SWAGG 3: Sorcery

By Jill Marshall

Legendary catgirl and head of the Runes, Matilda Peppercorn, is called to some SWAGGey action when a swarm of strange visitors arrive at the School of I.C.E. with a message.

Someone, somewhere, is waking up. But who? Scotland’s mysterious fairy folk and famous monsters? The race known only as ‘the Others’ who terrify all of witchkind? Or something much, much worse? Yes, yes and ... yes!

Dark forces are sweeping across the world. It’s going to take a team effort to fight off what’s awoken, if Tilly’s old friends and her new team of SWAGG can stop fighting with each other! But Tilly’s been woken up too. She’s always been a legend. But now, with SWAGG, she’s about to discover her ultimate destiny ...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jill Marshall
• Release date: Dec 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781990024917

Jill Marshall

Jill Marshall is the author of the best-selling Jane Blonde series and fiction for children, young adults and adults. Her middle-grade series about sensational girl spy, Jane Blonde,published by Macmillan Children's Books UK, has sold hundreds of thousands of copies around the world, featured as a World Book Day title and reached the UK Times Top 10 for all fiction. Jane Blonde has been optioned for film and TV and is currently undergoing some exciting Wower-ish transformations.Jill has now brought Jane together with her other series in this age group - Doghead, The Legend of Matilda Peppercorn, Stein & Frank - in a fantastic new ensemble series. Meet the SWAGG team, and their first book, SPOOK.As well as books for tweens and teens, Jill writes for young adults and adults, each with a collection of three stand-alone novels. She also writes for younger children, with a Hachette-published picture book for teenies, Kave-Tina Rox.When she's not writing books, Jill is a communications consultant and a proud mum and nana. She divides her time between the UK and New Zealand, and hopes one day to travel between the two by SatiSPI or ESPIdrilles.

Book preview

Chapter 0 - Prologue

As the wind whipped the three hags’ straggles of hair together into a spider’s web of silver knots, their veined and scabby eyeball rolled towards the cliff edge. Blinking grit from the membrane that acted as a lid, the eyeball scanned the beach below them, then cast an image of what it beheld to the trio of witches.

The Graeae bayed in horror, shouting their accusations at each other … at the moon goddess … at all others … at anyone who would take the blame away from them.

‘You failed us, sister!’ screeched the tallest hag, her vicious snaggle tooth slicing into her chin. ‘This was supposed to be finished!’

‘Finished! Finished!’ repeated the other witches.

The middle sister prodded the tallest in the side with one of her evil talons. ‘I am not the one at fault! We brought the Legend to our shores. Why is she not here protecting them?’

‘Mistress Moon who o’ersees all, tell us who is in your thrall!’ chanted the shortest witch, her gnarled, blind old face lifted to the glowing orb above them. ‘Tell us now so we may stop it! Vulture swoop and claw garotte it!’

Moonlight filtered across the vision from the eyeball. The Graeae gasped as one.

‘I know not the female, but the smaller male …’

‘Smaller male. Yes, yes, yes, he is familiar.’

The short witch sniffed, her face wrinkling in disgust. ‘Something reeks. Familiar indeed. Why so? Why so? I do not know.’

Suddenly the tallest hag swatted her across the scalp. ‘We’ve told you! You don’t have to rhyme every. Single. Thing!’ She punctuated each word with another swipe at the other hag’s head.

‘Sorry, sister, sure as can be. Please just stop and don’t hit …’ Ducking her head closer to the dusty ground, the short witch considered her next words carefully. ‘Either of us,’ she finished.

‘Silence, both of you,’ hissed the middle sister. ‘The female speaks. We must listen.’

‘Listen we must,’ agreed the squat sister solemnly, ‘on silent wings.’

Silhouetted against the immense, ice-blue supermoon, the middle witch hauled in the eyeball with a flick of her gigantic nail and dropped it into her pocket. Then they spun around, one by one, rising into the air amongst steely, silver flames until the fire bloomed into a mercury flowerhead. From its centre emerged a terrifying beak, followed by feathered shoulders and enormous, powerful wings. Except for their faces, which were those of the witches, the three became vultures.

As soon as they had all transformed, they launched themselves from the cliff edge and swooped down the cliff in zigzags, noiseless apart from the beat of their wings - thrummmm thrummmm, pounding softly like a puckered heart.

Below them on the beach, the female among the trio of people snatched something from the sand. ‘That can’t be all!’ they heard her hiss.

