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“Her age doesn’t change anything at all!”
    “Very well, then. We should get started.”
    “What, exactly, are we starting to do?”
    David stood straighter. When he spoke, he used his “minister” tone, a deep, rumbling register that he saved for the most basic levels of my instruction. I imagined that this voice was the one he would use with preschoolers if he ever explained the ABCs, or with beginning library students when he set out the finer points of the Library of Congress classification scheme. Not that he ever taught anyone but me. Not that I knew about, anyway.
    “This meeting with Teresa Alison Sidney is really just an introduction. She won’t test you this time. You just have to offer up a suitable greeting.”
    “So, I need to learn the proper witchy handshake? Or is this more of a curtsy sort of thing?”
    He swallowed as if bitter wormwood coated his tongue. “Actually, the curtsy isn’t a bad analogy.” He took a moment to study me, starting at the crown of my head and not stopping until he’d reached my toes. My toes, in their grungy sneakers. My toes that had not seen a pedicure in too many months to count. I tried to curl my feet under the front edge of the sofa. “This will be your introduction to magical society. Your coming-out party, if you will.”
    I laughed. “So, I’m going to wear a white dress and get someone to pile my hair on top of my head? I’m going to have to scare up an escort?”
    “You’ve already got one of those.” He settled his right hand over his heart, as if he were about to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
    “You’re kidding.”
    “I only wish that I was.” Again, with that head-to-toe survey. “The Coven takes these things very seriously. I’m not nearly as concerned about what you’ll wear, though, as I am about what you’ll bring.”
    “Bring?”
    “It’s customary for a new witch to offer a gift to the leader of her Coven.”
    “And I’m guessing that a plate of Melissa’s Peach Melba Tartlets won’t get the job done.”
    “Hardly.” David looked around the room. “You have to offer up something unique to you. Something that expresses your true nature.”
    It wasn’t difficult to follow his logic.
    “One of my books.”
    He nodded. “And you’ll have to bind it up in magic.”
    “Gift wrap won’t do? Even if I make a pretty bow and smother it in curling ribbon?”
    He pursed his lips as he shook his head, and I knew that I was just asking questions to tweak him. To tweak him, and to smother the sudden pang of loss that I felt at the notion that someone—anyone—would get to keep one of my spell books. The books I’d discovered in the cottage basement when I’d moved in last year. How could I feel so possessive about things that I didn’t even know existed a year ago?
    I further delayed choosing one of my darlings for banishment by asking, “And what exactly do you mean by binding it up in magic?”
    “Each witch presents things in different ways, ways unique to her powers and her temperament. If the element of Air spoke to you, for instance, you might surround your book in a miniature storm. You’d temper the winds, so that they could keep the book safe, and you’d train them so that they let one specific person—Teresa Alison Sidney—gain access.”
    It was my turn to purse my lips. I was hardly an expert on Air. In the past year, I’d harnessed it for a handful of spells, but it didn’t sing to my powers; it didn’t speak to me in any meaningful way. Just the same, I couldn’t imagine weaving a magical box out of Water—not after my repeated failures with the kitchen-cleaning spell. And I was getting nowhere near Fire. Not with one of my precious books.
    Even as I thought of all the magic that I couldn’t work, that I wouldn’t work, an idea took hold in my mind. I spun it about for a moment, testing it mentally, poking and prodding to see if I was an idiot, or merely an idealist. When I still didn’t see any