Magic's Child Read online

  The Magic or Madness Trilogy

  by Justine Larbalestier

  Magic or Madness

  Magic Lessons

  Magic’s Child

  Magic’s Child

  RAZORBILL

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Young Readers Group

  345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank,

  Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright 2007 © Justine Larbalestier

  All rights reserved

  ISBN 978-1-1012-1796-2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  In memory of Jenna Felice (1976-2001)

  and

  Marie Wilkinson (1952-2003).

  One from New York, the other from Sydney.

  I miss them.

  Note to Readers

  Like the first two books in this trilogy, Magic’s Child contains both Australian and American spelling, vocabulary, and grammar. Chapters from the viewpoint of the Australians, Reason and Tom, are written in Australian English, and those from Jay-Tee’s point of view are written American style. (I was tempted to switch that in this, the final book, so that Jay-Tee talked Aussie and Tom and Reason Yankee, but my editors didn’t think that was as funny as I did. Sigh.) To help you out, there’s a glossary at the back of the book, which is almost a hundred-per-cent true. Enjoy!

  Contents

  1

  Reason Cansino

  2

  Bruises

  3

  Not Alone

  4

  Pots and Pans

  5

  Feeling That Way

  6

  Light and Dark

  7

  Telling the Truth

  8

  Glowing

  9

  Disappearing Magic

  10

  Following Magic

  11

  Broken Pattern

  12

  Everything Changes

  13

  Hot and Bothered

  14

  Skin

  15

  Dancing

  16

  Sweating

  17

  907 Lights

  18

  Morning After

  19

  A Different Sky

  20

  Becoming Magic

  21

  Fragile

  22

  Another Door

  23

  Blue Silk

  24

  Jason Blake

  25

  Without Tears

  26

  Sarafina Cansino

  27

  Reunion

  28

  Magic or Madness?

  29

  Butterflies

  30

  Greed

  31

  Belly of the Beast

  32

  Full Kitchen

  33

  Asylum

  34

  Cansino Magic

  35

  God’s Children

  36

  Reason Cansino

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  1

  Reason Cansino

  My name is Reason Cansino. I’m fifteen years old, pregnant, and magic.

  I could fly if I wanted. Or turn lead into gold. Or my enemies into frogs. Or anything, really.

  I think.

  No one knows the extent of my magic. Least of all me.

  8

  When I was little, magic was the sensation of water sliding past my skin as I dove into the Roper River and burst back through the surface with a crayfish in my hands. I had no idea how it had gotten there.

  Magic.

  Sarafina stood on the bank and applauded. “Yes! Yes!” And I felt dizzy and proud.

  Or the taste of that crayfish later, cooked in coals, sweet and clean and fresh as dawn, its juices dribbling down our chins.

  Magic was long, steady rain after years of drought.

  My first taste of ice cream.

  Stories of ancestors told around the fire.

  Fibonaccis cascading through my body, opening up in a spiral dance into infinity. A spiral I could trace on my ammonite, unwinding from the tiniest point and stretching out into forever.

  8

  Before I came to Esmeralda’s house, I hadn’t known magic was real. Now I know that a magic person can get from Sydney to New York City by stepping through a door, can make light just by thinking about it, or money appear out of thin air, or clothes that are almost alive.

  I know the cost of that magic too. Use too much and you die. Use too little and you go insane. That’s the choice: magic or madness. Which will it be?

  My mother, Sarafina, chose madness.

  My grandmother, Esmeralda, chose magic.

  So did my grandfather, Jason Blake, and my friends Tom and Jay-Tee.

  Each of them with a finite amount of magic, winding down their lives every time they used it. Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

  Magic-wielders don’t live long. Use a little, no more or less than once a week, and you can make it to forty; use a lot, recklessly, and never see your twenties.

  That was me and Jay-Tee: reckless with our magic. Me, because I didn’t know; Jay-Tee, because she didn’t care.

  Tom was sparing and careful, because my grandmother taught him how, and because he had tasted madness like an unripe lemon. Better to live short and sane, he decided, than long and mad, like his mother, like mine.

  And, of course, you can always cheat. Find someone with magic who doesn’t know the rules, ask them for some of theirs. (They needn’t understand the question, just so long as they say yes.) Trick them, drink them, live longer. Take a little (or a lot) of their life; add it to yours.

  Just like my grandparents did. That’s why my mother chose madness.

  If you’re magic, you can’t trust other magic people. They want to drink you dry, steal all your magic, so that you die in seconds and they live forever. Or to fifty even.

  Magic is a disease.

  2

  Bruises

  Even though my belly was full of bacon, eggs, fried onions, and mushrooms, I still reached for my
fourth rambutan. I pushed my thumbnail into the thick, hairy, reddish skin, slit it open, and peeled off the jacket, revealing the translucent fruit beneath. I bit in, let the sweet juice explode in my mouth. Doing something as normal as eating kept me from panicking.

