Maze Running and other Magical Missions Read Online Free Page B

too.”
    “What ponyriding thing?”
    “Last week, when your mum gave us both a lift and you had to run back for your violin, she asked me whether I was exercising Lavender’s ponies too. She said you were awfully keen, out pretty much every morning. And I covered for you, said you were always chatting about horses at school. But I know you and Lavender hardly ever talk and she’s allergic to animal hair, so what are you doing? Is it a boy? Is ita mystery? Is it your music? What is it?”
    Helen, who’d stopped breathing as she heard Kirsty destroy her carefully built castle of lies, grasped at that last suggestion. “Yes it is! It is my music. You know what my mum’s like. If it’s not got four legs and a fascinating wound, she thinks it’s a waste of time. She disapproves of me spending more time on the violin than my other homework, so she’s trying to cut me down to fifteen minutes practice a day. Just quarter of an hour! That’s ridiculous. I’ll never be a professional violinist at that rate. So I’m sneaking out to someone’s barn and practising every morning. Please don’t give me away. Please! ”
    Like most of Helen’s lies, it wasn’t far from the truth. Her mum didn’t want Helen to focus just on her musical talent. She did insist on more maths and less music. And Helen did often take her fiddle with her when she met the fabled beasts, because Rona was a superb singer, and they sometimes composed and performed together.
    But it was still a lie. A lie to her best friend. After the lies to her mum and dad.
    The only people she didn’t lie to were the people she was lying to protect: Rona, Lavender, Catesby, Sapphire and Yann.
    Helen sighed. Yann. She hoped centaur healers could cure spears in the heart.
    But Kirsty heard the sigh differently. “Oh, Helen! It must be so hard. To have a dream and not be able to follow it!” She sighed too. “I’m lucky, my mum drives me to Edinburgh three times a week to play football.She’s so supportive. It must be hard when your mum is so strict…”
    Helen smiled. Her mum wasn’t strict. She had rules, like homework done, room tidy and limits on violin time. But so long as those rules were followed, she let Helen roam the countryside, and didn’t ask too many questions when Helen came back. Unless she was drenched in blood.
    “My mum’s alright. So are you!” She hugged Kirsty, and they raced through a list of French animals until the bus stopped.
    *
    Helen had been at the high school for months now and was used to the timetable, the maze of corridors and the huge sixth years. Today, when her mind kept flitting back to the blood on the leaves and the moment Yann’s heart stopped beating, she was grateful for the regular changes of subject.
    The last period was music, her favourite. But she kept glancing at the windows, hoping, for once, that she wouldn’t see a waving fairy on the windowsill. She didn’t want to get a message from her friends today. She didn’t want to hear that Yann had got worse, because the only way for him to get worse was for him to die.
    But by the time she’d clambered on the bus, listened to Kirsty’s chatter about what she’d burnt in Home Economics, then run home, she was desperate for news.
    She dropped her bags in the hall and stomped upstairs.
    She heard the door of the small animal surgery open. There was a muffled woof, then her mum’s voice. “Homework?”
    “It’s Friday,” Helen yelled. “I don’t have homework for Saturday or Sunday. Give me a break!”
    “Don’t be smart with me, Helen. What homework do you have for Monday?”
    Helen shouted back, as she reached her bedroom, “Not much. I have to plan out a story for English and do some maths.” Then she shut her door. “Also, I have to find out if my grumpiest friend is still alive and I have to keep my other friends safe…
    “Do you think I can do all that before Monday?” she asked the figures sitting on her bed: Rona on the duvet, Lavender