Chapter Eleven: Helena
Tiredness prickled at the corner of Matilde's eyes. She was used to waking in the middle of the night: to pick a rare herb, perhaps, whose powers would only be harvestable by moonlight, or called to the birth of a child or a cow, who knew nothing of the hour. She was not at all used to waking in the middle of the night to shuffle, with all the other men of her dormitory, into the chapel to pray. Each bobbing candle light floating above the witches heads seemed to prick and burn at her eyes, and somehow she could never quite find the right place in the rhythm of song, silence, and rote prayer to give in to the huge yawn she felt building in herself.
Her agreement with Edmund had been a couple of days ago now, but it seemed like it had been weeks. Looking back on it, she felt foolish. In the days that had passed since the hunt, as her body had slowly become less saddlesore, she had wanted to fulfil their agreement, to keep an eye out for Salazar and learn what he was doing. But to understand Slytherin's plans, she would first have to see him, and after the sorting feast, it seemed that he had disappeared into the castle. He did not seem to take his meals in the great hall, never seemed to appear in the corridors, and she had never seen him at mass. As she listened to the drone of a canticle, she thought that she could not blame him on this last point.
She would have liked to communicate this to Edmund, to ask his advice. She could see him now. Matilde was determinedly at the back of the church, somewhere where she could cast an eye over the penitents for Slytherin and Baron Malet. Baron Malet was present as ever, only a few rows ahead of her and surrounded by lackeys. At least she was able to keep an eye on him. Edmund's fair head was bowed in prayer towards the front of the church. He was so close, that was the rub: in theory, she could walk forward some fifty paces and be able to place a hand on his arm, to talk with him. But even as people would be leaving the mass soon to make their wearily back to bed until the dawn bell, she knew that she would be hard pressed to exchange even a few words with Edmund. Hogwarts was governed by rule and ritual, both spoken and unspoken: holding a conversation after mass was unthinkable, let alone with a Gryffindor. She had much to learn about magic, but some things about the intricate mechanics of the castle had already made themselves perfectly clear.
Matilde gazed up past the floating candles, past the ever-changing image of the night sky above. It was a little insubstantial, like a reflection on a pond – if you tricked your eyes just right, you could see right past it. She had had a lot of time to train her eyes, in Hogwarts's endless calls to prayer. If you looked just above it, you could see a vaulted ceiling. It was a true work of art: she had never seen anything like it, not even in the new church Lord Jean had been so proud of the work on back at home. Matilde found herself wondering how long it had taken a team of skilled craftsmen, before she realised that this castle had probably never seen a craftsman or a labourer. It seemed to her that the witches of Hogwarts had little care for the work of their hands, not when a wand could do the job as easily. The only exception had been the hunt yesterday. Some things were to be relished the old fashioned way, and killing, it seemed, was one of them.
She stared past the stars, letting her eyes unfocus and then refocus on the delicate carved arches of the castle ceiling. It really was a castle, she thought. Not a school. Not even a monastery. Oh, they would pray, and work, and write like a monastery. But Hogwarts as a place was a castle: towers of new, shining stone stamped onto the hills on the shore of the black lake. As she had ridden through England, through lands newly conquered and reconquered by King Guillame, she had seen plenty of castles just like it: new, tall, impregnable. A castle that said: we are here. This is our land, our place, and that will not be changed.
Commotion rose around her – at last, the interminable prayers were over, and Hogwarts was rising to its feet, ready to return to a few more blessed hours of sleep. People around her began to move, and she wondered what would happen if she were to sleep through the morning mass, if she were simply to lie on her pallet of straw and sleep long, long into the day. No floors to scrub for Marie, no herbs to pick or babies to deliver with Edyth, no horse to ride North, no prayers to recite or endless stone corridors to trudge. She smiled at the thought as she slipped from the chapel, anonymous in the crush of people. Well, no matter what the morning would hold after mass, it seemed certain at this point that she would learn little magic. Hogwarts simply had not known what to do with her, with this scrap of a boy with no Latin and no letters. She had wanted to ask Edmund what it had been like when he first came – he too was far from highborn, and there was no way he had been literate when he first came. While others had gone to the scriptorium, or to endless rooms to practice spells with the strange wooden wands Matilde saw everywhere, she had spent the last few days wandering endless corridors, seeing shafts of sunlight dappled across smooth flagstones, and losing track of each turn.
