I was five years old when we moved to London. I don't think I'd ever seen it before that; maybe not even heard the word. It didn't seem to be one of the kingdoms featured in my book of fairytales, though I flipped back and forth scouring the well-thumbed pages for its mention. Even then, I wanted my life to work like a fairy story – small, and safe, and predictable, with everything bad hideous, and everything beautiful good. Somewhere with nothing to be scared of, no unknown left to fear. I would be the hero, in a place like that - I was sure of it. The worthy, and the fearless, and the brave…

When we got to London, the reason for its omission became obvious. It wasn't great and green and glowing like all the pictures in the books I pored over. It was dull and dark and dreary grey, with big buildings that cluttered up the sky. Towers walled me in and huge crowds of people swept me up, whisking me away to places I couldn't control. In the dungeons below, great trains rattled and thundered like merciless bullets; and upstairs, roaring, smirking cars swept screaming through the streets, rushing round corners ready to eat me all up. Everything was huge, and everything was unstoppable.

Of course it wasn't in my book of fairytales. London wasn't small, or safe, or predictable. London was unknown – unfamiliar – London was uncontrollable. I couldn't be the hero, not in a place like that. Not in a place where you could never know what might be lurking in the shadows. Not in place that made you so afraid of your own. Even for me, it was a fairytale too far. My own little taste of the impossible.

I'd come to love witches so much because I knew that was just exactly what they dealt in.

Monday November 15th, 2027

I walked out of Miss Oswald's classroom in a daze, the sound of her voice still ringing in my ears. She'd talked all lesson, talked without stopping – talked and talked and talked, for longer than I thought I'd ever heard anybody. No one had interrupted her, though. No one had wanted to. Beatrice was right. Terrified or not, it was as if she'd cast a spell. We'd all stayed silent, hardly daring to breathe. Every word, every sound, every roll of her tongue, had painted the universe for us in the stale classroom air. It had begun to feel as if she really had risen us right up among the stars she talked about. The Earth had faded to just a pinprick of blue in her words – the monsters shrinking to minibeasts, London to a toytown, the shadows into scribbles of pencil. So small, so safe, so predictable. By the time she'd uttered that sentence, that one incredible sentence – It all depends on the position of the stars – I hadn't been afraid at all. I hadn't been afraid. For the first time in eight years, the first time since we'd moved to the land of noise and fear, the land of the uncontrollable – I hadn't been afraid.

It had come back, of course it had. The moment the bell had rung, plunging us all back to Earth with an unwelcome thump, all the old sick shaky fear had come running. It always came back for me.

And yet I wondered, as I left the classroom that lunchtime, whether maybe it didn't have to. Not now I'd found a witch to cast me my spell. Position of the stars. That was what had made it all shrink. It all depends on the position of the stars. Maybe I could cast it for myself. Maybe I could make it all shrink again. And maybe then I really could be the hero.

I just had to find something to test it out on…

"Well, you picked your day, Amy! God, that was even madder than usual," said Beatrice, biting into a segment of her orange as she shook back her long dark hair.

It was lunchtime. She'd taken me off to sit with a brand-new crowd of people, all of us huddled up on the damp concrete steps outside the canteen. I knew without having to be told that this was the 'popular' group; the social structure's ruling elite. Carlotta had ducked herself out of reach the moment she'd grasped where we were being led, rolling her eyes and throwing a half-hearted excuse over her shoulder in Beatrice's direction, but I hadn't known how to refuse. Even bearing in mind the position of the stars, setting out such plain disdain could surely be nothing short of turning myself over to the ogres. They'd call me that word again, that one terrible word, still stinging like a slap… Worse than any monster…

I shook my head, not wanting to think about it; dragging my mind to the scene in front of me instead.

"Miss Oswald's always pretty weird though, ain't she?" one girl was saying, tugging at her dubiously tiny tie with two precariously long nails. "I mean, cool weird, but still weird, don't you think? Like, no one else could get away with the stuff she pulls in a million years. Remember that crazy assembly she did last year, with all them random poems?"

