Celestine Nightshade knelt in the Maple Crypt garden and pressed her palm to the soil. It was cold tonight. The first time she walked this ground, the earth had warmed under her feet, and she took that as the land choosing her. She had come back every moon since to prove the land right. She wanted Shadowmoss to bloom here, the herb that could stop a heart or start one again, the herb no witch had grown past a seedling. Tonight she meant to seed the first bed. Tonight the soil felt like any other dirt. She knew why. Her grimoire was gone. Someone had lifted it from her cottage three days back, and without its moon-pages she had no focus to pull lunar light into the beds. She had tracked the thief as far as the ridge and lost the trail in rain. She could feel the book out there, still shut. Whoever took it was afraid to open it. That was the only mercy she had. Celestine set out what she did have. A row of small glass jars. A packet of Shadowmoss seed wrapped in waxed cloth. Her turquoise skirts pooled in the dirt. She spoke the binding words her mother had taught her and lifted her hands to the moon. The light slid past her fingers and scattered. The seed in her palm stayed dull. She tried again. Nothing held. A soft weight landed on the fence post beside her. A young owl, no bigger than her two hands, silver feathers catching the moon like frost on glass. It watched her with one wet blue eye. She had seen it twice before at the edge of the garden. Now it hopped down into the bed and dropped something from its beak into the loose soil at her knee. A wand. Slim, wood-shafted, crowned with a crescent of pale metal and a pink stone at the throat. Filigree ran the length of the handle. She knew the make. It had been her grandmother's, buried with her, and gone from the crypt for forty years. Celestine lifted it. The crescent warmed against her thumb. She raised the wand and spoke the binding words again. The moonlight bent this time. It ran down the shaft, pooled in the stone, and poured into the bed in a thin silver line. The seed in her other hand pulsed once, like a small held breath. She pressed it into the dirt. The soil closed over it warm. The owl did not fly off. It settled on the fence post and watched the bed. Celestine looked from the wand to the bird to the dark trees past the garden wall. Someone had put this wand in the owl's beak. Someone who knew what she needed, and knew where her grandmother was buried, and knew she was here tonight. She wrapped her hand tighter around the shaft and stood.

Celestine held the wand and watched the silver owl on the fence post. The seed was in the ground. The soil was warm. None of that was hers. Someone had put the wand in the bird's beak and pointed it at her garden. Until she knew who, every bloom in this bed would carry their fingerprint. She could not enchant a garden shaped by a stranger's hand. She had to name her benefactor tonight. She fetched her cauldron from the garden shed and set it on the flat stone by the bed. She filled it from the rain barrel, struck a small fire under it, and dropped in three things: a silver feather the owl had shed on the post, a pinch of the warm soil where the seed lay, and a hair from her own head. The water climbed to a boil and threw off pink and blue steam. A tracking brew. Her mother's recipe. It would show the face of whoever had touched all three. The steam gathered above the rim and thinned into a shape. Not a face. A tree. Dark trunk, wide crown, flowers in every color, small lights moving in the branches like fireflies. Celestine knew the tree. It stood a mile past the ridge, in a clearing her grandmother had called the grove. Her family had planted it. Her family had been buried under it. The steam held the image for three breaths and broke apart. A small black cat stepped out of the hedge and sat at the edge of the stone. Pink eyes, a collar that caught the moon. It looked at the cauldron, then at Celestine, then back toward the ridge. It had not been in the garden a moment ago. Celestine crouched and held out her hand. The cat pressed its head into her palm once and walked three steps toward the gate. It stopped. It waited. She understood. The brew had named a place, not a person. The cat had come to lead her the rest of the way. She pulled the seed packet from the dirt and tucked it inside her jacket. She left the cauldron cooling on the stone. The silver owl lifted from the post and flew low over the wall, headed for the ridge. The cat followed. Celestine followed the cat, wand in her fist. She had wanted a name. She had gotten a trail. Whoever was shaping her garden lived under her grandmother's tree, and she meant to stand in front of them before the moon set.

