Free Lily and the Prisoner of Magic by Holly Webb

the bench seat, clinging silently to each other in the darkness.

E ventually, Queen Adelaide led her daughter and their bodyguards out of the garden, leaving the girls and the princess clinging together inside the summerhouse.
    ‘Did you hear?’ Lily whispered. ‘She thinks her mother is being too strict.’
    ‘I knew Sophia wasn’t behind the way the Queen’s Men are behaving now,’ Princess Jane murmured. ‘She couldn’t have changed so much, even after all these years.’
    ‘But your mother is in charge now, isn’t she?’ Henrietta pointed out. ‘She’s the Queen Regent. It makes no difference what Queen Sophia thinks.’
    ‘Is it for ever? Can’t they change it back?’ Lily asked, frowning.
    Henrietta grunted. ‘Not to be unfeeling –’ here she nudged Princess Jane with a wet nose – ‘but the old queen won’t last that much longer, will she? She must be in her eighties.’
    Princess Jane sighed. ‘She looked awfully healthy to me. I can be just as unfeeling as you, Henrietta dear. I have very little affection for my mother, after forty years shut away on her orders.’
    ‘Who is your sister’s heir?’ Georgie asked suddenly.
    ‘Our next sister, Lucasta, and our little sister, Charlotte, both had to give up their claim to the throne when they married foreign royalty,’ the princess explained.
    ‘But that only leaves you!’ Lily gasped.
    ‘Well, except that I’m dead,’ the princess sighed. ‘Officially. I expect the heir is some distant cousin now.’
    ‘You’d be a much better queen,’ Lily muttered. ‘And I don’t care if that is treachery, and sedition, and all those things. Once we’ve got Father back and mended Georgie, I think we should fight for you to be restored to the throne.’
    The princess smiled at her. ‘I think you can probably be beheaded for saying things like that. But I have had an idea, about freeing your father.’
    ‘Really?’ Lily sat up eagerly. ‘I was planning that we could sneak back to the theatre and get the dragon, then he could still try and sniff us out a magician to help, like he suggested. But I’m still not sure any magician is actually going to want to help us; it’s too dangerous.’
    ‘I think I know one who will. But you’ll have to go and find her.’
    ‘Who?’ Lily breathed, and Georgie caught the princess’s hand excitedly.
    ‘The girl I told you about while we were still at Fell Hall. Rose, the apprentice magician who was my bodyguard. She was an orphan, a foundling. But then she found her mother in the end, and discovered that in fact she was a Fell, a child with a great magical heritage. She was one of the greatest magicians in London – she was truly famous. She and her master, Aloysius Fountain, helped to design the Archgate spells. So why not ask her to help you defeat them?’
    ‘Do you think she would?’ Lily and Georgie spoke at once.
    ‘And more importantly, where is she?’ Henrietta demanded.
    ‘She went to America, after the Decree,’ Princess Jane said sadly. ‘She fought against it for a long time – Mr Fountain did as well. He was Chief Counsellor to the Treasury, an important government post, before the queen had him dismissed. He was an alchemist, you see; he could make gold. But no one listened to them, or to me. Everyone was whipped up into such a fury. All magicians were traitors, all magic was suspect. And so they left.’ Tears were running down the princess’s face as she remembered her friends. ‘She went to live in New York. She wrote to me – told me how lovely it was. They were destitute, as my dear sister had seized the property of any magicians who fled the country, but Rose’s magic was much admired over there. She built up a business with Mr Fountain, prospecting for gold. Telling people where to dig their mines. And then she got married.’ Here the princess sniffed delicately, as though she didn’t quite approve. ‘Rather beneath her, I always thought, to marry a servant boy, but