Chapter 3

3

I walked back to Lightkeep Cottage, my worries weighing me down like sandbags I had to mentally drag along with me. I’d gone to Xiomara’s Cafe hoping for answers, but I only seemed to come away with more questions.

I found myself longing for my life back in Portland. Not Portland itself, or our familiar neighborhood, or the safety and familiarity of my school and my friends and the theater, although I missed all of that, too. No, it was the simplicity of it all—the mundane predictability of our day-to-day existence. I’d woken each day with a baseline sense of security that had been torn to shreds since my arrival here. I’d taken it all for granted—the safety, the banality of it all. And even for the things I worried about, it wasn’t anything like the worries I carried around with me now. At this point, I’d have felt relieved to fret about a science test or wonder whether a technical rehearsal would go off without too many hitches. It was almost like I’d been missing out on my real life all along, and now that I’d found it, all the troubles that had piled up in my absence were threatening to bury me all at once.

But then Lightkeep Cottage came into view, nestled against the winding seaside road, as natural in its place as the waving marsh grass and the cliffs and the rolling crash of the ocean. A deep sense of calm washed over me; and I was comforted by the knowledge that, whatever I might have to face, here I was. Despite it all, I was home for the first time in a long time. Lightkeep Cottage was my port in the storm, however new and frightening that storm may be.

I knew from the moment I opened the door that Rhi was at work in the kitchen. The aromas drifting through the house were enough to make my mouth water, despite the huge lunch I’d just eaten. I followed my nose to find her in her natural state: covered in flour and elbow-deep in ingredients.

“Hey, there! How was everything over at the cafe?” she asked, looking up and smudging more flour across her cheek with the back of her hand.

“Fine,” I said, because neither of us was emotionally prepared for the real answer. “Xiomara sent this.” I handed her a bag that clinked and clanked as she took it.

“Ah, excellent. I’ve been meaning to ask her to restock her Florida Waters,” Rhi said, rummaging her hand through the bottles with a satisfied expression. Then she looked up, her expression almost hurt. “Is that all?”

I grinned. “Nope.” And I handed her a paper bag heaped with take-out containers. “It was Cuban sandwich day.”

Rhi groaned with anticipation as she took the bag. “Even more excellent!”

I didn’t reply, only patting my stomach to indicate I shared her enthusiasm. “What are you working on?” I asked, gesturing to her work surface.

“I was testing out some new cookie stamps I’ve made using sigils. I thought we could all use some calming influence, so I’m planning to fill the cookie jar.”

The word “sigil” tickled the back of my brain, and I tried to remember what I’d read about the word, but my mind came up blank. “Can you… remind me what a sigil is?” I asked, smiling a little sheepishly.

“Don’t worry, working with sigils is still a bit advanced for you, but the basics are simple enough to explain. Come here, I’ll show you,” Rhi said, pointing to the sink in an unspoken command to wash my hands. When I had done that, she patted the stool beside her. I sat, and she handed me a rolling pin. “You roll, I’ll explain.”

I saluted like a diligent soldier, and then began to work the dough into a flattened circle as she spoke.

“I’m sure you’re already sick of me going on about intentions, but it’s foundational to your magic, so get used to it. A sigil is a way to represent an intention in the form of a symbol. The way it works, essentially, is to create a statement of intention, remove the vowels and the repeated letters, and then arrange the remaining letters into an abstract symbol.”

I smiled down at the dough I was rolling. “That sounds a little like how my friend Poe and I used to create a secret code to pass messages to each other that no one else would understand.”

Rhi threw back her head and laughed her throaty laugh. “That’s not a bad analogy. There is certainly some element of secrecy with sigil creation—or at least, some element of wanting to protect oneself. As you know, we witches couldn’t always practice so openly, and so practices like sigils were integral to our continued spellwork.”

“That makes sense. But how do sigils and baking go together?” I asked.

“Well, I created my sigils by carving them into these wooden disks. As you can see, they’re basically cookie cutters, except they will not only cut the shape of the cookie, but press the sigil itself into the dough, like this.” And she picked up a small wooden disk from her work surface, and pressed it into the dough I’d just flattened. When she lifted it, there was a complex design stamped into the surface of the cookie —a strange, lopsided collection of curves and slashes that made no sense I could understand.

“But… what’s the point? Someone will just eat it,” I pointed out.

“That is the point,” Rhi said, smiling again. “There are many ways to charge a sigil so that it is powerful, and one of those ways is to destroy it.”

