Chapter 1
It was a day like a freshly peeled orange: bright and zesty and sweet.
The smell of spring was in the air at Mallowmarsh, and Daisy Thistledown was feeling hopeful. All over the gardens, Botanists were hard at work, tending giant palm trees in the Great Glasshouse, harvesting football-sized plums from the orchards, and planting new lightning seeds in the Mallow Woods. Wild violets were blooming beneath the ancient yews, and the sky was filled with parakeets swooping from tree to tree, delivering the post and screeching joyfully.
A couple of apprentices waved at Daisy as they walked past, and she waved back, grinning. After three long weeks of waiting, the expedition to the Amazon rainforest would finally be setting off tomorrow, and Daisy felt the thrill of it racing through her veins like electricity.
She was standing at her usual spot on the edge of the lake, watching the Mallowmarsh shipbuilders put the finishing touches on their work. It had taken a team of trained Botanists two full weeks to lay the living beams and grow the mast from a seedling—but at last the ship was almost ready: proud and high on the water, with a hull of polished oak wood, a great white sail furled tight as a bud, and an elaborate system of rigging that used living green vines instead of rope. The ship strained at its moorings, as if eager to be on its way.
Daisy had observed the final preparations with mounting impatience and excitement: the deliveries of mosquito netting from Moonmarket and biscuit barrels from the Mallowmarsh kitchens; the piling up of no-glare marsh lamps and crates of phosphorescent mangoes on the shores of the lake. She had tried to help (and been waved away) as Botanists went staggering up the gangplank with heavy jars of healing chamomillion cream, packets of extra-sticky binding vine, and anything else that could possibly be needed for a voyage to the Amazon.
Of course, children weren’t technically allowed on the dock, but she had so far managed to ignore this instruction.
“Back again?” asked Madame Gallitrop, who was supervising the loading of a caged Venus flytrap onto the deck of the ship. Her voice was resigned.
“I thought,” said Daisy, “I’d come and see if you needed help.”
Madame Gallitrop, the head of the Intemperate House, was a plump and cheerful Frenchwoman with merry dark eyes and thick black hair swept back into an enormous bun. “I see,” she said dryly. “Well, ma chère, the ship is stocked, the provisions are loaded, and we are nearly ready to set off for Moonmarket tomorrow night.”
Daisy felt her fingers tingle, and she summoned a small vine from the shore to curl around her ankles. She could feel anticipation rise up in her like sap through a stem as she gazed at the floating ship. It looked very fine, with its portholes gleaming, flags fluttering, and its mast—a living oak tree—growing straight from the smooth wooden deck.
The ship was where Daisy felt closest to her mother.
This was partly because its jaunty pennants reminded her of Ma’s own devil-may-care brand of confidence, and partly because the ship was Daisy’s ticket to finding the person she cared about most in the world. Her mother was imprisoned somewhere in the heart of the Peruvian rainforest, and this was the rescue mission that was going to save her.
“Isn’t there anything I can do?” she asked for the hundredth time. “Perhaps I could polish the railings? Or dust the capstan?” The vine she’d summoned coiled eagerly over her left foot.
“No,” said Madame Gallitrop, shaking her head. “We have everything under control, ma chère. You know you’re not supposed to be here. Leave the preparations to the experts.”
“But—”
“Watch out!” It was a Botanist from the kitchens, toting a crate of ginger-root beer along the dock. “Out of the way! Children aren’t allowed near the ship.”
Daisy felt a wave of annoyance—and suddenly the vine at her ankle surged out of her control. It shot into the air, ballooned to the width of a python, and snapped the landing stage in two with a great splintering crash.
Daisy leaped back onto the bank just in time, but the barrel went flying into the air and lodged in the ship’s mast, showering ginger beer on the Botanists beneath. Madame Gallitrop toppled headfirst into the water with an almighty splash and emerged glowering, a frond of riverweed draped over one ear like an ill-conceived hairpiece.
