Brewing Up (Witch-in-Training, Book 4) Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Keep Reading

  Also by the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  Jessica lazily zigzagged over the roofs of the High Street, paused above Miss Strega’s hardware shop and sniffed the air. “How odd,” she thought as she zoomed down to the pavement and hopped off her broom. “There’s no smell of a bubbling cauldron. I thought I was to start my Brewing lessons today.”

  She sniffed once more – but there was nothing, not even a hint of Cold Smelly Voles – so she removed her flying helmet, helped Berkeley out of her pocket, lifted the door latch and hurried inside to find out what was going on.

  To her surprise, Miss Strega was not in her usual place behind the shop counter. Instead, she was whizzing around, fast-forwarding, reversing and zooming all over the place, pulling drawers open and scribbling notes on a clipboard. “Moonrays and marrowbones!” she was muttering. “What a mess!”

  “What’s a mess?” Jessica asked. “Have you lost something?”

  Miss Strega swivelled around, peered over her glasses at Jessica, stuck her pencil behind her ear and swooped to the floor. “Three economy packets of owl feathers, two phials of Fairy Tears, half a Dragon’s Tooth, one Wasp Sting and eight Spider Egg Sacs. That’s all!”

  “That’s all?” repeated Jessica, wondering what sort of spell Miss Strega was brewing up with that mixture.

  Miss Strega waved a hand at the open drawers. “I’m talking about Brewing ingredients.”

  “Brewing ingredients?”

  “By the hooting of Minerva’s owl, Jess! You sound like an echo. Don’t you understand this is an emergency! I’ve run out of everything from Mystic Biscuits to Teenage Slugs. We shall have to leave on a collecting trip at once.”

  “A collecting trip? Fantastic!” said Jessica who loved both travelling and shopping. “Where do we have to go?”

  “The attic,” said Miss Strega.

  “The attic?” Jessica’s face fell.

  “You’re still echoing me, dear. Now, on your marks.” She tweaked the starter twigs on her broomstick. “Ig-Fo-Li: Ignition, Forward and Lift.”

  As Miss Strega rose majestically towards the ceiling, her cat Felicity, who had been snoozing on top of a pile of Spell books, launched herself on to the back of her broom. Jessica remounted her own broomstick and followed them as they disappeared through the trapdoor into the attic.

  The attic smelt of old suitcases and dusty cauldrons – and cats, of course. Felicity was Miss Strega’s number one shop cat, but there were always other cats in residence, cats on holiday or having kittens or in hiding. Jessica took one of them on her lap and sat down on a pile of moth-eaten cloaks while Miss Strega rummaged about behind a curtain of cobwebs.

  “Here we are,” she said at last. “This is what we want – the Expedition Kit.” She began to haul out chests marked Samples and boxes marked Specimens, baskets of every shape and size, long-handled fishing nets and short-handled butterfly nets.

  “And of course, we shall have to take the campfire cauldron.” Miss Strega turned a small cooking pot upside down and whacked it. Several cross spiders scuttled across the attic boards in search of cover. A family of bewildered sleepy mice, who had bedded down for the night, tumbled out on to the floor. Felicity and all the other cats immediately chased after them.

  Once she had calmed everything down again, Miss Strega started loading her broomstick while Jessica inspected the Expedition Kit. Inside one of the boxes, she found rows and rows of glass jars and bottles, each labelled in Miss Strega’s spidery handwriting, as well as tweezers and camel-hair brushes, pin cushions and tins of rubber bands.

  “The plan,” Miss Strega explained, “is to collect all the standard shop items…”

  “Like Snails’ Drool and Gnats’ Spittle,” suggested Jessica, reading the labels on the bottles.

  “Exactly, but we’ll scoot around looking for some new products as well…”

  “…like the Conjuring Stones from Pelagia’s beach or Dr Krank’s Withershins Balls?”

  Miss Strega nodded her long chin vigorously. “Absolutely! Witches World Wide like novelty as much as anyone. So, we’ll need to fly off the usual flight paths and go to the Very End of the Earth.”

