A Most Magical Girl - Karen Foxlee Page 0,51

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