Page 20 of A Lady’s Guide to Witchcraft

In the end, a traveling peddler had offered a magical cure in exchange for one kiss from the beautiful Petal.

Their mother, desperate, had agreed.

Instead, Briar had offered him a cup of tea laced with vervain, and when he slumped in the hall, snoring loudly, she had stolen the charm from his pocket. She had replaced it with jack-in-the-pulpit flowers, with a whisper that they remember their witching name: fillet of fenny snake. The peddler had woken with his pockets full of garden snakes and run from the cottage. Petal, finally awake, had watched him from her bedroom window.

He never returned to Haven after that.

The thorns on all of the rosebushes sharpened as the memory made Briar’s fists clench. The smell of wet flowers hung thick as veils. The rain added another layer of sound, of distraction to the eye. The little pink cottage sat gently in a moat of blossoms, harmless as a teacake.

She could do this.

She had to do this.

She hurried through the back door, snagging a cane from an umbrella basket. Another knock sounded, loud, imperious. A summons. There was no time to dry her hair or change her muddy dress. She would use as much of the truth as possible.

And she would go on the offense before they could.

They would not expect it from her, a witch who ran a tearoom that used to specialize in love spells. Another weapon in her arsenal, however small. Small charms, small magics. Sometimes they were more effective than the flashier, more powerful ones, the witch bottles the Order used to steal and trap a witch’s familiar, the binding spells of jet and bone. The iron collar soaked in seawater.

Sometimes.