by Karen Foxlee
The cavern was filled with pebbles, and a shallow stream ran through its center. They moved as quietly as they could across it, there being nowhere to seek cover, but the noise of their feet was loud. The little stream chattered, and Kitty was glad for the sound. She limped, and Annabel watched her lift her skirts and examine the bandage.
“I could try magic again,” said Annabel. “It might work.”
“They say your mother was a healer,” said Kitty, sitting down and touching the bandage.
“Have you heard them speak of my mother?” whispered Annabel. Just the sound of the word mother and she felt tears.
I can no longer protect you from your destiny.
“Don’t start your bawling again,” said Kitty.
“I wasn’t,” said Annabel. “It’s just…What do they say?”
“That she was the mender of bird’s wings and other such wild things, and small children about to die—she could tend to them and mend them in time.”
“Let me try,” said Annabel
Even though they whispered, their voices echoed in that place.
Kitty stretched out her leg for Annabel.
Annabel closed her eyes and thought of what she wanted. She wanted the pain to lessen in Kitty’s ankle and for it to heal. It was very clear.
“Benignus,” she said, very slowly, and she thought she sounded very magical.
“Benignus,” she said again, but nothing happened. No light blazed from the Ondona. Her hand felt very empty. Magic was a puzzling thing.
“I’m thirsty anyway,” said Kitty, moving her leg away. She knelt down beside the stream and scooped water with her hand to taste.
“Go on,” she said to Annabel. In London Above many streams were poisoned, but this tasted clean. It was sweet and clear. “It’s good. I wouldn’t drink it if it weren’t.”
But Annabel’s expression had changed. She was looking into the water.
There was something dark flickering and twitching just beneath the surface, and Annabel thought it was a fish. She leaned closer. The stream was not deep, but she felt she was looking into the ocean. The depth confounded her. She worried over it, and her mind said, Look away, but her heart said, Look closer. The black thing twitched again. She watched its tail, and she saw that it was not a tail at all but part of a wing and that the wing was part of a horse flying through the night sky. The dark horse was drawing a dark carriage.
Deep in the shallow stream it was murky.
It was the shadowlings and Mr. Angel.
The shadowlings had formed themselves into a black chariot, and he rode upon their seat of claws. He rode through the London dawn shining feebly in magic fog, the chariot skating down streets, rising and falling, faster and faster. It undulated over rooftops and slid along lanes; it flattened the grass in gardens. The great fog opened up before it and closed behind it.
Annabel wanted to look away, to shout into the water, Stop!
But it was no good. There was nothing she could do but look.
The shadowling chariot slowed. It glided to a stop in a street she knew.
Mr. Angel stepped down and walked through the swirling fog to a doorway. He looked at the window above. A window that had been shattered and mended, the cracks still clear. He smiled.
Annabel felt Kitty’s arms beneath her shoulders. She took a gulp of air, realized that her face was wet.
“Are you trying to drown yourself, fool?” asked Kitty, pulling her back from the water. “You fell right in.”
Annabel tried to focus on the betwixter girl. She shook her head.
“I saw something terrible,” she said when the cavern stopped turning. “I saw Mr. Angel and the shadowlings at the house of the Finsbury Wizards.”
“Is it now or is it to come?”
Annabel tried to remember what Mr. Crumb had said. The past was colorful and noisy. The future dark and soundless. “To come,” she said.
Kitty turned and made her heart light small so Annabel could not see her face. “Well, we have time, then,” she said.
Annabel looked at the map on her arm. They had made their way through only a tiny part of the maze of lines. They were only halfway toward her elbow. She could not even see what was written on her face. Did they have time? How long had they been in Under London? All the darkness and endless tunnels conspired so that she could no longer tell. She was tired and she was hungry.
I am the Valiant Defender of Good Magic, she said to herself sternly. She smoothed down her muddy rosebud dress and straightened her newly torn red town cloak. She checked to make sure the broomstick and Ondona were safe.