“Destroy it? Seriously? What good would that do?” I asked, confused.

Rhi pursed her lips for a moment as she considered how to answer. Finally, she said, “Wren, let me ask you a question. Let’s say I was casting a hex on you, and I wrote your name on a piece of paper and then rolled it up and lit it on fire.”

I felt my eyes go wide, my mouth fall open. The words had sent an absolute jolt of fear right down my spine. Then Rhi slapped her hand down on the floured surface, scaring the shit out of me with the sound, and sending a cloud of flour into the air around us.

“You see? Now, why did you react that way? That was a visceral reaction!”

“I…I…” My stammering went on as I tried to analyze what felt like an automatic reaction that any non-witch would have had. “I’m not really sure,” I admitted after a moment’s pause. “I suppose it’s just… well, my name represents me, and so the idea of someone lighting…me… on fire feels like an attack. Something meant to hurt or destroy me.”

“That’s right! If my intention was to hurt you, that seems like a pretty powerful, symbolic thing to do.”

I looked down at the cookie in front of me, wary. “I’m suddenly thinking I might not want to be the one to taste-test these cookies,” I said.

Rhi chuckled. “I was just trying to illustrate a point. Destroying something can be powerful in magic, but it’s not always a negative thing.”

“Oh, okay,” I said, the last of the confusion clearing away. “I guess that makes sense.”

“Now, back to that idea of lighting your name on fire. Let’s take it a step further. Destruction is not the only purpose of fire, is it?” Rhi countered, seeming to really enjoy herself now, the way an expert lights up like a Christmas tree when their subject of expertise comes up in general conversation. “Can’t you also cleanse things with fire? Can’t you warm them? Light their path forward?”

I suddenly felt completely wrong-footed. “Oh, I… yeah, I guess that’s true.”

“My point,” Rhi said, “is that you can use the destruction of the sigil to enact its intent, even if the intent is a positive one. Fire is one way to do it—the process of baking is nearly that, but as long as my dough recipe is effective in holding the cookie’s shape, the sigil will not be destroyed. In fact, it will have gained in strength during the baking process.” Rhi reached over onto the cooling rack and plucked an already-baked cookie from among its fellows. She held it up and showed me that the design from the sigil disc was still perfectly preserved in the surface of the cookie. She leaned toward me and lowered her voice. “But can you guess how I intend for these sigils to be destroyed so that the sigil reaches its maximum power?”

“How?” I whispered, almost breathless.

“Like this,” Rhi said, and crammed the entire cookie in her mouth, chewing in a loud, exaggerated way.

I burst out laughing and she joined me for a moment before having to stop so she could prevent herself from choking on a mouthful of half-chewed cookie. When we’d both gotten a handle on ourselves, she handed me a cookie with a more serious expression.

“The intention of the sigil, and therefore, the cookie, is to achieve a state of calm,” Rhi said, “but without alerting the eater to the fact they’ve been influenced by the cookie. How did I do?”

I examined the cookie for a moment and then bit into it. Nothing very immediate happened. I took a second bite, waiting for something to take effect; but again, I felt no change. I took the final bite, chewed carefully, and swallowed. Nothing.

I turned to Rhi, unsure whether I should lie or hurt her feelings, and not really wanting to do either, but she held up a finger. “Wait for it,” she whispered.

And not a full second later, a wave of absolute contentment washed over me, leaving me with an almost floaty feeling in my head. I shook it, and like the whirl of flakes in a snow globe, the feeling began to spread and settle downward. I felt my shoulders drop, my knees soften. I felt the tension I was holding in my jaw suddenly ease. All of it was subtle and natural, but it made an enormous difference in how I felt.

“Wow,” I said, and found I could grin quite easily.

But Rhi shook her head. “‘Wow’ is not exactly constructive criticism, Wren,” she said, sounding a bit flustered. “I need something a little more descriptive than that!”

I tried to dig down under the surface of my newfound contentment to find my real thoughts. “I… well, it works. I definitely feel relaxed. Kind of… lighter, too. Like I’d had a lot of things weighing my thoughts down before, but now they’re gone.”

Rhi brightened at once. “Oh, I see! Okay, that’s helpful!” she chirped, and bent at once over a leatherbound book beside her, where she began to write feverishly. “Anything else?” she asked, as she finished her scribbling and eagerly looked up to meet my gaze again.

