Magic Lessons (Practical Magic) - Alice Hoffman Page 0,123

but was even more intrigued with Rebecca’s runic spells that bordered on dark magic. In a few weeks’ time, she was delighted when her mother presented her with a book of her own. She saw the rules of magic that must never be forgotten written on the very first page.

Do as you will, but harm no one.

What you give will be returned to you threefold.

The lines on Faith’s left hand had changed so radically they were unrecognizable; the red splotch that had appeared was still there, and sometimes it burned. She dyed her hair with madder root, which turned it a blood-red color. In truth, she didn’t care for rules of any sort; rules made little sense to a person who had grown up in a world without compassion or pity, where there was no moral code by which to abide. The rules that applied to the Nameless Art seemed childish. What she desired most of all was to find a Grimoire of the dark arts. She wanted protection and revenge, all that she might have used to defend herself when she was made to wear iron bracelets and pretend she was a perfect child; magic without rules, dark and deep and endless. Some people grow weak when they are victimized, others grow stronger, and still others combine those two attributes to become dangerous, even if the person in question is a girl who has recently turned twelve.

* * *

Faith soon grew accustomed to Manhattan and came to know the markets quite well. She regularly visited bookstalls to search through old piles of water-stained manuscripts. She would know the text she needed when she found it. It would feel like a nest of bees when she touched it, swarming and alive, ready to do damage once it belonged to her. Keeper followed at her heels, clearly disapproving of her mission. He growled at the booksellers and at those searching through the stacks. Occasionally, Faith was asked to leave a stall and take her hellhound with her. She began to leave him at home when she went searching, though the poor beast clawed at the door and howled, startling the birds in the branches of the Tree of Heaven.

And then one morning, in a bookstall on the outskirts of the Fly Market, among piles of ruined and rotted manuscripts, Faith found a handwritten treatise of the Dark Arts, a Grimoire that should have been burned on the day of its author’s death, but had managed to escape the fire. It was called the The Book of the Raven, dated 1600, London. The prose was written on thin pages of vellum in alternating red and black inks, then bound in black calfskin that had been tied together with knotted black thread. When Faith set her ear to the spine, she could hear it humming as the book came alive.

The Grimoire’s mysterious author was a woman with a huge range of knowledge, writing in both Italian and English. She’d been born in Venice and had become a member of the court of England; she knew more than most educated men about politics and falconry and music and myth. The author maintained that she was a poet, which was thought to be impossible for a woman, yet her claim was true enough. She had been the first woman to publish a volume of poems, a text that had gone largely unrecognized, not due to the quality of the work, but to the particularity of the sex of the writer. On the first page of her Grimoire was a quote from a man who many claimed had written love songs of admiration and desire for her, celebrating her strengths.

In the old age, black was not counted fair, Or if it were, it bore not beauty’s name.

The author of The Book of the Raven was dark in every way, not a traditional English beauty, but a beauty all the same. There was no cure for the sort of passion her admirers felt for her. It was an illness, a devastation, and, often, a crime. Those who desired her wondered if their love was natural, or if it had been induced by the use of magical incantations.

Love’s fire heats water, water cools not love.

The author of this Grimoire knew more about love than most, for at thirteen she’d been given over to a lord of the court who was three times her age. She looked at love with a cold, clear eye and a heart that was