So before I left the school library, I checked the Arts and Crafts section and grabbed a few beginner’s guides to knitting and crochet. I’d start practicing now on a store-bought yarn so I’d be ready when the nettle fibers were finally done.
After school was over, I waved good-bye to the others and flew to the hardware store. I bought several large metal tanks. They stacked together, but they were still too big for me to carry easily, so I also bought a wagon and loaded them in the back. Once again, I was grateful that me and my dad were living so close to the main street of town, since I no longer had a car to drive.
I felt like a kid dragging a wooden wagon behind me. Then I passed the fabric store on the way home, and remembered the other part of my project. I locked the wagon to the bike rack out on the street, hoping that no one would try to steal any of the tanks while I was inside, and hurried into the store.
Memories of the store made me stop short. The last time I’d been in the fabric store, I was helping Lindsey pick out colors for her next dress-sewing project. Back in October, when my family drama was coming to a head, I’d told Lindsey to stop telling me all of her boy problems; we hadn’t really talked since then. But before then, we’d been best friends for four years, and she was my first love, and my first broken heart. That felt like a lifetime ago. Everything had changed so much since then.
No time to dwell on that now. I pushed myself forward and found what I needed: the cheapest yarn on sale, which all came in pastel spring colors; several sizes of knitting and crochet needles, selected randomly from the middle and larger end of the scale; and a pair of weird paddles labeled “cotton/fine wool hand carders.”
When I got home, I dumped all of my purchases in the garage, grabbed a box full of heavy-duty garbage bags, and then hopped back on my broom and flew to the gate into the Otherworld.
Dandelion wasn’t home when I went to check there, but his door was unlocked. I found my first batch of nettles still soaking in the tub. They didn’t look any more rotten than they had been that morning, so I hoped they were okay. Then I grabbed the gloves and gardening shears he’d let me borrow before, plus a ball of twine, and went to find a new patch of nettles.
Somehow, the special sense I got from the dragon scale for finding my way through the Otherworld only seemed to apply to landmarks, and not locating particular plants that I needed. I spent a good deal of time tromping through the woods, careful to avoid any of the places where Fae or other magikin might live, bending down and looking in the underbrush. Before I found any nettles, I did locate a number of different herbs and other plants that I knew. Might as well have those ready for later, too, so I snipped them and stuffed them into one of the bags.
Finally, I filled up as many bags of nettles that I could stand to carry. Fortunately, my broom flew just fine in the Otherworld, too, so I made it back to the gate as quickly as I could while balancing so many different things. I flew straight on through the Veil to the mortal realm without stopping and headed home.
It was already dark when I got home, but I wasn’t finished. I set up all of the tanks in the garage, where it wouldn’t get cold enough to freeze the water, and put the bundles of nettles in to soak. Then I tied up all of the smaller handfuls of various herbs and took them inside to my bedroom, where I hung them up from the ceiling with pushpins. The warmer air inside would help them dry faster.
When I’d finished, I stopped and looked up at my handiwork. My room looked just like our old kitchen after Mom gathered ingredients from her garden. I used to complain when she brought her plants into the house, because their scents went everywhere. Now I was turning out just like her.
I shook my head at how things had shifted. It must be the price I paid for my witchcraft. Then I glanced at the time and saw Dad would be home and expecting dinner soon. In my eagerness, I’d forgotten about my homework; I would have to deal with that later, before bed. Ugh. There was always something waiting for me to do.
Over the next week, I worked every spare moment between school and sleep on finishing the cloak. I flew to the Otherworld to gather supplies and check on the first batch of nettles every afternoon, then came home to the rest of my project. The knitting books helped me practice my stitching, and I kept an eye on the progress of my other harvested plants there. I spoke to no one, and eventually, everyone gave up on trying to talk to me. I was lonely, but I didn’t have the time to feel bad about it.