  “That sounds great,” agreed Jessica as she hurriedly replaced the cork on a whiffy bottle labelled Aroma of Lion’s Den. “But how on earth are we going to carry all this gear? Once these boxes and baskets are full, our broomsticks won’t be able to lift off the ground.”

  “That’s where the homing brooms come in.” Miss Strega pointed at a pair of long-handled dusters leaning against the water tank and nodding their pink and grey feathered heads as they chatted. “They work rather like those racing pigeons that always know their way home,” explained Miss Strega, ignoring Jessica’s raised eyebrows. “Once we have collected enough stock, we send the brooms back with all our parcels; they’ll come and go as often as we please.”

  Jessica whistled admiringly. The homing brooms turned a little pinker and bowed.

  Miss Strega heaved the last of the boxes on to the back of her broom and handed Jessica a large butterfly net. “You’ll need that in a minute. Now, are we ready to fly? Are all your twig controls in working order? Have you got your flying helmet? Is your cloak clean?”

  Jessica nodded, fastened the strap of her aerodynamic flying helmet under her chin and smoothed down the front of her silk Super-Duper De-Luxe Guaranteed-Invisibility-When-You-Need-It cape.

  “Have you got your Spell book? Your wand? An owl feather in case you need to do some Mingling?”

  Jessica nodded again, three times.

  “Then, let’s take to the sky. I think we might start our journey with a moon-vault.”

  Chapter Two

  Jessica and Miss Strega perched on the tallest chimneypot and squinted at the sliver of banana-shaped moon. It was just visible behind a bank of damp black clouds.

  “I think it’s wobbling,” Jessica said, doubtfully.

  “Perhaps it isn’t a good night for vaulting.”

  “Fiddlesticks. It’s not wobbling; it’s shimmering, just as I’d hoped. Nets aloft, please.”

  Miss Strega flew on to the peak of the roof tiles and shuffled along it, holding her butterfly net in one outstretched arm. Jessica shuffled along behind her, wondering what on earth (or on moon) the nets were for.

  When the planet Venus was lined up precisely at a right angle to the control twigs of their broomsticks, Miss Strega shouted, “Deploy your Moon-Vault twig, NOW.”

  Immediately, Jessica’s plaits flew back over her shoulders and her scarf streamed out behind her back. It was like being on a rollercoaster with an invisible giant blowing into her face. Then she was off. She broke loose, shot up into the sky – and flew straight, bang, right into a cloud of sticky moondust.

  “Hey!” she yelled at Miss Strega who was ducking and diving ahead of her, scooping up the dust in her net. “Hang on.”

  “No, you keep up,” Miss Strega shouted back over her shoulder, “and catch as much of this dust as you can. I know it tickles but it’s very popular with fairies. They think they look cute sprinkling it around wherever they go – so dust away, Jess.”

  There was nothing, absolutely nothing, cute about moondust, Jessica decided. It got everywhere, in her ears and her eyes and her socks and her hair and up her nose like summer midges in a Scottish bog. It wasn’t tickl
y, but it was itchy, very itchy. So Jess pulled her scarf up to her nose, closed her eyes and flailed about with her moondust net as best as she could.

  When she opened her eyes again, she was already tumbling down the far side of the moon. The neon lights of an intergalactic highway lay ahead.

  “The Milky Way!” she yelled, tossing her net of moondust to Miss Strega and zooming towards the Milky Way entrance.

  As usual, there was a long tailback of fliers trying to get on to the Milky Way. There were turbaned viziers on flying carpets, dreamy angels on fluffy clouds and a set of flying saucers. Jessica cruised to a pause behind a white winged horse that was pawing the ground impatiently.

  Miss Strega came up behind her. “There,” she said, flipping over the pages on her clipboard and putting a large tick beside Moondust. “One done, only 332 more to go. Now, what on earth is holding us up today? Not another Phoenix rising, I hope.”

  “Look over there!” Jessica pointed towards the toll-bridge barrier where a large dragon with a very fat bottom had got stuck. Her scaly tail flicked nervously as she tried to reverse out, scattering scales everywhere.

