“Feeling kind of useless.” Bran and Siaka are doing things with bottles and plants and instruments while I sit here like a lump. Now, with the ice broken, I don’t feel quite as awkward around Siaka. It’s nice to hang out with someone my age for once, even if Bran’s here with us.

“Take this.” Siaka hands me what looks like an ancient manuscript. Words are handwritten in cryptic letters on a page of stretched animal skin. It feels as though it could fall apart if I breathe the wrong way. The mildew odor suggests it was buried underground for eons and only recently dug up.

“It’s seventeenth century,” Bran comments.

“I can smell that.”

Siaka laughs. “We received it last week from a Flame-finger family near Stonehenge.”

I scan the weird calligraphy, attempting to decipher the words. “Um, my English is pretty good, but I’m not sure I understand monk-speak or whatever this is.”

“Give it a try,” Siaka encourages.

I tip the parchment toward the light. “‘Thou shalt take a mortar and pestle made of the finest granite dug from the dark depths of the earth.’ I glance up. ‘What the...?”

“That would be these,” says Siaka, holding up a stone bowl and one of those crushing-sticks like you see in the windows of old-timey pharmacies. Mortar and pestle? I think that’s what they’re called.

“Did you dig these from the dark depths of the earth?” I ask, trying to look serious.

He laughs. “Someone must have.”

“Okay, then.” I continue to read. “Thou shalt crush ten leaves of the moleweed plant, harvested under the beams of a full moon with scissors crafted from the finest silver.”

“Check,” says Bran, counting out ten of the leaves.

“Wait a minute. Did you seriously harvest those with silver scissors under a full moon?”

“Yes,” Bran says. “That’s why I was out all night last Wednesday.”

“Where do you even find silver scissors?”

“They’re antiques. I have two sets upstairs for sale,” he says.

“Are you guys actually following all of these crazy mystical rules scribbled down by ancient medicine men?” I ask.

“We haven’t changed our techniques much in the last millennium,” says Siaka, cracking a smile. “So, you’re basically talking to two medicine men who follow crazy mystical rules on a regular basis.”

“Oops.” I’m embarrassed but also kind of in awe. There’s so much more to Bran and Siaka than meets the eye.

“To be honest,” Siaka says, “we’re following every rule, however weird it sounds. Who knows, maybe silver has a chemical effect on moleweed? And farmers have been planting and harvesting their crops based on phases of the moon for millennia. Now they just make it sound hip by calling it ‘biodynamic.’ There’s so much we still don’t understand about science. So, if our ancestors stumbled upon something that worked, we replicate their instructions to the letter.”