KNIT A SWEATER OUT OF SKY

SEANAN MCGUIRE

Seanan McGuire has always found Amelia fascinating. The witch has crossed paths with Sookie time and again, but her true home is New Orleans, a city that needs its witches more than ever after the last few years. Luckily for Amelia, she has her boyfriend, Bob, to keep her from biting off more than she can chew . . . most of the time.

—

The cherry tree on my dining room table was growing steadily. According to my notes, it was likely maturing about a day every two seconds, giving me a respectable “one minute equals one month” benchmark to use for judging its age. It had been a seed when I’d dropped it into the pot filled with rich bayou soil and started the stopwatch. In the fifteen minutes since then, it had reached and passed a year’s growth, putting out branches and stretching eagerly toward the ceiling. If Wikipedia was correct, I’d be seeing the first pale cherry blossoms within the next three-minute “season,” even though I couldn’t expect fruit until the tree reached its fourth year.

The trouble with witchcraft is that, for the most part, the only people practicing it are witches. That’s sort of like taking an entire field of engineering and only letting it be used by Boy Scouts, or handing obstetric medicine off to bird-watchers. You’ll still get bridges built and babies born, but it’ll come with a lot of weird bric-a-brac around the edges, like the tolls have to be paid with merit badges, and you can’t go into labor until someone’s spotted a blue-winged blackbird or something. Witches enjoy tinkering with the subtle fabric of the universe. It’s how we’re made. We’re the sort of people who see a loose thread and think, “I should yank on that to see what happens,” and it doesn’t much matter whether it’s a thread on a sweater or a weather pattern. Yank the wrong thread on a sweater and the whole thing unravels. Yank the wrong thread on a heat wave and you’re having a snowstorm in New Orleans in July. Half the bizarre weather in the South can be blamed on witchcraft gone stupid—only half, thankfully. No one who grows up in hurricane territory goes playing with those threads, because there’s just too much chance that your try at a Hail Mary pass will cause another Katrina. We don’t mess with big weather, but no witch born has ever been able to resist the little threads—and sometimes little threads can be more effective than big ones. Which brought us back to the cherry tree, spreading branches as big around as my wrist and laying in the infrastructure that would eventually be used to support a healthy crop of delicious fruit.

Witching isn’t like shapeshifting or being a telepathic fairy lady that all the vampires want to cozy up to; it’s big and it’s versatile and it’s dangerous as all hell. But that’s also what makes it so much fun.

The cherry tree was brushing the ceiling, and I was no longer confident in my ability to get it out of the apartment. I glanced at the stopwatch. The tree was entering its fourth year and should be reaching its private summer in another eighteen seconds. I watched intently as petals fell down like confetti, blanketing the room in pink and white, and small green fruit began to appear.

There were footsteps behind me. Bob was back from the store. The footsteps stopped abruptly, and he said, sounding bemused, “Amelia, there’s a tree in the dining room.”

“I know,” I said, not taking my eyes off the rapidly swelling fruits of my labor. “It’s a modification on that stasis spell I used right after Sookie’s cousin got killed. I was thinking if I could use it to freeze time for a while, maybe turning it on its ear would make it so I could speed time up within a certain limited sphere. I started it on the cherry seed, didn’t enchant the dirt or the pot I planted it in, and look—it’s working.”

Bob didn’t say anything. That wasn’t a surprise, although it was something of a disappointment. Then again, we’d been together for both more and less time than the calendar would admit; we’d been dating as humans for less than a month when I’d accidentally turned him into a cat by trying something outside my witchy weight class. He’d lived with me throughout his “feline period,” been turned back by someone who wasn’t me, tried to kill me, dumped me, taken me back, and, finally, taken me to Paris. It had been a weird relationship progression at best, and a really problematic one at worst. But he was a witch, too. He understood what it was like to see a thread and want to yank on it just to find out what would happen.

That didn’t make him comfortable with me being the one doing the yanking.

