Shadow of Night (All Souls Trilogy, #2)(122)

“We will be ready for them,” Matthew assured her.

“There are some things that your wife must do for herself, Master Roydon. Carrying the babe and seeing the Rede are among them,” Goody Alsop replied. “Trust is not an easy business for a wearh, I know, but you must try for her sake.”

“I trust my wife. You felt what witches have done to her, so you will not be surprised that I don’t trust any of your kind with her,” Matthew said.

“You must try,” Goody Alsop repeated. “You cannot offend the Rede. If you do, Hubbard will have to intervene. The Rede will not suffer that additional insult and will insist on the Congregation’s involvement. No matter our other disagreements, no one in this room wants the Congregation’s attention focused on London, Master Roydon.”

Matthew took Goody Alsop’s measure. Finally he nodded. “Very well, Goody.”

I was a weaver.

Soon I would be a mother.

A child between, a witch apart, whispered the ghostly voice of Bridget Bishop.

Matthew’s sharp inhalation told me that he had detected some change in my scent. “Diana is tired and needs to go home.”

“She is not tired but fearful. The time for that has passed, Diana. You must face who you truly are,” Goody Alsop said with mild regret.

But my anxiety continued to rise even after we were safely back in the Hart and Crown. Once there, Matthew took off his quilted jacket. He wrapped it around my shoulders, trying to ward off the chilly air. The fabric retained his smell of cloves and cinnamon, along with traces of smoke from Susanna’s fire and the damp air of London.

“I’m a weaver.” Perhaps if I kept saying it, this fact would begin to make sense. “But I don’t know what that means or who I am anymore.”

“You are Diana Bishop—a historian, a witch.” He took me by the shoulders. “No matter what else you have been before or might one day be, this is who you are. And you are my life.”

“Your wife,” I corrected him.

“My life,” he repeated. “You are not just my heart but its beating. Before I was only a shadow, like Goody Alsop’s fetch.” His accent was stronger, his voice rough with emotion.

“I should be relieved to have the truth at last,” I said through chattering teeth as I climbed into bed. The cold seemed to have taken root in the marrow of my bones. “All my life I wondered why I was different. Now I know, but it doesn’t help.”

“One day it will,” Matthew promised, joining me under the coverlet. He folded his arms around me. We twined our legs like the roots of a tree, each clinging to the other for support as we worked our bodies closer. Deep within me the chain that I had somehow forged out of love and longing for someone I had yet to meet flexed between us and became fluid. It was thick and unbreakable, filled with a life-giving sap that flowed continuously from witch to vampire and back to witch. Soon I no longer felt between but blissfully, completely centered. I took a deep breath, then another. When I tried to draw away, Matthew refused.

“I’m not ready to let you go yet,” he said, pulling me closer.

“You must have work to do—for the Congregation, Philippe, Elizabeth. I’m fine, Matthew,” I insisted, though I wanted to stay exactly where I was for as long as possible.

“Vampires reckon time differently than warmbloods do,” he said, still unwilling to release me.

“How long is a vampire minute, then?” I asked, snuggling under his chin.

“It’s hard to say,” Matthew murmured. “Some length of time between an ordinary minute and forever.”





Chapter Twenty Two




Assembling the twenty-six most powerful witches in London was no small feat. The Rede did not take place as I had imagined—in a single, courtroom-style meeting with witches arrayed in neat rows and me standing before them. Instead it unfolded over several days in shops, taverns, and parlors all over the city. There were no formal introductions, and no time was wasted on other social niceties. I saw so many unfamiliar witches that soon they all blurred together.

Some aspects of the experience stood out, however. For the first time I felt the unquestionable power of a firewitch. Goody Alsop hadn’t misled me—there was no mistaking the burning intensity of the redheaded witch’s gaze or touch. Though the flames in my blood leaped and danced when she was near, I was clearly no firewitch. This was confirmed when I met two more firewitches in a private room at the Mitre, a tavern in Bishopsgate.

“She’ll be a challenge,” one observed after she’d finished reading my skin.

“A time-spinning weaver with plenty of water and fire in her,” the other agreed. “Not a combination I thought to see in my lifetime.”

The Rede’s windwitches convened at Goody Alsop’s house, which was more spacious than its modest exterior suggested. Two ghosts wandered the rooms, as did Goody Alsop’s fetch, who met visitors at the door and glided about silently making sure that everyone was comfortable.

The windwitches were a less fearsome lot than the firewitches, their touches light and dry as they quietly assessed my strengths and shortcomings.

“A stormy one,” murmured a silver-haired witch of fifty or so. She was petite and lithe and moved with a speed that suggested gravity did not have the same hold on her as on the rest of us.