And if any other witch was going to be able to use it, those words had to be packed with potential. The London witches had taught me a great deal, but the spells I wrote tended to lie flat on the page, inert on anyone’s tongue but mine. Most spells were written in rhyme, which made them easier to remember as well as livelier. But I was no poet, like Matthew or his friends. I hesitated.
“Something wrong?” Sarah said.
“My gramarye sucks,” I confessed, lowering my voice.
“If I had the slightest idea what that was, I’d feel sorry for you,” Sarah said drily.
“Gramarye is how a weaver puts magic into words. I can construct spells and perform them myself, but without gramarye they won’t work for other witches.” I pointed to the Bishop grimoire. “Hundreds and hundreds of weavers came up with the words for those spells, and other witches passed them down through the ages. Even now the spells retain their power. I’m lucky if my spells remain potent for an hour.”
“What’s the problem?” Sarah asked.
“I don’t see spells in words but in shapes and colors.” The underside of my thumb and pinkie were still slightly discolored. “Red ink helped my fire spell. So did arranging the words on the page so that they made a kind of picture.”
“Show me,” Sarah said, pushing a piece of scrap paper and a charred stick in my direction. “Witch hazel,” she explained when I held it up for clarification. “I use it as a pencil when I’m trying to copy a spell for the first time. If something goes wrong, the aftereffects are less . . . er, permanent than with ink.” She colored slightly. One of her unruly spells had caused a cyclone in the bathroom. For weeks we found spatters of suntan lotion and shampoo in the oddest places.
I wrote out the spell I’d devised to set things alight, careful not to say the words to myself and thereby work the magic. When I was through, the index finger of my right hand was glowing red.
“This was my first attempt at gramarye,” I said, looking at it critically before handing it to Sarah.
“A third-grader probably would have done a better job.”
Fire
Ignite till
Roaring bright
Extinguishing night;
“It’s not that bad,” Sarah said. When I looked crestfallen, she hastily added, “I’ve seen worse.
Spelling out fire with the first letter of every line was clever. But why a triangle?”
“That’s the structure of the spell. It’s pretty simple, really—just a thrice-crossed knot.” It was my turn to study my work. “Funny thing is, the triangle was a symbol many alchemists used for fire.”
“A thrice-crossed knot?” Sarah looked over the frames of her glasses. “You’re having one of your Yoda moments.” This was her way of letting the air out of my vocabulary.
“I’m making it as plain as I can, Sarah. It would be easier to show you what I mean if my cords weren’t inside my hands.” I held them up and waggled my fingers at her. Sarah murmured something, and the ball of twine rolled across the table. “Will ordinary string do, Yoda?”
I stopped the ball by saying my own spell to arrest its motion. It was heavy with the power of earth and had a thicket of thrice-crossed knots surrounding it. Sarah twitched in surprise.
“Of course,” I said, pleased by my aunt’s reaction. After giving the twine a whack with her knife, I picked up a length of string approximately nine inches long. “Every knot has a different number of crossings. You use two of them in your craft—the slipknot and the double slipknot. Those are the two weaver’s knots that all witches know. It’s when we come to the third knot that things get complicated.”
I wasn’t sure if kitchen twine was up to showing what I meant, though. Knots made with my weaver’s cords were three-dimensional, but given that I was working with ordinary string, I decided to work on the flat. Holding one end of the length in my left hand, I made a loop to the right, pulled the string loosely under one side of the loop and over the other, and joined the ends together. The result was a trefoil-shaped knot that resembled a triangle.
“See, three crossings,” I said. “You try.”
When I took my hands off the string, it sprang up into a familiar pyramid with the ends properly fused together into an unbreakable knot. Sarah gasped.
“Cool,” I said. “Plain old string works just fine.”