Matilda's Arc

Chapter 7 of 7

Matilda bolted the door and set the stolen book on the table. The dented kettle rocked once and went still. She wiped soot from her hands on her apron and opened the cover. She had crossed a field and outwitted a locked door for this. She meant to read it now. The pages were thick and stiff. The ink was brown with age. She turned to the first recipe and her stomach dropped. The letters were not letters she knew. They curled and hooked like vines. Some had small marks above them, some below. She could not sound out a single word. She flipped through the whole book. Every page was the same crooked script. She recognized a drawing of a cauldron, a drawing of a moon, a drawing of a root she thought might be moonbloom. That was all. She could match a picture to a jar on her shelf, but she could not read the amounts. She could not read the order. She could not read the warnings. Without the words, the pictures were useless. Behind her, the half-brewed potion sat sealed in the cupboard. She had three days before it soured in the pot. After that the whole batch was waste, and she would have to start again from the beginning. She pulled the cauldron out from under the workbench and set it on the hearth. The green mixture inside had thickened at the edges. She stirred it once with a wooden spoon. It clung to the wood. She had until the next full moon to add the next step, whatever the next step was. She sat down with the book again and tried to match the shapes to any alphabet she had ever seen. She tried the old runes her mother had taught her. She tried the merchant script from the coast towns. Nothing fit. The book was written in a hand she did not know, and the witch who wrote it was long dead. She closed the cover. The lock clicked shut on its own. She had stolen a book she could not use. Matilda stood at the window a long time. The brambles around her cottage swayed in a wind she could not feel. Someone had sent the imp today. Someone was watching the cottage now. She could not carry the book to a stranger and ask for a translation. She could not ask the only witch nearby, because the book belonged to that witch. She thought of the one person who still came to her door without a plan against her. The one who brought honey and asked about her hat. She did not know if that person could read old script. She did not know if asking would cost her the potion or the friendship. But the potion would spoil in three days, and she had no other door left to knock on. She banked the fire and began to plan a visit.