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behind the outhouse, and two more in her huge and mysterious garden. I shouldn’t be here, I thought. I should speak to John Temsland first. But even as I turned to go, Soor Lily opened the door.
    “Come in, Keturah,” she said, half bowing. Her manner was unsurprised, as if she had been expecting me.
    “You know my name?” I asked. We had never spoken to each other before.
    “Everyone is speaking of you today, and not in quiet voices. But before, I knew you for your beauty.” She spoke in a soft, watery voice. “ ‘Twas no fairies you saw in the wood, Keturah,” she said, and I felt glad that she did not believe it.
    Soor Lily had been well named. Her walk was measured so that she seemed to float like an autumn lily in a pond. Her clothes she wore in layers like petals, and no one could tell if she was fat or thin. Her skin was pale and waxy, her expression unreadable.
    The furniture in her home was of large proportions. Great chairs made of rough-hewn logs and a table almost as big and heavy as Lord Temsland’s were set before a gigantic fireplace. Soor Lily’s pots, the size of cauldrons, hung from the ceiling, along with nets of bulbs and bunches of drying herbs. A great wooden closet stood against the wall opposite the fireplace, its carved doors discreetly closed. It was all very tidy and clean, and there was no evidence that Soor Lily was a witch.
    Though she was.
    She sat me in one of the great, solid chairs. In it, my feet did not quite touch the ground, though I was as tall as any woman. I listened for sounds of her big sons, but all was quiet.
    She curtseyed a little and then laid out two cups. She wore her hair unbound. “Have some tea. You must be tired from your long walk. So tired. Here is tea. Here, here, my beauty... So nice to know there is someone in the parish more vilified than I.”
    Her voice was a chant, soothing and gentle and throaty.
    “I don’t believe in love potions,” I said stoutly, refusing to touch the tea.
    “No, no, you don’t, ” she said quietly, reassuringly. She put warm scones before me, each the size of a pie plate. She hovered around me, at once diffident and attentive, like a bird brooding over her chick, lightly touching my shoulder, my back, my arm. Finally she sat at the table beside me and looked at me as if she were hungry and my eyeballs were just what she had been craving.
    “I don’t believe in sorcery, and I don’t believe in love sorcery most of all,” I said, though the defiance in my voice had lost its edge.
    “No, not at all,” she said. She brushed all the words from the air with her long, spider-leg fingers. “Not at all, my dear, my heart.” Her words disappeared into breathy nothingness, as if from moment to moment she forgot what she was saying.
    I thought I would stand and leave, now, now, but I did not, for I could hear the wind in the forest around me.
    “Is it true?” I whispered at last. “Is it true that you can make a charm that would show me my true love?”
    “Oh yes, it is true,” she said with sad resignation. “True love. Mmm—the highest of magics.”
    “I will have it,” I said, sounding braver than I felt.
    “You will have it,” she said, nodding to herself.
    I waited some time, looking at her, but she did not look at me. She studied the fire as if waiting for a phoenix to rise out of the flames.
    “Well?” I said at last.
    She glanced at me, cleared her throat, and went back to studying the fire.
    “Soor Lily, I said I would have it.”
    She turned glittering eyes upon me, and I could have sworn they had become as hard as amber. “Yes. Yes, you would have it,” she said low, almost in a whisper. “But there is the small matter of the price.”
    Ah, the price. The price was why people feared Soor Lily, for it was not always money she asked for. “I am poor,” I said. “You know I am poor.”
    “Poor, poor,” she said sympathetically, but there was no sympathy in her face. She studied the fire again. At