“Can you get a bowl from the kitchen?” I asked. The fruit was ripening with glorious speed, and that meant I needed to focus on suspending the spell. The last thing I wanted was to cover my entire dining room with rotten cherries.

“Sure,” said Bob. The footsteps started again, followed by the sound of a cabinet swinging open. I kept my attention focused on the cherry tree, where the cherries were about two seconds away from the peak of ripeness.

Witchcraft is a funny thing. All the really good spells are in Greek or Latin or something that sounds like Greek or Latin, but is probably as made up as Klingon or Pig Latin. It doesn’t make sense. Either only people in Europe ever figured out how magic worked—and I know that’s not true—or magic didn’t exist until some point after the rise of the Roman Empire, and that doesn’t make sense, either. We have stories about vampires and weres and fairies that go back way earlier than the Caesars, so why should witchcraft be any different? Answer is, it shouldn’t be. Our insistence on dead languages is all in our heads.

It’s all in our heads, but I still didn’t want a dining room full of rotten cherries. I rattled off the syllables of the break spell, making the modified hand gesture I’d concocted to go with them, and was gratified when the cherries stopped swelling. The tree rustled once before settling in its pot with a faint but audible thump that knocked the first few cherries off their branches. Most of them hit the table. I managed to catch one and looked at it admiringly before I popped it into my mouth, where it burst in a sweet rush of cherry juice against my tongue.

“Well?”

I turned to face Bob, grinning with cherry-flavored lips, before spitting the cherry seed into my palm. I tucked it into my pocket for luck and said, “I’m baking a pie tonight.”

The nice thing about being a witch in a committed if complicated relationship with another witch is not needing to explain things like, “Where did you get twenty pounds of fresh cherries?” Bob wouldn’t have bothered to ask even if he hadn’t seen the tree. Instead, he went for the practical side of things, asking, “What are we going to do with a cherry tree?”

I paused in the act of pitting a bowlful of cherries, looking past him to the dining room where our cherry tree, branches still laden with fruit, waited for its fate to be decided. “I don’t know. I think it makes a nice centerpiece, don’t you? Plus we can trigger another harvest any-time we feel like a fresh slice of cherry pie.”

Bob looked at me dubiously. I beamed at him. That only seemed to intensify his dubiousness, returning him to what I sometimes thought of as his factory setting: the funereal, almost dour man who’d managed to catch my full attention just by seeming like the last person in the world who’d have any interest in the arcane. “And you don’t think anyone will notice the buckets of cherry seeds? Or were you planning to bribe all the neighbors into silence with cherry pies?”

“Now that you suggest it . . .” I batted my eyelashes. Bob scowled. Laughing, I went back to pitting cherries.

“Amelia.” Bob sounded perfectly calm, which didn’t really tell me much; Bob almost always sounded perfectly calm. Bob was one of those men who could have looked a charging T. rex in the face and said, “I thought you were extinct,” while the rest of us were working up a good head of running and screaming. That was part of his appeal, if I was being honest with myself. He kept me calm. “I know you well enough to know that you didn’t just start experimenting with cherry stones because you wanted a pie. What were you trying to accomplish here? What was the goal?”

I focused a little more tightly on the bowl of pitted cherries in front of me. It was starting to look disturbingly like a bowl of organs, making me wonder whether haruspicy would work if you read fruit instead of a sliced-open dove. “I want to try something,” I said quietly.

“What was that?”

“I said, I want to try something.” I raised my head. “I haven’t really been stretching myself since that whole thing with Sookie and the blood bond, and I can’t really say that using a ritual someone else created to sever an artificial connection to a dead man is ‘stretching myself.’ The universe doesn’t want to connect living things to dead ones. Breaking them apart doesn’t really upset the natural order of things. Good for me if I don’t want the magic going strange, but not so good if what I’m looking for is a learning experience.”

“As someone who’s been on the receiving end of a ‘learning experience,’ can I just say that I’m not really that excited when you go looking for them?”