"Yeah, you're just pissed because you pronounced 'Bysshe' wrong when she called on you, Ellie," another girl told her, one eyebrow raised wryly as she scrolled through her phone.

"Bryan Kent heard!"

"Bryan Kent laughed," said Beatrice crisply, as if that decided the matter. "You're wasting your time on that one, Ellie, don't you think?"

"I think Beatrice has just got a kink for witches," commented the boy pressed up next to her. He didn't look too disappointed about the situation. Miss Oswald may have been the witch in residence, but the whole school seemed under Beatrice's spell.

He turned towards her, adopting an air of confidentiality and lowering his voice to a stage whisper. "And I don't mean to rain all over your fantasy, babe, that's totally not what I'm about, but you do know the broom is only there as a stand-in, right? Like, to compensate?"

"Really?" she shot back, eyebrows raised in perfect black arches. "You're going to be wanting how many of these magical compensating broomsticks, then, James?"

"You can set me up with at least three, Beatrice, you still owe me a fiver," James told her, the group rippling with laughter. Beatrice laughed too, her teeth even and pearly white against the rich caramel of her skin. I couldn't help thinking she looked more the fairytale queen than ever, effortlessly, airily confident; always the centre of the crowd, all her subjects straining to crane in around her. It was odd to think now that she was the same person who'd gazed such rapturous eyes through the rain with me that morning.

James paused, his head on one side; looking at her too. I wondered fleetingly if he'd ever seen her like that.

Maybe she wondered too. She flinched in annoyance, sensing his gaze. "What?"

He peered at her again.

"What?"

"Bea, I'm not fussy, you know. If you've got that fiver, you can give it me now."

"What do you mean?" she asked him crossly. "Quite apart from anything else, since when have I ever had a fiver to my name? You've been into town with me. I practically have to don a balaclava every time I pass outside the bank."

Ellie and the phone girl snickered, but James was still looking at her. "What's that in your hand, then?"

Beatrice's expression slipped a little – and maybe this morning didn't seem so odd after all. But she kept her voice steady, her eyebrows raised, aloof and acerbic as ever. "God, what are you taking in your tea, James? Because it certainly isn't sugar, I'll tell you that for free. There isn't anything in my hand, OK?"

When he failed to adopt an expression that conveyed any kind of conviction, she sighed heavily, irritated, and flipped it out for him to see for himself. "Look, nothing, see? Empty as my bank balance. Where do you get this stuff, the Daily Mail?"

I peered too, confused. No… surely…? But then I shook my head, dismissing the thought as quickly as Beatrice. Of course not.

James blinked at her, wounded. "All right, calm down! I asked you a question, Beatrice, it wasn't exactly the Spanish Inquisition." He bit his lip. "I don't want you to get into any more trouble, that's all."

"Ah, sweet," Beatrice said, rolling her eyes and mocking him. "God, James, do you not trust me to manage my own life?"

"Babe, have you met you?"

"And don't babe me, you strident misogynist!" A mischievous smile edged its way through her features, raising her eyebrows and kinking the corners of her lips up into a knowing grin. The morning's events seemed impossible again now. She was the queen, unquestionably the ruler and effortlessly the regal. The stuff of my fairytales. "Honestly, did you learn nothing from all those feminism debates?"

"Yeah, well, it's not difficult to be a feminist when Miss Oswald's the woman in front of you," one boy grinned, shuffling up to join in the conversation.

"Zac, ssh! She'll turn you into a frog, don't you know?" someone else warned, following him. And then someone else, and someone else, and someone else…

And there we were again, back on the witch.

It was taken as a fact here that that was what she was. Unspoken. Indisputable. I thought I could see now why Carlotta had ducked herself out so hurriedly. In amongst this crowd, her dismissals would have looked ridiculous. Everyone seemed to have a story, a theory, an anecdote. I listened open-mouthed, astonished at the fairytale unfurling itself for real in front of my eyes. It really was a spell. It really could change me.

But I shut my mouth quickly when I saw Beatrice watching me, an unreadable expression on her face.

Thankfully, her attention seemed to be in perpetual demand, and she was soon summoned away by yet another of her subjects.

