They work in silence for a moment before Siaka catches my eye. “Even so, if the formula succeeds, I’ll test it again with easier-to-find objects, like regular pruning shears from a garden shop ... see if we get the same results. The simpler we make the formulas, the easier it’ll be for our kindred to recreate them wherever they are in the world.”

I’m feeling pretty intimidated by how much Siaka already knows at eighteen years of age. But I’m distracted from that thought when Bran drops the leaves into the bowl and Siaka starts crushing them, and I can’t stop watching the movement of his bicep as he grinds the leaves.

He looks up, as though he’s sensed me watching.

“Um...cool?” I say, which sounds majorly stupid after his whole cultural history speech.

He raises an eyebrow.

“What?” I ask, all deer-in-headlights.

“What comes next?” he prompts.

“Oh! Yeah.” I pick the manuscript up. Bran’s fooling around with some bottles over a sink, so he doesn’t witness me blushing. Again.

“When the leaves of the moleweed plant are crushed into the finest of powder, thou shalt sprinkle it with forty tears wept by a revenant and mix into a thick paste.” I jerk my head up. “Wait a minute...the tears of a revenant?”

Siaka puts down the crusher and digs through his backpack. He pulls out a vial of clear liquid and hands it to Bran.

“What the...?” I begin. “That can’t be.”

“It can,” Bran replies, pouring the liquid into the bowl.

“Where in the world did you get that many tears from a revenant?”

“Charlotte volunteered her husband for the task,” Siaka says.

I stare at him.

“Sad movies,” he says, shrugging. “Ambrose is a sucker for them. I showed him Titanic followed by The Notebook. By the time we got through Old Yeller, he was ugly crying and I got two test tubes worth, so we have a back stock.” Siaka says this totally straight-faced, but when he looks up at me from the bowl, we both start laughing.

Even Bran chuckles. “Stop it!” he scolds. “I’m measuring.”

Half an hour later we’ve added “the milk of a goat who has birthed three kids” (which necessitated Bran visiting several local farmers) and “crushed marble from a widow’s tombstone.” They heated the concoction over “an open flame” and poured it into a “vial made of glass blown by a daughter of Eve.”

“I bought the vial from Claire, the glassblower living in the artist colony inland from my house,” Bran explains. Fitting the top carefully over the glass tube, he says, “We’ll give this to Arthur once he’s awake.”

“Arthur?” I ask.

“He offered to be the guinea pig for this particular experiment.” Bran takes off his apron and hangs it on a peg.