“If we could find the fairies …,” Dietmar said. “Frank and the others. Connie has betrayed them. They might be able to help us.”
“But where are they?” Jarrah shouted. She had caught some of Stefan’s wild rage. “Where are the lying little—”
Xiao said, “Wait.”
“Wait? Wait on what? Until dawn, when he kills Mack?”
“The fairies cast a Vargran spell that allowed us to see the castle,” Xiao said patiently.
“Yes, but only because we have the enlightened puissance,” Dietmar observed.
Xiao nodded. “The reason there must be twelve of us is that our power grows with each new member of the Magnificent Twelve. True?”
Dietmar snapped his fingers. “Ah! But even if we are only three Magnifica, it may be that our power is greater than the fairies’!”
“We must descend the hill,” Xiao said. “And when dawn comes, we must cast the spell and reveal the castle to as many people as we can get together. MacGuffin needs to remain hidden because he is no match for the terrible powers of the modern world. He has his band of skeletons and his spells. But what are these when weighed against the police and the army, and the city planners and zoning officials, the bureaucrats from Brussels, and, worst of all, the tourists who will descend like a plague of locusts should this castle suddenly be revealed to one and all?”
“We will need to practice the spell, doing it together,” Dietmar said. “And we will need a good crowd of people to be at the bottom of this hill when morning comes.”
“I’ll get you a crowd,” Stefan said, and everyone believed him.
Oscur exelmo oo-ma!
That was the spell Frank had spoken to reveal the castle. “Hidden castle show! Or else!”
Vargran was a magical language, but not a beautiful one. It got the job done but it wasn’t a language for composing song lyrics. And it was dangerous in the hands of one who possessed the enlightened puissance, so you could get into a lot of trouble if you didn’t get it just right.
But they had all heard the spell quite clearly and they were confident they had the words right. The problem was that, when they thought about it, there wasn’t really any way to practice it. Once you used a particular spell, it was a while before you could do it again. And if they sat around testing it out, they might be totally depleted when they needed it.
So instead they practiced saying other things together. They recited the words to Lady Gaga songs. They recited bits of poetry and sang the birthday song in unison, and Jarrah taught them Australian limericks best not repeated here.
Stefan had built a small fire in the rocks at the base of the hill, and the three Magnifica sat around it like a tiny glee club working on their harmony.
“I don’t think it will be enough to speak in unison,” Xiao said somewhere around four in the morning, with the black sky just beginning to turn navy and the stars just fading the tiniest bit. “We must find a way to unite our hearts, so that our powers will be truly unified.”
“I’ll unify your hearts,” Stefan muttered threateningly. He was getting very tired of standing by helplessly while the three of them sang songs around a campfire.
“Go and focus on how you will get people to this place,” Dietmar said, “and stop pacing around here interrupting us.”
Jarrah knew immediately that this was a mistake. Dietmar knew it a split second later when he was lifted clear up off the ground and held in the air by his throat. Stefan did this with one hand. He did it without grunting or straining, as if Dietmar were no bigger than a kitten.
“Mack is under my wing,” Stefan said. “You … are not.”
“Stefan is not our servant,” Jarrah said sharply.
“Her, I like,” Stefan explained further, pointing at Jarrah. “Because she’s cool. And her?” Stefan asked, jerking his head toward Xiao. “I told her father I’d take care of her.”
“A large, large guy, Xiao’s father,” Jarrah said. “Large and scary.”
“He’s not the least bit scary, he’s a scholar,” Xiao said. “Though,” she admitted, “he is large.”
Xiao’s father was a dragon roughly the size of an entire subway train.
“Put me down,” Dietmar said. Then when he found it suddenly hard to breathe, he added, “Please.”
Jarrah gave Stefan a shrug, and he put Dietmar down.
Dietmar rearranged his shirt and smoothed back his hair. “I know that I am not popular. I am never popular,” Dietmar said. “Sometimes I seem rude. Because sometimes I am rude. But it is not how I mean to be. I just want to do the correct thing.”