Before long, I didn’t even have to try concentrating my thoughts on what I was doing. The spell constantly filled my mind, even when I was trying to do other things. During English, I scribbled notes on the herbs that I still needed to find: marjoram, catnip, bluebells. Just when I thought I was finished, I remembered the name of something else Mom had taught me how to use. During math, I calculated out the dimensions of the cloak I would make, and estimated the amount of nettle yarn I would need for it.
Dad found the tubs of nettles soaking in the garage and made a weird face. By then my friends had told everyone that I wasn’t supposed to speak, so he knew not to ask me questions. I guess he was also used to strange plants all over the house from Mom’s witchcraft. He just looked at me and said, “Clean up any mess you make.”
I nodded to reassure him. Now he knew that my silence wasn’t personal, but I was still careful not to ignore him. And I tried to make both of us dinner in the evenings by heating something up, so he’d have food when he came home tired from work.
By Thursday afternoon, all of the nettles were retted. I set the bundles upright in the garage, leaned at an angle against a shelf so there was some airflow, and set up a space heater aimed at them to speed up the drying process.
Saturday morning, when I tested them, I could split the stems with my thumb. I began the painstaking, messy process of peeling off the pith to get at the fibers in the core of each nettle. Mindful of Dad’s warning, I worked in the garage and threw the discarded bark into a plastic bin. A lot of it fell on the floor, but I could sweep it up when I was finished.
It took all day Saturday, but by the evening, I had all of the fibers separated out. I draped them along the shelf next to the heater to dry again.
Sunday morning, I started carding the fibers, one handful at a time. While they only looked like rough dried grass before, now they were starting to resemble something that I might actually be able to work with, fine and smooth. When I rolled a little between my fingers experimentally, they twisted together and formed a dull brown cord. Well, it wasn’t going to be the prettiest yarn, but it would work. I was excited to see it finally coming together, and although I soon grew tired of hunching over the cards, I lost track of time.
Dad stopped me to come eat dinner, and then I realized that I’d forgotten my homework. After we ate, I forced my eyes open over my books so I could get the minimum done on my assignments for school. At last I fell into bed, exhausted, and slept so deeply that I didn’t dream.
Then, Monday after school, I threw myself back into work. I had only two days left before the trial, and although with practice my knitting was getting faster, two afternoons was barely enough time to make a scarf, let alone an entire cloak.
Not for the first time, I debated skipping school entirely to work on the spell. Surely my teachers would understand the importance of what I was doing, and I already had their permission to be out on Wednesday for the court hearing. But Dad would probably have something to say about me missing too many days.
I started the cloak by casting on as many stitches as I could fit onto my longest pair of circular knitting needles. I already knew that I’d have to work in segments and then sew them together for the finished piece.
The nettle yarn I’d made was lumpier than the synthetic yarn I’d bought from the store to learn how to knit, and little stray pieces of fiber kept sticking out. Learning to work with the new texture slowed me down. Then when I tried to add in the first dried herb, that added extra bulk, and I had to fiddle with it to keep the stems from poking out or falling o
ut completely. As a result, I didn’t make a lot of progress on Monday before I was forced to go to bed from exhaustion, and I was frustrated by my results.
I dragged myself to school on Tuesday, and then I brought the whole mess with me to the Otherworld to ask Dandelion. Fortunately, I found him at home. He guided me through a few extra techniques, and now that it made more sense, I was able to work faster.
Back at home, the knitting needles clicked and clacked in my fingers as I worked. By the time I took a break to eat dinner with Dad, my hands were cramped and sore. I massaged them in between bites of food and tried not to stare at the clock, but my mind kept doing little calculations, counting down the hours I had left. I’d completed my first section, but I still had so much left to do. Unless I had some kind of miracle, there was no way that I’d be able to finish on time.
After dinner, it was my turn to wash up since Dad had cooked. I shoved dishes in the dishwasher quickly. My skin dried out from the harsh soap and water, so I rubbed a little lotion on. Then it was back into my room to knit again.