There was no sunlight on the flagstones at this hour, of course. Outside of the chapel and its thousand floating candles, the lights were dimmer. She might catch a sliver of the moon through one of the long, high windows. She might see the flickering light of a torch, hanging on occasional brackets around the castle but with little rhyme or reason to their placement. More often, when neither was available, the crowd of other witches heading blearily back to their dormitories would simply raise their wands and mutter a spell to turn the tip into a bright point of shining light without any flame. Matilde was grateful for the crowd of witches, for their wands to light her way, for their footsteps treading the labyrinth of Hogwarts so she did not have to navigate it alone.
She liked being in a crowd. She had little in common with the people here, no language, no wand, but no one had to know that. She was simply another witch leaving the chapel, lost and anonymous in the jostle of warm, tired bodies. She was-
Someone placed a hand on her arm, and Matilde stopped dead.
"You're Robert, aren't you?" A woman was talking to her, talking in English – but an English with an accent Matilde hadn't heard before, flowing from syllable to syllable like wild honey. She turned, and the witch reaching for her looked a little older than her. She was tall, with brown hair framing her pale face. For a moment, the curls of her hair falling down to her shoulders made Matilde think of her own hair before Edyth had taken the knife to it. She did not realise it just then, but it was the first time since that day that she had thought of her long hair without immediately thinking of Giselbert touching it.
A moment passed, and she realised that she was supposed to answer. "I am," she said, staring at the woman who had interrupted her. She looked familiar. Yet men and women were kept quite separate at Hogwarts, and she was, she reminded herself, very much in the former category here. She had had little opportunity to interact with any of the other women here, let alone to talk with them: so why did this stranger feel familiar?
"I'm Helena," said the girl, in a voice that implied Matilde should understand the significance of that name. "My mother had asked me to see you."
My mother – and suddenly, Matilde looked at the tall young woman before her and knew exactly why her face looked familiar. If she merely added a few years to that face, if she changed Helena's nervous energy to calm poise, and if she placed that circlet of metal over her brow. "Rowena's daughter," Matilde breathed.
She had not intended to say it aloud, and Helena looked at her with amusement. "Yes, exactly," she said. "She sent me to find you. I've heard you do not have any Latin? That you cannot read?"
The lilt in her voice was soothing, but not so soothing that Matilde did not immediately worry at the words it was camouflaging. Rowena, self-appointed Queen of All Witches, would surely not stand for Robert's ignorance. Matilde took a deep breath. "I can't," she said. "I was hoping to learn, but they have turned me away from the scriptorium, and I am-"
"Quiet!" Helena said, gripping her arm tight. Matilde instinctively fell silent, knowing that this was it – that all her worst fears had come true, and that this was the moment where she would be banished from Hogwarts. "Get back here, out of the light…"
Helena's nails pressed into Matilde's skin, hard enough to mark it, and she found herself dragged along the corridor, into a pool of shadow between the torch brackets. She was too surprised to say much except utter a single muffled squeak, which made Helena stare daggers at her. She found herself pressed against the wall in the dark, Helena's arm in front of her to prevent her from moving, and then she realised: there were footsteps coming. A few footsteps, a heavy, brisk tread: they were growing steadily closer, but still quite faint – how Helena had heard them at all moments ago was a mystery. Matilde could feel Helena's arm shaking gently. Not knowing what to do, she placed a hand over Helena's, trying to calm her like she'd calm a startled animal, as the footsteps rounded the corner.
Baron Malet strode through the corridor, a guard flanking him on either side. Matilde found herself holding her breath without giving it a thought: next to her, Helena was so silent, so still that she could not possibly be breathing either. Matilde and Helena stood frozen to the wall, praying no one would turn their head: but the Baron moved with purpose, and only a few taut, agonising seconds passed before he and his compatriots had swept around a corner.
They both let out long, slow breaths. Helena's arm released Matilde, but Matilde made no motion to move away from the wall, instead she slid down it towards the floor, legs bent, perched on her heels.
"I'm sorry," Helena said, breathless. "I know that was sudden, that I acted quite improperly - I should explain myself-"
Matilde shook her head. "No, I understand. I know I arrived at Hogwarts with the Baron, but I'm not really…. His man." In more ways than one, she added to herself with a smile.
"Ever since the welcoming feast, when I played the harp," Helena said, brushing a lock of hair out of her face, "he's had his eye on me." She shuddered, and Matilde understood entirely. "He keeps finding excuses to talk to me, and he's…" she shrugged.