"Beatrice!" a girl across the way was calling, smoothing her spider-like false eyelashes and adding yet another roll to her already improbably short skirt. "You're in her English, you lucky bitch, you'd know. Isn't it a thing that Miss Oswald never, ever gives anyone detention? Like, no matter what you do? 'Cos Jasmine was saying to me the other day that this one time Kevin – you know, in your Drama, that one what got in isolation with you that time, he put all that stuff in the mince in Food Tech – anyway, he tried to–"

Beatrice rolled her eyes, cutting her off. "Yeah, as if she needs to! As if anyone ever dares to stray from her will of iron!" Then her black eyes sparkled. "And even if you were a total twat and did, Goldie, she's a witch. She wouldn't give you anything so mundane and prosaic as a detention. Oh no, she'd drag you back to her lair and simmer you in her cauldron while she sits there marking Year Eleven's mocks. On Macbeth! She teaches chemistry too, you know. She'd do it well."

"Or she might wave you off into atoms with one flick of her pen-shaped wand," added James, gesturing dramatically. "She was my sister's physics tutor last term, would you believe!"

"What, she teaches science?" the eyelash girl asked, wide-eyed underneath her spiders.

"Oh, Miss Oswald knows everything," Beatrice drawled – and for some inexplicable reason, she turned to face me instead, as if the question had been mine. "Honestly, Amy, it's weird. Like we walked in one day the other week, and there was all this maths scrawled up on the whiteboard – all these crazily complicated equations. And Miss Oswald was just stood in front of it, calmly solving them, as if she were bloody Pythagoras or something. It was insane. Then another time it was all this Arabic calligraphy – and then there's been Greek, and Hebrew, and Latin… I mean, no one even speaks Latin any more! I bet she only uses it for her spells."

"When was it Arabic? I don't remember that," said James, peering at her.

"Oh, I was in detention or something after school," she said quickly. Then she turned back to me. "She speaks loads more languages too, I've heard her. German with the German teachers, French with the French teachers, Spanish with" – here she paused, just for a split second, before recovering herself – "Spanish with the Spanish teachers, even Persian with that Iranian kid. It's mad, Amy, honestly. No one understands her at all. She's got to be a witch, I'm sureof it." She leaned in closer still. Her eyes were huge and dark, great pools of ink against her caramel-coloured skin, her red lips poised half-open. She looked impossibly beautiful – so perfect it was difficult to believe she was real at all.

"She's got to be," Beatrice repeated, as if it were her own magic spell. "She's got to be a witch, Amy. Don't you think?"

Suddenly I really could believe it had been her leading my gaze across the rain that morning. An almost desperate eagerness clung to her every breath as she waited, sparking her features like a firework. Enraptured.

If I hadn't known better, I would have said almost afraid.

But I did know better. People like Beatrice – the heroes, the ruling elite – they were never afraid. Not ever, not of anything. And certainly not of people like me.

I was sick of being a person like me. I wanted to believe in magic. I wanted to believe she could change me. I wanted to be the hero.

I nodded slowly.

"Even so, she'd have a hell of a job boiling you up, Goldie," said Zac suddenly. "Must be freezing there, this time of year."

The girl on her phone glanced up for the first time, bemused. "Freezing where? It's November, Zac, it's freezing everywhere. And who's boiling Goldie up? What have I missed? What are you on about? Am I sat here with a load of nutcases?"

"That's debatable," James murmured, his eyes on Beatrice.

"Well, she lives down that junkyard, doesn't she?" Zac countered, colouring slightly. "Miss Oswald. You know, that old one, down on Totters Lane."

I froze.

Beatrice whipped round so quickly James almost ended up with a mouthful of her long dark hair. He coughed and gagged, miming a comedy choking fit. I don't think she even saw him. "What did you say?"

"Foreman's Yard, that's the one," said Zac, snapping his fingers. "Yeah, have you never heard? I thought you knew everything, Beatrice. Dossier on legs!" He creased up laughing.

"And very fine legs they are too," she told him, eyebrows sky-high. "Heard what?"