I flicked a cherry at him. It bounced off his shirt, leaving a little red mark behind, like a lipstick stain or a wound. Bob looked at it, sighed, and murmured a word with too many vowels. The stain lifted off his shirt and flapped, like a molecule-thin butterfly, to hover in the air above the garbage. Once there, it burst, sending cherry juice raining down on the coffee grounds and used paper towels.

“Very mature,” he said.

“I’m not going to turn you into a cat again,” I said. “I know what I did wrong that time, and besides, it’s not like the spell I want to try would be directed at you. I’ve learned my lesson about using magic on my boyfriend.”

“It’s a miracle,” said Bob dryly. “So what, exactly, do you want to attempt that would somehow be made easier by being able to magically generate a cherry crop in our dining room?”

I smiled hopefully. “Help me get our pie in the oven and I’ll explain?”

Bob sighed and reached for the spare cherry pitter.

“Lots of cultures have stories about witches who’ve bound a wind to their service somehow,” I said, taking another bite of cherry pie. It had come out perfectly, with a flaky golden crust and just the right amount of sugar to make the cherry juice that oozed out of the pastry taste like a little bit of heaven. “Winds are supposed to be like puppies. If you do the right things and say the right words, they’ll come when you call, heel, sit, stay, the whole nine yards. Doesn’t that sound like about the best thing you’ve ever heard? Who needs the SPCA when you can have a pet weather pattern?”

“Since I was the last ‘pet’ you had, this isn’t really selling me on the idea,” said Bob blandly. “I have two major reservations. First, where does this wind come from? Are you stealing something from the local troposphere? Because we don’t have the most stable weather in the world here in New Orleans, and I don’t want the next hurricane to have your name on it.”

His words stung, and rightly so. Living between the Mississippi and the haunted waters of Lake Pontchartrain meant that we were always at risk of a flood or storm, and the scars from Katrina were still all over the city for anyone with eyes to see. This was the last place for someone to be fooling around with weather magic—which was exactly why I planned to start fooling around with weather magic. If we could just find a way to make the storms a little less severe, either by making friends with the local winds or by taming breezes that could interfere when things started to get bad, we might be able to keep things from being quite so bad in the future.

“You know that new girl, Minda? The one who thinks she’s better at witching than anyone?”

Bob nodded, looking perplexed.

I stabbed my fork into my pie. “I mentioned I was researching this ritual, and she said . . .” I swallowed. “She said, ‘Too little, too late,’ like the storms we’ve been having were my fault somehow. Like I should have been wrestling with the wind years ago. I asked her what she meant by that, and she said I knew what she meant. That if I wanted to sit around like some little old lady, knitting and gossiping while the world fell down, that was my lookout. It got under my skin, Bob. I won’t pretend it didn’t. I want to be able to do something the next time a storm blows up.”

This time, Bob’s nod was slower, and he looked almost understanding. “You didn’t answer my questions,” he said. “Start there.”

“I think you call the wind in from elsewhere; at least that’s how it tends to work in the old stories,” I said carefully. “Winds that live where you send out the call are more like, I don’t know, feral cats. They aren’t interested in being tamed. I don’t know why foreign winds would be any different, but everything I can find says that they are.”

“This is sounding more and more sketchy,” said Bob. “What does Octavia have to say about this?”

I bristled. “Nothing,” I said. “She’s not my sponsor anymore, and I don’t need her permission to try new things. I’d consult her if I thought I needed her. I don’t.”

“And I would still be a cat if not for her, so you’ll forgive me for being a little cautious,” said Bob. “Which takes us to my other concern: What happens if this goes wrong? What happens if you attract a nice little wind and it comes with a not-so-nice big hurricane? I don’t want you to be the reason this city finally washes away.”

