The Witches Three Cozy Mysteries 4-6

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Brianna was bustling around the library, moving around the large center table that was her usual workstation and consulting this or that page from an open tome then diving deeper into the stacks to find some other more obscure text.

Sophie and I knew from long experience that even if we understood the way the books were ordered in the library and were capable of helping out, Brianna would find the need to articulate what she was looking for to be maddeningly distracting to her mental processes.

There was nothing we could do but wait while Brianna whatever it was she was looking for. Which was hard for me, but for Sophie looked to be pure torture. She kept grabbing at her hair, which was already standing on end. I hadn't seen her do a single thing to her clothes, but somehow her entire appearance had downgraded from her usual perfectly crisp and brightly clean look to something… well, I wouldn't say slovenly, but only because it reminded me of what I saw in the mirror most days.

"This is insane," Sophie said, looking at me with wild eyes. I caught her hands to keep her from having another go at her hair.

"It's strange, but we'll figure it out," I said. "I'm glad Antoine came. Who knows how long we would've gone on, not remembering our own mothers, if he hadn't said what he did?"

"I didn't want him to come," Sophie said, turning away from me to start furiously pacing the small space between the last row of bookshelves and the doors out to the front porch. "I asked him not to. I need to keep him away from all of this."

"Why?" I asked.

Sophie stopped dead in her tracks and stood frozen for the third time that day. I was just reaching out to touch her shoulder when she spun to look at me. "I don't know. I thought I did, right up until you asked me. My mouth opened to answer, but the words weren't there. I don't know why, but I'm still absolutely certain it's important. What's happening to me?"

"Does it feel like what I get sometimes?" I asked. "That compulsion that kept me in Scandia until Cynthia Thomas came?"

"Maybe," Sophie said. "I don't know how that feels for you." She hugged her arms around herself tightly. "I've been telling him not to come here since I got here. I've had this feeling at least that long. Which seems to also be about the time I forgot that I was looking for my mother. Is it related?"

"Maybe," I said. "Hopefully when Brianna pulls this spell together, we’ll get a better picture of things."

"I hope so," Sophie said. "But I doubt it's going to explain everything. If something is making us forget our mothers, and making me keep Antoine away, I can see how that could be connected. But what about the other thing? The fact that our mothers were students here in the 60s? That's got to be something else entirely."

"Well, time travel isn't so strange for us," I said.

"But we only go back to one time, and it isn't the 60s," Sophie said. She started pacing again, but more slowly, and still hugging herself as if the room had gone cold. She looked like a lost child, the sweater that had fit her perfectly that morning now hanging from her like a stretched out, shapeless garment.

I didn't know how to make her feel better. Maybe it would just take time.

"You can still call Antoine," I said. "He might not even be as far as the airport yet. I'm sure he'd come right back if you asked him to."

"Why would I do that?" Sophie asked.

"If you've been driving him away for no reason, I just thought maybe you'd want to talk to him again and explain. Or just have him there for comfort or something?"

Sophie pondered. Then she straightened her shoulders and smoothed her hands over her hair. "No. I'm OK."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes," she said, and she was sounding more like her usual self. "I don't know the reason I wanted him away from me, but I still think there might be one. Maybe when Brianna helps us figure this all out, I'll remember what it is. In the meantime, seeing him again is just going to be more awkward. I can't explain things to him at all."

"He doesn't know you're a witch?" I asked.

"No. That much I do remember about my mother: she always insisted on complete secrecy," she said.

"I think I'm ready," Brianna said, coming towards us with a glass sphere carefully balanced on top of a pile of heavy books. Sophie grabbed the sphere before it could roll off its perch.

"Should we take this outside?" I asked.

"No need," Brianna said. "It's not related to the time portal, so we can work here."

"Where it's warm," Sophie said.

"Yes," Brianna agreed. "Amanda, there's a chain of yarn in my pocket…" She hiked the books in her arms a little higher until I found the bundle of yarn in her sweater pocket and pulled it out. Although it was an even shade of red and crocheted from a smooth, well-spun yarn, I knew it had been carded and died and spun and crocheted all by Brianna's own hands down in the cellar.

"What's this for?" I asked.

"Use it to make a circle on the floor here," Brianna said. "We'll all sit inside it to contain the magic. Just in case whatever I find turns out to be malevolent."

"And this?" Sophie asked, rolling the sphere from palm to palm.

"In case whatever we're poking at needs to be contained," Brianna said. She waited for me to line up the yarn chain behind her in a gentle arc before settling down in a cross-legged posture and arranging the books around her.

When I reached the end of the yarn I had made a circle just large enough to contain the three of us sitting with knees touching, Brianna's books tucked mostly under her own legs, the sphere in the center of the three of us.

"First we need to cast the circle," Brianna said. "We need to make it a separate space from the rest of the world around us. It shouldn't be too hard; it's just a tiny variation of what we do in meditation."

"Just make it a circle around the three of us," Sophie said, but she didn't look like she quite grasped it.

