His frown turned into a half-hearted smile. “No—it’s just that pomegranates always make me think of hell.”
She choked back a startled laugh. “What?”
“The myth of Persephone and Hades.”
Her lack of recognition must have been clearly written on her face, for he said: “Hades, lord of the underworld, falls in love with Persephone, daughter of the harvest goddess. He skips the step of courting her and simply drags her down to the underworld with him.”
A bit like some employers she knew.
“Zeus eventually steps in to make him send her back, but Hades gives Persephone a handful of pomegranate pips as she goes.” He poured the squashed remains of his pips through the strainer she’d set up over the glass jar. “You see,if you eat or drink while in the underworld, you are doomed to spend eternity there, goddess or no.”
She could feel goose bumps rising on her arms, never mind that it was a myth. “Did she know?”
“I never got that impression.”
“What a rotten trick.”
“Mm.” Blackwell plucked out more pips. “She ate the tempting gift, as you might expect, and must spend every winter with her captor. Forever.”
Beatrix added her juice to the mix. “Funny how I no longer feel any desire to give this fruit a try.”
“Most wizards feel the same way, actually. Pomegranate pips are paired with a fairly dark spell to make contracts binding. Appropriately enough.”
Her curiosity was well and truly piqued. “How does that work? Do you eat while casting?”
“That, Miss Harper, is classified.” The forbidding manner in which he said this was ruined by the quirk of his lips when he finished.
“Could you at least tell me why leaves are so critical to spellwork? I’ve wondered for years.”
“That’s no secret, though I suppose you get precious few opportunities for the answer in Ellicott Mills,” he said. “They’re the equivalent of kindling. No kindling, no fire.”
“Well, yes, I’d figured as much, but—leaves? Not the same flair as eye of newt.”
“You could use a newt, actually, but there’s something off-putting about a small animal expiring in your hands,” he muttered, crushing the pips rather harder than necessary.
“It’s a sacrifice.” She frowned. “I’d never thought of it like that before.”
“Magic requires living fuel. If they’re magically preserved immediately after they’re picked, leaves work at least as well as a small animal, not to mention they’re eminently more portable and less grisly to use.”
She slowly added her juice, eyeing up the measurement lines on the jar. “I think that’s all we need.”
He glanced at the manual before leaning over until he was eye-level with the beaker. “A bit too much, actually. Brewing demands an exactness most exercises in cooking don’t.”
He fetched a shot glass from one of the cabinets and tipped in a tiny amount, the equivalent of a few pips’ worth of juice. Then he added what he’d just finished crushing. “Care to try the hell fruit?”
“Hah! No.”
“That binding spell works only on magic-users, you know. I’m wounded by this distressing lack of trust.”
Though his grin made clear he was joking, she gave serious consideration to what he’d said. She didn’t trust him completely, it was true. But up to a certain point—yes.
She took the glass from his hand and drank, the liquid sweet on her tongue.
He glanced away, then down at the table, as if he didn’t know where to look. Something about her gesture had unsettled him, or perhaps it was just simple surprise.
She swallowed and winced. The fruit had a bitter aftertaste.
Without comment, he cast a spell on the juice in the beaker, unwrapped the dried willow bark and set a handful on each side of the table. Then he asked, “You read the section about Anglo-Saxon units of measurement?”