“I’m getting a little annoyed about all the little ‘Amelia can’t control her magic’ comments tonight, okay? I’ll head out to the river before I try anything, and I’ve modified the stasis spell enough that it should be able to stop anything that I start before it snowballs out of control.” I forked off another bite of pie. “I won’t say it’s perfectly safe—magic is never perfectly safe—but I think it’s worth the risk, and I don’t think that the chances of it going wrong are high enough that it’s not worth doing.” I canted my chin down a bit and looked up at him through my eyelashes before playing my hole card: “I was really hoping you’d be there to check my ritual circle and make sure that I’m not missing any steps.”

Bob sighed, the long, pained sound that meant I’d just won the argument. “Do you promise not to flood the state?” he asked.

I grinned.

Weather witchery is difficult for a lot of reasons. There’s the whole “weather is a big, complex thing” to be considered, as well as the potential for property damage if it’s done wrong, but mostly the problem is in the intricacy of the rituals involved. I normally wouldn’t have attempted something like this without at least three witches, preferably four or five. But with most of the practitioners in the city still focusing on cleaning up their own neighborhoods, it was just me and Bob setting up the circle down by the riverbank. Lightning bugs flickered in and out of view, and a soft breeze was blowing out of the west, smelling like fresh flowers and somebody’s home-baked muffins. It was making me hungry.

“I’m still not sure this is a good idea,” said Bob.

“Never know until you try it,” I said, and held out a hand. “Can I get the jasmine?” Bob solemnly handed me a Tupperware bowl full of dried flowers, and I commenced to scattering them around the lines of salt, iron ball bearings, and cedar ash that I had already drawn. Something this size required more effort than a slap-and-tickle “runes and salt and prayer” design. This was the kind of ritual where I needed to cast it like I meant it.

“Let’s just go over things one more time,” Bob said.

“I know what that means,” I said. “That means ‘Let me explain why this is a bad idea one more time, because I’m sure this is the time you’ll mysteriously decide to listen.’ Well, I’m not going to listen, and I’m not going to change my mind, so how about we skip that part and move straight to me getting down to business?”

Bob smiled in that slow way that always made me want to tear his clothes off with my teeth. “It’s a good thing I like it when you’re impulsive,” he said, and took a step back from my circle. “I’m here if you need me.”

“All right.” I sank to the ground, sitting cross-legged to minimize the risk that I’d somehow blur one of the lines I’d spent so much time and care to draw. Resting my hands on my knees, I thought back to the words I’d translated from the books of folklore that first led me down this possibly foolish road. There were so many different variations, and so many possibilities, all of them leading to either success or failure.

I’m not a girl who likes to fail.

What I am is a girl who likes to get things right the first time. I’d spent so long staring at the slips of paper with my translations written on them that when I closed my eyes, I could see the strings of cursive unspooling against my eyelids like a map waiting to be followed. The first word came to my tongue like a promise. The second followed like a prayer, and then it was just words upon words, spilling out into the cool night air with all the force of a vow that had been yearning to be heard. Magic is a thing that lends itself to metaphor, because there’s nothing in this world or any other that can be said to be exactly like it; magic is what magic is, and all our descriptions have to call upon other things, or make no sense at all.

I could feel Bob standing behind me, his love and support mingling with a healthy dose of wariness and concern. It wasn’t like mind reading—I couldn’t tell if he was wondering whether he’d left the oven on or admiring my ass—but it was a sort of temporary empathy, his magic resonating back on mine in a form of complicated sonar. I could feel the moths in the air and the frogs in the mud and the gators in the water around me the same way, although they were mostly just presence and not personality. That was all right by me. I’ve never much felt the need to get up close and personal with any part of an alligator, and that includes its feelings.

The ritual was long enough to be exhausting and short enough to be achievable. I gasped out the last of the words and felt the air around me go suddenly and impossibly still, as if I had—without moving—stepped into the eye of a storm. Bob cleared his throat nervously. I opened my eyes.

Nothing hovered in the still air in front of me; nothing twitched its ephemeral tail back and forth like an anxious puppy, waiting for me to notice it and remark on how clever it was. My eyes went wide. “Bob?” I squeaked. “Do you, uh . . . I guess ‘see’ isn’t the best word here, is it? Do you perceive what I’m perceiving?”

