The Threads of Magic by Alison Croggon (best books for students to read .TXT) 📗

turned out to be nobles. He didn’t tell her that he thought it had moved when he picked it up, or of his conviction that it was somehow alive. As he spoke, Oni went very still.

“It’s a bad thing,” said El, shuddering again. “I could feel it. I couldn’t sleep with it in the house. It gave me awful dreams. That’s how I knew we had to get rid of it.”

“And where is it now?” said Oni.

“The thing? I told Pip to throw it in the river. You did, didn’t you?”

Pip didn’t answer. He thought that El would likely punch him if he said he had kept it.

“Don’t tell me you still have it? Pipistrel, I told you, it’s evil. It’s bad luck.” El was almost crying, and her chest began to heave jerkily, as it did when she was agitated.

“Show me,” said Oni.

“I can’t,” said Pip. “It would be wrong.”

“Show me.” Oni was staring at him, her eyes burning.

Slowly Pip reached under his clothes and took out the Heart. It was warm to his fingers, warmer even than his own skin. It fitted pleasingly in his palm, smooth and leathery. It was uncanny, that was certain, but he didn’t feel the same revulsion toward it that El did. It was magic, he was sure, but he didn’t think it was evil.

El flinched and turned away, but Oni breathed in sharply. She bit her lip and reached out and touched the Heart with the tip of her finger, stroking it gently.

“Oh my,” she said. “Oh, the poor, poor thing.”

Pip looked at her curiously, his annoyance forgotten. “You know what it is?”

Oni sat back, biting her lip. She looked shaken. “I think you’re in trouble, Pip. If I’m right. I might be wrong, though.”

“So what is it?” El stole a look at the Heart, and then turned away. “It’s horrible. I don’t want anything to do with it.”

Oni was silent for a long time, her face troubled.

“You might as well tell us,” said Pip, putting the Heart away. “We ought to know.”

“I don’t know if I can trust you, Pip.” Pip opened his mouth, about to protest indignantly, but she held up her finger. “No, I don’t mean that I think you’re a snitch or nothing like that. It’s more . . .” She trailed off.

“More what?”

“We got to talk to Ma.”

“Your ma? Why? Could she help?” El turned around.

“There’s a lot you don’t know about us. Stuff you shouldn’t know. For your sake, as well as ours.”

“What are you talking about?” El looked offended. “I’d never do you down. You know that. Don’t you? All these years . . .”

“It’s not just me, El. If it was just about me, I wouldn’t worry — well, not much. But it isn’t.” Oni paused again, frowning. “I got to go back to work, but we should meet up later and go to see Ma. Maybe meet me at Linkpin Square at the sixth bell. Don’t you poke your noses out of this door until then, not one inch, and leave out the back alley. I just hope to the gods that no one saw us coming here.”

“We was careful,” said Pip. “I’m as certain as I can be that no one followed us. You said I was being silly. You said —”

“Yes, I get it,” said Oni crossly. “You were right.”

Now Oni was annoyed.

AS THE SUN DIPPED BEHIND THE CITY BUILDINGS, EL and Pip headed by indirect ways for Linkpin Square. “Square” was a grand name for a triangle where three alleys met: it was a tiny patch of weedy ground overshadowed by dank tenements. It was twilight by the time they arrived, but they felt hideously exposed as they waited in the darkest doorway they could find, their necks prickling as if unseen eyes were watching them from the blank windows above.

Oni was late. El had begun to grow anxious, worrying that the assassin had tracked her friend down, and maybe had already cut her throat, and El’s breath came in little gasps. Pip hated it when she got like that, and he was ready to punch Oni by the time she finally arrived. Oni ignored his reproaches, saying shortly that she couldn’t help it, and that it would be better to keep moving instead of wasting time arguing.

From Linkpin Square, they made their way to the Old Palace. It took them longer than it normally would: they doubled back on their tracks and hid behind low walls, listening for stray footsteps, and once they made a shortcut via an abandoned building, slipping in through a broken window. Pip was using all the tricks he knew, but traveling with two others made him feel horribly visible. He was pretty sure, all the same, that nobody saw when they wriggled through a gap in the railings and dived into the overgrown park at the back of the Old Palace.

Once they were inside the grounds, Oni led them unerringly to her mother’s kitchen garden, where they climbed over the wall and knocked on the door.

Oni’s mother wasn’t pleased to see them and told them to come back the next day.

“Ma, it’s important,” said Oni. “Else I wouldn’t have come.”

“It’s Georgie’s day.”

Oni swore. “So what?”

“So you can’t be here.”

“I told you, Ma, it’s important.”

“How important?”

Oni looked over her shoulder, as if she thought the shadows might be listening, and lowered her voice to a whisper. “I can’t say, Ma,” she said. “Not out loud.”

Her mother’s jaw tightened. Oni met her eyes stubbornly, and at last Amina sighed and held open the door. “All right,” she said. “But be quick.”

She let them into her kitchen: a large, whitewashed room flagged with red clay tiles that stayed cool even in the fiercest heat of summer. At one end was a hearth with a roasting spit next to a covered oven, and at the other were rows of mullioned windows over a wooden workbench. The windows looked out onto the walled garden where