back. She brushed salt from her fingers into the bag, and some of it scattered the floor.
"The Duke tendered me an ultimatum today," she said. Sebastien didn't answer, but she heard the clucking noises as he coaxed the cat. Apparently, the animal's name would remain el Capitán, for when Sebastien reappeared, he cradled seventeen pounds of marmalade tomcat.
"How shall you keep him in the circle?" Sebastien asked. "I would rather you did not touch him."
"No, that would be unwise. Just put him within the line; animals understand protective circles."
Sebastien did as she instructed, and Garrett closed the circle before the cat identified the gap. Whiskers trembling, it began a slow circuit of her improvised workspace, inspecting the line on the floorboards. But as she had predicted, it respected the barrier, and having made one and a half circuits, sat down beside a table leg and began to wash a forepaw, pretending vast unconcern.
With tongs held in gloved hands, Garrett lifted the paddereen and touched it to the tip of the cat's tail. The cat twitched its appendage aside, but on the second try, Garrett managed to make good contact. She spoke three harsh, ancient words of Aramaic and a fragile green-blue aura stretched like cobweb from the cat to the rosary bead, coiling around the latter and tearing free. The cat stared over its shoulder at her with greatly affronted dignity. Garrett lifted the tongs, holding the paddereen up to Sebastien with a chuckle of triumph.
"Should I be seeing something?"
"Only if you were a sorcerer," she said, and laid the glowing rosary bead gently in an empty watch glass. "If you were trained, or very powerfully gifted, you would see that the bead has, through contagion, become the receptacle for the entirety of the sundered spell, and is now exhibiting a typical luminescent quality which we may term limerence."
She took up the lint-padded envelope she'd laid on the table and placed it near the watch-glass. It was, as Sebastien had noted, covered in pencil sketches, rather good ones. For a moment, Garrett permitted herself a frown at the waste of talent, though she could not say if it was because artistry was wasted on a maid, or because an artist was wasted as one.
She sketched circles and diagrams around each one with the silver-bladed knife, connecting them with straight and wavy lines. And then she calmed her mind, and with her knife in her left hand and her wand in her right, crossed them over envelope and bead and spoke a word.
With a whisking sound, the rosary bead shot back into the envelope. "Well," Garrett said. "I'd say that was conclusive. The address is block-printed, though. I fear we've no hope of a handwriting match."
She put the bead back in the watch-glass and set the envelope aside.
"So," Sebastien said, "Tell me about the ultimatum."
She smoothed Jack's list beside the watch-glass, weighing the corners with copper pennies and dome-shaped beads of tempered glass. "Sebastien, you will have to flee."
And that was all. She heard him shift—he let her hear him shift—and she knew in that gesture that he understood the Duke's threat, and her decision, as plainly as if she'd laid the whole thing out for him, point by point.
"Not for the first time," he said. "I can't leave Jack."
"In a moment I'll be ready to set him right." She feigned confidence; he'd know she was pretending, but that was fine. "He's not in danger."
Sebastien harrumphed. "And in any case, this is his house. I am but
a lodger."
Garrett refrained from pointing out that she had guessed correctly, contenting herself with a quiet gloat. She spoke words over the paddereen and made a little heap of iron filings in the same watch glass, then sketched runes and sigils in the air with the tip of her wand. Real sorcery was not particularly spectacular, despite the flash and gunpowder one might see devoted to making ritual convincing when it came to stage plays.
She tapped the glass once, twice, a third time, and blew across the filings in the general direction of Jack's handwritten list. If the name of the sorcerer appeared there, and if she'd done everything correctly, the iron filings would wing through the air, clump and stick and find themselves attracted to it, as if by magnetism.
They flew, all right. Past the paper, out of the scope of the altar, past the startled cat, and into the open top of Garrett's carpet bag.