preces meæ non sunt dignæ

Isabella thinks it's time to start spreading the word. Before she ascends to Archangelhood. She'll have more work on her plate, then, and it will be easier if she can trust more people with the details of how she's carrying it out.

Alleluia should be the one to tell Delilah. But she's going to tell Serah herself.

"I have been thinking about telling your auntie Serah about magic-and-everything," Isabella says to Damaris one morning. Magic-and-everything has been a term unto itself; it encompasses the magic, and where it is from, and the nature of Jovah and Jane. "Do you want to be there when I do?"

liber scriptus proferetur

When Ariel is six, Isabella judges that she is ready to hear about Things, and sits her down.

She starts the same way she did with the elder girls:

"Have you noticed that your daddy and I seem to be able to do some things that other people can't?"

sed tu bonus fac benigne

One of the most awkward things about being the leader of the host is that Isabella has to issue assignments to people who are or have been in positions of authority over her. Delilah knows enough about what needs doing to keep herself occupied with useful errands when she isn't explicitly enjoying her retirement, but Rinnah is another story; she doesn't quite grasp that sometimes her daughter wants to talk to her for non-social reasons, might really just mean to talk to her to send her a hundred miles west and pray for rain.

This is how Rinnah winds up with the privilege of taking her eldest granddaughter on her first weather intercession.

(Rinnah was told about magic and worlds and Jovah a month prior, and absorbed all this information with admirable calmness, and proceeded to behave as though none of it makes a whit of difference - which Isabella has not prodded at, since of course this is optimal for secrecy.)

Rinnah knocks on Damaris's door, in her flying leathers, grinning from ear to ear.