“Problem?” Stan asked.
“Matthew’s gone off the grid,” Gallowglass explained. “Benjamin’s got him.”
“Ah.” Stan looked worried. “Benjamin always was a bastard. I don’t imagine he’s improved over the years.”
I thought of my Matthew in the hands of that monster.
I remembered what Benjamin had said about his hope that I would bear a girl.
I saw my daughter’s tiny, fragile finger touch the tip of Matthew’s nose.
“There is no way forward that doesn’t have him in it,” I said.
Anger burned through my veins, followed by a crashing wave of power—fire, air, earth, and water—that swept everything else before it. I felt a strange absence, a hollowness that told me I had lost something essential to my self.
For a moment I wondered if it were Matthew. But I could still feel the chain that bound us. What was essential was still there.
Then I realized it was not something essential I’d lost but something habitual, a burden carried so long that I had become inured to its heaviness.
Now it was gone—just as the goddess had foretold.
I whirled around, blindly seeking the library entrance in the darkness. “Where are you going, Auntie?” Gallowglass said, holding the door closed so that I couldn’t pass.
“Did you not hear me? We must go after Matthew. There’s no time to lose.”
The thick panels of glass turned to powder, and the brass hinges and handles clanged against the stone threshold. I stepped over the debris and half ran, half flew up the stairs to Duke Humfrey’s.
“Auntie!” Gallowglass shouted.
“Diana Bishop! Have you lost your mind?” Months of reduced cigarette consumption meant that Sarah was making good progress pursuing me.
“No!” I shouted back. “And if I use my magic, I won’t lose Matthew either.”
“Lose Matthew?” Sarah slid on the slick floor on her way into Duke Humfrey’s, where Fernando, Gallowglass, and I were waiting. “Who suggested such a thing?”
“The goddess. She told me I would have to give something up if I wanted Ashmole 782,” I explained. “But it wasn’t Matthew.”
The feeling of absence had been replaced by a blooming sensation of released power that banished any remaining worries.
“Corra, fly!” I spread my arms wide, and my firedrake screeched into the room, zooming around the galleries and down the long aisle that connected the Arts End and the Selden End.
“What was it, then?” Linda asked. She’d taken the stairs at a more sedate pace and arrived in time to watch Corra’s tail pat Thomas Bodley’s helmet.
“Fear.”
My mother had warned me of its power, but I had misunderstood, as children often do. I’d thought it was the fear of others that I needed to guard against, but it was my own terror. Because of that misunderstanding, I’d let the fear take root inside me until it clouded my thoughts and affected how I saw the world.
Fear had also choked out any desire to work magic. It had been my crutch and my cloak, keeping me from exercising my power completely. Fear had sheltered me from the curiosity of others and provided an oubliette where I could forget who I really was: a witch. I’d thought I’d left fear behind me months ago when I learned I was a weaver, but I had been clinging to its last vestiges without knowing it.
No more.
Corra dropped down on a current of air, extending her talons forward and beating her wings to slow herself. I grabbed the pages from the Book of Life and held them up to her nose. She sniffed.