“Is this what love does?” Maria wished to know.

“That’s not the name I’d give it,” Hannah responded.

“Is it so different than your man, who claimed you had a tail?”

“Perhaps not, but at least he was a coward and never set his hands on me.”

In the morning, after a quiet night of sleep, their visitor was in better spirits. Hannah crafted an amulet of apple seeds. She then added mandrake, the heart of all love potions, first mentioned as such in Genesis, referred to as Circe’s plant by the Greeks. The roots of this plant grow in the shape of human limbs, combining the aspect of a dragon and a man. It was so powerful that some refused to pick it themselves, and instead attached the plant to a rope wound around a dog’s neck, so that the dog would be party to the mandrake’s wrath when it was pulled from the earth, for the plant screamed when it was taken, its roots torn from the comfort of the soil in which it grew. Rebecca admitted she had cast a spell on her husband years earlier. She had bound him to her, bewitching him with the Tenth Love Potion, a spell far too dangerous for common use.

Wrap a red candle on which his name and yours is written on red paper, soak in dove’s blood and burn through the night. Saying the words:

Love conquers all, so it must be. Let him burn with love for me.

My lover’s heart will feel this pin, and his devotion I will win.

There’ll be no way for him to rest or sleep, until he comes to me to speak.

Only when he loves me best, will he find peace and with peace rest.

The incantation must be recited while stabbing a dove’s heart with seven pins on the seventh day of the week. For the use of the Tenth, an enchantment too strong for the usual manner of dissolving spells, Rebecca had paid a steep price. She could not undo the magic she had called onto herself, though she had tried for more than ten years. To change what she had wrought, Rebecca needed help from another woman, one who was adept at magic and could reverse the spell entirely. Hannah was that person, a master at the Nameless Art. After she made the charm, she wrote Rebecca’s name and her bewitched husband’s name on a white candle coated with myrrh oil. She then had Rebecca say: “I burn this candle as a token of the spell that binds our love. Let this magic now be broken by the gods above.”