A Most Magical Girl - Karen Foxlee Page 0,46

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 smelled 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