“Do you mean, ‘Can I tell that there is a breeze of some sort hanging a foot from your face’? Because if that’s what you mean, then yes, I can.” Bob sounded rattled. I wasn’t sure if that was because he hadn’t had faith in my magical abilities, or because this whole situation was more than a little unnerving. I was going with the latter, since I was pretty rattled, and I had absolute faith in my own magical abilities. Besides, that way I didn’t have to be mad at him, and I was going to want some celebratory sex as soon as we got back to the apartment.

Slowly, I began to grin. “It worked,” I said. “I put together a ritual based on research and logic, and it worked. I am the man.”

“Point of order,” said Bob.

“I am the woman,” I amended. Cautiously, I reached for the stationary wind. “Hi, little fella. I’m Amelia. I’m the one who called you here. It’s nice to meet you. I hope we’re going to be friends.”

“Do winds make friends?”

“Shush. Having a moment of deep mystic import here,” I said, and continued reaching my hand toward the nothing I could sense hovering just outside the boundaries of my ritual circle. Something brushed my fingertips, something insubstantial as air that nonetheless tingled like an electrical storm. My eyes widened in wonder and delight—

—and just like that, my little bit of tamed nothing was gone, vanishing back into the night. I jolted backward, feeling as if I’d just been stung by a swarm of hornets.

“What just happened?” I demanded. “Where’d my wind go?”

“Where did all the winds go?” Bob sounded more frightened than dismayed. I twisted without getting out of my ritual circle, frowning at him. He frowned right back, gesturing wildly with his hands. “The air is completely still. How often have you been this close to the water and not felt any wind at all? They stopped right before yours showed up. I thought it was part of your spell.”

“I didn’t cast anything that should have interfered with the wind outside of the one I was calling,” I protested. I climbed to my feet, the pins and needles in my calves telling me that I should probably have done that a few minutes earlier. “I’m serious, Bob, I know what I did and didn’t do, and I didn’t do anything as big as that.”

Bob frowned slowly. “Who did you tell that you were going to try this?”

“Not much of anyone, really . . .” I said. His frown deepened. I sighed. “All right, I may have told a few of the other witches. Just to get their perspective on things.”

“Did you share your notes?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to.

Bob picked up a handful of salt and flower petals from the edge of the ritual circle, holding his hand flat and blowing on the mess as hard as he could. It drifted out as an improbable cloud before falling to the mud, forming a rough arrow that pointed east.

“I love magic,” I said, and grabbed the ritual supplies before taking off at a run.

Without wind, the surface of the river was perfectly still, more like a sheet of glass than an actual body of water. The fireflies had disappeared. They probably didn’t know how to fly in air that wasn’t moving at all. I ran, and Bob paced me, both of us watching for anything out of the ordinary. I don’t know what I was expecting, really; a circle like mine, maybe, or someone holding up a sign that read, I am the source of all your problems.

Honestly, the woman standing on the surface of the water about eight feet out from shore was overkill where the “unusual sights” department was concerned.

I slid to a stop, the slick mud beneath my feet making the gesture graceless, although the rapid pinwheeling of my arms did at least keep me from eating riverbank. Bob was wearing slightly more sensible shoes and had an easier time of it than I did, although my pride was reassured by the fact that he had to do some pinwheeling of his own to keep from tipping over.

The woman on the water turned to face us, and smiled. “Hello, Amelia. And Bob, too. It’s a surprise to see you out on the river tonight. I genuinely didn’t think she’d be able to talk you into this.”

Bob reached up and adjusted his glasses. He didn’t say anything. He just scowled.

Sadly, my daddy raised me a little more polite than that, even when I’m talking to someone who’s clearly decided that the laws of nature don’t apply to her. “Evening, Minda,” I said, folding my hands behind my back in a vain attempt to look nonchalant. “What are you doing out here?”

