Page 3 of Magic Lessons

Whereas Hannah’s Grimoire had vellum pages and a wooden cover, the book she fashioned for Maria was a true prize, a magical object in and of itself. It was made of real paper, dearly bought from a printer in the village. The cover was black and bumpy and cool to the touch, unmistakably supernatural in nature, made of a most unusual material. Cadin had led her to the shallows of a nearby pond where she found a large toad floating on the calm surface, already cold and lifeless when Hannah knelt to hold it in her hands. For those who were uneducated, toads were full of evil magic, and witches were said to transform themselves into toads if need be. This toad’s fate would be to guard a treasure trove of cures and remedies.

As Hannah walked home in the fading dark, the toad’s skin sparked with light. This made it clear that a Grimoire formed from this creature would have its own power, and would give strength to the written enchantments it bore. Any spell would be twice as potent. Hannah prepared the leather that very night, secretly, and with great skill, salting the skin before stretching it on a wooden rack. Overnight the toad-leather grew twice as large as it had been, taking on the form of a square, which signified the mystical shape of the heart, combining the human and the divine, and representing the four elements: fire, earth, air, and water. It was an omen of power and heartbreak and love.

When presented with the book, on Midsummer Night in the year she turned ten, Maria cried hot tears, the first time she could recall doing so, for although witches are said to be unable to cry, rare occasions cause them to do so. Maria was swept up by raw emotion and gratitude, and from that day forward she cried when she was flooded by her responses, burning her own skin with her dark, salty tears. Never in her life had anything truly belonged to her and her alone. She marked this day forever after as the day of her birth, for it was, indeed, the formation of the woman she would become. Her fate was tied to this book as if her future had been written with indelible ink. On the first page were the rules of magic, ones Hannah declared they were obliged to follow.

Do as you will, but harm no one.

What you give will be returned to you threefold.

From then on, each day was a lesson, with more and more to study, for it seemed there might not be time for all that Maria must learn. Hannah had begun to hear the clatter of the deathwatch beetle inside the house, the dreaded creature whose sound echoed in times of plague and famine and illness, predicting the end of a life. One could never be sure whose life was in peril, but on this occasion Hannah knew. After finding a small neat hole in the wall beside her bed, set there from the creature’s burrowing, Hannah held up a burning twig to smoke out the beetle with yellow sulfurous fumes, but it did no good. If anything, the clicking grew louder, deafening at times, for there was no way to prevent a death that has already been cast, as every man and woman who walks the earth is bound to know when their own time comes.

Perhaps the girl had foreseen Hannah’s death before Hannah herself had, for Maria worked harder than ever, studying by lamplight, doing her best to ascertain if a curse could be reversed and a death unmade. At ten she was old enough to be aware of the unkind ways of the world. She’d heard the stories Hannah’s clients told, and had seen those who were too ill to be saved by any means. She knew that life and death walked hand in hand and understood when Hannah confided that a Grimoire must be handed down to a blood relative or destroyed upon the owner’s death. Magic was dangerous if set in the wrong hands. At the hour of her adoptive mother’s death, Maria must burn her book even before she accompanied Hannah’s body to the burying ground.

She had begun her own book, with Hannah’s lessons taking up the early pages, and these would always remain a treasure. Maria wrote carefully, with curving, near-perfect script, using ink made of the bark of hawthorn and oak trees and the ashy bones of doves she had found strewn in the grass. Maria made a bond with doves, as she had all birds, and much later in her life, she would be grateful she had done so.

For Love

Boil yarrow into a tea, prick the third finger of your hand, add three drops of blood, and give to your beloved.

Never cut parsley with a knife if you are in love or bad luck will come your way.

Salt tossed on the fire for seven days will bring an errant lover home.

Charms for wandering husbands: feather, hair, blood, bone.

Prick a candle with a pin. When the flame burns down to the pin, your true love will arrive.

To win the favor of Venus in all matters of love gather a white garment, a dove, a circle, a star, the seventh day, the seventh month, the seven stars.

To study love with an expert is a great gift, and yet Maria wondered why, with access to so much power and magic, Hannah had spent her own life alone, without love.

“What makes you think I have?” Hannah didn’t look the girl in the eye when she spoke, perhaps for fear of what the sight would allow Maria to intuit, things that were best kept private. There are secrets that must be held close, and most of these have to do with the wounding of the human heart, for sorrow spoken aloud is sorrow lived through twice.

All the same, Maria didn’t let her questions go unanswered, and now she was even more curious. “Haven’t you? I’ve seen no man come near.”

“Did you think I had no life before you came along?”

This notion only caused Maria’s interest to pique. She pondered that statement, her mouth pursed, deep in thought. Contemplating her own personal history, she had begun to wonder who she’d been before she was left in Devotion Field on a snowy day. Who had given her life and loved her, only to have left her in the care of a crow? Did she resemble her mother or her father, for surely every individual who was born must have parents. She noticed then that Hannah’s eyes were damp, and not because of the sun’s glare. That was when she knew the truth about Hannah.

“You did know love,” Maria declared, quite convinced. She didn’t just presume such a thing, as much as she read it in the air, as if Hannah’s past was made up of letters set into a book and that book was the world they walked through.

They were deep in the forest where Hannah was schooling Maria on how to hide should the need arise. Ever since the days of the witch-finders, it had been necessary to plan an escape at all times. Birds lived in such a manner, settling into the thickets so deeply and with such complete silence not even a fox could spy them.

Hannah gave the girl a sharp look. “You’re not invisible if you talk.”

Maria crouched beneath the junipers, barely breathing, not far from the place where she’d first been found. She knew the value of silence. Cadin was perched in the branch above her, equally quiet. Perhaps he had the sight as well, as familiars are said to do. He had not spent a single night away from Maria from the time he’d found her in the field, and Maria always wore the blackened silver hairpin the crow had brought her as a special gift. Sometimes she imagined the pin in a woman’s long red hair; perhaps it was a vision of the original owner. Whatever its history, the hairpin was her most valued possession, and would be all her life, even when she was half a world away from these woods.

“Bring me something wonderful,” she always whispered to Cadin when he set off on a flight, and she patted the feathers of her beloved thief. “Just don’t be caught.”

On the day of invisibility, he went off when they were finished hiding, winging across the field. It was very warm and the leaves on the willows were unfolding in a haze of soft yellow-green color. The ground was marshy all around them and ferns covered the heathland. On the way back to the cottage Hannah said, “You’re right.” She looked straight ahead as she spoke, but she had an open expression on her face, as if she were young again. She was remembering something she had done her best to forget.

Maria hurried to keep up with her. “Am I?”

Being told she was right was a rare treat, for Hannah believed that character was built when it was assumed that a child was most often wrong and still had much to learn.

“He was a man like any other, an earl’s servant who had seven years to work off his debt. That is what poor men must do, and I didn’t fault him for it. I was willing to wait, for a year is only as long as you let it be, but then I was arrested. They said I used my skill at writing to send letters to the devil and that I had a tail and that all men were in danger when I walked by, not because I was beautiful, I wasn’t, even I knew that, but because I could cause their blood to boil or go ice cold. I suppose they made it worth his while to turn against me, for after my trial was over, he was a free man with coins in his purse. He was the one who said I had a tail, and that he’d chopped it off himself so that I might appear to be a woman rather than a witch. He gave them the tail of a shrew and vowed it was mine, and if a fool is believed then those who believe him are even bigger fools.”

Maria thought over this new information. “So that is love?”