by Karen Foxlee
“Do you even know where we are going?” asked Kitty.
“I take you to the Lake of Tears,” said the troll.
“You are very kind, Hafwen,” said Annabel.
Kitty sighed.
“I want my star,” said the troll.
“You’ll get your star, dear Hafwen,” said Annabel.
Annabel had felt the expanse of the Lake of Tears on her arm, but nothing could prepare her for the sight of it.
They stumbled, very suddenly, out of a passage and onto its shore. Hafwen held her flame up, and they saw the dark stretch of water. They could not see its edges. It felt endless to Annabel.
“So, how do you get across the Lake of Tears?” Kitty asked.
“No one crosses the Lake of Tears, skinny,” said Hafwen.
“But you said the dead ’uns are sent across the Lake.”
“They are dead ’uns in funeral boats,” said Hafwen.
“And where would we find a funeral boat?” asked Kitty.
“You would find a boat where the funeral boats are built,” said Hafwen.
“And I am sure you don’t know where that is,” said Kitty.
“Of course I do,” said Hafwen, and she puffed out her little troll chest. “I will show you.”
She led them along the shore, and the dark water sucked and slapped against the rocks. It was a lonely sound. A hungry sound. An unsettled sound.
“I don’t like this place,” said Annabel.
“Hush,” said Hafwen. “All you humanlings do is talk. We must be quiet or the boat builders will hear us.”
There was no sign of boat builders. There were only rocks by the light of Hafwen’s little flame. Large rocks, small rocks, slimy rocks. The three of them slipped, clambered, climbed. Sometimes the dark water rushed through spaces and touched their toes. They walked and walked until their legs ached.
“She’s tricking us,” said Kitty.
But then Hafwen took her flame and extinguished it in the water, and they were in darkness.
“We are close now,” she said, and they heard suddenly the sound of hammering from a long way off and the faint murmuring of voices.
They climbed in the blackness then, tripped and tumbled, and Kitty swore so loudly once that Annabel was sure they would be heard, but the hammering only paused and then continued.
It grew louder, the voices clearer.
“You must build it well, and well it must be built,” said one voice. “Pay attention, young Calder.”
There was a flurry of banging and sawing.
“Has the wyrm ever come our way?” asked a younger voice.
“Why, yes,” said the older. “It has come across this lake and in through Trollingdom, eating trolls, sucking them up, here and there—even the then king in all his dandies, straight into its mouth, crunch, crunch—until there were none left but a few young ’uns huddled somewhere secret. That is why we must build the boats and send him the fresh dead ’uns, the noblest act of any troll, and then he will not come a-hunting us. Put a nail here. Here be a good humanling nail. See how it is made. They are better made than any other. Humanlings be good for naught but making nails.”
There was a sharp bang.
“Well done, young Calder. Calder shall be a boat builder yet.”
Hafwen stopped still and looked back at Annabel and Kitty. She placed a hairy finger to her hairy lip. She pointed to the water before them, and Annabel saw there were many small boats, some Hafwen-sized, some Aunty-sized. They bumped against each other quietly in the water. They were tethered to the rocky shore by ropes.
Hafwen knelt down and unfastened one of the ropes and motioned for them to get inside. Kitty, with hands on hips, refused.
“It’s too small,” she hissed.
“Get in,” said Annabel.
Annabel clambered into the stern.
“Kitty—quickly,” she said.
Kitty refused.
“We could have chosen a bigger one,” Kitty said.
“Get in,” said Hafwen, and she pushed Kitty in as best she could. The boat rocked. Kitty cursed. The hammering on the shore stopped. There was the sound of startled voices. The light of torches flared over the rocks, and several trolls appeared, rushing toward the shore.
Hafwen waded beside the boat, pushing them as fast as she could.
“Humanlings!” the crowd cried.
“Traitor troll!” they shouted.
“Jump in, Hafwen!” said Annabel. Hafwen was up to her round troll waist in water.
“No troll crosses the Lake of Tears alive,” said Hafwen, but she looked back at the trolls on the shore. More had arrived. Their angry voices boomed from the rocks.
