“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.”
“You sound just like your father.” Sarah poked at the knot with her finger. “There’s one of those hidden in every spell?”
“At least one. Really complicated spells might have two or three knots, each one tying into the threads you saw last night in the keeping room—the ones that bind the world.” I smiled. “I guess gramarye is a disguising spell of sorts—one that hides magic’s inner workings.”
“And when you say the words, it reveals them,” Sarah said thoughtfully. “Let’s give yours a go.”
Before I could warn her, Sarah read the words of my spell aloud. The paper burst into flame in her hands. She dropped it on the table, and I doused it with a shower of conjured water. “I thought that was a spell for lighting a candle—not setting a house on fire!” she exclaimed, looking at the charred mess.
“Sorry. The spell is still pretty new. It will settle down eventually. Gramarye can’t hold a spell together forever, so its magic weakens over time. It’s why spells stop working,” I explained.
“Really? Then you should be able to figure out the relative ages of spells.” Sarah’s eyes gleamed.
She was a great believer in tradition, and the older a piece of magic was, the more she liked it.
“Maybe,” I said doubtfully, “but there are other reasons that spells fail. Weavers have different abilities, for one thing. And if words were left out or changed when later witches copied them, that will compromise the magic, too.”
But Sarah was already in front of her spell book, leafing through the pages.
“Here, look at this one.” She beckoned me toward her. “I always suspected this was the oldest spell in the Bishop grimoire.”
“‘An exceeding great charm for drawing clean air into any place,’” I read aloud, “‘one handed down from old Maude Bishop and proven by me, Charity Bishop in the year 1705.’”
In the margins were notes made by other witches, including my grandmother, who had later mastered the spell. A caustic annotation by Sarah proclaimed, “utterly worthless.”