"Well, that's where she lives, down in Foreman's Yard." He stopped to glare at the phone girl, who was snorting into her camera at his words. "Eva, stop! It's true, I swear it is. I've seen her there loads of times, just sort of pottering about by this metal container thing. Her motorbike's parked there too, sometimes. It can't be a very comfortable lair, I've got to say – all that scrap! But good for cauldrons. And she looks amazing for it, don't you think!"

There was a myriad of groans at his lewdness. I hardly knew what they were for. I hadn't taken in anything since the words 'Foreman's Yard'. Words I'd never wanted to hear again.

Beatrice wasn't listening either. She didn't even seem to have heard what Zac had said. Instead, she leaned in closer, still full of that same, strange urgency. "Foreman's Yard?"

Zac frowned at her. "Yeah? God, Eva, can you stop laughing?" He flapped at the phone girl impatiently, almost catching her in the eye with her own keyboard.

Beatrice took no notice. "Definitely?"

He frowned harder, having fought himself free. "Beatrice, you don't want to get dragged off to her lair, do you?"

She sat back slowly, an odd expression on her face – almost as if she were considering it. James snorted with bemused laughter, shaking his head. "You are so nuts."

Beatrice blinked, seeming to recover herself. Then she smiled. Turning to James, she told him, "James, your determined stating of the obvious becomes horribly tedious for one and all involved after a while – refrain if you can, please." Then, to Zac: "And no, of course not. That's the whole point."

"The point of what?"

She sighed, as if it should be obvious. "Well, as James so graciously deigned to point out to you all earlier on, I'm in trouble all the time. If I'm going to wind up there some day, I might as well know where I'm going. A reconnaissance scout, if you will."

We all blinked at her. She rolled her eyes. "I'm going to have a scout around Foreman's Yard, yes? Tonight, maybe? What do you think?" She cackled with witchy laughter at our faces, baring her teeth like a cat, the same as that morning in the hall. "Nice and dark!"

I looked at her, struck dumb. This couldn't be happening. Not here. Not now.

Not again.

James raised his eyebrows. "OK, you are nuts."

"What did I say about stating the obvious?"

"Well, you are! Bea, you can't go!"

Zac nodded in agreement, his eyes wide. "I wasn't… Beatrice, I wasn't being serious. And Eva, you can shut up, by the way, before you start that laughing again. It was just a joke, Bea, it was just like the witch thing. I mean, of course she's not a witch, not really. No one really thinks that. I was kidding about with the junkyard thing, I swear – I was just trying to get Eva to stop laughing at me. It's probably just her way to school or something. And I bet it's not even her motorbike I've seen, maybe some bloke's got a similar one and can't be arsed to pay for his parking. Beatrice, it's crazy going there, seriously. And in the dark! You can't!"

She laughed at him. "Oh, well, if you're all too scared…"

I should have seen what was coming next.

Beatrice turned to face me, smiling her beautiful, fairytale smile. "Amy," she said. "I bet you're braver than all these jokers. Tell me, would you do me the honour of coming with me tonight? To Foreman's Yard?" She grinned a wicked grin. "In the dark?"

I stared at her, my heart thudding. My hands dropped to my sides, stolen broomstick all but forgotten, my witch coat catching the breeze and flying out behind me. Like a cape. The sheens of tiny stars dancing in the corners of my eyes seemed to shift position as I watched, just a little.

I could do it, this time. I could do it, I could dare it, I could be just like everybody else. Just like all the heroes. I could run right in there and dare it, with this fairytale queen of the school. I could think of the position of the stars to stop me ever being afraid, because Miss Oswald was a witch, of course she was, of course she had to be – and then my story could be rewritten. I wouldn't be that word any more after that, still eating me right down to the bone; hard and sharp and ugly. I'd be drafted in as the hero this time, as the worthy and the fearless and the brave, and no one here would ever know the difference…

"No."

Beatrice blinked – and then she laughed, a little shakily. "Oh, it's the wicked stepmother! Everybody hiss!"

