part, but the kink in her magic still prevented her from all-out spellcasting. Incantations tasted like dust in her mouth. And though she’d been able to maintain a trance state the night before, she suspected she might be suffering from a form of psychic cataracts that clouded parts of her shadow vision. How else to explain the inability to identify the cause of the melancholia in the roots?
Her magic was unsteady, but perhaps the weakness was like a strained muscle and she just needed to get moving again. Or maybe it was like a hand falling asleep and she’d feel a prickling pain take over once the magic rushed back in. Hadn’t she felt a small jolt of . . . something . . . when the wishing string caught fire and the mortal agreed to let her stay despite his prejudices, sealing it with his hand pressed to hers?
That man. A cloud of privilege had risen off him like morning fog the moment she’d confronted him in the field. He was a peculiar one. City raised and book fed, intelligent and generous, yes, and yet malnourished when it came to a belief in the profound. He’d been taught to believe in only what he could see, feel, hear, taste, or smell. There was a time she wondered what it was like to live with such confinement of spirit, until she found herself held captive inside another creature’s skin.
Was that what it was like to be a mortal?
An unexpected pang of sympathy for the man crept up on her as she wiggled her toes inside her soft slippers—well, with the one notable exception. Though Old Fox had nearly eaten her alive, she was glad for the physical reminder of what she’d endured. The ache kept the fire of revenge burning, stoking the hard coal of hatred that smoldered day and night within her. And for that she would hide her magic from the mortal and let him continue believing the world he saw was the world he lived in.
A page in the spell book rippled softly, as if disturbed by a breeze. “Yes?” she asked, and the words “strand of wolf’s mane” shimmered on the page in iridescent green ink. “Ah, of course. Clever book. You found it.”
She sorted through the upper shelf to locate the woolly stuff. If dipped in sheep’s oil and twisted with a braid of cotton to form the wick of a candle, the smoke from the flame would repel the miasma that had been allowed to creep in over the fields each night. The Toussaints from the Alden River valley had used that particular spell on Château Renard before to stifle growth. Grand-Mère should have been able to counter the jinx on her own, but the old woman must truly have lost her edge to let the damaging fog linger over the property for so long. For humans, old age stole their hearing, their sight, or their mind. But when Nature was unkind, witches lost their intuition.
Not finding the wolf’s fur stored with the jars of teeth and claws where she’d expected, she searched through the drawer until she located a paper envelope labeled “Hair, Tails, and Whiskers.” She found the necessary strands inside but was curious to see what else Grand-Mère may have misplaced. Half a dozen envelopes were stacked inside the drawer. One contained dried owl pellets, another the tail feather of a nighthawk, and one held a pressed primrose, sealed between wax paper. All useful for adding to various potions, but not kept where she preferred to store them. She removed the remaining envelopes from the drawer to see what other mysteries they held, when a stray slip of paper fell out from between them onto the worktable.
More potent than anything she’d yet handled, her fingers trembled as she picked up the faded and brittle scrap of paper. On it was an ink-drawn illustration, a stately house centered under a bold font that read “Domaine du Monde,” the wine label for Bastien’s premier red, the wine she’d helped coax into existence for him just before she was ambushed.
She’d felt the yank on her conscience to confront him the moment she returned to the valley. Even now she had to grip the edge of the table to keep from running down the road and throwing a curse-bearing brick through his front window. Time and patience, she reminded herself. Revenge allowed to ferment would carry the most power. But as she stared at the