  Jay-Tee pushed her plate away. She’d eaten the bacon but not her eggs. “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing.” I blinked. I didn’t turn my head away quick enough to avoid seeing how faint her magic was. How close she was to dying.

  It was less than twenty-four hours since my should’ve-been-dead ancestor, Raul Emilio Jesús Cansino, changed me. Every time I closed my eyes—every time I blinked—I saw magic. Light of varying intensity dotting the darkness. Each time my eyes closed, the magic world of light had gotten bigger, stretched further.

  I was afraid it wasn’t going to go away. I was afraid of what it meant. I hadn’t been able to sleep last night and didn’t know if I’d ever be able to sleep again.

  Most of all, I hated barely seeing Jay-Tee. Tom’s light was strong and clear; Esmeralda’s was dazzling, but Jay-Tee’s was a smudge, fainter than the Milky Way.

  “Really nothing?” Tom asked, peering at me. “You don’t look like it’s nothing.” He took another bite of his chocolate muffin. Tom didn’t like fruit.

  “Yeah,” Jay-Tee said. “You look weird. Why do you keep staring like that?”

  I was trying not to blink. My record so far was three minutes. Any more than that and my eyes burned and watered until my lids shut. And there were the magic lights again, waiting for me.

  “Reason? You’re doing it again.” Jay-Tee got up and walked towards the back door. She leaned against it, looking back at me.

  “Sorry,” I said. “You’re not thinking of going through the door, are you?”

  Jay-Tee snorted. “No, of course not. Esmeralda made it very clear that it’s out of bounds. Besides, I don’t know where the key is.”

  “Well, even if you did know, you can’t go through. It would use up too much magic. You don’t have enough.”

  “You’re saying I can’t even—”

  The doorbell rang. Jay-Tee pushed off from the door. “I’ll get it,” she said, heading down the hall, “but you have to tell us what’s going on.”

  “Yeah,” Tom said. “You can’t hold out on us when something this big is happening to you. It sucks for us too, you know.” The front door groaned open. “Probably just Mormons or something.”

  I closed my eyes and Tom became nothing but shining magic as bright as the door that led to New York City. I could recognise his magic now, feel the Tomness of it. He had years of it left. Jay-Tee had more like minutes. I wondered how much I had. Did this new magic run out the same way the old did? Jason Blake seemed to think so, at least about the Cansino magic he and Esmeralda had. I was something different. Raul Emilio Jesús Cansino had chosen me. I wished I could see inside myself the way I could see them.

  “What?” Tom asked. “What’s up, Reason?”

  “Nothing. Really. What are Mormons?” I asked. From the front hall I could hear Jay-Tee talking to someone, but not what they were saying.

  “No way,” Tom said. “No way do you not know what Mormons are!”

  I hadn’t the foggiest. I let Tom go on about how I didn’t know anything, even though he should be used to it by now. I reached for another rambutan, wishing Jay-Tee’s brother were here. He wouldn’t muck me about; he’d just tell me what a Mormon was. I wondered if Danny would still like me with my eyes all red and watery and my belly pregnant with our child. How was I going to tell him about that?

  “You really never heard of Mormons?”

  “Nope.”

  “Reason!” Jay-Tee yelled from the front of the house. “It’s for you!”

  I put the fruit down, wiped my mouth, and headed out of the kitchen and along the hall. In the doorway stood a woman dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, with shortish, feathery hair, and a backpack slung over one shoulder. She was smiling—or rather, beaming—at me.

  When I blinked there was only darkness where she was standing.

  “You must be Reason, then. I thought Jay-Tee was, but that’s been cleared up. Not that you look alike. Well, except for the bruises. Were you two in a fight?”

  Jay-Tee touched her cheek and I touched my eye at the same time. Jay-Tee’s bruise was all garish purples, reds, and blues, a souvenir of Esmeralda’s attempt to give her Raul Cansino’s magic. She wasn’t a Cansino; it hadn’t taken.

  “Two different fights, looks like. Your bruise is older, isn’t it?” she asked, looking closely at my face. I’d almost forgotten about it, days old and faded into pale yellows and browns. I’d gotten it shifting the heavy box buried in the cellar. It had smashed into my face as I prised it free. Inside I’d found the dried-up corpse of Le Roi, my mother’s cat.

  The woman stuck out her hand.

  I shook it, wondering who on earth she was. She caught my expression and laughed.

  “I’m your social worker. Jennifer Ishii.”

  “Hi,” I said, thinking, My social worker? Then I remembered. A million years ago, when my mother, Sarafina, had gone mad and been sent to Kalder Park and I’d been sent to live with my grandmother, Esmeralda, they’d said a social worker would be along to check on me once a fortnight. They’d said lots of other things too. I’d been in such a daze I hadn’t heard half of it. Yet it hadn’t been a million years ago: it had been twelve days.

