The Pictish Child by Jane Yolen

Och—yes, I have her name. The auld dears told me. It will make the spell all that much tighter, and she’ll nae remember a thing after. I have always been good at knotwork. In fact, anything to do with yarn. Even before I kenned about the Craft, as we call witchery here in Scotland.” She spoke with a casualness that belied the wickedness she was doing. “And then I discovered that the black arts have a use for it, the yarn skill. To call a wind, to send a flux, to take someone into yer power.”
    Jennifer stared at Fiona with growing horror. The young woman looked so normal, so nice as she fiddled with Molly’s curls. Yet what she was really doing was so wicked. Jennifer shuddered. Then she glanced at the shawl over Gran’s shoulders, with its tasseled fringes tied in intricate knots.
    What was it Gran said about elfknots? Then Jennifer had it: Their power depended on the magic-maker’s intentions.
    Well, she knew Fiona’s intentions, all right—and they weren’t good. The knots on the shawl over Gran’s shoulders had sapped her of her natural power. Jennifer thought that if she could just somehow get over and pull the shawl off of Gran, then Gran could battle Fiona for them all.
    Slowly Jennifer sat up.
    But Fiona saw the movement and turned. “Dinna try me,” she said, lifting one finger from her work. She had already tied the second elfknot and was beginning the third. “Dinna think to try me. Ye Americans—ye have nae power.”
    That was when Jennifer remembered Gran’s voice clearly saying, Scots have power, but Americans have …
    She hoped it would work. She knew herself untrained in magic; indeed, she hadn’t even believed in magic before they’d come to Scotland and battled Michael Scot. Still—she had to try. There was no one else. The old ladies and Gran were caught by the magic shawls, Peter and Molly frozen by the ice cream, Ninia stunned by all that had happened. It was really up to Jennifer now.
    She moved the hand that held the three-pronged plug, held it in front of her like a weapon, and pointed it at Fiona.
    â€œNo power, maybe,” Jennifer said, “but we do have electricity!”
    Focusing entirely on the hand holding the plug, Jennifer made herself think of electrons rising up inside her. My hand is a conduit , she thought. I am a conductor. She raised her hand for a magical downbeat.
    And suddenly arcing through her body was a surge of electric power that ran down her arm and into the cord. She could feel it, like a great tingling sensation all over. Then the electricity leaped out of the plug in three separate shining strands, to strike right at the center of the silver scissors lying on Fiona’s breast.
    The shock hit Fiona with such power she was knocked backward across the room and bang up against the wall. Falling to the floor in a heap, she lay without moving.
    â€œOut like a light,” Jennifer said, trying to stand but suddenly so weak she could not get up off her knees. “An electric light!” She giggled, not out of amusement but out of pure relief.
    The dog came galloping back into the room. “Did it work?” he cried. “Did it work? I remembered the elfknots on the lampshades. So I scampered out of here and knocked them over and chewed through as many as I could … Ye should see the auld dears moving aboot in there. They have much of their auld energy back.”
    â€œAnd maybe,” Jennifer added, “their power.” All she wanted to do was to sleep. But they had no time for that, so instead she pointed to where Fiona lay on the floor.
    The dog loped over to the fallen Fiona. He sniffed her head to toe, then back again, and looked up. “What’s this? What’s this? Nae the knots, then?”
    Jennifer stood slowly and went over to the table. She lifted the shawl from Gran’s shoulders and felt a rush of foreign power under her