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some attempt to bury anything that remained.
    All that was left were a few small scattered pieces of metal, as though everything else had melted away with the snow. Even the swing was gone.
    I stood there for a time looking out over the brown, muddy landscape around me. It was so ugly and so full of promise.
    I turned and headed for home.
     
    ∞ ¥ ∞ Ω ∞ ¥ ∞  
     
     

By Blood and Incantation by Lisa L Hannett & Angela Slatter

    T he cunning woman heats salted water, carefully stirring in clumps of bee propolis. Spoonfuls of honey. Rosemary sap. Aloe dew. Sweet-scented steam rises from the surface, softening the ever-dark wrinkles in her cheeks. She skirts the round hearth to gather ingredients, heels scuffling and scraping with each step. Old injuries, these, but persistent. When the woman was much younger, much less cunning, she could sprint. She could give frantic chase. Fast as a hare across her yard, fast fast down to the bog. She could splash in night-mud up to the thighs. She could dig in the mire, getting right down into the grime. Splashing, scooping, sobbing, searching. She could hobble herself on half-sunken blades, corroded silver, jagged bones. Ancestral offerings, once flashing in late afternoon sun, now glinting through the murk, so shiny and tempting. So dangerous underfoot.  
    She doesn’t go far now. Doesn’t flee the yard curving around her cottage, doesn’t breach the hedge encircling the lot. She doesn’t hare, or dash, or delve anywhere near the life-sucking wet. Instead, she spends her days tending circles. Bog, briar, yard. Cottage, hearth, wooden washtub. Circles within circles within circles. She keeps them intact, protected. Keeps herself, slump-shouldered Brona, at their centre. Forever staying put.
    People come to see her, never vice-versa. She won’t leave — and why should she? Her life, past and future, is here. She has all she needs. More: she has what they need. Herbs and remedies, blood and incantations. She never asks for payments. She will, however, accept gifts. Things left beside the hedge, close enough to the gate to accommodate her limp. Cupboards filled with food and other, useful, supplies. A log-pile always stacked. Ice chipped from the well in winter. Some gifts, though, should be greater than others. Warm-bodied thanks from grateful husbands, for instance — but this not so often now as before.  
    The men are younger than they once were. They are bashful. Reluctant. Their noses wrinkle at the threshold of her cottage, smelling something off.
    The stink of years, Brona supposes. Loneliness. Desperation.
    She doesn’t force matters. She will exchange favours with whoever comes knocking, and will take no more than her due — knowing that service and offering must be commensurate in value.
    “ Leeches,” she’d said, earlier this evening, to the maids who’d appeared on her doorstep. Two freckle-faced women, neither cunning. Steeped in the same stench that shoos potential lovers away. “Plucked from the deepest heart of the Grumnamagh — nowhere else. Bring as many as your legs can carry.”
    The pair had wanted to grumble, to negotiate — to debate! Brona had seen complaints in the slit of their gazes. But they’d taken the jars she’d forced on them, did as they were bid. A favour for a favour.
    None would survive in the village, the cunning woman knows, if it wasn’t for her.
    If it wasn’t for her, the bogs would be full.
    Her gait assumes its usual cadence as she circumnavigates the fire. A few logs cupped in the packed-dirt floor, nestled deep. The cottage’s pulsing heart, a blackened pot bubbling above its embers. She pads her hands with old linens, unhooks the cauldron. As always, it thuds to the ground between her mangled feet, much too heavy to carry when full. Grunting, she drags it behind her, over to the washtub discreetly kept behind a hazelrood screen.
    Dried muck covers everything back here. Timber, tub and skin alike are stained a