“Thank you,” she said to Kitty. “For saving me. I might have drowned.”
“You’d never get anywhere without me,” said Kitty, but there was no anger in her voice. Instead, Annabel thought she saw a flicker of a smile, the quick passage of sunlight across her face, but Kitty was turning already, moving across the cavern, and the only sound was their feet crunching over the pebbles deep beneath Under London.
In London Above the pigeons flew through the night. They flew through the great brown fog, to Bloomsbury, to Hampstead, to Stepney. To St. John’s Wood and Kentish Town. The wizards sat down on their chesterfields to wait. Mr. Bell took the Adela, which lay on the tea table between them.
“Benignus,” he said gently, lowering the fire.
He took the wand and turned to the window and made it whole again except for one sliver of glass. He took that sliver, still cool from the night air, and held it in his palm. He gazed upon it and wished for a sign that Annabel and Kitty had entered Under London and were safe. But the vision did not come.
He saw Mr. Angel and the shadowlings. He saw them rushing through the streets. The army was growing—there were hundreds of the nightmare creatures now. They swarmed behind Mr. Angel, whispering to each other strange empty secrets, stories without endings, snatches of conversation they had heard in the world. They moaned and cried and giggled to each other. Their claws scratched against the sides of churches and tapped on children’s windows.
Mr. Bell looked up from the glass and shook his head.
They waited then. They sat very still on their chesterfields and waited. They were accustomed to waiting. Wizards wait for signs and omens. They wait for the sun or the moon to be at just the perfect place in the sky. They wait for the sugar to slide to the bottom of their brownie tea and dissolve. They wait for a prickly feeling in their ears and, when it comes, know it is the right time to look into their seeing glass.
But this was a terrible waiting. They waited during the first hours of that strange dark day. Londoners choked upon the fog. They closed up their windows, greasy with soot, and lit their fires and huddled round. Warning bells sang up and down the river, and birds flew into windows, and men walked off bridges by accident and carriages collided on street corners.
They waited solemnly.
They waited sadly.
Finally it came. The knock at the door.
Mr. Bell stood and made the journey down the stairs. Down past the ancient books and boxes. Down past the peeling wallpaper, his knees creaking and groaning. The shadow in the glass at the door was huge, but he did not cower. He opened the door to his visitor.
“Mr. Angel,” he said.
“Mr. Bell,” said Mr. Angel, and then he began to laugh. Mr. Angel laughed at the old wizard’s politeness and his fear. He laughed at the dark day he had created. He laughed at the ride he had taken through the sky. He laughed because night would come and the full moon would rise. He raised his wand and pointed it at Mr. Bell, and the shadowlings crowded in behind him to watch.
“When out calling, a young lady never touches the cups and saucers until tea is served.”
—Miss Finch’s Little Blue Book (1855)
Annabel and Kitty found a lone torch burning in a passageway that seemed to stretch for miles. Kitty took it and swallowed her heart light. They were glad for the new warm glow. There were hundreds of passages, all stinking and sticky, all emp
ty. At each turn they consulted the map.
“Yes, this is the right one,” said Annabel when she knew, when her finger and her heart and the map told her. She tried to sound cheerful, as though choosing one slimy hole over another were a normal occurrence. Keep going, she told herself silently each time she thought of the shadowling chariot sliding to a stop before the house of the Finsbury Wizards.
The passage narrowed. Annabel and Kitty crouched and crawled in the silence.
“Where could they all be?” whispered Annabel.
“Perhaps they have gone to a troll wedding. Trolls are always getting married,” whispered Kitty.
“How do you know?”
“Miss Henrietta always says it,” said Kitty. “ ‘It’s as muddled as a troll wedding.’ ”
Annabel pictured Kitty and Miss Henrietta talking this way. Miss Henrietta could not look at Annabel without seeming disappointed, yet she looked at Kitty with a strange reverence. The wizards, too—a reverence and a sadness.
