Destiny (1)

Ash gently removed her hands from around his waist, and hissed, “Lower your voice! Someone might hear you,”

Thalia snorted.

“What’s the chance of that happening? I say anything, no one hears me. I ask for food, they pretend not to hear me. That’s why I found you. You listened to me! Even if you were just a squirrel at the time…”

I glanced between the two of them, perplexed.

“Will someone please tell me what the heck is going on!?”

Thalia giggled.

“Ooooh, can I tell her? I like telling stories!”

“Sure…”

“What‘s your name?”

“Fay,”

Ash shrugged in reply.

“OK! So, once upon a time-”

“Can we just skip to the pertinent part?”

Thalia frowned. “What does pertinent mean?”

“Oh, never mind,”

“Well, anyway, my mum left my dad when I was, like, three, I’m eight now by the way! My birthday was two weeks ago!” She stuck her head up in the air proudly. I smiled at her. “Well, we didn’t have enough money, so we became pickpockets. It was lots of fun! Like being spies. It was our secret! And then, about a year ago, my dad went missing in a big crowd of people. I was very sad for a while, and I hid in the woods. But no one would listen to me! They just gave me mean looks. And then I found a squirrel in the woods. I looked after it, and named him Charlie. Then, one day, he turned into Ash! He explained that he had run away from home, and he could turn into any animal that lived in the woods. I told him to turn into a unicorn. I don’t know why he wouldn’t. After a few weeks, he went missing! I thought he’d left me like my dad, but I knew he wouldn’t. I put up signs, but I think the nasty police took them down. Something about not having proper… something.”

“Permission? Permit?”

“Yeah. But after a couple of days, he came back. He looked very messy. He said that a horrible girl had stopped him from being able to turn into animals, and he had to go somewhere safer. I tried to stop him, but he went anyway. I told him the next time he was in London, say hello to me. He was very confused. But what he didn’t know, was that this was where I was going to stay from then on! The people here are absolutely oblivious to pickpockets!” She paused for a second. “The end.”

“Well, that explains a lot,” I said to break the noisy silence. Noisy, because of the voices around us from tourists snapping holiday pics of the statue. It is almost the Easter holidays after all. Silent, because, well, no one knew quite what to say.

“So, why’d you come back?” Thalia bounced along cheerily, shaking back her dreadlocks of dark hair that must have been pretty once, but so long ago, there was no trace of it.

“Tal, we came back because we need to find something. It’s hidden inside the statue. We need to find a riddle hidden somewhere on it.”

I stared at him. How did he know all this? I wasn’t aware of how to find it!

Thalia just beamed mischievously.

“That’s easy. I’ve been hanging out here for a while now, and there’s a little slate with writing on it on the base!”

I glanced over where she was pointing, and instantly knew it was just a plaque.

“Thalia, have you even read what it says?”

She shrugged.

“I dunno. I never learned to read.”

I strode over to it, Ash hovering tentatively behind me. Trotting lightly, Thalia overtook us both and ran her hand over it. That earned us a few odd, sideways looks from passers-by.

The plaque read:

King Charles I

1625-1649

The bronze statue was made in 1633 for Lord Treasurer Weston by Hubert Le Sueur. It was acquired for the Crown and set up here in 1675. The carved work of the pedestal being executed by Joshua Marshall

And it stopped abruptly with no explanation.

“What’s that?” I asked, spotting a strange mark on the side of the slab.

Ash’s hair popped into my peripheral vision, followed by his confused face.

“It looks like a handle.”

He was right. I reached out, pressing my hand over it, and was surprised to feel a bump in the rock. I recoiled because I was taken unexpectedly. Scrutinising it further, I saw there was nothing there except the strange mark. The thing I had touched- it was invisible!

I grasped the block, felt Thalia and Ash’s eyes bore into me with interest, and yanked hard. That was before I felt myself go weightless, and the world spun out of control around me.