A Most Magical Girl - Karen Foxlee Page 0,81

fingers frantically looking for purchase. She went toward him, but Hafwen held her back. It sucked him slowly at first. It dragged him backward toward its terrible mouth. It took a great breath then and sucked him up fast and gobbled him quickly through its leather slit. The sound of his cry was brief.

The machine cried one long note.

There was a great blast and more white light, a giant expanding ring of white light that blew out the bellows and spewed glass and petals and paupers’ shoes. A ring of white light that exploded outward with paper and mourning pins and blackwork samplers. It hit the walls. It blew out the windows. Rubble rained down around them.

Then the machine’s screaming faltered. It dropped several octaves. The gears and cogs, protesting, ground to a halt. There was a dull thud. The machine was quiet.

Annabel lay on the ground breathing hard, the Morever Wand in her hand. A single white handkerchief fluttered down from the ceiling, shining in the moonlight. It landed upon her heart.

She took it and held it to her face and began to cry.

“A young witch will rise well before dawn. She will make yellow tea and look at the weather and feel how it impresses itself upon her spirit. If it is fine, she should stay indoors. But if there is wind and rain, she will take her broomstick and ride with delight for just a little while.”

—Miss Henrietta’s notes, kept for Annabel Grey

It is exactly the kind of day she sees things. The rain comes in squalls, and the sky is wild with rushing clouds. She rises at dawn and dresses quickly. She is good at her buttons now. She ties her apron strings. She wraps her long fair hair into a bun. In the silence of the house her footsteps echo. She tiptoes in and out of the rooms in the half-light. Sweeps the cinders, starts the fire in the small kitchen, brings water to boil.

She lets the porridge cool so Hafwen can sleep later, trolls being grumpy if they are woken too soon. To rouse her, she must go through the shop and the magical storeroom. She likes to stop still in that place, just for a moment, to hear it murmuring to itself, the broomsticks rustling and the seeing glass chiming and the peat mud bubbling in jars.

She goes down the dark staircase and through the old parlor and into the riverbed chamber. She hears the secret river and thinks of all the places she has visited deep down below. They still sting on her skin, those places, even though the map has vanished.

When her great-aunt Estella spoke to her on the Lake of Tears, she had indeed been hovering close to death. The wounds from Mr. Angel’s Black Wand and the shadowlings were too much for her old body to bear. She is gone from the bedchamber now.

That is a new pain for Annabel, one of many, and she busies herself to seek solace from it.

There is Hafwen to care for, sitting up and waiting in her small bed filled with clean straw. Everywhere in the cluttered room are the things she collects: shiny teaspoons and scraps of paper on which she is learning to draw, old dresses, ribbons, green grass pulled from the earth, ladybugs in glass jars.

Hafwen is holding her prized possession, her glittering star.

“Look how it sparkles this morning,” says Annabel.

Hafwen smiles and shuts the lid on the star brooch. She holds it to her heart.

“But is it a real star?” Hafwen asks with the box still held close to her chest as they climb the stairs.

“No, it is not a real star,” says Annabel. “But you know I have said I am sorry.”

Hafwen opens the box again in the kitchen and gazes upon her jewel. “Yes, but I love it all the same,” she says.

She is full of questions in the morning, this troll: Why do you think the world has oceans? Why do humanlings like bells? Where do birds learn their songs? Why is there a queen in London Above, but not a king? And could Hafwen fit another star inside her box?

Annabel makes tea, listens, half listens, drifts. Three heaped teaspoons and the pot turned widdershins and left to brew. She pats her broomstick, which is leaning near the back door, and she feels its delight at her touch. It wants up and flying and the sky.

“Soon, dear broomstick,” she says.

She throws slops out into the laneway