Matilde thought. She knew exactly what Helena was saying: but would Robert? She would have to play this carefully. "When we were travelling," she said slowly, playing for time, "he… disrespected a woman. In front of her husband, and all his company." She stood slowly, pacing the corridor. "It's good to stay away from him," she said simply. There. That had not been so bad. A slight stretch of the truth, a little vagueness – but she felt fairly confident that that was how Robert would have explained it, not Matilde.
Helena nodded. "That doesn't surprise me. He has the good sense not to be too obvious, not in front of Mother, but I can see his intentions. Still, I'm sorry, Robert, I know we've just met…"
Matilde cut across her. Now that the shock had worn off, she was overflowing with questions, all of them racing to make it to her tongue. The one that made it out first was: "How did you know he was coming?"
Helena smiled. She clasped her hands together, moving her long fingers in a complicated blur of motion. Matilde thought she was just trying to let out some of the tension of the Baron's passage through their movement; but a moment later she had pulled a bright silver ring from her finger and waved it before Matilde.
"Oh, back when he first started bothering me, I put an enchantment onto this ring. If he's close, it starts to burn," she said, her words flowing together like a melody, like notes rippling from her harp. Matilde realised that she did not only recognise Helena for sharing her Mother's face. She remembered her playing at the feast: she remembered those same pale, elegant fingers coaxing note after note from the harp strings. "I got the idea of a wearable charm from mother and that damn diadem…" she was tossing the ring between her two hands, never still, eventually sliding it back onto her fingers.
Matilde had no idea what a diadem was, but she had more than enough questions for this girl, and decided that that was one of the least important ones. She sighed. Perhaps it was time to face the music. "You said your mother had sent you to find me? Because of my Latin?" Since the mad dash to the shadows, she doubted now that where this was leading could be quite as bad.
"Yes, of course," Helena said, "I'm sorry, Baron Malet distracted me-"
"That's quite alright," Matilde said. She felt like she was trying to soothe a sparrow, all tiny, fast motions, hopping from one spot to another.
"When someone without any Latin, or without his letters, comes to Hogwarts, there is always a tutor assigned to help them," Helena began, in one rattling breath. "I've always been good with other tongues, particularly English, so mother has said I should tutor you."
"I… that would be wonderful," Matilde said. Her heart was still pounding from the Baron, and she wished she could calm herself properly: this offer had managed to catch her entirely off guard, and yet it seemed so obvious in retrospect. "What should I-"
"Wonderful!" Helena said, twisting the ring back onto her finger. It was not the only one she wore, Matilde realised. On both of her hands, Helena wore more silver than Matilde could ever hope to have in her whole life. "We can meet after lauds mass tomorrow. When people are going to the scriptorium, we can work on your writing. The Latin will be harder, but…" she shrugged and barely managing to cover her mouth as she yawned. "I'm sure you'll be more than up for the task."
"I'll see you there," said Matilde, yawning alike.
Morning came and after lauds, Matilde found herself in an annex. It was one of the outcropping of tiny rooms around Hogwarts without apparent purpose: this particular one had sprouted from the side of the scriptorium like a plant sending out a new shoot. An abundance of light shone through high windows, aided by the flickering light of a couple of candles on the long table before them, but they were shut away from the quiet scribblings of Hogwarts other devoted scholars: it would be easy, Helena explained, for them to talk here so that she might teach Matilde properly without disturbing the almost-eery silence of the scriptorium.
The empty sheet of vellum stretched in front of Matilde like a fresh-ploughed field in spring. She gripped the quill between her thumb and two fingers with distaste. Helena peered over at her, fretting anxiously.
"Good," Helena said, examining Matilde's clumsy grip on the feather. She flourished a wand with ease and tapped at the tiny clay pot before Matilde, muttering a word in Latin. Matilde was so enchanted with the movement of her hands, with the shining of candlelight reflecting from the rings on those elegant white fingers, that she didn't notice that for a moment, nothing happened. Helena frowned. Her wand tapped the inkwell again, and it began to fill with a rich black ink. "Now," she said, "see if you can copy over this…"
She flourished her wand across the page in a complicated squiggle, and a glowing trail of golden light followed the wand's tip, leaving a symbol emblazoned across the vellum in light. Matilde stared at it dispassionately. She had heard, barely, of rune magic when she learned with Edyth. They had planned to make a study of it this winter, crowded around her fire in the long dark quiet of the year. Those plans felt long gone now, so far away that looking back on them was like looking back into another life. But she did recognise this symbol before her. Oh, Helena might know it as one of the letters of her Latin script, but this was a rune, alright. She knew that if she pulled the bones from her pack, that one unhappy reminder of Giselbert she did not quite seem able to get rid of, she would see there a single fragment engraved with the same symbol.