She spat out a small water beetle. “Enough,” she said, her voice unusually frosty. “Kindly help me out of the lake, Daisy, and then make yourself useful somewhere else. You must learn to control your magic.”
Daisy Thistledown was a Botanist too—one who had only just discovered that she had green magic. As it turned out, using magic was one thing; keeping it in check was another.
“But,” she said, bracing herself against the bank to heave Madame Gallitrop out of the water, “I want to do something. I want to help!” She heaved again, and the Frenchwoman collapsed onto the remaining half of the landing stage. She righted herself with dignity, straightening her sopping overalls.
“Non!” she said, reverting to her native French. “That was the fourth accident this week. You can go and ‘help’ elsewhere!”
“Oi! Get that child OFF the landing stage,” roared one of the shipbuilders, a grizzled man who was persuading the nearest mizzenmast to grow high enough to take a sail. “What have I said about untrained children using magic near the ship?”
Madame Gallitrop, now standing on the shore and dripping from every inch of her hair and overalls, shot Daisy a pointed look.
Daisy slunk away, her cheeks hot. But she was still close enough to hear the shipbuilder’s words as he surveyed the damage she’d done to the dock.
“That girl,” he said, “is a lost cause.”
Chapter 2
Max Brightly was a lost cause. That’s what the midwife had said approximately two minutes after he was born, taking one look at his furious pinched mouth and the way his small, angry fists punched the air. And people had gone on saying it all his life: “That boy,” they said, “is a lost cause.”
His mother’s friends had said it wryly, flinching at his outraged infant roars. His teachers had said it despairingly, lifting their hands in defeat each time Max picked a fight or used a word so rude it made them feel faint. And so, finally, had the doctors—lots of them, after Max became sick and even breathing began to hurt. The tone was hushed now, but not so quiet that he couldn’t hear the words from his hospital bed, where he lay with his skin very white—so pale that his birthmark stood out like a smashed strawberry beneath his right eye—and his hands resting on top of the starched cotton sheets. “That boy is a lost cause.”
In fact, the only person who had never said it was his mother. “There’s nothing lost about you,” she told him fiercely. And she glared at anyone who dared to suggest otherwise.
Max’s mother wasn’t an angel, or a saint, which was what most people who knew her liked to say. After all, Max thought, angels didn’t wink at you slyly when someone told a bad joke, and saints didn’t wear blue jeans with silver boots or turn heads in the street with their golden hair and loud laughter.
Max turned heads too, but for other reasons. He hated the way people always seemed to glance from him to his mother, wondering how she could be related to the boy with sticking-up black hair and the unrepentant scowl. The only things he’d inherited from her were his gray eyes and the deep dimple that appeared in his left cheek when he smiled, which wasn’t very often. He was as spiky and awkward as a conker shell, and other people often made him feel itchy, like the feeling you get from wearing a prickly sweater that has shrunk in the wash.
There was one other thing he’d inherited from Marigold Brightly, but it wasn’t something you could see from the outside. It was a sort of bone-deep, bone-headed resolve. When Max decided to do something, he did it.
Which was why, when he found himself, at the age of twelve and three-quarters, kidnapped and imprisoned in a damp cellar, Max decided he was going to escape.
* * *
It was very cold inside the cellar and Max could hear the sound of water dripping somewhere above his head. It was, he thought, the loneliest sound in the world. He had been here for a long time now—he wasn’t sure how long—and hunger was blocking out his thoughts like white noise.
What he knew was this: he had been taken from the London hotel he’d been staying at with his mother (“Just for a few nights,” she had said, when they’d arrived from New York). They had been in the middle of an argument—the usual one, about Max not being well enough to start school—when a noise had sounded from the corridor. There had been a moment, stretched out in Max’s memory, just long enough for them to look at each other, eyes wide.
Then the door had splintered and fallen inward with a scream of wood, and suddenly the room was full of two men—big and tall and masked. Max’s mother had shouted and then the taller of the two men had crossed the room in three steps and backhanded her across the face so that she fell to the ground and lay still. Her eyes were closed, and Max couldn’t see if her chest was moving.
