Several more weeks had passed uneventfully, and Oisin was once more reading in the library with Bel when a deep chime sounded somewhere else in the house.
They’d begun to spend quite a lot of time together. Oisin sought out Bel most of the time, joining him reading or walking with him in the forest. But Bel sometimes came and sat beside him as he worked on his potions, too, or offered his thoughts as Oisin took notes on the Principia Magica, which he was slowly working his way through. It was more difficult reading than the spell book, and most of it made little if any sense to him, but he would sometimes find something that made his experiments with potions and salves suddenly come clear, the principles behind their action no longer mysterious.
He was reading it again now, for he still
