Stitched spellbook with eye and banner flash

You will not believe what Master Oswin has had me doing since the frost came in. He has been mending the old grimoire at the back of the tower, the one bound in calfskin and sewn shut along every seam, and I have been holding the lamp while he works. The book has an eye set into its front board, a brass-rimmed thing that opens when he speaks the incantations and shuts again slowly, like a cat deciding whether you are worth the trouble. Yesterday it opened on me and stayed open. Master Oswin sighed and said, "Ah. It has taken a fancy to you."

Then the trouble started. The knotted cord on its spine, which he swears is the binding that keeps the pages from wandering, began to fray at one end, and he sent me down to the cellar for the blue wax. I came back to find him standing very still with a quill in one hand and his spectacles in the other. He had written the word Hocus across the top of a blank page, and the ink beneath it was wriggling about as though it could not decide what it wanted to become.

I told him it was all just a bunch of nonsense, which is what the Chancellor says whenever the tower asks for more coal. Master Oswin laughed, rather rudely I thought, and said, "Then say the other half, child, and let us see whether the nonsense minds." So I did. The eye blinked, the stitches along the cover pulled tight as drawstrings, and the cord untied itself with a sound like a sigh. The spine is mended. Master Oswin says I am to be his assistant now, which means I am also the one who says the words.

Your loving sister, Wenna