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her boots and fell asleep dreaming of applause so loud it spanned several worlds.

Chapter 5
    The sun was high in the summer sky when Helen woke. She was stiff, still had her boots on, and had pine needles poking into her scalp.
    Someone along the corridor was playing incredibly fast scales on a flute; someone else was flushing the toilet. From the boys’ wings she could hear Tommy, the percussionist from Glasgow, warming up thunderously. He wasn’t going to make any friends here. Not at this time in the morning.
    Helen wasn’t sure she was going to make friends here either.
    She’d been so proud of being the youngest person selected for this summer school. But now she was here, she wished the age gap wasn’t so big. She was still eleven. She’d only just finished her last year at primary school. All the other students were teenagers, already at secondary school.
    The only thing she had in common with them was that they were all excellent musicians, but that wasn’t enough for friendship, especially when Professor Greenhill still had to choose her soloists. They were competitors, not colleagues.
    Now Helen knew there were fabled beasts and magical beings in the forest, planning to drive thestudents away or lure them into another world, it was going to be even harder to chat to the others like this was just another music class.
    Though if she was going to be stuck with them in a faery mound for centuries, perhaps she should make an effort. So she had a quick shower and walked down to breakfast all fresh and smiling.
    The night before, the students had been allocated to different wings: the girls to the Murray and Sinclair wings on the west of the lodge; the boys to the Campbell and Gordon wings on the east.
    The Professor, her deputy and the visiting tutors were staying in the old lodge building which had been the original “big house.” The students were in four wings built last century to turn it into a hunting, shooting and fishing lodge. The McGregors were in the final stages of renovating the lodge to turn it into tourist accommodation. The four wings would be for families, so each wing had its own kitchen and bathroom.
    The renovations weren’t quite finished though, Helen thought, as she stepped over a dusty toolbox on the way to the kitchen.
    The students had to make their own breakfast in their own kitchens, but would have lunch and tea in the old lodge dining room. Helen could hear the four other girls in the kitchen, arguing about whether they should each make their own breakfast or whether they should take turns, a different person making breakfast for the whole wing each morning.
    Helen walked into the kitchen at an unfortunate time. Zoe, one of the other violinists, was facingthe door, in mid-sentence. “… Aha. The girl wonder ! Our very own primary prodigy! Are you old enough to work a toaster? Does mummy let you use electrical equipment?”
    Helen sighed. Since she’d arrived at Dorry Shee she’d bandaged a wolf and faced down a pack of eternal hounds. She ought to be able to handle a teenager from Edinburgh. If she didn’t stand up for herself right now, she would be the “wee girl” all week. Anyway, she needed the kitchen to herself to make a picnic.
    So she smiled sweetly. “Would you let me make you breakfast? That would be fun. At home, I sit in a high chair and daddy makes me toast fingers. Would you like toast fingers, Zoe?”
    Zoe scowled, and Helen wondered if she had gone a bit far, but the three other musicians round the table laughed. Juliet, the flautist, thanked Helen politely when she put the toast, butter, jam and honey on the table. Alice, the cellist, patted a chair for Helen to sit beside her.
    But Helen didn’t sit down, she pottered around making extra slices of toast until everyone else had gone upstairs. Then, in between bites of her own breakfast, she made jam sandwiches and cheese sandwiches, took the top six chocolate biscuits out of a new packet, rinsed a couple of