The shorter man put a finger to his lips and raised his eyes. Catching sight of the vultures, he shook his head quickly and curled the woman’s fingers over her palm. Whatever she was holding was now hidden from view. Before she could speak, the man clamped his hand over her mouth; with the other, he hauled her roughly to the water’s edge and pushed her into a boat that bobbed in the shallows, the other man running to catch up.

Before the sisters could reach them, the woman and taller man installed themselves on the boat’s narrow seats, as the short man jumped in and shoved them out to sea in one flowing movement, straight towards the moon. It looked as though the rowboat was sliding along a shimmering road, straight across the surface of the ocean. As they left the shoreline behind, the gleaming pathway flashed – once, twice – and suddenly the boat vanished.

The vultures cawed and screeched in frustration, circling above the spot where the pair had disappeared, their claws slashing at … nothing.

In fury, they raced back to the beach and dropped down into the sand, a trio of granite pillars standing stark against the glittering moon.

‘They were after the Runes. We must raise the Legend,’ whispered the middle hag.

‘Legend! Legend!’ repeated her sisters.

‘Or maybe …’ The squat witch wretched, the words in her mouth bitter, unbearable, poisonous. ‘The others,’ she spat, gulping back phlegm.

The tallest sister stared out to sea, her fact twisting with rage. ‘I thought this was OVER!’ she screamed.

From behind her jagged fang sprang a horrifying tornado. It swirled out across the sea, sucking water into its depths until a whirlpool plunged deep, deep into the waves. Suddenly it inverted, rising up into a watery tower. For a second it appeared to be taking on a shape – an ethereal, glimmering, winged

shape … but then it dispersed into a trillion droplets, soaking them all. ‘Aghghgh! You do it,’ she snapped to the shortest sister.

‘Together,’ said the middle sister. ‘This requires all our strength.’

As one, the Graeae raised their arms towards the moon, and began to chant.

‘Defender of the Trinity, and all the Sisters’ legacy,

The time has come to show the world the magical power of unity.

Awaken spirit, hail ye sprite!

Come three, join two, make one…

Come fight!’

Their ferocious, terrifying cry split the night sky with forks of lightning, rolling out across the ocean to distant lands, uncharted depths, unseen horizons.

And somewhere across the continent, a silver head lifted from sleep.

Chapter 1 - A Witchy Wakening

For a moment when I opened my eyes, I couldn’t remember where I was.

This is not all that unusual, to be honest, what with being me, Matilda Peppercorn. As a girl who is sometimes a witchy cat or a witchy young woman or a protector of other witchy cats or people, I’ve woken up or come to from being knocked out in some very weird places. Up trees. In a cell. Even inside the Sphinx at the Pyramids of Giza.

But this was a different kind of not-knowingness. This time it wasn’t because I’d taken a beating to the head, or had a spell cast over me via some witchy armpit mist. This was just one of those ‘don’t recognise this ceiling’ moments, which could just mean that I was back at home with Ian and Caroline (or Mum and Dad as they still insist that I call them), or sleeping on my BFF Mattan’s truckle bed after we’d talked and watched videos for way too long, or even that I’d been sleep-walking out of the dorm room at the Runes that I still shared with four other girls during the week, and had fallen asleep in my office instead (seeing as I’m honorary sort-of headmistress in some weird way that even I find hard to explain, despite lots of talking!).

This particular ceiling, though, was completely covered in paintings – one in a circle in the centre of the room, and the others in the four quadrants that spanned out from it, rather like the way the School of ICE was set out.

Then I remembered. ‘That’s where I am!’

I was in Lowmount Castle, home of Jack Bootle-Cadogan and now the site of the School of Inter-Connecting Energies or I.C.E for short. Just a few weeks before, we’d tackled a few Egyptian monsters and I’d brought the WoWs (that’s non-gender-specific Witch or Warlock) and FFs (also non-binary Felidae Fighters aka WoW familiars aka cats) for a bit of a schooly swap. Most of them didn’t remember ever being anywhere but the Runes, seeing as they were mostly orphans, so they were over-the-top excited to be staying in an actual castle with people who weren’t cats, WoWs or orphans.

Actually I’d had trouble getting them to leave. Many had taken up residence in the Torture Room. Even though I had a bed, I’d also decided to sleep there to be fair to them.

I leaned up on one elbow. Several Runes girls were stretched out in sleeping bags, littered across the posh polished flooring like stepping-stones. Two of them were curled up in cat form in the pans of the enormous witch-weighing scales.

