A Most Magical Girl

by Karen Foxlee

  They whispered the words they had heard. They whispered the words into his ears, folding and unfolding their claws. Well, if you won’t let me try some magic on it they keep my feet warm I know faeries and sure enough I know their bones can you use your magic kitty, please a light, Benignus, Benignus, Benignus, Benignus.

  Mr. Angel put his hand up to hush them and motioned them back among the others.

  “Follow,” he said to his army, and they rose up after him now, a dark flock, a black fluttering cloud.

  “Down!” he cried, and they slipped behind him, one hundred of them small into the folds of his cloak.

  “Up!” he cried, and they erupted from the fabric, grew large, grew monstrous.

  “Destroy!” he shouted, and pointed to a carriage that had turned onto the road.

  Afterward, he stood among the remains, the tiny fabric scraps still raining. He tasted wood splinters and dust and horsehair, and he smiled his terrible smile. The girl had gone down into Under London, but she would come up again. He would have her then to feed to his machine.

  His wand was nearly empty.

  The moon was high.

  He would need to feed his machine again. It needed a lonely china doll that a girl no longer loved or a little pauper’s coat that never gave warmth. It needed black hatpins from a widow’s veil. It needed flowers from a new grave.

  But first he would visit the Finsbury Wizards. He would have the Adela. The old men would bow down before him or he would turn them to dust. He would have all the lesser wands: the Delilah, the Kyle, the Old Silver, and the Little Bear. He would have all the good wands, and he would destroy them one by one. He would destroy them so that good magic was gone for good.

  “When visiting town, a young lady should walk with her carriage erect and her bonnet straight.”

  —Miss Finch’s Little Blue Book (1855)

  In the cavern behind the Singing Gate, there was an opening. It was an arched entrance, quite tall and grand. It looked like a tunnel that led somewhere important.

  “The map,” said Kitty, and the room filled with her demand.

  “Say please,” said Annabel, even though Kitty was leaning against her and had a very sore ankle. The girl had no manners.

  “Please, Miss Grey,” Kitty snarled.

  Annabel smiled.

  “Get your gigglemug off me,” said Kitty. She supposed that smiling must be something that all rich young girls were taught. Smiling as though they owned everything, even the weather.

  The stone walls took their argument and repeated it several times.

  Annabel held out her left arm. Straightaway she saw that the lines from her left palm to the Singing Gate had vanished. They had been erased from her hand.

  “Perhaps what we pass disappears,” Kitty said, taking Annabel’s hand.

  “I would be very glad for that,” said Annabel. Oh, to be herself again, with pure white unmapped skin.

  “But no good if we have to find our way back,” said Kitty.

  Beyond the black line of the Singing Gate, there was the large circle of the cavern, and beyond that only one line that marched neatly across her arm.

  “Well, that makes it simple,” said Annabel cheerfully. “We just go down this tunnel.”

  But Kitty didn’t release her. She placed her finger on the line that threaded away to the edge of Annabel’s arm. When she reached the edge, she turned Annabel’s arm over. The line continued, but it was lost in a vast web of tunnels and chambers and hollows and spaces that covered Annabel’s entire forearm. In the center of the complicated maze were four neat words.

  “The Kingdom of Trolls,” whispered Annabel, and she felt quite winded. “Oh, I see.”

  She tried not to sound too scared.

  “We must find our way through Trollingdom,” said Kitty.

  On Annabel’s upper arm there was a body of water. Annabel could see tiny waves drawn there and, up high, the words The Lake of Tears. She went to touch that part of her skin but stopped. The feeling was terrible there, so lonely and empty.

  “The Lake of Tears,” she whispered.

  “Through the Kingdom of Trolls—if we can find our way through—and across the Lake of Tears somehow,” said Kitty. “And then…”

  She peered at Annabel’s shoulder, trailed her eyes up onto Annabel’s cheek, and looked away.

  “What?” asked Annabel. It was awful to be mapped in places she could not read.