“Take her to the king!” they shouted.
“He’ll chop her up!” they shouted.
“Hafwen—please come!” cried Annabel. “You must.”
“No troll crosses the Lake of Tears,” said Hafwen, but her voice was not so sure.
“She’ll sink the stinking boat,” said Kitty. “Leave her.”
But it was the wild girl’s hands that reached out for the troll’s all the same.
Hafwen had one short hairy leg in the boat, and Annabel and Kitty dragged her in by an arm each. The boat rocked under the weight of her. She squeezed between Kitty and Annabel, looked at them apologetically, and smiled.
Annabel smiled in return. She had her broomstick ready. She dipped it in the water and began to paddle. They moved farther from the shore and from the crowd of angry trolls, who called but did not follow. They were too frightened of what lay beyond the Lake of Tears.
“Everything will be fine,” said Annabel.
Kitty scowled at her, half squeezed out of the boat by Hafwen. “Yes, a fine night to visit a wyrm,” she said at last, and began to laugh.
They hadn’t gone far before there was a reshuffling in the boat. Kitty complained bitterly until Hafwen stood to let her move to the bow. The boat tilted heavily to starboard when Hafwen sat down again. Annabel was very glad to have Hafwen beside her, her shoulder pressed against Annabel’s own. Hafwen smelled of the earth and unwashed clothes and deep, dark places, and for reasons Annabel did not understand, this was comforting. She could never explain such a thing to Isabelle Rutherford.
Hafwen rowed with the wooden torch, and Annabel used the broomstick. They moved the little boat out onto the black water. The troll crowd, which had grown large and loud with boos and hisses, grew smaller and smaller until it was just a glowing line and was then swallowed up by the darkness altogether.
“Can you make a light, Kitty?” asked Annabel.
Kitty hummed for a while and produced a small pale green orb.
“Keep it away from me!” shouted Hafwen, flailing and flapping so that the boat swayed wildly.
“Hush, Hafwen,” said Annabel. “It will not harm you.”
Kitty blew her heart light close to Annabel’s arm. Hafwen leaned as far away as she could. There was the lake drawn upon her upper arm, filled with dark waves. The very same lake that rocked them now to drowsiness. Beyond the lake there were more caverns, one after another, that grew smaller and tighter, winding onto her throat, where she lost sight of them.
Her companions looked at her skin in silence, and then Kitty swallowed her heart light.
“I need to rest.” Kitty coughed. “My chest hurts.”
Annabel thought and thought and thought in the darkness.
She wondered what a real dragon looked like. She wondered if it was always bad or perhaps had a good side, too, the way Hafwen had seemed very bad but had turned out rather charming in the end. Hafwen, who had given up everything. She was a very brave troll. Annabel supposed there had never been a braver one.
Then she thought of London Above going about its business. All the streets and hospitals and churches and houses and inns and taverns and Parliament, with all the lords in their silks, and all the ladies in the parks taking a turn, and none of them, not any of them, aware of what went on down below
. That there was a wall made from faery bone and there was the maze of Trollingdom, and that deep below their feet slept a dragon.
Annabel stopped rowing. It seemed the boat was moving itself now, riding the small waves, up and down, lulling them. Hafwen had begun to snore quietly in a rumbly troll way, and Kitty’s head was lolling in the darkness. Curled at the end of the boat, she looked peaceful and sweet. Annabel felt the seeing glass pressed against her chest.
She had asked it to show her Hafwen; now perhaps it could tell her how to approach a dragon. She took it from her dress and placed it on her palm. It was blank, of course. Empty. She sighed at her stupidity. She needed light to see inside the glass. Yet as she was about to put the glass away, she noticed a tiny glimmer within. A flicker. She looked up toward the cavern ceiling, which she had thought would be lost in darkness, but she saw that it was studded with pinpricks of light. They were like tiny stars, and she wondered if they were fireflies or some kind of precious stones.
