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.”