in the iron bedstead by the banked fire, blanketed by a half dozen purring cats. Pap had been her adoptive father for twenty years and Lost Pine’s charm maker for twice that, and all of those years had been filled with hard work. Since fever took his eyesight last summer, the work that had been Pap’s livelihood—gathering plants, compounding salves, charming buildings, reading fortunes—had fallen to Emily. She was glad to do it.
She went to the table where items were collected in a willow basket: brushes and pots of milk paint, sticks of charcoal and a platter-size slab of white oak. The oak had been edged and planed by Dag Hansen, the most prosperous lumberman in Lost Pine, who had commissioned a protective hex plaque for the topmost eave of his big new timber shed. Taking the basket, she stole quietly from the cabin.
Her foot was on the threshold when a vivid flash of rust-red caught her eye. A robin, the first of spring, flew from where it had been perched on the sill of the small front window. She watched it vanish into the top of a blue spruce.
A robin on the windowsill—an omen of true love. That seemed encouraging. But less so the question it begged: true love for whom?
Not you. The robin’s call drifted down from the spruce’s crown. Not you.
Tucking the basket under her arm, Emily walked quickly, as if she could outrun the sound. But it followed her, high and piercing:
Not you.
On a grassy swale overlooking the main road from Dutch Flat to Lost Pine, where the rapidly rising sun was bright and hot in the cloudless sky, Emily set herself down to work.
She laid the slab of oak on her lap and looked at it for a long time. It showed the signs of Dag Hansen’s strong, industrious hands. He was a good man. A good, kind, trusting man.
He’d make a wonderful husband.
She opened the pots of milk paint. Reaching into the silk pouch she wore around her neck, she took out the little bag of ashes. She put a generous pinch into each pot.
Then she dipped a horsehair brush into the yellow and began dabbing carefully at the oak, muttering rhyming incantations as she laid the bright color onto the wood. She focused her intentions, concentrating on prosperity and happiness, goodwill and success, love and (Heaven help her) fertility.
She focused closely on her work, so deeply engrossed that when an echoing “Hey there” came up from the road, she almost knocked over the pot of red. Shading her eyes with a paint-stained hand, she noticed how high the sun had climbed.
“Hey, Em Edwards!”
On the road, a pair of heavy bays stood in front of a stout buckboard. It was Mr. Orta, the delivery agent for the Wells, Fargo & Company express office in Dutch Flat. She waved, set her work aside, and hurried down, glad to stretch her stiff legs.
“I thought it was you,” he said, pushing his cap back. “What are you up to?”
“I’m painting a hex for Dag Hansen’s new shed.” Emily was aware of a high, tense note in her voice. For goodness’ sake, it sounded like she was confessing to a shooting! She licked her lips and continued. “They’re putting it up this afternoon.”
“Folks say he’ll have the narrow-gauge track laid into Dutch Flat before summer, and you folks won’t have to wait for me to haul deliveries up to you.” He gave her a sly look. “I suppose there’ll be a dance later?”
“I suppose,” Emily said, not wanting to talk about Dag and dancing. She craned her neck to see what Mr. Orta had in his buckboard. Two huge crates, half covered with canvas.
“Who are those for?” She pointed.
“Curiosity killed the cat,” he chuckled. “But I guess it can’t do no harm to a sturdy young Witch like you. One’s for that easterner, that fellow Stanton. The other’s a bunch of separate deliveries from Baugh’s Patent Magicks—an order in it for almost everyone up here, it seems.”
Emily looked at the crates more closely. Sure enough, one was marked with the distinctive blue logo of Baugh’s Patent Magicks—a saucy genie rising out of a bottle in a cloud of smoke.
A whole crate of Baugh’s. Emily felt like spitting in the dust.
“I don’t suppose I could talk you into dumping that crate into a ditch and pretending it never came?” Emily gave Mr. Orta a winsome, slightly desperate smile.
Mr. Orta chuckled awkwardly. They were, after all, joking about her livelihood.