  Miss Strega tut-tutted. “Shame to see those going to waste, Jess. Perhaps you could zoom over and pick them up.”

  Jessica twiddled with her broom twigs, took off at an unexpected angle – a sort of diagonal lift – twirled over the queue and swooped down behind the flustered dragon.

  “Do you mind if I take some of your scales?” she asked, smiling her sweetest smile.

  The dragon turned around, revealing a long mournful face and surprisingly bushy eyebrows. “You can have all the scales you want, Miss,” she sniffed, “and if you can Spell me out of here, I’ll tell you where you can get some Dragons’ Teeth for nothing as well. I know you witches like a good supply of those.”

  “I’m only a witch-in-training,” said Jessica, stuffing as many of the dragon’s scales as she could into her saddlebag, “but I’ll see what I can do.” She took out her wand and waved it about. “This should work.

  “With a wave of my wand, da-da.

  A bang of my heels, bang-bang,

  With a gnash of my teeth, clang-clang,

  Three bats of my eyelids and a wink,

  Your bottom will begin to shrink –

  I think.”

  The dragon’s bottom stopped thrashing around. Little by little, it began to shrink.

  “Hey, steady on,” said the dragon with a loud snort. “I don’t want to be too bony. I’ve got to sleep on a lot of sharp metal objects. You don’t want to be too thin if you live in a cold cave on top of a hoard of gold, you know.”

  “Right,” said Jessica, with a giggle. “That should be enough.”

  With one final wriggle, the dragon was FREE. She flew off with her cheeks ablaze, snorting embarrassed plumes of smoke.

  “Hang on,” shouted Jessica, “what about the Dragons’ Teeth?”

  “Drop in to Torquemada, the dragon dentist,” the dragon shouted back. “Tell him Gonzina sent you.”

  Chapter Three

  Some time in the middle of the night, Jessica and Miss Strega flew over a walled city. Far below, Jessica could see high gabled houses with pointy eaves and a castle with turrets all lit up with double strings of yellow lanterns.

  When Miss Strega gave the signal to descend, they landed on a chimney on a high rooftop and looked down at a huge cobbled square within the castle walls.

  It was market day. Hundreds of stalls had been set up higgledy-piggledy in every bit of space. Jessica was amazed to see that every stallholder was wearing a tall conical hat, and that beside each stall, there stood a huge cauldron, hubbling and bubbling and giving off some very strange smells, not all of them delicious.

  “It’s a witches’ market!” exclaimed Jessica.

  “Not just any witches’ market. It’s the Market at the Very End of the Earth,” said Miss Strega, with a contented sigh. “Let’s go shopping!”

  As soon as she hit the ground, Miss Strega behaved as if someone had switched her on to the spin cycle. She whizzed along the rows of stalls, elbows akimbo, stocking up on all sorts of leaves and shoots and barks and seeds. She hurtled across the bridges and up and down the castle battlements buying Mermaids’ Gloves and Sphagnum Moss; Antler Tips and Reindeer Velvet; Poisonous Laurel and Deadly Nightshade. She sent a juggler flying and trampled on his collecting hat to reach the top of a queue for some very rare Scotch Bonnets. (These, she explained to Jessica, were vicious red peppers to tie the tongues of fibbers and spoofers.)

  In no time at all, she had packages tucked under her arms, and bags hanging off her shoulders and her wrists, not to mention little parcels in every pocket of her cape. Jessica zoomed along behind her, loading up the homing brooms whenever Miss Strega looked as if she might collapse under the weight of all her purchases.

  “I have a funny feeling,” she thought as she watched Miss Strega open the drawstring of her purse for the umpteenth time, “that these market witches have put a Spell on us.”

  At that very moment, there was a loud violent explosion behind them. They swung around to see a saleswitch in front of a cauldron full of things popping and sneezing and leaping about.

  “Snapping Hazelnuts from the witch-hazel tree!” the witch called out as she ladled the popping mix into paper pokes. “Don’t go home without them. Only one maravedi the kilo.”

  “What are they for?” Jessica nudged Miss Strega.

