Page 44 of The Moorwitch

I slowly sit up, looking around. Each of the items I brought back to the floor has a little hovering charm bound around it. Several of them are beginning to flake away, and the smell of ashes grows stronger. In an arrangement of glass jars, vases, and cases along one wall, a good many frogs are frantically jumping around, excited by the activity. At least she didn’t try to sendthoseflying about, nor did she draw energy from them. But the greenery in their cages—mounds of moss and weeds she’d planted for them to hide in—is all wilted and brown, sucked dry. A clear sign of a clumsy amateur’s first Weaving.

“You can channel,” I whisper.

“I can channel!” She claps her hands, giggling. “I knew I could! I always knew it!”

“Sylvie, you canchannel.”

“Aye.” She frowns. “We just discussed that.”

Rising to my feet, I pick up a carved oak Valkyrie, complete with a tiny wooden sword and cunningly shaped armor, and I recognize Mr. North’s artistry in it. Picking at the hovering charm tied around the figurine’s waist, I shake my head, speechless.

“The first few didn’t go right,” she says, anxiously peering over my shoulder as if I were a teacher grading her exam. “I had to work at it a bit. I forgot the loopy thing you did at the end.”

But it’s not her technique which steals my breath away—the knots are clumsy—but rather the fact she channeledso manyat once.

I hold up the doll and frown at her. “Sylvie, have you ever channeled before?”

“I’ve tried, and I got a warm feeling all through me, but I never knew any knots. Nobody would teach me. I tried to learn battle spells from some spiders I caught in the larder, like Robert the Bruce did when he was fighting the English. But I guess they weren’t the same sort of spider.”

The question is, does Conrad know Sylvie has magic? He told me she’d been tested, and that nothing had come from it. Was the Weaver who tested Sylvie simply incompetent, or did Mr. Northlie?

And if he did know she could channel, did he purposefully leave her untrained?

Because the only reason anyone would neglect a child’s magical aptitude ... is because they want it to go away.

If left untended, the ability to channel fades over time. A child fully capable of crafting a hovering charm at age five could lose the knack entirely by the time she is ten, if she is never taughthowto control that energy. That’s why it’s so important that young Weavers are trained early. It’s what, I believe, my aunt intended to happen to me. If I hadn’t been taken in by the Order of the Moirai when I was, I’d have lost the talent entirely not long after leaving her house.

Heat sparks in my chest, a waking dragon.

“Sylvie.” I keep my voice low and easy, so she can’t see the rage building to an inferno inside me. “Did your brother ever let anyone test you, to see if you had magical aptitude?”

“What does that mean?”

I kneel opposite her. Then, pulling the spare thread from my sleeve, I twine it around her fingers and mine; a four-hand cat’s cradle. She watches eagerly, eyes bright. The web is spread between us, threads quivering expectantly.

“It would have looked like this,” I say. “Whoever was testing you—perhaps the schoolteacher in Blackswire—would have asked you to close your eyes and exhale very slowly, while thinking of these things: The wind pushing open a cracked door. A heavy cloud finally releasing rain. An oak shoot pushing up through the soil, finding the sunlight for the first time.”

“Like this?”

She shuts her eyes and breathes out; at once the thread between us glows blue white and crackles with frost, all the way up my fingers and then my arms. Above us, flakes of snow begin to fall from nowhere, lacy white and soft. The air in the room turns frigid; my breath clouds white in front of my lips. The damask drapes on the window and bed creak as they stiffen, ice riming the fabric.

The thread burns through to ash, powdering our hands.

“I did it again!” she says, holding her palms out to catch the snow. “What spell is that?”

“It’s a simple cold spell,” I whisper. “And no one ever asked you to do that?”

“No.”

So hedidlie.

I look up at the snowfall, which begins to dwindle now. A few more flakes drift down and lace the carpet before dissolving into water. “You’resureyou haven’t done anything like this before?”

She scowls. “I told you I hadn’t! What’s wrong? You look angry.”

What’s wrong? What’s wrong is that Sylvie is ten years old. She has magic, yes, but she’s never used it before. Which means it should have faded away years ago. She shouldn’t be able to summon a thimbleful of energy.

But to fill all those hovering knots, and to react to the test like that ... I’ve only ever seen girlsbarelychange the temperature of the thread, the difference all but imperceptible. I remember my own test, administered by Sister Elizabeth three days after Lachlan addled my aunt’s mind. I’d summoned enough cold to frost the tips of the old woman’s fingers, which had made her nearly giddy with astonishment.