  “Through the Kingdom of Trolls first,” said Kitty, avoiding her gaze. She winced when she went to take a step.

  Annabel looked at the grand opening opposite them. It was most definitely the way into the Kingdom of Trolls, and into the Kingdom of Trolls she must go. I am the Valiant Defender of Good Magic. I am a most magical girl. She tried to think those thoughts with certainty, but they were still shaky in her mind. She looked at the Ondona in her hand and remembered how she had made the good magic come out of its end. That made her stand a little taller.

  Be brave. Be good.

  They must go forward. The shadowlings must be stopped. All she need do was think of what she had seen in the washtub, the darkness about to sweep over London. They had to keep moving until she reached the Morever Wand.

  “We will fly,” said Annabel.

  Her broomstick was there beneath her arm. It thrummed softly against her. She had not called it hers yet, but it felt right to, although just having such a thought made her bite her bottom lip. What would Isabelle Rutherford think of such a thing?

  Kitty shook her head. She took a torch from the stone wall. “The passages will not stay high for long. Not if it is a place for trolls. Trolls are short and fat and like to crawl.”

  “Well, then,” said Annabel, and she could not disguise the little shiver she gave. “We will fly for as long as we can.”

  The broomstick did not like the passages. The broomstick, they learned, liked air and open places. At first, it would not budge. It was like a stubborn donkey that no amount of carrots or cajoling could move. Kitty sighed and made it worse.

  “We need to find the White Wand,” Annabel said to the broomstick, tucking the Ondona into her sash. “The Morever Wand. It’s very important.

  “We need to save London,” she added.

  “You are on a very special journey, dear thing,” she said. “Please fly.”

  She tried other encouragements. “Imagine when we are home—why, we will fly together into the sky.”

  Threats. “If you don’t fly this instant, I shall be very cross indeed.”

  What worked in the end was not words. She imagined having the wand in her hand and climbing back up the river ladder and seeing the Miss Vines. Just the thought of them filled her with longing: Miss Estella’s wild smile and Miss Henrietta’s frosty blue eyes. She didn’t know how she could miss two people so much whom she had only just met.

  The broomstick shot off through the entrance to the passage so fast that Kitty nearly fell off.

  But it did not like to be hemmed in. It flew close to the stone ceiling, and they needed to crouch low to avoid banging their heads. It was skittish. It did not like twists or turns, and the passage abounded with them. The tunnel bent back on itself, the ceiling lowered, the walls narrowed. For some time the Singing Gate’s glow stayed with them, but then the light leached from the passage. Occasionally in the distance a torch flickered, and they passed where it cast its pool of orange light upon the ground.

  Kitty held up her own torch to darkened places.

  In the dimness they saw that finally the tunnel was branching ahead. The broomstick hesitated, faltered, stopped.

  Kitty flinched when she stood.

  “Map,” she said. Then, remembering, “Please, Your Royal Highness.”

  They sat on the ground, their backs against the narrow tunnel wall, and looked at Annabel’s arm. By the torch flame Kitty’s eyes were very green. She took Annabel’s arm and peered at it. Her hair was a wild tangle, and she had her knees drawn up to herself. She sme
lled of blood and green grass.

  “I wonder if I could learn to sing up a heart light,” said Annabel.

  Kitty did not answer her but looked at the map.

  Annabel thought of what light she might have inside herself and what song she might have to sing to get it out. Perhaps something strange would happen. Perhaps it would be like the cup of her mind, which was not fancy china after all but dark pottery and bottomless. Maybe fire would come out of her nostrils instead. She smiled in the dark.

  “I wish I understood it, though,” said Annabel. “How you do it.”

  “Perhaps some things are not meant to be understood,” said Kitty.

  “But have you met someone else who can do it?” asked Annabel.

  “No,” replied Kitty. “But I’ve met all magical types that can do the strangest tricks. Mr. Huxley turning into a wolf right before my eyes, and Miss Henrietta, too, half out of her crow clothes. The Bloomsburys looking into their magic mirrors and mending broken hearts.”