“Isn’t it obvious? I’m showing the world what a two-bit charlatan you are.” She was holding a censer in one hand. As she spoke, she inscribed a wide arc with her hand, leaving a trail of smoke behind her. It didn’t move at all. One more sign of the absence of wind. “One little breeze? Really, Amelia? What’s the value in that?”

“Well, it was sort of a ‘proof of concept’ order, with a little bit of ‘not upsetting the local weather systems so much that we all get washed out to sea’ as a bonus,” I said carefully. “You didn’t live here when the hurricane hit. You don’t know how bad things got.” How bad things still were, in certain parts of the city. It was difficult to overstate what Katrina had done to our beautiful city. There was a reason most of the local witches wouldn’t even have attempted weather magic. It was the same reason that I was being so careful.

Minda snorted. “I’ve seen storms. That wasn’t the hurricane’s fault.”

I felt, rather than saw, Bob drawing himself up beside me. He’d missed Katrina completely, on account of his having been a cat at the time, but he’d still seen its marks. “Are you suggesting that it was the city’s fault somehow?”

“No, I’m outright stating that it was your fault. All you lame-ass witches who couldn’t bother to figure out the spells you needed to keep the weather under control. You deserved what you got.” She made another lazy circle with her censer. Another ring of smoke formed and hung preserved around her. “You’re weak. You’ve been living in the Big Easy so long that you’ve started to think life should be all sunshine and games. Well, there’s a new witch in town, and I am going to show you how it’s done.”

There was something about those preserved loops of smoke that bothered me almost as much as the motionless air. I took a step forward, my shoes squelching in the mud. “Minda, let’s talk about this. I don’t think you really understand how delicate the systems are here. Make one mistake and we’re all going to wind up paying for it.” I sounded like Bob. There was something almost poetic about that: I hadn’t listened to his warnings, and now it looked as if Minda wasn’t going to listen to mine.

I hadn’t listened to his warnings . . . My eyes widened as I looked at Minda’s loops of smoke in a new light. Viewed from the side, they were random, overlapping with one another to form an almost chaotic series of squiggles. But viewed from above . . . viewed from above, they would form a series of broken concentric circles. She was sketching a ritual circle, using water instead of earth and smoke instead of salt. It was brilliant. It was audacious.

It was going to get us all killed.

“Minda, you have to stop.”

“No, I don’t,” she said smugly. “All I had to do was wait until I felt you start your spell, so that I could be ready to call you here to witness my greatest triumph. Now sit back, Miss Broadway, and get ready to see a real show.”

She flung her censer into the air, and the sky exploded.

The thing about magic is that it doesn’t really care about right or wrong or maintaining the balance of things; magic finds its own balance if you give it long enough. What magic cares about is respect. Do you respect what you’re doing? Do you understand it well enough to do it properly, or are you just a kid fooling around in your mama’s closet and making a mess out of things? Magic isn’t forgiving. It doesn’t treat nicely with people who don’t treat respectfully with it. But sadly, that doesn’t mean the people who are respectful are immune from getting hurt.

Minda’s frozen circle remained exactly where it was as the water around her kicked into windblown life, suddenly ripped into waves two and three feet high. It was the sort of water that normally accompanies a bad storm—and from the black clouds that were racing into view on the horizon, that was exactly what we were about to get. I tried to take another step toward the water, only to find myself pushed backward by a fierce wind that roared out of nowhere and knocked me into Bob.

He caught me before I could go sprawling, his strong hands gripping my shoulders as he leaned close and shouted against the wind, “She’s going to blow us away!”

“Not just us!” I shouted back. Clouds of that size weren’t going to be happy with three witches and a stretch of riverbank. They were going to keep on gathering until they found themselves a bigger target. “We need to stop her!”

“How do you suggest we do that? Throw rocks at her until she feels bad about herself and stops trying to kill us?”

“Not quite! Do you trust me?”

There was a brief pause. Bob didn’t have to say anything for me to know how loaded a question that was, especially coming from me to him. Finally, without taking his hands off my shoulders, he shouted back, “Yes! Yes, Amelia, I trust you!”