  Miss Strega looked a little sheepish. “Search me,” she whispered. “I’ve never heard of them. See if it says anything in your Spell book.”

  Jessica took out her Spelling Made Easy.

  “‘The Snapping Hazelnut or Hamamelis’,” she read out, “‘is the Universal Cure for swellings, burns, windy bottoms, scalds, night worries and sore eyes. Just add boiling water and the Snapping Hazelnut will do the rest.’ Golly, it seems to fix just about everything.”

  “Absolutely,” said the saleswitch, snatching a rogue hazelnut that snapped and crackled and spat out seeds as it tried to escape from its poke. “No witch’s cupboard should be without them.”

  Miss Strega sighed and opened her purse once again. “I’d better take three kilos – but I won’t pay more than two maravedis.”

  The next thing to catch their attention was a cauldron billowing clouds of steam and hot soapy bubbles. When they peered into it, they caught a glimpse of the heel of a striped sock, the toe of a football sock, the leg of a grey school sock, and then the lacy frill of a baby sock. They bobbed to the surface, one by one, then sank back beneath the bubbles once again.

  “How curious!” Jessica declared.

  “It’s the Pool of Lost Socks,” said the witch-in-charge, giving the cauldron a brisk stir with a wooden spoon. “All the odd socks in the world that ever go missing end up here.”

  “What do you use them for?” asked Jessica.

  The witch winked. “Are there nights when ghostly footsteps drag up and down your staircase? When you can’t sleep on account of screeching owls, howling wolves or singing cats?”

  Jessica and Miss Strega nodded. “Singing cats especially,” they said together. Felicity, curled up in the feathers of a homing broom, opened one orange eye and stuck her tongue out at them.

  “Then what you need is one of these,” said the witch. “A Putasockinit™, the enchanted sock, is guaranteed to reduce the volume of all nocturnal nuisances.”

  Jessica looked puzzled.

  “It makes them shut up, I mean,” explained the witch. “Just hang a Putasockinit™ on the end of your bed or put it in your muncheon and you can say goodbye to sleepless nights. Go on, take your pick.” The Sock Witch tapped the lip of the cauldron and hundreds of socks bobbed up to the surface, all eager to be rescued and returned to a useful life, even without their twin.

  Jessica fished one out. It was rather grey but had digital toes in the Witches World Wide colours of jade and purple, so it seemed a good choice. Miss Strega chose an emerald green one; sh
e thought she might have owned it once so she was a bit miffed that she had to pay to have it back.

  When Miss Strega was quite satisfied that she had inspected every market stall, she and Jessica headed for the shops under the arches. Tucked away in a dark corner, they came across a tiny shop that gave off the most wonderful smell. The witch-in-charge beckoned them in, scurried behind the counter and came back with a tray of little hard sugar cakes. But when Jessica made to take one, the witch grabbed her arm and gave her a wicked grin. “These are rompedenti, my dear. You don’t want to eat them.”

  “Who are they for then?”

  “Aaahh,” said the witch, tapping her nose in the traditional way. “Just stamp the biscuit with the name of a person you want to cast a spell on, and within twelve hours, all their teeth will turn black and fall out. And the best thing is, there is no antidote.”

  “Great honking goose feathers!” said Jessica. “That’s wicked.”

  “Spot on!” agreed Miss Strega. “They’re bound to come in useful sometime. Three dozen, please.”

  Their next discovery was even more amazing. Down a blind alley, they stumbled across a stall of blankets.

  “Going on a secret mission?” hissed the witch behind the stall. “Don’t leave home without Cover of Darkness, the blanket that stretches to infinity and back again. Just wrap yourself and your broom in this and you’ll be there and back before anyone knows you’ve left home.”

  “Every single one of my customers will want one of those!” Miss Strega declared delightedly. She whistled for the homing brooms to come and load up. “I’ll have the lot.”

  Once Miss Strega had given the brooms their flight plans and waved them off, she turned to Jessica. “I don’t know about you, my little lamb’s lettuce,” she said, “but my feet are killing me – let’s have breakfast.” And she steered Jessica towards the flickering neon lights of the Hags’ Express Diner.