There—the little glass flashed again. She held the ruby-red seeing glass higher, toward the ceiling. If she could align the glass with one of those specks of light, it might illuminate the piece. But it was difficult. The lights high above on the cavern ceiling seemed to be moving, because the boat was moving. The ruby-red glass would flash, and then the boat would glide on, the speck left behind.
She experimented for some time. She tried to match the glass with a speck in the far distance, the farthest she could see, and finally she captured one. The ruby-red glass flashed crimson, and she saw inside it.
She saw nothing useful.
She saw ruby-red glass suddenly glow.
It was a start.
She felt Hafwen breathe beside her and heard Kitty murmuring in her dreams. She looked deeper into the ruby-red glass. There were shadows now. The shadows were moving, and one of them was tall and one short, and that made her breath quicken. Her head said, Look away, the way it always had, from puddles and shiny silver spoons and lacquered jewelry boxes, but into the glass she looked.
The shadows moved toward her, and through the glass they grew giant. Now the cavern ceiling was aglow in ruby-red light. The shadows loomed huge across it: a tall woman and a short woman. And though she could not see their faces, she knew they were her great-aunts, and it filled her with joy.
“Miss Henrietta,” she started to cry, but her great-aunt’s shadow on the red cavern ceiling held a shadow hand up to her shadow face and hushed her.
“You have come a long way, Annabel Grey,” the small shadow said. Or the waves said, the stones said, the cavern ceiling said.
“But I don’t know where we will go next, or how we will…,” started Annabel. “You see, there’s a dragon. You didn’t tell me about the dragon!”
The taller shadow flickered darkly against the stones but did not speak.
The two shadows swam murkily on the ceiling, became nothing, and then formed bodies once again.
“You must not fear the dragon,” said the short shadow, who Annabel knew must be Miss Estella. “You have the broomstick.”
“Oh,” said Annabel.
That seemed easier said than done. She wondered if Miss Estella or Miss Henrietta had ever been anywhere dangerous or met a dragon. How could she defeat a dragon with a broomstick?
“Time moves quickly,” said the shadow Miss Estella. “The darkness is gathering.”
“We’re trying awfully hard,” whispered Annabel.
She thought of the Ondona thrown on the fire, and her heart beat faster.
“Never mind that,” said the little shadow.
The shadows unshaped themselves again and reshaped, and a shadow tree appeared, its shadow limbs stretched across the ceiling vault before dissolving.
“All of good magic depends upon you,” said shadow Miss Estella when she reappeared.
The taller shadow stepped forward. She moved closer and closer, the way a mother leans down over a child in bed to place a kiss upon its head. Annabel thought perhaps that was what the shadow Miss Henrietta was about to do, and if the real Miss Henrietta had done that in the magic shop, she would have been horrified, but here on the Lake of Tears she was quite looking forward to it.
The shadow giant Miss Henrietta came closer until Annabel’s face was covered in the velvety Miss Henrietta shadow, but she did not feel a kiss. She felt nothing, and then the shadows were gone. Annabel’s glass moved out of alignment with the tiny speck of light, and the ruby-red glow of the cavern vanished. There was only darkness and the three of them drifting across the lake.
She remembered what the wizards had told her about visions that spoke. If someone speaks to you directly from a vision, then that person is dead or very close to death, hovering between the two worlds. Annabel had not wanted to remember those words. She put her face in her hands and began to cry.
Mr. Angel carried the good wands to the machine room. He ran his hands over them, and the shadowlings leapt and danced upon the walls. There were five hundred now, more. He had raised them from the bottom of wells and behind paintings. From tea chests and unopened trunks. From unused ballrooms and forgotten stairwells. From quiet vestries.
Now they watched him.
When he leaned forward to examine the dark-magic gauge, they copied him. They grew themselves tall and thin and leaned forward with shadowy monocles pressed to their empty eyes. The needle had moved past two-thirds full. Mr. Angel snapped the wands, one by one, like twigs. He fed them to the machine, which groaned. The gauge needle trembled and climbed.