"Rād," she breathed, speaking the rune's name. She had not meant to say anything, and found Helena looking on at her curiously. Not knowing what else to say, she trawled the depths of her memory for what else she could remember: there was something in the girl's look that was a question, an invitation, and she could not help but share. "The rune of the rider. For a brave traveller, and a long journey…"
That was what her rune bones had said ever since she left Edyth, every time she cast them: just the rider, again and again. It was so reliable, so opaque, that she had not bothered throwing them since they had crossed the border into Scotland. Perhaps now she had arrived, if she were to cast the bones again, she would finally learn something new. But she did not like to think of the bones or the unhappy chance that had brought them to her. Sometimes, when she was half-asleep, she felt her hand close around them in their leather pouch – but that did not mean she had to bring them out.
"You know rune-magic?" Asked Helena. Matilde looked up at her, and realised that the girl was staring at her, eyes wide. She hurriedly looked down, back at the stretch of vellum in front of her, with the golden glow of the rād still drawn huge across it.
She took her time replying, dipping her quill in the still black ink. Slowly, her hand shaking a little with the attention it took to draw the nib across the rough page before her, she followed the golden trace of the letter. Her attempt wobbled across the page, and she had to ease the pressure on the quill several times for fear of passing straight through.
"Not quite," Matilde said through gritted teeth. It was hard to speak as she tried to trace this pattern across the page. Perhaps that was why the scriptorium was so silent. "But there was a witch in my village, a Saxon woman. Before I came here, to Hogwarts, she started to tell me of her magic. I learnt just the beginnings of the runes, the first letters of the Futhark…" She pulled the quill away from the parchment, and examined her handiwork with a critical eye. The trouble was that runes were easy: clear, straight lines. It all felt so much more attainable, even with this strange, delicate tool. It was certainly easier than the strange, flowing curves of Helena's Latin hand.
"Not bad," Helena said. Matilde did not need Salazar's skill of reaching into a mind to know that it was a polite lie. "I hope I'll know the runes soon enough," Helena continued, frowning. "Mother is teaching me nearly every language of the isles, you see. That's why I speak English to you now, and why I can speak with the servants and stablehands here in Gaelic if I please. But I'm not sure even she knows much of their magic: just the letters themselves."
"So you're from-" Matilde asked.
"Wales," said Helena. "Well, Mother is. I'm from Hogwarts, I was born here – I've never been more than a few miles from Hogwarts and the lake." For a moment, she paused, all the quick, darting energy of her sucked out. "But she's taught me each and every language," she said, and it was as though she had never hesitated. "And this rune – the rider, you said?" Matilde tried to agree, but she left no space for her to, the words a river flowing from her mouth, "It's the same as a letter in the Latin alphabet, the letter R." She gave Matilde a hard look, a look that Matilde could not understand for the life of her. "Bringing together the old ways and the new," Helena said, as if to herself, "and is that not the foundation of all of our magic here?" Matilde said nothing, but privately doubted that. She had seen little of any old ways she would recognise here. All was new, and alien, and wrong. "So if I were to write your name…" Helena continued, and plucking the quill delicately from Matilde's fingers, she wrote a set of symbols beginning with the same letter in a corner of the parchment.
"My name…" Matilde began. Oh. Oh, of course. For just a moment, Matilde had been so focused on this strange art of writing, so focused on showing what she knew to Helena, on proving that she knew something of magic, that she had forgotten to be Robert entirely. Of course Robert's name would start like that.