“Uh…” I felt the pressure of her expectation, but I tried not to let it bother me too much. I focused on what I’d just experienced and hit on something worth mentioning. “When the feeling first hits…” I began.

Rhi leaned toward me, practically giddy with expectation. “Yes?”

“Well… it comes on kind of strong, sort of like the whole intention hit me in the face at once, instead of creeping up on me slowly. Relaxation doesn’t just hit you that way. It takes time.”

Rhi was nodding vigorously as she dropped her gaze to the book and muttered, “…less… chamomile…” Then she set her pen down and grinned. “That’s very helpful feedback.”

“What’s that book?” I asked. At first, I’d mistaken it for a cookbook, but once Rhi had started writing in it, I realized that the pages were actually blank except for Rhi’s minuscule handwriting and some rough, hand-drawn sketches of some plants.

“Oh, this is my kitchen grimoire,” Rhi said. “My working version, at least.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean, I’ve gone through at least a dozen of these volumes over the years. Someday, I’ll sift through it all to find the winners and compile them all into one volume,” she clarified.

“No, I mean…” I swallowed, feeling that shame that can only come from asking for an answer you know you’re already supposed to have. “I mean, what was that word you said: grimoire ? What does that mean?”

Luckily, Rhi didn’t scoff at my ignorance. “It means a witch’s book of spells,” she said with a little shrug. “It’s as simple as that. An individual witch will often work on her own grimoire throughout her life as she experiments and grows in her craft. After all, spells and recipes are a helpful jumping-off point, but all magic requires some personalization.”

“Does every witch have her own?” I asked as, with a sudden stab of panic, I pictured my own grimoire, completely blank inside except for a series of increasingly messy and frantic question marks.

“Not at all,” Rhi said, and her knowing smile made me think I hadn’t masked my panic very well. “Many covens have a family grimoire that belongs to the whole, and they all work out of it. Some of them are very old, compiled by generations of witches, each adding her own spells and advice.

“Does our coven have one?” I asked. It still felt so weird to say “coven” in reference to my family, the word awkward as it stumbled off my tongue.

“We do,” Rhi said, and reached into a cabinet behind her to pull down a heavy, leatherbound book. She placed it on the counter between us, brushing some flour out of the way as she did so. “You can see the more recent spells and entries are all in Asteria’s handwriting, and before that my aunts, my grandmother, my great-grandmother.”

“Wow,” I said. “How old is it? It looks like it’s in pretty good shape,” I said.

Rhi smiled. “This one is only about a hundred years old.”

“Only?”

“It’s not the original Vesper Coven grimoire,” Rhi said. “Family legend says that the original grimoire, the one brought to Sedgwick Cove by the First Daughters, was lost in the battle with the Darkness. It was said to contain some of the most powerful magic ever set to paper, magic the First Daughters would not even dare to perform.”

“Lost how? What happened to it?” I asked.

Rhi dropped her voice to a spooky whisper. “No one knows. It’s a mystery.” Then she grinned. “Personally, I doubt it ever existed.”

“Why?”

“Well, in the first place, it would have been madness to keep such a book back then. If it fell into the wrong hands, it would have been conclusive proof of our magic, and we would have been burned at the stake. And secondly, it seems like the kind of legend our foremothers would have perpetuated to bolster our magical reputation. No one would mess with us if we could truly perform the kind of magic that grimoire is said to have contained.”

I nodded. “I guess that makes sense. But don’t you ever wonder what?—”

“Rhi? Persi?”

My mom’s voice, coming from the direction of the living room, sounded sharp with anxiety. She came around the corner and stopped short at the sight of me.

“Oh! Wren! I didn’t realize you were back, honey. I was just about to text you.”

“Why? What’s up?” I asked.

“If you’re looking for Persi, she’s still over at Shadowkeep,” Rhi said, as she replaced the grimoire in the kitchen cabinet.

“We’ll have to pick her up on the way. What are these, anyway?”

“A new recipe for sigil work. It’s supposed to produce a calming effect,” Rhi said, handing my mom a cookie. We watched in surprise as she crammed it whole into her mouth.

“Um, mom?” I said, suddenly wary. “Pick Persi up on the way to where?”

“Might as well bring that whole batch, Rhi. We’re gonna need them,” my mom said, before turning to me to answer my question. “We’re going to the Manor. We’ve been summoned.”

And she made another cookie disappear in a single, slightly manic bite.