"More like a sphere, really," Brianna said. "The yarn circle is just a visual cue of where that sphere intersects the floor. I'll say some words, but you should think of your protective winds defining that boundary. And Amanda, weave it with threads."

"All right," I agreed and closed my eyes.

This time, when Sophie's warm breeze blew over me, I knew the baked goods I was smelling were Auntie Claire's beignets. And I could feel the pang of homesickness that squeezed her heart, but she put it aside to focus on the spell. When I turned my attention to the world of threads, I found them already moving around as if to protect us. I only made a few tweaks to the arrangement before going back to my body and its more mundane awareness.

"All right," Brianna said, looking down at the page of the book tucked under her left knee. "Take my hands and flow your power into me. I'll say the words of the spell, and then we'll see what happens."

I put my hand left hand in hers, then took Sophie's hand in my right. This part was very familiar. We'd been practicing it a lot. I had learned to hold back the full force of what longed to flow out of me. It had been a long time since I'd burned either of them, and even though we had never attempted to use that power for anything as big as what we were doing now, I was determined that I wasn't going to slip up.

Brianna chanted words over and over, words so strange my mind refused to even make out the sounds of their syllables. It was a good thing she didn't want us to repeat them after her because even though I could hear the repetition and knew it was only maybe a dozen sounds, they wouldn't stick in my mind at all.

I looked up at Sophie, hoping to get a sense if she felt the same confusion, and was startled by the impression that I was looking at some sort of overlapping image. I could, with great focus, see the world of threads and the mundane world at once, layered on top of each other, but it was a strain. This wasn't that, but I was definitely seeing something like a thick, dark cloud overlapping the top of her head. It was both there and wasn't.

Sophie felt my gaze on her and looked up. Her eyes widened, her focus more on my forehead than my own eyes, and I was certain she saw something going on with the top of my head too.

We both looked to Brianna, who had stopped chanting. Brianna looked from me to Sophie then back again, more with intellectual interest than with shock.

"What is it?" Sophie asked. Her hand twitched in mine, as if she wanted to reach up and touch whatever it was.

"The spell made manifest," Brianna said.

"So someone did cast a spell on us," Sophie said.

"Yes, this was deliberate," Brianna said. "It has intentionality. We didn't just accidentally trip one of Miss Zenobia’s old wards somewhere in the house or anything."

"But why don't we remember the spell happening?" I asked.

"Because it's still there, in our brains," Sophie said. "It's no wonder I can't think straight. Look at it."

"Can't we get rid of it?" I asked.

"It gets tricky," Brianna said. She wrinkled up her nose and crossed her eyes, and the cloud in her brain jostled then settled back down. "We can't dispel our own brain fogs, but two of us working together can pull it out of the mind of the third."

"Let's do Brianna first," Sophie said, and I nodded my agreement. Brianna being clear-headed was definitely a priority."

"Focus on drawing it out but putting it into the glass sphere," Brianna said. "Don't let it slip away from you."

"Got it," I said, closing my eyes. In the world of threads, I could see the darkly glowing filaments resting in the shining web of her mind, like the scribble of an angry child. They were tangled among her own threads, but I gently separated them out, aided by a warm breeze that I couldn't feel, no longer actually being in my body, but I could see as it softly blew through the threads.

Then Brianna was free. I opened my eyes.

"Oh," Brianna said, blinking.

"Tell us," Sophie said.

"No, not yet," Brianna said. "Let's get Amanda free first, and then you, and then we'll talk."

They both turned their attention to me. I fought the urge to tense up, as if I were about to come under a surgical knife. Sophie's magic was easy to relax into. Brianna's magic was more like little brass instruments working in my brain, but I could feel how deft she was in her work.

It felt like losing a scab that had dried so tightly it was pulling all the skin around it. Now my mind was coming free, little by little. Then it was gone entirely. I saw the cloud floating past my nose to sink to the floor, joining Brianna's little cloud already in the sphere.

And I remembered. All at once, a flood of images from as profound as the day my mother had died in my arms to as mundane as baking cookies on a rainy afternoon while listening to Buddy Holly on the radio.

"I remember," I said, my vision starting to swim.

"Sophie now," Brianna said. I nodded, but the tears wouldn't stop coming. "Amanda."

I took a deep breath and, as much as it killed me to do it, pushed the memories aside. "I'm ready," I said.

I focused on the scribble of threads in Sophie's brain, this time aided not by a dancing breeze but as if by surgical instruments I couldn't see except by their effects. Brianna let me take the lead, somehow sensing when I was going to turn my attention to this filament or that knot, and she would lift it or scrape something away.

Then it was done, sealed inside the glass sphere with the other two. I opened my eyes, suddenly acutely exhausted. Magic was so tiring.

"Sophie?" Brianna called softly.

Sophie still had her eyes closed, but tears were spilling out between her lashes. Then she tugged on our hands, and we all went from sitting with our hands joined to kneeling in the center of the circle in a tight hug. And even Brianna was crying now.