Life has been blessedly quiet after the nightshade episode. School is back and the new little coven has been introduced to a few other witches in the area as potential apprentices. There’s no way I could take all of them on, I barely cope with Sarah and Ben.

Even sour-sauce Emma has a mentor in the form of our local Medium. Apparently the ‘interesting’ the nightshade saw in her is some sort of ability to connect with spirits and the like. I’d be worried but both Agnetha (the medium), and Sarah say she’s a different girl, easier to be around and eager to learn everything about her newly found skill.

Since today is Saturday, I’ll have Sarah’s company in the afternoon, after her football match, and we’ll be making a fresh batch of healing balm. Or rather she will be. It’ll be her first time creating a magic-infused brew from scratch and this isn’t my easiest recipe. What it is, is quick. She’ll get a result in a single session, rather making the base, then having to wait for a full moon or three red sunsets.

I was clearing away lunch when she knocked on my driveway-side door.

She was jiggling like she needed the loo when I opened the door and pointing to the sky over my house. “Double rainbow!”

I joined her outside and looked up. She was right. Two rainbows, as vivid and perfect as you please, in a perfect arc over my home and garden.

I ushered her inside. It’s hard to tell whether a double rainbow, especially one paying such close and specific attention to a small area of land, is a good or bad sign. Better to be inside either way.

Sarah had other ideas, racing through the house, and out onto the garden terrace. “We need to harvest the warding herbs.”

“What?”

She turned, all but dancing on the spot with impatience. “Bella’s Dad found her grandma’s spell book and Bella says there was a spell in there that made wards, and if you used herbs harvested under a double rainbow, they’d hold even through Halloween!”

Well now, that’s news. Maybe Barbados gets more double rainbows than we do, for someone to be able to make that deduction. It was worth a try, and the healing balm wasn’t urgent. It was mainly for Ben anyhow, he’s growing so fast, he’s having trouble adjusting and is constantly bumping, scraping and tripping.

Sarah messaged Bella, who replied with the list of plants to harvest, then arrived – through the garden-side gate – half an hour later, a slightly confused father in tow. He mucked in on the harvest readily enough, and Bella kindly handed me her grandmother’s book to read over afternoon tea.

The recipe created, for want of a better explanation, beeswax-based crayons. Infused with the warding power of about ten different herbs, I could see why it would be so strong. Rather than simply splashing a potion about, you could double the effect by drawing protection runes on whatever you wanted to serve as a barrier.

Bella finished sorting through our harvest. “We’ve got almost everything. I just don’t understand the bit about sentient beeswax. How can wax be sentient? And if it was, would it want to be melted? Can we just use normal beeswax? I’m pretty sure we can get some from the craft shop in town.”

I grinned. “We could. Or we could use the wax I gathered and cleaned a couple of days ago from my resident hive of sentient bees.”

And that is why I’ll be supervising two apprentices in the morning, as all three of us learn the ins and outs of both a new warding recipe, and crayon-making.

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