Status Updates From Tea & Alchemy

Our mouths were greedy, slipping against each other and tasting, as if cleaning honey from a spoon.

People like me don't really dream. Our future is set from the day we were born.

I had balked at the idea of a wedding that no one but Goosevar would recognize as such. Yet in this woodland chapel, under the watchful moon, regal in her velvet cloak of stars, that notion seemed very small. What need have we of anything more than this ancient rite that had served the inhabitants of this island for centuries?

Father Kelly talked about the Romans when I looked at the bell tower painting with him. He said they went to war against the old religion and won. Do you think the man the druids gave to Goosevar was a Roman?

I do. They wanted the creature they'd summoned to have a taste for their enemy's blood.

The robed chanters were druids. Does the word mean anything to you?

Mum talked of druids sometimes when we left offerings at the sacred well in Coldvreath. She said they were holy men of the old religion, before priests, and that they, too, had once left offerings at the well.

That's right. Druids were the priests - and priestesses - of this isle before the Roman army invaded.

But do you think it might simply have been a dream?

I know what a dream feels like, Harker. That's not what this was. It's still so clear and real in my mind that it's like it actually happened.

The only thing I blame Jack for is his roughness with you. If you were my sister and I thought a man had hurt or compromised you, I would have put a bullet in him, too.

Mina, you saved my life. I might have killed you.

Aye. But you didn't.

I would have placed no value on the life you saved, had I taken yours. I place little value on it as it is.

And if you had died, I would have blamed myself.

Tea sets everything right.

Maybe not everything, but it at least gave you a moment to rest and think.

I was an anchor, sinking slowly to the bottom of a dark and lonely sea, echoes of my long life drifting around me. Some memories were brighter than others, like coins winking among the flotsam.

In the old stories, people are tormented and cursed for disturbing fairy homes or sacred places.