  “Oh, tell me more,” said Annabel.

  “Hush,” said Kitty, and again she frowned her fierce frown and pulled Annabel’s arm closer.

  She touched the line, followed it until it came to the place where they sat. Here, the path divided into two. They saw that each of the two passages branched. The map became a nest of lines, crisscrossed and crosshatched. An impossible maze. An unsolvable tangle of lines and caverns.

  “Now what?” Annabel whispered.

  “You’re the most magical girl,” said Kitty.

  Annabel knew there must be something she was meant to do. Something magical. This was what was expected of her as the Valiant Defender of Good Magic. Yet all she felt was stupid. Kitty watched her.

  Annabel put her own finger against her skin at the place the tunnel divided.

  She didn’t want to.

  She didn’t like the way the map burned upon her skin. Her head said, Look away, but her heart said, Touch.

  Annabel traced the lines with her fingertip, and a terrible thing happened.

  The tunnels and chambers and caverns and chasms filled her head as her finger moved.

  “Oh,” she said.

  The places filled her head with rock and moss and water dripping on walls. Her mind raced through these places. Past stone and straw and dark lichen. Dirty troll washing on sagging lines. The sudden close face of a troll: lumpen, gray, its rotten mouth smiling. Annabel wrenched her finger from her own skin and looked to Kitty, breathing hard.

  “You see it as you touch?” said Kitty. “It makes sense if you have the sight and the map is magical.”

  “But up close. I see the walls,” said Annabel, and there was a restless panic inside her, as though the whole map wanted to burst off her skin or burrow deep—she wasn’t sure which. “It makes no sense.”

  “Your problem is you’re always looking for sense,” said Kitty. “If you see it close, you must be able to see it far. Try again. Move from the walls; move your mind.”

  “I don’t want to look again,” said Annabel.

  “Oh, save us,” said Kitty. “Look again or I’ll bang you on the head. You aren’t much of a valiant defender of anything if you don’t.”

  It was true, Annabel knew it, so she touched her finger to her arm again, and immediately the rock wall rushed up to her face. If it could, that rock wall would climb inside and fill her up. She was the map and everything in the map, and it was a dreadful thing her great-aunts had done to her. The rock wall all lined with mud and straw and the saliva of trolls rushed past her. Her mind careened and crashed through the tunnels until she heard Kitty’s voice.

  “Slower, Annabel Grey,” Kitty said. “Slower.”

  Her voice came from a long way off, but Annabel listened and slowed her breathing. Her vision slowed. She breathed deeply and fought against the urge to lift her finger. She didn’t want to see a troll. Not its gray teeth or skin. She breathed deeper still, shifted her mind a little. She was away from the wall now but still cramped and close to it.

  “Above,” she said quietly to herself.

  Then she was looking down on the tunnels, looking down on the passageways corkscrewing and doubling back on themselves—empty places, places filled with echoes. She caught a glimpse of a troll rushing along a path beneath her and then of troll houses—rough pockets cut into the earth, roundish, lumpy, devoid of any comfort—and, inside, trolls eating and sleeping and dancing and weeping.

  And quite unexpectedly she saw herself in one such house, and Kitty as well.

  They were there, huddled on the floor, looking frightened. But she had rushed past that place before she could stop. She tried to backtrack, reverse her finger on the map, but she could not find the room again. She decided it must have been her mind playing tricks. That’s all it could be, and anyway, she felt she was on the right path now. The tunnels were untangling. There was an airiness to them. They were wider. A huge open cavern appeared and a vast dark lake within it. Another little boat was waiting on its shore. She knew that was the right place to be. The Lake of Tears. She removed her finger from her arm.

  “The first path,” she said.

  “You’re certain?” asked Kitty.

  Annabel thought of them huddled in the troll house but shook the image away. The boat at the end felt right. It was the correct path. She knew it in her fingertip and in her heart. It felt good to trust herself. She had asked of her vision and been rewarded. She took a deep breath.

  “I am certain,” she said.