"That's right," Helena said, with a somewhat disarming smile, "I thought perhaps that copying it wouldn't be a bad place to start writing. There'll be time for copying from the scriptures and from the books of arcana once you have a stronger hand – we may as well start you with something easier to understand." Her hands – never still – gestured towards the papers she had before her. There were pages of a cramped, careless hand, dotted with flyaway specks of ink. Often it was hard to see where one single letter ended and another began: each word seemed to be a flow, a long squiggle of vague shapes instead of the lonely symbols she expected. Then there were the other pages: pages Helena had clearly spent much time on, each of the letters carefully spaced. In the margins, vines burst into fruit and witches stretched out thin wands. Sometimes, one of the letters at the start of a line or a page would be drawn huge, adorned in many colours and contained in a box of flowers, of fresh fruits, of running hares… Matilde found her eyes gravitating to an R, set out upon the page with infinitely more care and skill than she could ever hope to master. There were other letters she might recognise as runes, but she didn't know what they were called in Latin – it was the only letter on the whole page that she could name. She felt herself flushed, embarrassed – here were these beautifully crafted pages of words, and all she could do was scour them for a single letter.
Helena saw her staring at the loose pages, and reached impulsively to straighten them. "Mother's notes," she said. "She won't trust anyone else with them. I'm to copy them out and make them beautiful: when they're ready, they'll go into the library here." Matilde nodded absently. Helena talked of her mother a lot: but who, she wondered, was Helena's father? Rowena had no husband at Hogwarts that she had seen. She did not wear a widow's black. Matilde knew that she could not possibly ask, but perhaps she was not alone in carrying the shame of an unknown father. She gave Helena a smile. She was glad to have something in common with her.
Helena reached over with her wand and tapped the vellum in front of Matilde, her wand touching the huge R she had scrawled across it. In an instant, the ink faded to nothing, and Matilde struggled to suppress a gasp. All of that work, gone in an instant. "Sorry," Helena said with a grimace, "but the vellum's expensive, see? We haven't yet got a spell to conjure it that's better than the real thing, and I can't have you wasting sheet after sheet as we practice your letters, can I?" She waved her wand over the sheet, frowned, and waved it again, a lock of her hair slipping over her face as she concentrated on mumbling an incantation. Light lines were scored across the page, stretching one edge to another. Helena picked up the quill again, and she wrote a series of letters across the page, starting with R. The letters were easily twice as high as the ones Helena had been copying on her own work. Matilde guessed that it was her name – Robert's name, rather – again. "There," Helena said. "Now, if you write along the lines, and copy that, until the end of the page, perhaps it will help you grow accustomed to a quill." She leant back, stretching her back, before moving further down the bench and beginning to spread out the loose sheets of her own work.
Matilde stared at the word before her, trying to memorise each shape, willing some understanding. It was hard not to feel stupid, particularly next to Helena: it seemed that she had needed hardly a moment to bury herself into writing at such speed Matilde half wondered if she had cast a charm on herself. She thought back to the hunt, and to her conversation with Edmund, a few days ago. She could do magic without a wand. She could tell a creature what it wanted so convincingly that they believed her. She could move pain. She could do so much magic that no one at Hogwarts had any idea of. So what if they could read, and write? She could learn that, and it would be far easier than learning the real magic, the practical witchery that she had learned with Edyth. She would like to see these pampered, spoiled witches learn any of that magic. Matilde picked up the pen and began, slowly, shakily, to copy the letters before her.
It was hard, thankless work, made no easier by the flying quill of her fellow scholar. Surely the beautiful script Helena produced could only be made by slow, deliberate movements: but she was a blur of unceasing activity, her quill gliding across the page and dipping back in an inkwell she intermittently tapped with a wand to refill. Matilde had managed to copy the letters she had been assured were Robert's name, twice: the second set of strokes were, if anything, shakier than the first.
"What are the notes that you're copying?" Matilde asked, her pen starting the curves of another R. Perhaps a little conversation would make the time pass a little quicker.
Helena looked up. Somehow in the flurry of movement, she had managed to smear ink across one cheek: she brushed vaguely at it with one hand as she answered. "Mother's notes? Oh, they're just about magic in England. The Stone, you know?"
"I'm not sure I do," Matilde said. The way that Helena had said The Stone was more than just any stone – it was the difference between the way Giselbert had once referred to Lord Jean as the lord, but to God as the Lord. She gritted her teeth at the thought of Giselbert, suddenly uncomfortable in her own skin. She felt uneasy with Helena's casual discussion of this stone as though it were something she should know. She might have been a Norman by birth, but she was the one who knew a little of the runestones and could cast spells without Latin, without a wand: she had thought that she was the one here who knew of English magic.
"In London?" Helena said. "The Adder Stone, you know?"