“Good! Then hold on tight, because I’m going to need you keeping me grounded!” I plunged my hand into my pocket, digging through the lint and small debris of daily life until I found the thing that I was looking for: a cherry stone.

“This better work,” I murmured, and pulled it out of my pocket, chucking it into the onrushing wind as I began to chant.

The ritual I’d used to call my small, quickly stolen breeze had been based on the idea of calmness and respect in the face of something that was never meant to be commanded. I could recognize echoes of that ritual in Minda’s chant, but where I had politely asked, she was ordering, and where I had offered, she was demanding. It was a harsh contrast that made me question my own motives a bit. Had I really been trying to push my understanding of magic, or had I been showing off?

Maybe a little bit of both, if I was being honest, and yet neither one was going to be as much of a stretch as what I was trying now. The wind was forming into a funnel around Minda, racing around and around in the classic cone shape that always made my heart feel like it was going to stop. She didn’t seem to realize just how much danger she was putting herself in with that positioning. She kept chanting, and her chained winds carried my cherry stone—taken from a fruit that had grown on my magical cherry tree—once, twice, three times around her, all clockwise, sketching out the idea of a ritual circle in the air.

Circles don’t need to be drawn with concrete materials. If I’d forgotten that, Minda’s circle of smoke would have reminded me. She drew my circle for me, etching it around hers, and when she was done, I began to do something that was, if not impossible, at the very least difficult, and dangerous, and very, very ill-advised: I began casting multiple spells at the same time, a part of one and then a part of another and then a part of a third, all as I pulled on the world around me and tried to weave them together like a rope made of nothing but will and wind.

“Standing stasis, catch and hold—come to me, oh wind of Aeolus, master of—faster, faster, spin the wheel—keep the lines as drawn forever, heeding neither time nor—” On and on it went, the three spells chasing one another like a dog chasing its own tail, until I no longer knew for sure where one ended and the next began. Bob was still behind me, his hands on my shoulders, lending his strength to my casting. If not for the twin solidities of his body and his will, I might have gone straight over into the mud and let Minda have this impromptu wizards’ duel.

Won’t Octavia be proud of me for getting my butt kicked in such a traditional way, I thought dizzily, and kept on chanting. I could feel the winds starting to waver. Some of them were bowing to my insistent command that they heel, sit, and stay. Down, boys, down.

Maybe talking to forces of nature as if they were dogs wasn’t the most respectful way to go about things, but I didn’t have the time or energy for respect, given the circumstances. Minda was shrieking indignantly from her place on the water, and when her shrieks gave way to high, angry chanting in a language I didn’t understand, I knew that the real fight was just beginning. I dug my heels into the mud.

The force of Minda’s pocket storm slammed into me like a freight train only a few seconds later.

The thing about magic is that it hurts like hell when it punches you in the face. I managed to keep on chanting, but it was close. Bob held on more tightly as I reached into the storm with both hands, the triplicate spells of stasis and speed and binding spilling out of me and into the storm-torn winds, confusing them as much as they were confusing my own magic. Casting something to speed the world up and something to stop it at the same time seemed counterproductive, as if I would be canceling out my own magic rather than strengthening it. That was sort of the idea.

Minda had whipped these winds into a killing frenzy. I was all right with keeping them there—that was what my stasis was for, intended to prevent her from pulling her own magic out of the equation, no matter how much she might want to. And she was going to want to, if I had my way, because no one with half a brain would stay in the spell once she realized what I was doing. Assuming that what I was doing didn’t backfire and age me into dust in a matter of seconds.

Belatedly, I realized that if the spell backfired in that specific way, Bob might well be within the blast radius, at least enough to catch a decade or two that he hadn’t asked for and probably wouldn’t want. Sorry, sweetie, I thought, and kept casting. My throat was starting to ache from the strain of shouting against Minda’s storm. It seemed like a small price to pay, all things considered. The little reprobate had used my research, my ambition to set herself up to be Queen of the Storm. Well, if anybody was going to profit irresponsibly from my research, it was going to be me.