Only Janet was awake, lying on her front before the fireplace cauldron with her sleeping bag rumpled around her like a chrysalis, reading with her usual serious frown.

‘Morning, Janet,’ I called.

She gave me a thumbs-up. Not big on words, Janet. Brilliant, stern and scary witch, though, which is why she’s my second-in-command at the Runes.

‘Watcha reading? A spelling book?’

She held it up over her head so I could see it. It was a very dull but shiny guidebook with the title ‘Lowmount Castle – Home of Lords and Legends!’

‘But how did they know I was going to be living here?’ I asked, completely innocently but also truly because I am, after all, an actual legend.

Janet just snorted. Flipping over onto her back, she held the pamphlet up over her face so I wouldn’t try talking to her again and carried on reading.

Okay. So now I was bored. What to do next? I could go and find my biffle, Mattan, who was also sleeping over at the School of ICE but had probably invented an excuse to sneak out early and meet up with her boyfriend, Alyx Smuggity Sunderland. Thomas would probably be lurking about with them too, wherever they were. Of course, the three of them together were my Guardians and probably should hang out together, ready for guarding – but it was probably time for me to take a moment to teach Thomas about third wheels ...

Rather than tackle that awkward conversation any time soon, I decided to get breakfast and maybe find my new team members – the SWAGGY ones.

Jane Blonde, spy-and-logic queen, great with the code cracking and the gadget stuff, some quiet wisdom and niceness thing, and making boys fall sappily in love with her.

Jack, one of the saps – and also a dog-headed Egyptian god in charge of … well, death.

And talking of death, alchemist and super-scientist Stein, who was undead and kept alive by his own crazy creations like pom juice, and …

Our leader Gideon, who was just actually dead. A ghost. Sometimes there, sometimes not, always turning up when we least expected and not showing when we thought he would, although since we’d opened the School of ICE, he was definitely hanging around Janey a lot more. I mean, hanging around a lot more.

I hauled my legs out of the sleeping bag and fell off the torture rack I’d been dozing on. As I stood up, ready to tiptoe out of the room, Janet glared at me and then frowned towards the top of my head.

‘What? My hair? It’s wild in the mornings.’

Truth be told, my hair’s wild much of the time, being steel-grey and blazing blue and sticking out in all direction like electrical wiring. When I’m mad, it gets bluer and sticks out more, possibly in order to take people’s eyes out or puncture their spleen. These were all relatively recent discoveries so there hadn’t been time to test it all out properly.

I patted at it half-heartedly, but Janet sighed. ‘No. Up there. I think someone wants you.’

She jerked her head towards the ceiling. Craning my head backwards, I followed her eyeline to the central circle on the ceiling.

In the very centre was a tableau of some woman on a throne, wearing a floaty pale green dress and brandishing a sword. Around her flew bunches of little angels, all chubby and cherubby. I’d stared at the same sweet and pretty boring painting for the last few nights so that I’d fall asleep, thinking how nice it was that our dear friend Laura Bassi, aka the Roman goddess Minerva, was watching over me.

But the picture had changed. The little angels were literally flying, swarming around the apex of the ceiling like bees. The woman was no longer on her throne but was jumping up and down on the chair’s plinth, pointing her sword at me and mouthing something.

I did some lip-reading. ‘Bake Off … no. Try make-up. Well, that’s just rude. Laura Bassi, just come down off the ceiling and tell me!’

‘It’s not me.’ The tall, elegant figure of the fabuloso Italian physicist drifted up through the gappy ancient floorboards. ‘I’m here.’

Janet flicked through some pages in the guidebook, then held up a finger to silence me before I could even start. ‘It’s Athene. Greek goddess of wisdom and war. Painted in 1740.’

‘Ah, yes, Minerva’s Greek counterpart,’ said Laura Bassi.

‘So is she speaking Greek?’ I squinted up towards the figure as she swiped her sword left and right and in circles, her hair escaping from its tight ringlets as she got more and more agitated. ‘Maybe that’s why I can’t understand it.’

Janet tutted. ‘Don’t you have a Greek boyfriend? Greek ancestors? A whole Greek legend that’s all about you?’

‘That’s all …’ True. That was all true. ‘It’s complicated. I’m very complex.’

‘No. You’ve got a complex,’ muttered Janet.

Laura Bassi’s ghost laughed. ‘I know some Greek; let me see.’