He roared and scrambled toward her; he tried to fling himself on the man—and then a sack was tossed over his head, and everything went dark. He felt himself being lifted bodily over the other man’s shoulder. “No,” he heard himself shout. “Mom! No, please!” He flailed out wildly with his arms, straining to get free, and felt his fist strike something hard: the man’s nose. Max’s captor grunted, and then he knocked Max’s head against something hard, and his brain became a firework that flared and then went dark.
Chapter 3
The shipbuilder’s words echoed in Daisy’s ears as she walked away. A lost cause. He was right, she thought miserably. She lost control of her magic every time she used it—but most of all, she was lost without Ma. Her hand sought out the daisy-shaped pendant she always wore around her neck. It had belonged to Ma, and though it usually calmed her, now she felt only a sharp, twisting worry.
Ever since the letter from her mother had arrived on the night of the Great Mallowmarsh garden party, Daisy had been waiting for nothing else but for the rescue mission to set off. Instead, she had been asked to wait, and wait, and wait some more.
Over the last few weeks, the Greenwild had been swept with attack after attack by a shadowy organization called the Grim Reapers. Daisy shivered at the name. The Reapers were driven by greed above all else—and, as Artemis said, the Greenwild was a treasure chest of priceless plants and animals that could make an unscrupulous person very rich indeed. Artemis White, the commander of Mallowmarsh, had been working overtime, keeping track of the Reapers’ movements and organizing defense measures.
“We survived our attack,” Artemis had said. “And so far, the Reapers haven’t been able to penetrate any of the other pockets. Even so…”
“What?” asked Daisy. She knew that only people with green magic could enter the Greenwild—which meant that the Grim Reapers couldn’t get in, or at least not without help. They belonged to the outer world, or “the Grayside,” as Botanists called it.
“Even so,” said Artemis, “there are people with green magic who support the Reapers. Botanists gone bad, if you like.”
Daisy nodded and Artemis sighed, pushing her long silver hair away from her face. The fine lines around her blue eyes looked shadowed and creased. As the commander of Mallowmarsh, Artemis was responsible for every soul within it. She was also Daisy’s grandmother, a discovery that both of them were still getting used to.
“My theory,” said Artemis, “is that Botanists who misuse their power—who turn it against living things—poison the magic inside themselves and so lose access to the magical world. But it’s only a matter of time before the Reapers find a way in.” She rubbed a hand over her eyes. “And in the meantime, the Grayside is no longer safe. We have to assume that every port, airport and city in the outer world is being watched. It will be safer to travel to the Amazon via Moonmarket, instead of through the Grayside. And that way, we can convene with Botanists from other pockets—the ones brave enough to go against the Bureau.”
The Bureau of Botanical Business governed the many pockets of the magical world, and it had forbidden any rescue missions to the Amazon. Artemis was almost certain it had been infiltrated by Reapers. “So, we’ll have to be careful,” she said. “The French are joining the search alongside us, along with Botanists from Italy, Japan and India. We meet at Moonmarket.”
Moonmarket, Daisy knew, was a vast crossing-place between all the pockets of the Botanical world, and it was open for just one night a month. Travelers going through Moonmarket could hitch a ride on boats heading all over the world, which meant that you could start the night in Melbourne and end it in Mumbai, or travel from Cape Town to Cannes in a heartbeat. It was by far the best means of international travel—as long as you didn’t mind waiting for the full moon, of course.
Tomorrow, thought Daisy, with a skip to her heart. The ship would be sailing for Amazeria, the biggest pocket in the Peruvian Greenwild—and the one nearest to where the missing Botanists were imprisoned. She pulled Ma’s letter out from her pocket and read the words she had read so many times that she knew them by heart:
My rascal. I’m alive.
That was all; but they were words to make hope burn like a candle inside her. Ma had vanished on an expedition to the Amazon rainforest when her plane had crashed back in December, and she had been reported missing, presumed dead. Now it was early March, and Daisy knew that Ma was alive, but imprisoned by Grim Reapers.