I have heard it said she can sing up her spirit light. There are not many girls like Kitty anymore.
They crawled and crawled and crawled until their knees hurt. They wriggled on their bottoms through tight spaces. They looked at the map on Annabel’s arm until their vision blurred. Hours passed. Kitty raised the torch and shone it into the many rooms that opened off the tunnels. Each time, they scarcely breathed until they saw the room was empty. They were rough little earth rooms, with no furniture at all. Annabel thought if these were troll homes, the trolls must be very uncomfortable indeed.
But in one of the small rooms the light caught on something in the middle of the floor. The girls held their breath, thinking it was a troll, but the thing did not move, and they crept toward it. It was a rough sack, filled to the top with apples. They were old apples, some of them very soft, and the smell of them was strong and ripe. Annabel’s stomach lurched, and her mouth filled with saliva.
There were more sacks. One contained a grayish vegetable that smelled blank, like potatoes; another contained stones. There was a sack in the far corner that contained things that looked like pale carrots.
“I’ll eat an apple,” said Kitty, going back to the first sack. “I’ll eat the whole lot.”
“Should we?” whispered Annabel. “I mean, they aren’t ours.”
In the dimness she saw Kitty’s incredulous face.
Kitty was a girl who ate where she could: in the orchards and vegetable gardens of grand houses, at the baker’s bins where children with empty eyes fought over scraps of dry bread.
“I’d be eating new bread if it weren’t for you. We haven’t eaten for hours and hours,” she said. “Who cares who they belong to? Have you seen any apple trees on our journey, Annabel? These are troll apples, stolen from cellars up above. We’re only stealing what has already been stolen. Here.”
She thrust an apple into Annabel’s hand and retreated to the far corner of the room. She chose a place between two large sacks.
“In case anyone comes,” she said.
Annabel took the broomstick from her back and the wand from her sash. She couldn’t properly see which parts of her apple were brown and which were good. She was reluctant to start eating, but her stomach growled. The torch flame was low; it cast a small orange glow.
“I wonder what color my heart light would be,” said Annabel, sitting cross-legged in the darkness.
“How would I know?” said Kitty. She ate noisily. Her first apple was already gone. She spat out a bad bit, and it made Annabel feel queasy. Then she was up and returning with several more in her skirt. She passed two more to Annabel, who hadn’t started on the first.
“How do you learn to do it?” said Annabel. “I mean, how did you know to even try?”
“Well, how did you know you could see in puddles?” replied Kitty. “You just looked in one, didn’t you?”
Annabel took a small polite bite. For a rotten apple it tasted wonderful.
“I didn’t really understand what was happening,” said Annabel.
“Nor I,” said Kitty. “I only knew that inside me is a part separate to this outer skin, and one day when I was a wee thing, I sang to that part and the light came up. And I worked at it, see, just the way you are getting better at seeing things. I can sing the light up, is all. And when the shell of me is gone, then the light will stay out wandering.”
“Oh, don’t talk of such things. It makes me sad,” said Annabel.
Kitty laughed and spoke with her mouth full. “Can you feel what is inside you, Annabel Grey?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what’s in here,” said Kitty, reaching to touch Annabel’s heart. “Not the dress and the fancy knickers and the manners, but in here.”
“Yes,” said Annabel, and then to sound certain she said, “Yes, I can.”
“Liar,” said Kitty, and she laughed her sudden joyous, wicked laugh. “You don’t know nothing, Annabel Grey.”
Her mood was improved by food.
“We should rest,” she said. “Close our eyes for just a little while for strength.”
She drove the torch into the ground.
Annabel thought of her vision in the cavern stream. The terrible black chariot and Mr. Angel looking up at the poor Finsbury Wizards’ window. She shook her head. They shouldn’t stop. But even as she shook her head, she began to feel drowsy. The apple was heavy in her belly, half-fermented, sticky on her lips. She rubbed her eyes.
“Just a little while,” said Kitty.
“Yes,” said Annabel. “Yes, I suppose you’re right.”
