“What was the spell you thought I’d come here to do?” I asked curiously.
“Oh,” said the spirit. “It’s a spell you can only do with the waters of the wishing well, to unlock your true potential. Only certain witches can do it. The ones with the potential to be great. When you walked into the clearing tonight, the moon shone behind you like a crown of bone, and the night streamed behind you like a cloak of shadows. I could see you were born to be a witch of legend.”
“Wow.” I coughed, trying to hide how pleased I was. “I don’t hear that every day.”
“You should,” murmured the spirit. “But I’m glad you found what you were looking for. If you’re sure that you did.”
A chill needle sliced through the warm clouds wrapping my mind. The hour was very late, I realized. Ambrose was waiting for me. I was scared that he’d worry. I scrambled to my feet, even though I wanted to stay and talk to the spirit a little longer. Maybe hear some more about the spell.
“I did.” I lingered another instant. “Thanks again. I wish I could repay you.”
The spirit of the wishing well nodded as she sat upon the bank, silver hair twisting about her like moonlit leaves in a wind I could not see. There was something forlorn about her shimmering, slender form. She seemed as sad to watch me go as I was to leave.
“If you want to repay me, come and see me again. It has been so long since mortals visited my well and made wishes for me to live upon. I am so lonely, and there are so many things I would like to say to you.”
I stopped in my room to change clothes and then carried the river flowers to my cousin’s door. I’d already decided not to tell him about the tumble into the stream, or the spirit of the wishing well. Ambrose would be upset if he knew I’d gotten in trouble because of where he sent me when he was helpless to go with me or protect me.
Ambrose always tried to play things off and keep the mood light, but every now and then he couldn’t help letting a sign of his frustrated fury slip through the façade. Trapping him in this house was as wrong as confining a tiger in a birdcage, and sometimes a predator’s eye gleamed through the bars.
Today he seemed glad to have something to do. He let me into his room with a whispered inquiry as to whether the two-headed monster had seen me come in with the goods. I said that was no way to talk about our aunts, and we grinned at each other, a pair of conspirators who knew we were probably going to get into trouble. That was half the fun.
Ambrose took the flowers and laid them out on the table where he’d prepared the rest of the materials for the spell: Harvey’s hair, the coltsfoot, a length of old rope, and a special candle. Ambrose snapped his fingers, and a flame leaped from the wick, not yellow and blue but black on black, as if a shadow of a flame was burning.
“They say if someone pure of heart lights this candle, the dead will rise,” Ambrose told me, his voice warm and eager. “Sorry, candle, not today.”
Necromancy was Ambrose’s pet subject. I watched him lean over the table, his dark eyes mirrors of the black flame, alight with magic and mischief.
“Have you ever been in love, Ambrose?” I asked. “Who was the lucky guy or girl?”
“Oh …” said Ambrose, “that’s a difficult question.”
“Is it a difficult question where the answer is yes or where the answer is no?”
Ambrose shrugged and gave me a fox-like grin.
“It’s tricky for witches to love. Perhaps we have harder hearts than mortals. Hard and cold as the highest stone wall, people say. Witches are well-known to be cold and fickle. Maybe it’s because we live for centuries, and mortals die so soon. Our hearts must be resilient, because they need to beat longer.”
He spoke lightly, but the words settled as heavily on my heart as stones. In the times of the witch trials, mortals used to “press” us witches for confessions. The pressing meant they would pile tablets of stone on a witch’s chest until the witch confessed her own sins and the names of other witches in her coven. One of the heroes of Salem, a warlock named Giles Corey, refused to give up his fellow witches. He died, his last words calling out for his mortal torturers to add more weight.
Right now, what I was doing and the thought of what was to come felt like stone tablets on my own chest, making it difficult to breathe. Was Ambrose saying that when I went through my dark baptism, I wouldn’t care so much for Harvey and my friends? Was he saying that he and my aunts didn’t care as much as I’d always thought—that they couldn’t care about me as much as I’d always believed they did?
I didn’t want to be crushed under any weight. But I didn’t want to be hard-hearted either.
Ambrose was merrily twining flowers through the length of rope. “I don’t want to talk about the past. I’d like to be in love in the future! I’d like love to come to me as a great and wonderful disaster. Failing that, I suppose it would be exciting to be captured at sea.”
I blinked. “I’ve never thought of love and piracy as similar things.”
I stared at my cousin and wondered how different what we felt was, and what we wanted. If I had a soft mortal heart in a witch’s breast, would the dark baptism crush or freeze it?
No. I knew witches could love. I had proof. My father had loved my mother so much that he married her, against all tradition and all law. Their love had been epic, world-changing, rule-breaking. I had always wanted a love just like theirs.
And ever since I was a little girl, in all my daydreams of storybook love, Harvey was my prince.
“I always thought I’d love to be a sexy pirate. Oh well, let’s get your love life in order before we address the tragic issue of mine. Knot this rope nine times as we say the words.” Ambrose winked as he handed me the rope. “Knot of nine, his heart is mine.”
I took the rope in my hands, feeling its rough surface scrape across my tender palms. I thought of the first time Harvey had held my hand, in that dark movie theater, and how our skin pressed together had felt electric.
Strangely the icy touch of the spirit’s hand, pulling me from a watery grave, came back to me, more like a shiver than a memory. It felt foreboding. The word last occurred to me again. Last chance to turn back, I thought.
I tied the first knot in the rope with one swift, decisive movement.
“Lavender’s blue, rosemary’s green; she will be loved as soon as seen,” I murmured.
“Omnia vincit amor, et nos cedamus amori,” Ambrose added, the Latin tripping so fast off his tongue I barely understood it, though I’d learned Latin at Aunt Zelda’s knee.
“Omnia vincit amor …” I repeated, stumbling on the words. I tied several more knots, trying to keep up in one way at least.
“Quos amor verus tenuit, tene—”
The black flame of the candle leaped, looming suddenly and terrifyingly large. Ambrose smiled in the same way, with leaping darkness. Like a wicked witch.
“Wait,” I said. “What was that?” I couldn’t hear the last words he’d said. Something about tenebris, or shadows, I thought.
My hands were still moving, on automatic. I tied the last knot of rope twined with rosemary, lavender, and the flowers from the river that had cost me so dearly. The rope felt warm suddenly in my hands, as if it were a living thing.