The three of us stared up at the ceiling, trying to figure it out. Actually, to be honest, I’d given up trying to figure it out since it was probably Greek, and Laura was onto it anyway. Instead, I was wondering what I was going to do about the Greek boyfriend. I really liked him, and he was an excellent cat and all, but as Guardian of the Graeae he was never going to be able to leave Greece and it was getting boring just hanging about in his cave every few weeks. I’d tell him soon. I’d Broover over and have a chat, or maybe get Jack to zzzippp me over there … but no, he’d be annoyingly dreamy over Janey and might start even asking me advice … or perhaps I could …

‘Tilly!’ cried Janet, snapping her fingers in my face. ‘Waking up!’

Wowsers, I must have been out a long time if she’d bothered to get out of her sleeping bag.

‘I’m awake! I’m awake!’ I stamped my feet. ‘Look, I’m even upright!’

Janet sighed and thrust her index finger nearly up my nose. ‘Not you.’ Ah. She was pointing upwards. ‘Athene. That’s what she’s saying.’

‘It’s English, not Greek,’ said Laura Bassi. ‘I suppose she is an English painting, after all. But she’s repeating it over and over. Waking up. They’re waking up.’

The second she said it, I could see it. They’re … stab of sword … Waking … swings sword around head … Up … thrusts sword into cloud painted above her head, narrowly missing a roly-poly cherub.

‘They’re waking up,’ I repeated aloud.

With a groan of relief that I practically heard, Athene nodded, planted her sword in the ground beside her throne and slumped onto her seat, looking very dishevelled and a bit sweaty. The little angels lined up behind her, peering down at us with concern all over their beautiful round faces.

There was an obvious question, though. ‘Who?’ I said. ‘Who’s waking up?’

Athene stared at me bleakly, then planted her head on her palm. I knew that look. She’d given up.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll found out. It’s obviously important.’

She shrugged and sort of solidified as the cherubs dispersed around her, finding their original positions. In moments Athene and the angels were just a painting again, etched onto the dome of plasterwork. Her part was done, evidently.

‘Well, what do you think—’ I started to say.

But then another sound filtered through the walls. Even though many would have said it was impossible, the noise was even louder than my voice – but somehow gentle at the same time. Musical and yet not from an instrument. A horn but not a horn.

Laura, Janet and I gazed at each other, feeling and hearing the call at the same time. All around us, girls began to stir from their sleep, shaking off their sleeping bags and stretching out feline or people legs as they stood and looked around, some transforming from cat to human and others pulling on their dressing gowns. Then, as one, they stumbled sleepily to the door and followed the sound along the corridor.

‘What is that?’ whispered Janet.

Laura tilted her head, puzzled. ‘It sounds like some kind of a … a conch.’

‘A what now?’

‘A shell,’ said Laura Bassi. ‘A massive sea shell.’

Janet nodded, her eyes suddenly glazing over. She turned towards the door as if someone else was in charge of her limbs. ‘They’re waking up,’ she echoed in a whisper, following the others into the corridor.

And then I felt it, later than the others because of my legendness, maybe, but definitely still feeling that noise. It was pulling us in, drawing us on an invisible cord to the centre of the sound, with the same lurch in the stomach that came from emerging from a deep, dreamless sleep.

‘Waking up. They’re waking up,’ I repeated.

Exchanging a last worried glance with Laura Bassi, I followed Janet out of the room and into the corridor, gathering with the stream of people and non-people tottering out of the other rooms in SWAGG’s other quadrants – spy, alchemy, Egyptology - towards the centre of the building.

All following the conch call. All dragged along in the current of sound.

All feeling the extraordinary pull … the weirdy pull on their heartstrings.

Chapter 2 - Never Say Fairies

Because of the pulling on heartstrings thing, I wasn’t a million percent surprised to see my fellow SWAGGer, Jane Blonde aka Janey Brown (which was how she looked now in her jeans and tee-shirt), standing on one of the high steps in the very grand central stairwell. I’d never even seen the steps before, but then, Lowmount was a massivo building with lots of levels, so it made sense it would have a stately staircase winding up to the turrety tower in the middle, with oil paintings of Jack’s weird ancient relatives lining the walls. As predicted, Jack Bootle-Cadogan and Gideon Flynn were grouped around Janey like guardian cats as Stein descended the stairs from somewhere even higher. My own actual guardian cats, Mattan, Alyx and Thomas, were nowhere to be seen.