He destroyed the good wands that had raised fires in hearths and made dead trees blossom. That had coaxed babies from dying mothers and ignited love in unexpected places. The good wands that had helped ruined cakes rise and summoned good rains and bought sudden afternoons of much-needed sunshine. The wands that had given good dreams and seeded good friendships and soothed grieving mothers and healed injured limbs and fixed broken wings.
It was the end of good magic, the end of the Great & Benevolent Magical Society. And the machine, sensing this ending, sang up in ecstasy.
“A young lady always ascertains she has her hand luggage before disembarking. There is nothing more vexing than to find oneself in the rain without an umbrella.”
—Miss Finch’s Little Blue Book (1855)
Annabel stopped crying almost as soon as she’d started. Where would crying get her? She simply would not believe that her great-aunts were gone. She couldn’t be separated from her mother and find out her father was not a dead sea captain and then lose her brand-new great-aunts as well. It was impossible.
There was a job to be done, and she would do it. She was the most magical girl, and there were prophecies about her, and…She stopped because that seemed more impossible than anything. But she pulled her cloak close to herself and straightened her shoulders and took a very deep breath.
Emerald-green ice skates, she thought. The emerald-green ice skates she’d had her heart set upon before her whole world turned wrong. The green ice skates her mother had promised her for her birthday.
“Why, it must be my birthday,” she said to herself very quietly, and Hafwen snored beside her in a comforting, grumbly way. “Many happy returns, Annabel Grey.”
Just saying that made her smile because she was not at all who she thought she would be when she turned thirteen. She was someone completely new, and she liked the new her. She was brave and good, and she had magic inside her.
Her smile vanished when she saw a light in the distance and realized it must be the far shore of the Lake of Tears. The fires were pretty from a distance but horrible up close. The rocky shore was littered with centuries’ worth of funeral boats, pile upon pile of sticks and wood and spot fires smoldering. The place smelled terrible, acrid with smoke, pungent with death. She woke Kitty and Hafwen, speaking softly so they were not startled.
The hull of their boat scraped against rock, and Hafwen, her little gray troll face all creased and confused, looked happy at first, until s
he realized where they were.
Kitty rubbed her eyes. “I’m starving,” she said, and Annabel could tell she was pretending to be unafraid.
“I’m sure the West-Born Wyrm is, too,” said Annabel.
They laughed nervously, except for Hafwen, who had begun to tremble.
It was very, very quiet.
“We need a plan,” said Annabel, lowering her voice. It was the type of place that made you want to whisper. “A perfectly proper plan for how we can either defeat or avoid this wyrm creature.”
Miss Finch always said a young lady should make a list of her day’s chores. Rise and dress, recite her French conjugations, answer letters, and do something delightful like sketch in the park. Annabel decided that finding the Morever Wand should be no different. They would consult the map. They would find their way to the dragon’s lair. They would ask it very politely to allow them to pass.
She shook her head. Even she knew that was an impossible plan.
They stepped as quietly as they could into the shallow dark water. Annabel took Hafwen’s rough hand, and Hafwen held tight. By the light of a smoldering boat, Hafwen and Kitty looked at the map on Annabel’s shoulder. Kitty traced a line from there up to a spot on Annabel’s cheekbone.
“A hole here. Then cavern after cavern, leading to its lair, and beyond it lies the Morever Wand,” she said. “No other way.”
They looked at the small rocky shore and its awful rubble. There in the cavern wall was one entrance, narrow and dark. Hafwen whimpered.
“Well, if there is no other way, there is no other way,” said Annabel. She closed her eyes. She was meant to know what to do. What had Miss Estella told her? The answers were in her head and in her heart. You must not fear the dragon. You have the broomstick.
She looked at the broomstick. Well, that didn’t make an ounce of sense.
Hafwen and Kitty watched her. It made her feel uncomfortable.
You must not fear the dragon. You have the broomstick.
She knew many things. She knew how to wear her hair, how to walk gracefully, how to play the pianoforte. She knew which mountains were bigger, the Vogelsbergs or the Carpathians. She knew how to nod agreeably, even when things were not agreeable. How to read French, which she was not so good at, and Latin, which she was very bad at. But she didn’t know how the broomstick could help.
