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.
“Too much direction,” another said, frowning. “She needs to let matters take their own course, or every draft she makes is likely to become a fullblown gale.”
Goody Alsop accepted their comments with thanks, but when they all left, she seemed relieved.
“I will rest now, child,” she said weakly, rising from her chair and moving toward the rear of the house. Her fetch trailed after her like a shadow.
“Are there any men among the Rede, Goody Alsop?” I asked, taking her elbow.
“Only a handful remain. All the young wizards have gone off to university to study natural philosophy,” she said with a sigh. “These are strange times, Diana. Everyone is in such a rush for something new, and witches think books will teach them better than experience. I’ll take my leave of you now. My ears are ringing from all that talking.”
A solitary waterwitch came to the Hart and Crown on Thursday morning. I was lying down, exhausted from traipsing all over town the previous day. Tall and supple, the waterwitch did not so much step as flow into the house. She met a solid obstacle, however, in the wall of vampires in the entrance hall.
“It’s all right, Matthew,” I said from the door of our bedchamber, beckoning her forward.
When we were alone, the waterwitch surveyed me from head to toe. Her glance tingled like salt water on my skin, as bracing as a dip in the ocean on a summer day.
“Goody Alsop was right,” she said in a low, musical voice. “There is too much water in your blood. We cannot meet with you in groups for fear of causing a deluge. You must see us one at a time. It will take all day, I’m afraid.”
So instead of my going to the waterwitches, the waterwitches came to me. They trickled in and out of the house, driving Matthew and Fran?oise mad. But there was no denying my affinity with them, or the undertow that I felt in a waterwitch’s presence.
“The water did not lie,” one waterwitch murmured after sliding her fingertips over my forehead and shoulders. She turned my hands over to examine the palms. She was scarcely older than me, with striking coloring: white skin, black hair, and eyes the color of the Caribbean.
“What water?” I asked as she traced the tributaries leading away from my lifeline.
“Every waterwitch in London collected rainwater from midsummer to Mabon, then poured it into the Rede’s scrying bowl. It revealed that the long-awaited weaver would have water in her veins.” The waterwitch let out a sigh of relief and released my hands. “We are in need of new spells after helping turn back the Spanish fleet. Goody Alsop has been able to replenish the windwitches’ supply, but the Scottish weaver was gifted with earth, so she could not help us—even if she had wished to. You are a true daughter of the moon, though, and will serve us well.”
On Friday morning a messenger came to the house with an address on Bread Street and instructions for me to go there at eleven o’clock to meet the last remaining members of the Rede: the two earthwitches. Most witches had some degree of earth magic within them. It was the foundation for the craft, and in modern covens earthwitches had no special distinction. I was curious to see if the Elizabethan earthwitches were any different.