the Sprite to you, Talia, with everything else going on. Aunty E found it in my rune circle but when it told me what it needed, I had Lucy talk to it instead.

“She’s a green witch,” I said. “And I don’t know what sort of witch I am. An experimental witch.”

“You are a seer,” it said.

“I see flashes of the future, sometimes,” I said. “I’m not…”

It looped a vine-like finger through my hand. And I saw – it wasn’t nice what I saw, Talia. It wasn’t warm like the flash I had when I met Suniya. No, it was hot, the decay and dying and destruction of nature, and it frightened me, because I could tell how the Summer Sprite was frightened.

“I wanted to be a problem-solving witch,” I told it. “Can I solve this?”

It gave a sad little rustling shake of its head. “Not alone. But you need to see, Olive. And open their eyes.”

It vanished, somehow, in a gust of wind, and I sat alone.

It was a heavy truth, one I can’t lighten with a spell. But perhaps I can do something about it – even if I can’t solve it alone.

Yours sincerely,

Olive.