I lost track of time as I worked. I kept thinking that I could stay up a little later, skip some sleep before the trial. It wouldn’t matter how prepared I was for the trial if I hadn’t finished the spell and couldn’t speak. I had to be at the castle by nine, and it would take half an hour to fly there, so if I woke up at eight I’d have just enough time to get ready. Could I get by on six hours of sleep before then? What about five? If I could just finish one more section, I would have enough to call it a shawl, and maybe the guardian would accept that…
Then the alarm clock beeped loudly. I sat upright in the chair and blinked, looking around. The room was blurry. Was that daylight coming in through the window already? It couldn’t be!
I was slumped over the chair at my desk. The half-finished cloak was on the floor, fallen out of my hands when I dozed off at some point in the middle of the night. I grabbed what I could, shoved it into a bag, and jumped up. I’d fallen asleep without finishing it, but there was nothing that I could do now.
My back complained with every movement, and my neck was so stiff that I could hardly turn my head. Sleeping in the chair was the worst thing I could have done.
I tried to recover with a quick hot shower. Then I flew to What a Drip for coffee and a bagel. Caffeine and food would help me feel better.
The coffee shop was busy as usual in the mornings, but the owners, Tom and Frank, were nowhere to be seen. A couple of twenty-something girls were managing the front counter instead. I also realized that many of the regulars I knew were nowhere to be seen. They must all be heading up to the castle to watch the trial. Great—I needed an audience to make things worse.
I scarfed down the bagel and gulped the hot coffee, then looked at the time. Eight twenty-five. I had to get going. I slung the heavy bag of knitting back over my shoulder, went outside to my broom, and took off. The day was shaping up to be a disaster already.
11
The Traitors' Trial
Rosamunde
As a witness, I was led to a small waiting room near the Court Hall, and left alone. Unlike the lavish sitting parlors in much of the castle, this room was plain, with no decorations on the walls and only a plain wooden table with a few uncomfortable chairs. I wouldn’t be able to watch the court proceedings and find out how they were going. There was also no way of knowing when it might be my turn. A guard would come and fetch me. Until then, there was nothing I could do but sit and wait.
And even though I was cramped and stiff, I kept knitting. I’d lost count of how many hours I’d already worked on the cloak, but it was finally starting to take shape, and looked about half of the size that I’d originally calculated. It wasn’t pretty—dried herbs stuck out in many places, like the whole thing had been dragged through a field of weeds, and the stitches and rows were uneven, with some funny gaps. But I wasn’t going for style. The important thing was that I finished as quickly as possible.
Hours ticked by as I worked. At one point, I did have to get up and go find a restroom. I stretched and tried to ease my muscles as I walked. If only I knew how to make some kind of pain reliever charm or something else to make me more comfortable while I worked, I could have been prepared for the long haul, but it was too late to worry about that now. This spell was a test of endurance as much as anything else.
Around noon, a servant came to tell me that the Court had taken a break for lunch, and offered me a selection of sandwiches. I couldn’t ask how things were going, so I just smiled and took two of the tuna salad. I scarfed them down in minutes and went back to work.
At two-thirty, my phone buzzed suddenly. In the silence of the room, it made me jump almost a mile. I pulled it out and found a text from Ashleigh. “Get ready,” she wrote. “You’re going to be called soon.”
I pulled the whole cloak out of my bag and spread it out on the table to survey my work. It was uneven and lumpy, but it was getting pretty big, maybe two-thirds of the size I’d planned on. Big for a shawl, maybe a little short for a cloak. But was it good enough? Every herb I’d gathered was in there. I was running low on nettle fiber yarn. It had to be done, because I had run out of time.
But when I picked it up and draped it over my shoulders, I felt disappointed. Something wasn’t finished. I couldn’t explain exactly what, but there was a knot in my stomach that said it just wasn’t right yet. And the dragon scale necklace heated up, almost enough to burn my skin, in a sudden warning. The guardian was telling me that I wasn’t finished yet.
