It’s so close, though. The last gap in the web she’d been constructing all afternoon obstinately remained unfilled. Her fingers twitched against the leather cover of the book by her side, and in her mind she saw a well of twisting blue-and-green fragments, circling endlessly like water around a drain. She teased them out, delicately, feeling them squirm and wriggle against her mental grip as if they were alive. She saw one that might fit there, and the end of it would link the other piece, which fit here . . .

Her father had once brought her a jigsaw puzzle with a picture of three kittens sleeping. Alice had put it together in one afternoon, but she kept it intact on her bedroom table for a week, unable to think of anything else to do with the thing. She’d decided it was a fairly pointless amusement, and had never asked for another. Now she wished she had, for the practice; this was like doing a jigsaw puzzle without the picture on the box, with pieces that twisted and fought when you tried to put them down.

The last link snapped into place, and the whole structure shivered. Alice released her mental grasp, tentatively, and saw the lines of azure flame tremble like trees in a strong wind. After a moment, they settled down, and the structure held. It held!

Alice opened her eyes. She was sitting in a dark corner of the library, in between two tall piles of books. A hurricane lamp burned by her left knee, throwing long shadows. Across from her, Ending lay in the gloom, her cat-slitted yellow eyes glowing with interest.

Between them were three thick pieces of parchment. When Alice had started, they’d been blank. Now they were covered with words, the same almost-but-not-quite-comprehensible script she’d seen in her mind, printed neatly in ink instead of written in blue fire. She could feel the meaning inside them, not random and undirected like the scraps she’d found in the books but tuned, harnessed, humming with power. Just glancing at them almost brought the magic forth, and she hurriedly looked away and started folding the sheets over, hiding the words from view.

“I did it,” Alice said. The fatigue of a long day’s work melted away in her excitement. “It held!”

“It certainly seems so,” Ending rumbled. She yawned, and lantern light gleamed on her ivory fangs. “We’ll have to test it, of course.”

Excitement changed to frustration, all at once. The thing she’d constructed was a sort of trap for magical creatures, a set of wards that created a barrier that would contract until anything inside it was securely restrained. Ending had told her that creating this kind of magical trap was one of the simplest uses of Writing.