Emily Feather and the Secret Mirror Read Free

been a good one? Unless they just hadn’t wanted her?
    A tear fell on to the chocolatey crumbs, and Emily gulped.
    Robin swallowed a huge bite of his second muffin and eyed her worriedly. “Do you want me to get Mum? She’s in her workroom. She said she had an idea for a new design for a scarf…” He started to get up, backing away as though he thought the crying might be infectious.
    â€œNo,” Emily sniffed, shaking her head. “I’m all right. It’s just scary – what if I am like my mum and dad, and they didn’t care about me at all? I might turn out to be a horrible person too.”
    Robin wrinkled his nose, thinking. “I suppose so. But you aren’t horrible now, are you? Why should you turn into somebody else?”
    â€œBecause I feel like somebody else!” Emily cried. “Everything’s changed!”
    â€œNo, it hasn’t!” Robin glared at her. “It’s exactly the same, except you know about it. That’s all.”
    Emily stared at him helplessly. All? She supposed he was right – but how could he think it was so easy?
    Robin chased crumbs round the table with one finger. “You really are a very good cook. And you always knew you didn’t get that from Mum or Dad, didn’t you?” Their mother’s home-made cakes were legendarily awful. All four of the children conspired to hide them at school cake sales, or they had until Emily had just taken over. Their dad didn’t cook at all, except for sandwiches made out of toast and anything he could find in the fridge, when he wandered out of his study at three in the morning after wrestling with a difficult chapter.
    Emily sighed. What Robin said was true. Then she smiled sweetly at him. “You aren’t having another muffin, so don’t even try.”

Emily made a mug of tea and put one of the chocolate-orange muffins on a plate. Then she headed for her dad’s little study, which was cleverly fitted into a cubbyhole under the stairs. Although, thinking about it now, it was an awful lot bigger than it should have been. Emily picked a chocolate chip out of the muffin as she stared at the study door. There must be some sort of spell. The space under the stairs was just a tiny cupboard, really, so how was there room for a desk and a red velvet armchair? Let alone the piles and heaps and wobbling towers of books. Emily shook her head crossly. How had she never noticed these things before? She put out her hand to open the door. Her dad was working, but she reckoned that if she was lucky, with the tea and muffin as bribery, she might be able to get him to stop for a bit and talk to her.
    When he and her mum had told her what the family really were last weekend, Emily had been so shocked she’d hardly asked any questions. The news was just too big and strange. After they had told her the truth, Emily had run away from them all, desperate to have some time alone to think. But the house, which was full of doors that led to nowhere, and everywhere, had somehow sensed the eruption of fear and magic from the family argument and shifted. Looking back now, of course, there had been odd hints of something strange about the house long before. Moments when Emily thought she saw something odd in a mirror. The way the clouded, swirly old glass in her bedroom windows seemed to have strange cities floating in it. Her dad’s study. She should have known it wasn’t just her imagination.
    As Emily had raced up the stairs, they had changed into something strange and new. She had thought it was her parents trying to stop her, and kept running, until she burst out through one of the secret magical doors on to a riverbank somewhere elsewhere. The fairy world.
    It hadn’t taken long for the fairy people to find her. Over the years they had caught glimpses of her through the doors and wondered about this curious human child, almost in their world. Her arrival had been