Chapter Five #2
The cook waved her spoon at him. “Get along with you, Barberry,” she ordered. But she was smirking, and she left the flowers where they were.
Two days later, he replaced the first two vases with another two, tossed most of the contents onto a compost heap, and retreated to his greenhouse with the threaded blooms to see whether the spell had worked. And it had.
He didn’t bother to listen to two days’ worth of work conversation and gossip, but skipping through, he confirmed that the flowers had held everything they’d “heard.” Now to see if he could insert his spelled blooms into the dragon lord’s inner sanctum.
*
Singing worked. Sephie tried it on her own, with the wash bowl in her bedroom, steadying her breathing, building a picture in her mind of the bowl hovering over the washstand, then singing that intention to it, letting the tune and the words come to her as she focused on the outcome she wanted.
“Rise gently, sweet bowl
Hover smoothly above.
Now higher, now lower
Now settle, sweet as a dove.”
Neither great lyrics nor a great tune, but it worked. It truly worked. The bowl rose smoothly, hovered for a few minutes, and then lowered itself so carefully onto the washstand that there wasn’t even a chink.
She tried it with her hairbrush, a cushion on the window seat, and even her dressing table stool, though when she tried to set the stool dancing across the room, it flew out of her control and bashed against the wall.
Was it possible that what counted to her gift were the pictures she saw in her head rather than the words she sang?
For when singing to the stool, she had suddenly thought of the wild dances of the shearing gangs in the hills near her Granny’s cottage, just at the part of the evening that Granny always said they had been out too late, and should be heading home.
Or perhaps it was both. Perhaps the pictures in her head helped her gift to interpret the words, for “dance” could mean many things.
Next time, she would think of a sedate gavotte. She checked the dent in the wall and decided she would save future experiments for the exercise room.
She arrived at the exercise room the following morning full of excitement, ready to show Cousin Jasper what she had learned. To her disappointment, he wasn’t there.
“Jasper is not at home,” said Cousin Delia. “The weavers are rioting in the north, and breaking machines in the mills. The prince regent has sent Jasper to talk to them.”
Oh. Sephie wondered if the Hawk would be interested in that morsel of information. Yes, of course he would, but she mustn’t think about that here, lest Cousin Delia somehow managed to detect her thoughts.
“I made a bowl rise,” she said. “And a stool dance, but it banged into the wall. I am sorry about the dent.”
Cousin Delia’s eyes widened and then she stepped forward and took Sephie’s hands. “You made your magic work! Persephone, how wonderful! How exciting. Show me.”
Obediently, Sephie went to the equipment shelf for the copper bowl Jasper had provided to practice with. She set it in the middle of the floor, focused her mind on her intent, and then sang a rhyme to raise the bowl.
It drifted up from the floor. She changed the rhyme, encouraging it to weave along the room, bobbing and twirling, picturing one of the sprightly but controlled line dances she had seen when she and Granny had been invited to tea at the nearby manor.
Beside her, Cousin Delia clapped her hands and laughed out loud. “That is delightful, Persephone.”
Bringing the bowl to a gentle halt by her feet, she admitted, “I was a bit rough with the stool. I hadn’t yet realized I needed to be specific about what kind of dance.”
“I dare say it shall be easy to fix,” said Cousin Delia, dismissing Sephie’s concerns, “and I expect it is not the first time these walls have been dented by someone learning their own strength. What is important is that you have learned to direct your power. Singing! However did you come to think of that?”
Sephie should have expected the question. She could not answer it, of course. She could not implicate Mr. Barberry. She stared at Cousin Delia, and the lady must have thought she didn’t know what to say, for she waved her hand as if to erase what she had just said.
“Never mind, Persephone. What is important is that you thought of it, and it works. Will it work for the other things Jasper had you doing? There’s a block of wood on the shelf, and I shall send for an apple.”
The block of wood stubbornly refused to become the carving she wanted, though at least it transformed into a duplicate of the bowl she had been levitating. Perhaps Sephie’s song was not specific enough, or perhaps her visualization of her intent was faulty.
A footman had delivered a basket of apples in response to Cousin Delia’s order. Could she make one of them twice its size? The song came easily, and the apple responded exactly as she desired.
“You did it,” said Cousin Delia, clapping her hands and bouncing with excitement. “Try again, Persephone.”
The results were the same the second time, and the third, but when she tried to make the fourth apple four times its size, it exploded, covering her and Cousin Delia in apple pulp.
“I am so sorry,” Sephie said, in an agony of embarrassment. “I should not have done that.”
But Cousin Delia didn’t look angry. In fact, she was laughing when she wiped her face with her handkerchief.
“How were you to know that would happen? We probably should have waited for Jasper before trying anything new, but I was just so excited. Persephone, dear, we both need a good wash before anything else. Shall we call it quits for today? But you have done well, and Jasper is going to be so impressed when I tell him.”
He was more likely to castigate Sephie for doing unauthorized magic where it might put the lady catalyst at risk. Now that Sephie stopped to think about it, she had been foolish and reckless, the very faults that Granny had worked so hard to beat out of her.
Cousin Delia was being so kind. Too kind. Sephie was now even more indebted to her, and she hated that.
“Is there anything I can help you with today?” she asked, with a vague sense of balancing the accounts.
“That is kind of you, Persephone. I suppose… Are you any good at flower arranging? It is our day for it, and I always help the housekeeper, but if you would do it instead, I can spend more time in the nursery. Only if it is something you enjoy, though.”
As it happened, Sephie did like arranging flowers. There was something very soothing about it. Cousin Delia told her when and where to meet the housekeeper, and they parted, each to their own room, to wash their faces and change their clothes.