Shadow of Night (All Souls Trilogy, #2)(138)

“And what do you know about being a weaver?” Goody Alsop asked sharply.

“Not much,” I confessed.

“Diana should sip this first.” Susanna approached me with a steaming cup. The scents of chamomile and mint filled the air. My dragon cocked her head in interest. “It is a calming draft and may soothe her beast.”

“I am not so concerned with the firedrake,” Catherine said dismissively.

“Getting one to obey is always difficult—like trying to curb a daemon who is intent on making mischief.” It was, I thought, easy for her to say. She didn’t have to persuade the beast to climb back inside her.

“What plants went into the tisane?” I asked, taking a sip of Susanna’s brew. After Marthe’s tea I was a bit suspicious of herbal concoctions. No sooner was the question out of my mouth than the cup began to bloom with sprigs of mint, the straw-scented flowers of chamomile, foamy Angelica, and some stiff, glossy leaves that I couldn’t identify. I swore.

“You see!” Catherine said, pointing to the cup. “It’s as I said. When Diana asks a question, the goddess answers it.”

Susanna looked at her beaker with alarm as it cracked under the pressure of the swelling roots. “I think you are right, Catherine. But if she is to weave rather than break things, she will need to ask better questions.” Goody Alsop and Catherine had figured out the secret to my power: It was inconveniently tied to my curiosity. Now certain events made better sense: my white table and its brightly colored puzzle pieces that came to my rescue whenever I faced a problem, the butter flying out of Sarah’s refrigerator in Madison when I wondered if there was more. Even the strange appearance of Ashmole 782 at the Bodleian Library could be explained:

When I filled out the call slip, I’d wondered what might be in the volume.

Earlier today my simple musings about who might have written one of the spells in Susanna’s grimoire had caused the ink to unspool from the page and re-form on the table next to it in an exact likeness of her dead grandmother.

I promised Susanna to put the words back as soon as I figured out how. And so I discovered that the practice of magic was not unlike the practice of history. The trick to both wasn’t finding the correct answers but formulating better questions.

“Tell us again about calling witchwater, Diana, and the bow and arrow that appear when someone you love is in trouble,” Susanna suggested. “Perhaps that will provide some method we can follow.”

I rehearsed the events of the night Matthew had left me at Sept-Tours when the water had come out of me in a flood and the morning in Sarah’s orchard when I’d seen the veins of water underground. And I carefully accounted for every time the bow had appeared—even when there was no arrow or when there was but I didn’t shoot it. When I finished, Catherine drew a satisfied sigh.

“I see the problem now. Diana is not fully present unless she is protecting someone or when forced to face her fears,” Catherine observed. “She is always puzzling over the past or wondering about the future. A witch must be entirely in the here and now to work magic.”

My firedrake flapped her wings in agreement, sending warm gusts of air around the room.

“Matthew always thought there was a connection between my emotions, my needs, and my magic,” I told them.

“Sometimes I wonder if that wearh is not part witch,” Catherine said.

The others laughed at the ridiculous notion of Ysabeau de Clermont’s son having even a drop of witch’s blood.

“I think it’s safe to leave the firedrake to her own devices for the time being and return to the matter of Diana’s disguising spell,” Goody Alsop said, referring to my need to shield the surfeit of energy that was released whenever I used magic. “Are you making any progress?”

“I felt wisps of smoke form around me,” I said hesitantly.

“You need to focus on your knots,” Goody Alsop said, looking pointedly at the cords in my lap. Each shade could be found in the threads that bound the worlds, and manipulating the cords—twisting and tying them—worked a sympathetic magic. But first I needed to know which strands to use. I took hold of the colorful cords by the topknot. Goody Alsop had taught me how to blow gently on the strands while focusing my intentions. That was supposed to loosen the appropriate cords for whatever spell I was trying to weave.

I blew into the strands so that they shimmered and danced. The yellow and brown cords worked themselves loose and dropped into my lap, along with the red, blue, silver, and white. I ran my fingers down the nine-inch lengths of twisted silk. Six strands meant six different knots, each one more complex than the last.

My knot-making skills were still clumsy, but I found this part of weaving oddly soothing. When I practiced the elaborate twistings and crossings with ordinary string, the result was something reminiscent of ancient Celtic knotwork. There was a hierarchical order to the knots. The first two were single and double slipknots. Sarah used them sometimes, when she was making a love spell or some other binding. But only weavers could make the intricate knots that involved as many as nine distinct crossings and ended with the two free ends of the cord magically fused to make an unbreakable weaving.

I took a deep breath and refocused my intentions. A disguise was a form of protection, and purple was its color. But there was no purple cord. Without delay the blue and red cords rose up and spun together so tightly that the final result looked exactly like the mottled purple candles that my mother used to set in the windows on the nights when the moon was dark.