  Two weeks ago I hadn’t had a friend in the world; now I had Tom, Jay-Tee, and, back in New York City, Danny. Two weeks ago I hadn’t been pregnant. Or known I was a magic-wielder.

  “Did you forget I was coming today?”

  “Er…” I didn’t think Esmeralda had told me the exact day the social worker was supposed to visit.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Oh,” I said. Tom came and stood behind me. Jennifer Ishii took a step into Esmeralda’s house and offered her hand to Tom.

  “And you are?”

  “Tom. I’m Tom Yarbro.”

  “And you were in the same fight as Reason and Jay-Tee?” She leaned forward, peering at his cheek.

  Tom looked confused. “Oh, you mean this?” He touched the bandage that covered the long scratch that had come courtesy of my grandfather, Jason Blake.

  “She’s my social worker,” I whispered to him, which was silly, because she was right there.

  Way back when, before I’d known about magic, all I’d wanted to do was escape my grandmother and rescue my mother. Back then, I’d planned on persuading the social worker that I was being mistreated, so they’d move me away from Esmeralda. And here I was with an incriminating bruise on my face. All I had to say was, She belted me! She belts us all! and Jennifer Ishii would snatch me out of there faster than a croc taking its prey. But I didn’t want to go. I wanted to stay in Esmeralda’s house. I still didn’t trust her. Not entirely. But I felt safe there, with my friends and out of my grandfather’s clutches.

  “Social worker? Huh,” Tom said.

  “That’s right. It’s my job to report on Reason’s well-being. How things are going, whether she’s well looked after. Is she being fed? You certainly don’t seem malnourished, Reason. How’s your accommodation?” She looked around. “Seems quite fabulous to me.”

  “You don’t look like a social worker,” Tom said. “Shouldn’t you be wearing a suit or something?”

  Jennifer Ishii laughed again. “We’re supposed to look presentable. I don’t like suits and I find that most of my clients don’t either.”

  “Clients?” Jay-Tee asked.

  She shrugged. “That’s what we call the people I check on. So how about these injuries you all have?”

  “We were just…” I trailed off.

  “Messing around,” Jay-Tee finished.

  “Reason fell in the cellar,” Tom said at the same time.

  I nodded. “I tripped.”

  “In the cellar?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You were al
l mucking around in the cellar?”

  “Oh, no,” said Jay-Tee. “Not Tom and me. We were wrestling and it got a bit out of control. I won, though, ’cause Tom was cut, but I just got bruised.”

  “No way. You so didn’t win! My cut’s tiny! That bruise is huge. Practically your whole face. You can’t call—”

  “I see,” Jennifer Ishii said, with a smaller smile. “Do you want to show me your bedroom, Reason? Give me a tour of the house? Or do you want to sit down first and have a chat? I think we need to chat, don’t you?”

  I blinked. Saw the faint light of Jay-Tee, the brighter one of Tom, and the nothing of Jennifer Ishii. She wasn’t magic. Like Danny, she was entirely magic-free. No running out of magic for her. No dying young for Ms Ishii. “I guess. We were just finishing breakfast.”

  I led her into the kitchen and pulled up a stool at the table. She sat down, looking out the windows at the backyard and the huge Moreton Bay fig that, for some reason, Tom and Esmeralda called Filomena.

  “Great kitchen. Nice backyard. Do you climb that tree?”

  I nodded and then wondered if I shouldn’t have. Was climbing trees a bad thing? Would it get Esmeralda in trouble? “I mean, only a little bit. Carefully.”

  “Do you want something to eat, Mrs Ishii?” Jay-Tee asked, saving me.

  “Just call me Jennifer.”

  “Jennifer,” Jay-Tee said, obediently. “There’s fruit. Though some of it’s kind of weird.” She slid the fruit bowl even closer to the social worker.

  “Or something to drink?” I asked.

  “That would be lovely. Is that orange juice?”

  Jay-Tee jumped up, got a glass, and poured her some.

  “Thank you,” she said, taking a sip. “So you both live here too?” she asked Jay-Tee and Tom.

  Jay-Tee nodded. Tom shook his head.

  “She’s a friend,” I blurted. “From America.”

  “I live next door,” Tom said at the same time.

  Jennifer Ishii smiled. “That’s interesting. I didn’t realise you’d ever been to America, Reason. How did you two meet?”

  “Her parents are friends of Esmeralda’s,” I said, quickly, hoping she wouldn’t ask to see Jay-Tee’s passport or anything. I didn’t think Jay-Tee had a passport. Or if she did, it was probably back in New York City, on the other side of the door.