“What’s in your potion?” She leans against a fluted column crowned by carved stone leaves and tries to appear disinterested. She’s sure the man is a liar. Her heartbeat quickens anyway.
He launches eagerly into his speech. “I have crafted this tincture personally from a recipe that was handed down from my great-great-great-grandmother. She used it to protect her family from the unearthly happenings in her village long ago. Tell me, have you heard about the power of iron?”
Beatrix rolls her eyes. Every house in Lancaut had a horseshoe over its door, even hers. Especially hers. “I’m aware.”
“Excellent! That is the first ingredient: three iron horseshoes, forged on Midsummer Eve.”
She brushes her thumb along the smooth edge of the narrow band that sits on her left hand. It’s nothing like the ring it replaced. It has no oak leaves or acorns engraved on the outside, no Latin inscription on the inside, no sentiment attached to it at all except maybe resentment. She’s sure the smith thought her mad, to ask for an iron ring in exchange for her gold one. He weighed her wedding band in his hand, convinced she was trying to cheat him. He clamped it between his teeth, scrutinized it in the bright morning light with squinting eyes until he was satisfied she wasn’t a crook, only an idiot.
She shoves her hand in her pocket. Horseshoes and iron have proven useless to her, the stuff of old wives’ tales. She turns her attention back to the walk and her potential marks.
The man continues. “Then I soak them in the southerly flow of the River Wye and filter the infusion under the light of a full moon.”
Beatrix tenses, as if she’s bracing for a blow. “The Wye?”
The man smiles at her, oily and gap-toothed, sure he’s caught her now. “Ah, yes, I have traveled far and wide in my efforts.”
She turns back to him. “Where on the Wye?”
He waves a bony hand, dismissing the question like a bothersome fly. “It doesn’t matter. All of it is equally potent.”
“But—”
The man pushes on. “I then add Saint-John’s-wort and yarrow flowers that have been carefully harvested from hallowed ground by the nuns of a nearby abbey.”
“Tintern?”
He continues, louder than before. “And last, but not least, I add a single petal of the rarest of flowers, one that will only bloom where a faerie has breathed their last.”
He pauses, waits for Beatrix to be suitably impressed and hand over her money.
She frowns. Iron and southerly flowing water, Saint-John’s-wort and yarrow flowers, are no cure. Neither are blessings, offerings, or walking any which way around churches of every shape and size and denomination.
The man holds the bottle out to her. The green glass shines almost black in the shadows of the alcove. “What say you, my dear?”
Beatrix has never heard of a flower that only blooms where a faerie has died. Has never heard of a faerie dying at all. He probably made it up, along with every word about the Wye and the abbey. But somewhere inside her, hope has already sparked, has already set her heart racing. “The flower you collected, you say a faerie died where it grew?”
“Indeed,” the man says gravely.
Beatrix steps closer. The rest of his audience has gone, filtered away now that she is in his grasp. He stinks of smoke and sweat. “How?”
“That, I do not know,” he says. “I have never witnessed it.”
She knew it was too good to be true, but she can’t let the idea go. That is the problem with hope. You cling to it like a raft in a storm, never realizing it is the thing that is drowning you. “Then how did you discover the flower?”
“An inordinate amount of luck,” the man replies. She hates how patronizing he sounds. “And my great-great-great-grandmother’s sketches.”
He has an answer for everything, just not the one Beatrix is searching for. “How does a faerie die?” she presses. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
The man sneers at her. “I’m certain there are lots of thingsyouhave never heard of.”
His words glance off her. She has been called far worse than ignorant. “What about Lancaut? Do you know it?” Had he collected his water from the same bank where she used to stare at her reflection? Did the nuns from the abbey she was condemned to enter collect his herbs? Was she the unearthly thing his family needed protection from?
The man shakes his head.
“That’s all right. No one does.” But his words have planted a seed that has already taken root, twisting through her thoughts like a noxious vine. When Beatrix closes her eyes, she sees Lancaut just as it was the night she fled it. But time changes things. Takes things. Takes everything, in the end. Her parents and her sisters, William and their daughter—everyone is buried in the walled cemetery around St. James’s. It has never occurred to her that St. James’s might be gone, too.
The man’s voice softens, and so does his expression. “My poor dear, I can see you are most concerned about the welfare of your soul. I notice you even wear a ring of protection. But if your ring was warding offthe evils of the world, you wouldn’t be here.” He says it like he’s solved some great riddle. In truth, there is only one reason Beatrix still wears the useless ring.