“We must,” said Kitty. “You know we must.”
Annabel took off her cloak and lay it on the ground between the two sacks.
“Share the cloak with me,” Annabel said in the darkness. It was softer than the ground.
She didn’t think Kitty would, but she felt her shifting closer. She had a wild smell, this girl. She smelled of the streets and the leaves and the sky.
“I wonder who your mother was, how you came to be alone,” whispered Annabel.
Kitty remembered red hurting hands and children in a line, the closeness of bodies, the cold.
“I don’t recall. Perhaps I was stolen” was all she said.
Annabel imagined that. No mother. Not even a tiny memory of a mother.
“My mother had to go away,” she said. “On…business abroad.”
“She had to go away so you could learn your talents,” said Kitty. “She is magical, and you are, too. Perhaps she’s gone to fetch her wand back.”
Annabel pictured her mother fetching her wand, the Lydia. She imagined her taking it back from the Witches of Montrouge.
She is magical, and you are, too.
Annabel smiled in the dark. “I miss her,” she said.
She said it to Kitty but just as much to the darkness. She wanted to see her mother, to meet her, her real mother, the one who had been hidden away Annabel’s whole life. There were a thousand questions she wanted to ask her. Questions she must have answered.
“You’ll see her again,” said Kitty, and then she was overcome with coughing, and Annabel felt the feverish warmth beside her.
“What other magic is in you?” asked Annabel when Kitty had settled.
“Hush,” said Kitty. “You never stop talking.” She yawned a giant apple-scented yawn.
“Why don’t you live with the Miss Vines?” asked Annabel. “They could teach you and help you with your talents.”
Kitty didn’t answer for so long that Annabel thought perhaps she had fallen asleep.
“That’s not my place,” Kitty said at last.
Why? Annabel wanted to ask. It was there on her tongue, which had grown heavy and thick. Why? Where was her place? But sleep was taking hold of her already. It was taking hold of them both. It was taking them and plunging them further down, deep down into darkness.
“There is no need for that, Mr. Angel,” said Mr. Bell, and he bowed sadly. “We have
the Adela and lay it down before you. We have sent messages to the other members of the Great & Benevolent Magical Society, and I know that they will do the same.”
“You are sensible, old wizard,” said Mr. Angel, nodding. He held a hand up, and the shadowlings shrank behind him into the folds of his cloak. He followed Mr. Bell up the stairs.
The wizards waited in the parlor, the Adela on the tea table before them.
Mr. Crumb took it and slowly stood. He handed it solemnly to Mr. Angel and looked very frightened.
“Very wise, gentlemen,” said Mr. Angel. “When the clocks are all stopped and the darkness comes, I will have all the palaces and mansions, all the churches, all the Parliament rooms. I will keep whom I choose, destroy whom I choose, and if you serve me well, you shall have your own spoils. But first…the girl. The Vine Witches have sent her into Under London to find the Morever Wand?”
Mr. Bell nodded.
Mr. Angel gave a small laugh. He raised his hand again to the shadowlings, as they slipped from the folds of his cloak and spun and eddied about the room. They whispered and wept so that the old wizards held their hands to their ears. When they were done, one of the terrible dark things held Mr. Keating’s handkerchief on its glinting claw.
The handkerchief that Annabel had dried her tears on.
“I sent the shadowlings to bring her back. They have not returned. She is alone? Do not lie to me.”
“She travels with another girl. A betwixter by the name of Kitty. You will have heard of her.”
Mr. Angel gave it thought.
“And you think she can save you all?” said Mr. Angel. He looked at the Adela in his hand. “You think that she can save good magic? You think she will return by moonrise and defeat me? Do not lie.”
There was nothing to be said but the truth.
The wizards bowed their heads.
“We believe she will,” they said.
“At the dinner table, a young lady should never contradict her host. In all circumstances she must put forward an agreeable and graceful countenance.”
—Miss Finch’s Little Blue Book (1855)