The cat led Celestine over the ridge and down into the grove. The silver owl swept ahead and settled on a low branch of the tree at the center. Celestine knew the tree from the tracking steam. Dark trunk, wide crown, flowers in every color, small lights drifting through the leaves. Her family's tree. At its base, propped against the roots, lay her stolen grimoire. It was closed. The clasp was still shut. She stopped ten steps out. She held the wand low, not raised, not lowered. If she pointed it wrong, whoever waited under this tree could take it from her, and the seedling in her bed would die by morning. She spoke first. "I came for a name." The air beside the trunk thickened. A woman rose out of the roots the way steam rises off water. She was tall and thin, with dark auburn hair and purple eyes. She had Celestine's face, only older, and she was clearly dead. The ghost held up her open hands to show them empty. "I called the book to me," she said. "The book called you. I needed you here, and I could not walk to your gate." She looked at the wand. "That was mine once. Before it was your grandmother's." Celestine's grip eased, but only a little. "You planted the seed." "I woke it," the ghost said. "I cannot finish it. Shadowmoss will not bloom on one witch's moonlight. It needs two, from the same blood, channeled together." She placed a hand flat against the trunk. "You stand in the garden and lift the wand to the moon. I stand here and push the light down through the roots. The roots run under the ridge to your bed. We meet in the soil. That is the only way it opens its flower." She met Celestine's eyes. "I have waited a long time to ask a living cousin for her hands." Celestine walked to the tree. She picked up the grimoire and felt the warmth return to her chest, the way the garden soil had felt warm the first day. She tucked the book under her arm. She reached out with her free hand and set her palm on the bark, next to the ghost's. The bark was cold. The ghost's hand was colder. The owl watched. The cat sat by her boot. "Tomorrow night," Celestine said. "When the moon is full over the bed. I'll lift the wand to draw in the light. You send the light through the roots." She lowered the wand to her side and did not let it go. The ghost nodded. The pact was made. The bloom was still a night away.

Celestine walked back over the ridge before dawn, the grimoire under her arm and the wand at her hip. The cat kept pace at her boot. The owl flew ahead in short hops from branch to branch. She meant to reach the garden, check the seedling, and rest before the moon rose full. She smelled the blight before she saw it. Something sour, like wet metal, drifting up from the tree line at the garden's edge. She broke into a run. At the far border of her bed, the neighboring wood had gone wrong. Purple ooze slid down the trunks and pooled between the roots. It crept forward in slow waves, eating the grass black as it moved. Ten paces from the ooze, the seedling sparkled in its bed, small points of light on the young moss. If the ooze reached the roots, the bloom was finished, and so was any hope of a second witch in her blood ever finishing it with her. Celestine set the grimoire on the garden stone and opened it for the first time in four days. Her chest warmed. She turned to a page her mother had marked long ago, a cleansing draw that used still water as a mirror to pull poison out of soil. She needed a wide basin. She turned in place and saw the stone birdbath at the garden's north edge, its bowl full from last night's rain. She dragged it, scraping, to a spot between the ooze and the moss bed. The owl landed on the rim and dipped one silver wing into the water. The water brightened. She raised the wand, not to the moon this time, but low, toward the birdbath. She read the words from the page and held the wand steady. The water in the bowl began to turn. A thin purple thread lifted out of the soil at the ooze's front edge and drifted toward the basin. Another followed. The ooze slowed. It stopped. It began to pull back into the tree line, thread by thread, drawn into the water until the bowl went dark as wine. The grass at the border stayed black, but the line held. The seedling was safe. Celestine lowered the wand. Her hands shook. The birdbath sat full of poison now, and she could not empty it into her own ground, or the neighbor's, or the stream that fed the grove. The owl watched the surface without blinking. The cat would not go near it. She looked up. The moon was already climbing, thin and early, and the full face would rise tonight. She had saved the moss and bought herself one problem in trade. She would have to carry the bowl somewhere before the ritual, and she did not yet know where a witch could set down a basin of stolen blight without killing what grew beneath it.