Stasis, to keep her storm from dissipating. Binding, to transfer it to me if she let it go. And finally, speed, to wear it out and wear it down to nothing before it could move beyond this empty little stretch of river. The gators and frogs that lived here wouldn’t be happy about having their habitat churned to gumbo, but everyone else would live untroubled and unaware of how terribly wrong things had very nearly gone. That was enough for me.

Minda was pouring everything she had into the storm, whipping it to greater and greater heights. I just kept pushing and pulling at the same time, the motion reminding me of a spinning wheel twisting and turning the fiber into thread—or maybe Rumpelstiltskin’s fabled wheel, turning straw to gold. I kept that image as central in my mind as I could, trying to use it to motivate myself. Chase the impossible, Amelia. Do whatever it takes, but chase the impossible, and don’t let it out of your sight.

The first length of fiber to spool down from the storm was surprising enough that I almost dropped the spell. It was rough and resisted being pulled; it burned my palms. I pulled it harder, starting to wind it around my arm the way I’d seen older witches work when they were unwinding store-bought yarn to turn it into a usable ball. And it kept coming, length after length of gray and blue and white fiber that was so much like wool as to make no difference, all of it spinning down out of the sky.

I kept pulling. Bob’s hands tightened on my shoulders, holding me in place and giving me his strength. We were both nearly exhausted. I didn’t know how I was doing what I was doing—that would be something to worry about later, when we weren’t fighting for our lives against a crazed witch with a storm the size of Louisiana ready to chuck at anyone who riled her up.

But it wasn’t really all that big anymore, was it? The storm that had seemed poised to take on the whole state was now barely big enough to cover the river, and it wasn’t breaking free of that arbitrary boundary. Minda screamed again, sounding more frightened than angry this time, and there was a splash that didn’t sound like raindrops or jumping frogs; somebody’s “walk on water” spell had just gone the way of my patience, shattering into a million pieces and dropping her into the troubled, alligator-filled water beneath her feet.

I kept on pulling. Minda might be out of play, but her spell wasn’t, not quite; there was still enough magic in the air to keep those clouds spinning, and that meant I had to keep doing my own sort of spinning, chanting my triplicate spells and ripping impossible yarn out of the troubled sky.

I don’t know how long that went on. I just know that the last length of yarn dropped into my hands as the final storm cloud wisped away into nothingness, and I collapsed backward into Bob, who seemed like the most solid thing left in a half-faded world, and he caught me before I hit the mud, and my eyes closed. Then my spell was cast, and there was nothing else for me to do but pass out in the least ladylike way possible.

I woke up lying on the grass in front of our car, which was a serious improvement on the muddy bank where I’d lost consciousness. Bob had piled his Windbreaker up under my head as a sort of pillow, and I appreciated the gesture more than I could say. Bob himself was sitting a few feet away, cross-legged, winding what looked like lengths of storm-colored yarn into balls.

“Is that it?” I sat up, blinking. “Is that the stuff I pulled down out of the storm?”

“It is,” he replied. “Care to explain how you did it?”

“I haven’t the faintest clue, but won’t we have a nice time figuring it all out?” I beamed at him. I was exhausted down to the bone, but I was also damned proud of myself. I’d done something completely new. Something even better than calling a single wind. Which reminded me . . . “Where’s Minda?”

“I didn’t see her come out of the water.”

“Good,” I said viciously. “Maybe the gators got a treat.”

“Could be,” said Bob.

I leaned forward, plucking at one of the trailing pieces of yarn. “I’m going to need to learn how to knit.”

Bob’s eyebrows raised. “Why’s that?” he asked.

“Well, I figure it says something nice about my skill as a witch if I knit myself a sweater out of sky, don’t you?”

Bob blinked. And then, to my relief and delight, he began to laugh.

“Come on,” I said, picking myself up and offering him my hand. “Let’s go home. I want a slice of cherry pie.”