Kim has been living on the streets of London since she was a small girl. She has always dressed and acted as a boy because it was safer, but as a teenager is getting harder to hide her identity under ragged knee pants and threadbare jackets. Kim gets hired to sneak into the wagon of a traveling magician. She has long since sworn off of burglary, but takes the job because she isn't expected to steal anything, just report what she finds. Her attempt goes wrong, and she is caught by Mairelon, who immediately recognizes that she is a girl. He is intrigued to find out what she was hired to do and agreed to let her travel with him out of London to escape the wrath of her employer. Kim discovers that Mairelon's magic act is a cover for a clandestine investigation related to some magical items Mairelon has been accused of stealing. Mairelon recruits Kim to help him in his quest to clear his name, and in return Mairelon will start to educate Kim in simple magic, and courtly manners.
I guess I am on a little bit of a Patricia Wrede binge. This one was written years before the other two I read, but is has a very similar setting and magic system. It was fun, but almost completely devoid of any romantic interest between the main characters. I expected it to be a "My Fair Lady" kind of plot. It wasn't, but maybe there is more of that in the second book in the series. One interesting part of the book is Kim's dialect. She uses a lot of cockney slang terms I had never heard before, even though I have read a lot of Regency period novels. I had to just assume the meaning of some of them by context. I wonder how Ms Wrede became so fluent in their use? (1992, 286 p)
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