The craft

Everything in the two catalogs is made by one of six methods, and a practitioner who knows the six can read any receipt in the book. This chapter is those six: what each suits, and what each costs in hours.

Gathering

A component is a part of a thing, not the thing: the root, the cap, the inner bark, the gum that runs when the bark is cut. Receipts name the part because the rest of the plant is usually inert and occasionally worse.

Season and hour matter for the same reason. What a plant holds moves through it over a year and over a day — into the root before winter, into the leaf in spring, out of the flower by noon. A receipt that says gathered before the dew lifts means it. A component gathered at the wrong hour is not weaker by degrees; it is frequently nothing at all.

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One will not gather what one cannot name. There is no receipt in this book that repairs the wrong plant, and there is one that will kill a man who mistook it, and I have written which.

The six preparations

Each is worth knowing by what it suits and what it costs in hours:

• Infusion is steeping in water off the boil, the way one makes tea. It is the gentlest method and the one that loses the most. Leaf and flower give up what they hold easily and are spoiled by harder handling.
• Decoction is boiling and reducing, and it is the method most of the sixth chapter uses. Roots, barks and lichens hold onto what they hold, and only sustained heat over hours will have it out of them. This is where the four-hour fire comes from, and where most failures happen.
• Tincture is steeping in a strong water rather than in water. Some components give up nothing to water at any temperature and give it up readily to spirit. A tincture is slow, keeps almost indefinitely, and doses in drops rather than mouthfuls.
• Unguent is working a prepared component into rendered fat. It suits anything that must reach a body without being swallowed, and anything meant to act on one small area of skin.
• Smoke is the shortest method and the shortest-acting. A component dried and burned reaches a body in a breath rather than a quarter of an hour, and leaves it as quickly. Nothing prepared this way lasts long enough to be measured in hours.
• Distillation is the still: heating something already fermented and catching what comes off it, which is stronger than what went in. It makes the back half of the fourth chapter and the base for every tincture in the sixth.

Water is the solvent under four of the six.

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One will use soft water and one will use it fresh. What water is for is taking a thing out of another thing, and it does that whether one is holding a pot or not — which is why water alone rusts the bones, and why I will not have it drunk on its own in my house.

Keeping, and knowing when it has turned

Every entry says how long its preparation keeps and how a practitioner knows it has gone over — a smell that leaves, a color that arrives, a separation that will not stir back together. A turned preparation is rarely inert. It is usually still active and no longer the dose on the label.

Stoppered glass, out of the light, and cool.

What magic does at the bench

Four spells are proposed more often than the rest, and she answers all four together.

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Of the spells one is offered

Four spells are named to me by every apprentice who would rather cast than sit, and I will say plainly what each is worth at a bench.

Druidcraft will open a bud or a seed pod on the instant. That is a real thing and I use it, and it will not fill a basket; one flower is one flower, and a decoction wants a handful.

Plant Growth enriches a countryside for a year and doubles what it bears. It is a farmer’s spell and a fine one. It will not bring tonight’s root to tonight’s pot.

Prestidigitation warms a cubic foot of dead stuff for an hour. A decoction wants four hours at an even boil, so one will cast it thrice and still stand over a pot that never came up, for warming is not boiling and never was.

Purify Food and Drink does exactly what it says, and what it says is ruinous here. See the seventh chapter; I will not have it explained twice.

Two spells in the eighth chapter were written for this bench and do the work the four above do not: Steady Fire, which holds a vessel at an even boil without fuel or attention, and Hasten the Root, which brings one plant to a usable harvest rather than to a single blossom. Neither is necessary. Both reduce a day’s work to an afternoon.