Time passed, moving in its cyclical way, but a cycle so vast it can give one the impression of forward movement, of progression. Berthe grew older and her folks grew frailer and died in quick succession. She tended to them in their ailing days as best she could, but her thoughts were constantly elsewhere; on honing the skills the Master continued to teach her nightly, on learning to sustain her awareness for longer periods while disincarnated, on caring and keeping safe the blacksmith’s nail (which she now kept inside a mangled wooden pulpit, which she’d rescued when the local chapel had been struck by lightning and burned to charred ruins), and finally on doing her utmost to avoid the Abban boy and his kin at all cost.

Her nocturnal lessons with the Master advanced. He taught her not only how to travel, but also the vital properties of certain rare and toxic plants, which, once she inherited the farmhouse outright, Berthe dutifully planted and tended in the root cellar. She built a tidy little box-garden and filled it with deadly flora. One of her greatest pleasures became to survey the oleander, the starry mountain laurels, the regal purple blooms of monkshood, the plump baneberries, the full trumpets of datura that seemed ready to burst into song, and of course the fine and sacred belladonna.

Though grown and tended in their own unique beds, each plant maintained a hidden connection with its bedfellows. Berthe somehow simply knew this to be so. Joined like threads in a spider’s web, together these toxic blooms formed a veil, formed the veil that distinguished one plane of being from another. And when the time was apt, this veil might lift for her. But for now, discretion was key.

Since the day he’d discovered Berthe in the stables, the Abban boy had grown increasingly obsessed with her. In the beginning this addiction had taken the form of clumsy flirtations, but when Berthe refused his advances the Abban boy grew embittered, spiteful. Rumours of witchcraft soon after began to circulate through the village, which forced Berthe to become intensely cautious, even during her most innocuous comings and goings. She kept her implements (nail, diary, ruined pulpit) secreted in a storage hatch above her father’s old desk, removing them only under cover of darkness.