Everyone else milled about in the reception area at the bottom of the staircase, with blank expressions on their faces as they peered around for the source of the call: Anya and G-Mamma who’d obviously just left the kitchen, judging by the spoons and spatulas in their hands; twins Joe and Mindy and their best bud Chandi, and all the various people who’d turned up for the opening of the School of ICE and just never left – vampires and werewolves, familiars and WoWs, ghosts and ghouls and other freaky freakersons from Jack’s family, and a few of Janey’s spy friends.

The conch call was deafening – and seemed to be trumpeting out of a hole in the atmosphere that hovered in the space above their heads.

Janey waved to me from the staircase. ‘Tills! Up here!’

I shoved past a few dozen gawping bodies of various types and bounded up the staircase. ‘What’s up there, Steiny?’

‘The tower and turrets, a very long way up,’ he said with a sigh. ‘It reminds me of home.’

‘What’s your excuse, Tilly? You took your time,’ said Jack.

‘I was busy talking to your ceiling.’

They all stared at me. ‘Is that a euphemism?’ Gideon said.

Eh? ‘Do you mean the instrument they’re blowing? Laura Bassi says it’s a conch shell.’

‘No, it means you were actually on the loo or something … never mind,’ he went on. ‘You really were talking to the ceiling, then?’

‘Well, it was talking to me. A painting of Athene came to life and told me that they’re waking up. And before you ask me who’s waking up, we hadn’t got that far by the time this noise blasted out and everyone tootled off down here.’ I stared at the hole in the atmosphere. It was just a circular patch of noisy darkness in an otherwise empty space – until I spotted something swarming around its edges like mosquitoes. ‘Perhaps it was those midges floating around the sound-hole.’ I nodded towards the source of the trumpeting. ‘That noise could be the whine of a kazillion mozzies.’

‘Talking ceilings. Invisible midges. You’re on fire today,’ said Jack with a grin, trying to share it with Janey.

She ignored him. ‘Tilly, what do you see? It just looks like a patch of night sky to me.’

The others nodded in agreement.

‘You don’t see the mozzies? There are hundreds of them. Tiny little things, all swirling around the outside, and some of them coming out of it. In fact, now I look properly,’ I said, with a determined squizz across the staircase, ‘they’re sort of shimmering in the shape of an ear. No, not an ear. A … oh! A shell. Laura was right!’

‘A genius being right! How about that?’ crowed Jack, his boy skin turning pink when Janey glanced at him. It turned even pinker when she frowned, and I could totally see why. Being snarky didn’t suit him, especially when he was using it to try to impress the kindest one of the lot of us. I’d have to introduce him properly to Alyx: he could give Jack lessons. They could call them Snarky Sessions.

‘Perhaps, Mistress Peppercorn,’ ventured Stein, ‘they are something of your more magical world that the rest of us cannot yet see.’

‘That’s true,’ I said.

Then I leaned over the staircase and waved. ‘Hi down there! Can anybody else see the midgey mosquito things?’

A small proportion of the hundred-strong crowd below us wrenched their dribbly faces away from the noise-hole. I was very proud to notice that nearly all of them were WoWs and FFs, along with one or two of Jack’s dead ancestors. When they could summon some movement into their necks, most of them nodded.

‘Janet, what do you see?’

‘Flies. Tiny. Lots,’ she droned.

Not sure why I’d asked Janet, really, as this was about as much as she ever said, but her words had impact in any case. Even Jack crouched down to transform into Anubis, then took another look over the banister. ‘Oh, yes, I see them now,’ he said. ‘Good theory, Stein.’

‘A genius being right. How about that?’ I muttered under my breath.

With his canine hearing, Jack heard it. ‘Sorry,’ he whispered.

Gideon coughed. ‘I wonder if we’re focusing on the wrong thing,’ he said, carefully not looking at any of us. ‘Maybe we should be more worried about how this thing has appeared and transfixed most of the people here. It’s drawn them to a central location where we’re possibly all vulnerable. What’s coming next?’

As if it was answering his question, the noise suddenly stopped. Everyone’s eyes snapped open as they looked around in panic. Waking up? Gideon was right. Something else was coming – and where were my Guardians when I might need them?

But the something else appeared to be the mass movement of midges. Fizzing up into the centre of the staircase, so many that they appeared in a semi-solid cloud, they moved out of their shell formation and rapidly re-shaped themselves.

‘Lips!’ barked Jack. ‘In case you can’t see it, they’re making lips.’

The others looked at me for confirmation. ‘He’s right,’ I said, watching the mouth take shape in front