Daisy stood on the shore of the lake, remembering it all. How Ma had set off for Peru in pursuit of a dangerous news story. How Daisy had been left behind at a boarding school called Wykhurst—and how she had decided to escape and search for Ma when she’d gone missing. In the process, she had found a hidden silver door in the depths of the Palm House at Kew Gardens in London—and behind it, she had discovered a world where plant magic was real. A world that held the answers to the mystery of Ma’s disappearance.
The Greenwild, thought Daisy. Her blood still thrilled at the name. It was a great hidden world: a place where all manner of things were possible. A place she hadn’t known about until she’d stumbled across it by accident that day in Kew Gardens. Except, of course, that it hadn’t really been an accident. Ma had given her a glowing silver paperweight (Daisy knew now that it was called a dandelight) and it had cast its beam of light like a compass needle, leading her to the hidden door. It was sitting in her pocket now, heavy and cool, with a dandelion puff trapped inside the glass like a silver firework—ready to light up when it was needed.
She felt an indignant movement from inside her other pocket and glanced down to see Napoleon looking back up at her, one feline eyebrow raised, white whiskers quivering.
“All right, I know,” she told the tiny cat as he leaped onto her shoulder. His fur was black and white, and his teeth were tiny and fierce and pointed. “You got me here too.”
Napoleon was a kitten with fine whiskers and an even finer sense of his own importance. He had adopted Daisy soon after Ma had vanished, and it was true: she would never have reached Mallowmarsh without his help.
Daisy fingered Ma’s letter, tracing it for clues. Ma was a journalist, a writer by trade, which made it even more frustrating that the note was so short.
There had been nothing strange about Ma deciding to go to Peru, since she often traveled to research stories. What had been different was Ma deciding to leave Daisy behind. Until then, they had gone everywhere together, and Daisy had spent most of her life moving from place to place, as Ma chased one breaking news story and then another. Daisy had celebrated her third birthday in Berlin, her fourth in Cairo, and her fifth in Mogadishu. She remembered her sixth birthday in Bolivia: a perfect summer day when Ma had bought a single rose from a street vendor and tossed it on the floor of their hotel room. Seconds later, the entire suite had been twined with roses up to the rafters, growing out of the overstuffed armchair, bursting through the shiny mahogany headboard, and rustling foot-deep around the walls. Daisy had been young enough to convince herself, later, that she had made the whole thing up. But arriving at Mallowmarsh—a place of lily-pad boats and magical glasshouses—had taught her that birthday roses were the least of the marvels green magic could achieve.
Even so, Daisy missed her mother so much that it was like having a constant stomachache. She missed Ma’s bright brown eyes, crinkled with laughter at the edges. She missed the way that Ma took her dancing, and sailing, and out for tea to eat giant cream puffs (“Life is too short not to eat cream puffs,” she said.), and stayed up half the night with her reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. She missed Ma’s stories of growing up in Iran, and the way she spoke to Daisy in Farsi, the language of her childhood. She missed Ma’s scent of ink and jasmine, and the way she made her feel that anything in the world was possible.
Ma had been her ally, her best friend, and they had told each other everything. That’s how it had always been: ever since the death of Daisy’s father when she was only three years old. Pa had been an English Botanist called Henry White—and he had been killed by Grim Reapers. Now, the Reapers had taken Ma too, and Daisy would do anything—anything—to make sure that she didn’t lose her in the same way.
She turned back to the words in Ma’s letter: words that made her want to shout, “Hurry up!” to every Botanist who passed.
I’m alive, Ma had said. But for how much longer?
Napoleon meowed, and Daisy looked at him. “Yes,” she agreed as they turned their back on the lake. “Not long now. We’ll be on that boat tomorrow. Come on,” she said, glancing at her watch. “It’s almost five o’clock.”
Copyright © 2024 by Pari Thomson.
Copyright © 2024 by Elisa Paganelli.
