Shadow of Night (All Souls Trilogy, #2)(139)

“With knot of one, the spell’s begun,” I murmured, looping the purple cord into the simple slipknot. The firedrake crooned an imitation of my words.

I looked up at her and was struck once again by the firedrake’s changeable appearance. When she breathed out, she faded into a blurred smudge of smoke. When she breathed in, her outlines sharpened. She was a perfect balance of substance and spirit, neither one nor the other. Would I ever feel that coherent?

“With knot of two, the spell be true.” I made a double knot along the same purple cord. Wondering if there was a way I could fade into gray obscurity whenever I wished, the way the firedrake did, I ran the yellow cord through my fingers. The third knot was the first true weaver’s knot I had to make. Though it involved only three crossings, it was still a challenge.

“With knot of three, the spell is free.” I looped and twisted the cord into a trefoil shape, then drew the ends together. They fused to form the weaver’s unbreakable knot.

Sighing with relief, I dropped it into my lap, and from my mouth came a gray mist finer than smoke. It hung around me like a shroud. I gasped in surprise, letting out more of the eerie, transparent fog. I looked up. Where had the firedrake gone? The brown cord leaped into my fingers. “With knot of four, the power is stored.” I loved the pretzel-like shape of the fourth knot, with its sinuous bends and twists.

“Very good, Diana,” Goody Alsop said. This was the moment in my spells when everything tended to go wrong. “Now, remain in the moment and bid the dragon to stay with you. If she is so inclined, she will hide you from curious eyes.”

The firedrake’s cooperation seemed too much to hope for, but I made the pentacle-shaped knot anyway, using the white cord. “With knot of five, the spell will thrive.”

The firedrake swooped down and nestled her wings against my ribs. “Will you stay with me?” I silently asked her.

The firedrake wrapped me in a fine gray cocoon. It dulled the black of my skirts and jacket, turning them a deep charcoal. Ysabeau’s ring glittered less brightly, the fire at the heart of the diamond dimmed. Even the silver cord in my lap looked tarnished. I smiled at the firedrake’s silent answer. “With knot of six, this spell I fix,” I said. My final knot was not as symmetrical as it should have been, but it held nonetheless.

“You are indeed a weaver, child,” Goody Alsop said, letting out her breath.

I felt marvelously inconspicuous on my walk home, wrapped in my firedrake muffler, but came to life again when my feet crossed over the threshold of the Hart and Crown. A package waited for me there, along with Kit. Matthew was still spending too much time with the mercurial daemon. Marlowe and I exchanged cool greetings, and I had started unpicking the package’s protective wrappings when Matthew let out a mighty roar.

“Good Christ!” Where moments before there was empty space, there was now Matthew, staring at a piece of paper in disbelief.

“What does the Old Fox want now?” Kit asked sourly, jamming his pen into a pot of ink.

“I just received a bill from Nicholas Vallin, the goldsmith up the lane,” Matthew said, scowling. I looked at him innocently. “He charged me fifteen pounds for a mousetrap.” Now that I better understood the purchasing power of a pound—and that Mary’s servant Joan earned only five pounds a year—I could see why Matthew was shocked.

“Oh. That.” I returned my attention to the package. “I asked him to make it.”

“You had one of the finest goldsmiths in London make you a mousetrap?” Kit was incredulous. “If you have any more funds to spare, Mistress Roydon, I hope you will allow me to undertake an alchemical experiment for you. I will transmute your silver and gold into wine at the Cardinal’s Hat!”

“It’s a rat trap, not a mousetrap,” I muttered.

“Might I see this rat trap?” Matthew’s tone was ominously even.

I removed the last of the wrappings and held out the article in question.

“Silver gilt. And engraved, too,” Matthew said, turning it over in his hand. After looking more closely at it, he swore. “‘Ars longa, vita brevis.’ Art is long, but life is short. Indeed.”

“It’s supposed to be very effective.” Monsieur Vallin’s cunning design resembled a watchful feline, with a pair of finely worked ears on the hinge, a wide set of eyes carved into the cross brace. The edges of the trap resembled a mouth, complete with lethal teeth. It reminded me a bit of Sarah’s cat, Tabitha. Vallin had provided an added bit of whimsy by perching a silver mouse on the cat’s nose. The tiny creature bore no resemblance to the long-toothed monsters that prowled around our attics. The mere thought of them munching their way through Matthew’s papers while we slept made me shudder.

“Look. He’s engraved the bottom of it, too,” Kit said, following the romping mice around the base of the trap. “It bears the rest of Hippocrates’ aphorism—and in Latin, no less. ‘Occasio pr?ceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile.’”

“It may be an excessively sentimental inscription, given the instrument’s purpose,” I admitted.

“Sentimental?” Matthew’s eyebrow shot up. “From the viewpoint of the rat, it sounds quite realistic: Opportunity is fleeting, experiment dangerous, and judgment difficult.” His mouth twitched.