"Beatrice, no," Carlotta continued, crouched behind her from where she must have crept up. Her eyes were very bright, her cheeks sharp pink, her soft Scottish words spiking and rising as she spoke, sharper and sharper, stumbling over each other in hard staccato bursts of anger. "You can't do this. You can't. I won't let you. I know what you're doing, and you can't, OK? This is twisted, this is evil. I won't let you drag anyone else into you being mad like this, Beatrice. God knows I shouldn't even let you do it to yourself." She bit her lip, blinking away the glossy brightness from her soft brown eyes. Then she sighed. "I will come with you, OK?" she said. "You can bring me. I'll go along with whatever it is you want to do; you can talk about witches or whatever to me the whole time, and I won't even try and stop you, I promise. But you don't do this to Amy." Her voice was still quiet, but harder, firm, her face set. "You don't do this to anyone, ever. Do you understand, Beatrice? Do you hear me?"

The whole group was silent as a stone, every word ringing low and clear. Beatrice must have heard her. Everyone had. Yet she made no move whatsoever to indicate her awareness of the fact; no acknowledgment of the words or their meaning – whatever they did mean, and I didn't know. She didn't even twitch. Her body was fluid as honey as she twisted further towards me. Her beautiful black eyes pierced into mine, and her perfect pearly teeth glinted into a grin.

"Amy, I dare you."

It was the grin of a wolf.

Long ago, all the way back at the beginning of Year Seven, there had been a game. It had been devised by the social structure's ruling elite, and had existed for a single purpose: it decided your worth, once and for all. The game would write your reputation, dictate your standing – it was the game that elected the heroes.

What choice did I have but to join in?

The rules had been simple. Every lunchtime, crowded in at the end of the field where the rest of the school knew better than to venture, one of the people right at the top – one of the rulers – would take their turn in crafting a challenge for the rest of us. A dare, to prove ourselves worthy. Anything at all, so long as it made us scared enough.

The Dare Game had lasted three weeks; Monday to Friday. Fifteen days to prove ourselves. For fourteen days, I struggled through. I climbed trees, picked nettles, knocked on doors – desperate to begin my blank slate with a different story. By the fifteenth day, I had almost dared to relax. I was used to the fear; used to pushing myself through it. Maybe it wasn't so difficult – maybe it had never been so difficult. Maybe all I had to do was tell it like a story, and then it would become one. Small, and safe, and predictable. Maybe I even started to believe it.

With the fifteenth day's dare, the plot twisted.

Of course being the hero could never be that easy.

Until then, the dares had always taken place at lunchtime – in the field, in full daylight. Occasionally we'd ventured up towards the distant school buildings, but not often. The dares had their place, and we had ours, the game's rulers had loftily assured us.

On the fifteenth day, they said something different. It was the last show, the final act. Our last chance. That day's dare wouldn't take place at lunchtime at all, they said – nor in the field. Instead, after school, they would take us somewhere else. Somewhere unknown; somewhere unfamiliar. Somewhere that would prove our worth above and beyond everything. If it was conquered, we would win the Dare Game. We would be the heroes; I would be the hero, finally. If we refused – well, we wouldn't.

You couldn't refuse a dare – not ever.

That evening, in the pitch-black of September's half-past nine, the game's rulers had threaded us through the streets of Shoreditch to the Totters Lane junkyard. It had hummed in the dark like something alive, velvet shadows crouching in the corners, wolfish shapes rising up out of the ground. The gate creaked and the gravel pricked and the air seemed to breathe.

It looked just like the London of my little-girlhood.

The fifteenth day's dare was to run right in. All the way around. It was the dare that would prove ourselves. It would prove our bravery, prove our fearlessness, prove our worth. Our heroism. It was the dare that would have rewritten me.

The fifteenth day's dare was to run right in. All the way around. Over the ground that stretched up claws; past the shadows that hid the world from view; through the darkness that swallowed everything up, closing off the small and safe and predictable. Closing off the fairytales.

The fifteenth day's dare was to run right in. All the way around. I ran right away instead, too terrified even to look back over my shoulder as the word they shouted rang in my ears like the tolling of a bell, scrawling the heroes out.

You couldn't refuse a dare – not ever.