She sat Anna down at the table with four pieces of good, thick paper folded in half and stitched together at the crease, a little jar of ink, and a goose-quill pen—and her own all-important book. “Copy down th’ fust receipt,” she ordered. “Don’ use more paper than I used in my book.”

For a moment Anna felt paralyzed. There could be no making mistakes with this good paper and ink. Every letter would have to be perfect. I kin do this, she told herself over and over, but it was a long, long time before she got the courage to dip the quill in the ink, carefully drain off the excess, and write the first letter. With her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth and her brows furrowed with concentration, she dipped and wrote, dipped and wrote, until she had filled the entire page. She had no idea what the words were that she had just written, because she had been so concerned about copying them correctly, but she looked up from her task with triumph when she had finished.

“Done!” she exclaimed, and her aunt left her work at the sink to come look it over.

“Done, an’ done well,” Aunt Jinny agreed. “Now, what’s it say?”

“One part chamomile,” she read, stumbling over the name of the herb. “One part lavender. One part purple coneflower. One part lemon balm. Steep a tablespoon in bilin’ water fer as long as it takes t’ say Psalm 100, strain, an’ drink. Good for gen’ral ills, coughs, an’ bad sleep.”

“Thet’s the tea we been drinkin’,” her aunt told her. “Gen’rally good for whatever liddle troubles y’all got, an’ tastes good too. Now le’s go make it up.”

Her aunt made her look at the samples of fresh herb, gathered from the garden that morning, then the dry, then crumble the dry in her fingers and taste and smell it, until they were both sure she would know what they were in any form. Then she made up the batches of tea, first with her aunt, then alone.

She looked up from the last task to find Aunt Jinny smiling with approval. It was the first smile she had seen on her aunt’s face since she had arrived here, and she found herself blushing with pride.

“Y’all got th’ touch,” Aunt Jinny said. “Le’s put these up.”

Together they portioned out generous amounts to be enclosed in the packets Anna had seen the potions packaged in before—round, unstructured pouches made of woven grass. When the pouch was packed full, all the loose grass stems at the top were gathered into a bunch, and tied up, and Aunt Jinny finished by tying a tiny spig of chamomile and lavender to each packet to identify it. “I weaves these in winter,” she said, pulling one off the stack to her left and filling it with the tea. “When I runs out, I gotta use scrap cloth, an’ people don’ seem ter like that as much. With y’all here, I likely won’t run out anymore.”