  In the chosen passage Annabel and Kitty could not stand upright. They had to walk bent over with their hands stretched out before them. Soon they needed to crawl.

  Annabel had never crawled on her hands and knees through a troll tunnel while carrying a broomstick and a wand before, and she never wanted to again. Even worse, Kitty made her go first and kept treading on Annabel’s cloak and skirts. Annabel was almost certain it was on purpose.

  “We must be careful,” whispered Kitty, carrying the flame. “Trolls are vicious.”

  “Have you met one?” whispered Annabel.

  “I have. In Tottenham. Well, the back of one, going down its hole. That was enough. The smell of it went up my nose and didn’t come out again for weeks. They have tiny sharp teeth that can rip you to shreds.”

  “Raise the flame so I can see what is ahead,” whispered Annabel.

  “No, I must keep it low in case we come upon one,” said Kitty.

  Which made Annabel feel even more frightened. She didn’t want to meet a troll.

  “I heard they eat pretty rich girls for tea,” said Kitty quietly from behind.

  “Stop it,” said Annabel.

  Kitty was mean and ungrateful for a girl who had been saved from the Singing Gate. Annabel felt the pull on her cloak again and was about to become very cross indeed when she heard Kitty whisper, “Stop.”

  Up ahead, there was the sudden glow of a light and the sound of gruff voices. Kitty tugged Annabel back against the wall and extinguished their torch into the earth.

  “What Gruen should like very much for supper is rotten apples,” came one very clear voice.

  Annabel saw the light ahead stop. A short silhouette appeared, standing at what seemed to be a passage crossroad. Another shape materialized in the light.

  “Filled up with juicy worms,” said a second voice.

  “Yes, full of worms,” said the first. “Does Mab smell something?”

  “What?”

  “Gruen caught a whiff of something strange!”

  The flame went higher, and light rushed down the tunnel toward Kitty and Annabel. It stopped just short of where they huddled.

  “Probably naught,” said the first. “But Gruen could have sworn there was a sweet smell.”

  The light went up again, held higher, so that it came within inches of their knees.

  “Gruen has rotten apples on his brain,” said the second with a laugh, and then they were moving again, taking another fork in the passage, turn
ing away from Kitty and Annabel, who held each other in the darkness.

  They crept forward again, and Annabel’s knees felt terribly wobbly. She fumbled in the dark until she found a way to tie her broomstick to her back using her sash. She tore a hole in her dress high up near her collar and pushed the handle through so it stayed close to her skin. It felt wrong to rip her dress, but she also felt clever. The broomstick shivered there quietly, and she was glad for it. She was a girl with a broomstick tied to her back and a wand tucked in her sash. A most magical girl. She whispered those words and remembered the sudden gush of magic that had moved the Singing Gate.

  At the places where the passages branched, there was always a torch burning on the wall. The trolls must have a network of them, Annabel supposed, like the gaslights in London Above. At each intersection they consulted Annabel’s arm by the flame’s light. Annabel traced her finger over the map but never again saw themselves huddled on the floor in a troll house, which made her feel better. She would hate to make the wrong decision.

  Sometimes the tunnels went down almost imperceptibly. Other times they plunged, and Annabel and Kitty scrambled on their bottoms to stop from falling. Sometimes they heard voices, troll voices, far away, coming closer. Laughter sometimes. Once, the thundering of footsteps up ahead, with the shouts and cries of a celebration. But the map took them away from these places. Deeper and deeper. It grew quieter and quieter.

  “I don’t like it,” Kitty whispered.

  She was used to the roar of London. The churning and thundering and rattling of factories. The tenements, the turning wheels, the street criers, and the drunkards singing and the bells ringing. The voices of the trees and grass. The sudden upward rushes of birds on the marshes. Down here the quiet hurt her ears. It was a deep-beneath-the-earth quiet.

  Finally they reached an open space where they could uncrouch themselves. There was no torch, so Kitty hummed in the dark until she had a heart light, and she threw it into the air and grew it so their shadows leapt out before them.