With a sinking feeling, I realized that I had failed. If I spoke now, I would break the whole spell and fail the test.
I had a choice. What was more important? Testifying to make sure that Zil and everyone else were punished for helping my mom? Or completing a spell I didn’t understand as part of an arbitrary test to prove myself to the Guardian of the Veil for a job that I wasn’t sure I really wanted? After all, if helping the guardian meant that I had to stay out of Fae politics, I might end up being left out from my friends’ lives forever.
I’d made a promise to the guardian. But I’d also made a promise to the Count and to my friends to testify. Now there was no way that I could keep both promises.
I put my knitting back into the bag, then squared my shoulders. I had to do what was right.
A guard in the gold-trimmed, forest green uniform of the Count led me into the Hall. The Count sat in the judge’s chair at the head of the room, with the witness stand empty on his right, and the jury sat in ranks to the right of that. Before them were the accused on the left and the prosecuting attorneys on the right. There were too many accused to sit at the table itself, so most of them were ranged in seats behind, watched over by more guards. The rest of the room was filled with many people that I knew, including Glen, Ashleigh, Zil’s parents, other family members of the accused, and people from town. Seeing them all made me stop short and take a deep breath.
The guard nudged me forward gently. I stepped up onto the witness stand.
The court reporter, a middle-aged man with a receding hairline, stood up and looked directly at me. “Raise your right hand.”
I raised my hand.
The reporter continued, “Do you affirm that the testimony you are about to give will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”
I nodded solemnly.
The court reporter gave a small smile. He probably thought that I was just nervous, because I was shaking. “You must answer out loud.”
I looked over at my friends helplessly.
Glen stood up and cleared his throat. “If it please the court, I can offer an explanation.”
Count Duncan leaned forward and beckoned to his grandson. “Approach.”
A guard opened the gate for the visitors’ gallery and let Glen approach the bench. He looked up at me with a reassuring smile, then looked back at the Count. “Your Grace, Rosamunde has taken an oath of silence. She cannot answer at this time.”
Coun
t Duncan looked down at me with his brow furrowed. “Is this true?”
I glanced away, then forced myself to look back at him and nodded.
His frown deepened. “You promised that you could testify in this trial. Would you go back on your word now?”
All that I could do was raise my hands helplessly.
“How long will this oath of silence last?”
Again, I shrugged and lifted my hands. I hoped that I would finish soon. If I could pull another all-nighter, maybe I would be done by tomorrow. However, I had no idea how to explain that without speaking.
The count sighed. “Rosamunde McAddams, you are dismissed until such time as you inform the court of your ability to speak once again. I hope that it will be soon. The court recognizes that oaths are a serious matter, but these proceedings are also important. Do what you can.” He lifted his gavel. “This court is in recess while the prosecution prepare their next witness.”
I breathed a heavy sigh of relief as I stepped down from the witness stand. I would fly home and work as hard as I could. A glance at the clock told me that it was just now three in the afternoon. Maybe by eight tomorrow morning, I could tell the court that I was ready to testify.
Glen and Ashleigh followed me out of the room to try to speak with me, but I just gave each of them a hug and walked out. There would be time to explain when I was finished. With my bag of knitting weighing heavily on my shoulders, I stepped outside and found my broom.
After the trial, I flew home as fast as I could. But when I got back to my room and set down my bag, a wave of exhaustion swept over me. I’d been pushing myself to work hard over the past week, and I’d barely slept the night before. All of the strain was catching up to me, and my bed just looked so inviting.
Maybe some rest would do me good. I’d close my eyes for just an hour or three. To be sure that I didn’t oversleep, I set my alarm clock, kicked off my shoes, and collapsed on the bed without even bothering to change out of my clothes. I was asleep only moments after my head hit the pillow.
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