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.