Matilde shook her head. She still understood nothing, but her thoughts were racing. An adder stone, a subject of much magical study – could this be something to do with Salazar? The adder under his control, the language of snakes…it would all make sense. "I've never been to London," she said. "I haven't heard of this…"
"You said your mentor, the one who taught you some magic, was Saxon, didn't you?" Helena said. Matilde nodded. They had both set their quills down now. "Well, perhaps that's it," said Helena, with a strange smile playing across her face. "There's more than one way to cast a spell, and different folk learn it differently," said Helena, and she shot a strange, regretful look at her wand. "The Saxons may have lived in the islands for far longer than the Normans, but there are some older than them…" She looked at Matilde's furrowed brow, and continued, her quill set down upon the table. Outside, the scriptorium seemed to be a place of entirely silent work – Matilde was glad she was able to talk here, to learn more than just her letters and a little Latin. She had years at Hogwarts to learn that, after all. "My mother's people were in the islands many lifetimes before the Saxons, after all, and they have their own magic, old magic, the magic of the druids and of the land." Matilde nodded. In all of her study of magic with Edyth she had been more focused on the practicalities of spells and poultices than the history of magic, of who had first brought what spell to Britain. Henbane was for gutache, St John's wort was for a fever. Life was to be preserved, pain was to be banished. Those were the rules. Magic simply was, an unerringly true fact about the universe – there was no sense that it had come from somewhere.
"There are small adder stones all around us," Helena continued, barely slowing. "If you've ever found a stone with a hole worn through it, that's an adder stone, a small one."
"I think…" Matilde cast her memory back. "I think that the witch who taught me, Edyth… I think she might have had one." It was the first time she had spoken Edyth's name aloud for many weeks, since she had mentioned her at the first stop on her great journey North. It felt strange to finally speak of her again, to hear her name on Robert's tongue. "But I never saw her pick it up or use it for a spell, it was just there, in her house. She certainly never said anything about snakes…"
"That's how it can be with the old magic," said Helena. "We keep something because of its power, long after the nature of that power has been forgotten." Matilde was not quite convinced by her simple assessment – it seemed to her that Edyth, stooped and gnarled with years, was far more likely to remember old magic than either Helena or her mother. "But The Stone…" Helena continued, dabbing again at the ink smeared across her face, "The Grand Adder Stone stands underneath London, in a cave rich in arcane power, and it's huge, much taller than a man. Far too big to be picked up or moved, even by magic. I've never seen it, but mother says that it stands so tall that the hole is big enough for you to fit through if you crouched, though, of course, you wouldn't…" she trailed off, shaking her head as though in awe of the magic the stone could hold. "They say," she said, her voice taking on a conspiratorial note, "that when the Romans first came to Britain, they came because the Emperor of Rome's seers wished to study and understand the Great Adder Stone. And they say that when King Guillame claimed he had the right to the throne, it was because his advisors wanted the same thing…"
Helena stopped abruptly, and sat watching Matilde – she realised that the girl was monitoring her reaction, cautious she'd said too much. She smiled involuntarily – she was sure that the Baron and his party would feel otherwise, but she had not the least interest in defending the honour of her king. "You can say what you want about the Bastard here," she said, shrugging her shoulders. "I don't care why he came here, or if he's the true king, or who's telling him what. I just care that he dragged me along with him to Britain."
Helena gave her a nod of recognition, of thanks, but the slip of her tongue seemed to have drained all the energy from her. She picked her wand up, and seemed to be in imminent danger of looking at Matilde's scrawl and resuming the lesson. Matilde realised she had to lay her guesses on The Stone out before her to keep the conversation from moving on. "So the Adder Stone…" she said, and it had the desired attention: Helena's attention snapped back to her instantly. "What does it do? What would happen if you were to go through the hole? Would you…" she swallowed, aware that it might sound ridiculous as soon as she said it, "would you be able to speak to snakes? To command them?"
Helena stared at her. "To talk to snakes?" She said, looking at Matilde askance. "No, it's not called an adder stone because…" she shook her head slowly. "If you were to go through the stone, you'd never return, Robert. The Grand Adder Stone is the barrier between our world and the land of the spirits. Between life and death itself." She gave Matilde another long, considered look, and seemed to suddenly wake up as though from a trance. "Now," she said, "let us see how the writing of your name has gone…"
Matilde groaned internally, but try as she might, there was no more diverting of the conversation from matters of letters for the rest of the day.