The cottage was stone once, and then the stone was only a crumbling scaffold, and the walls were only thorn, blossom, and vine – but it still remembers how to be a house, and the woman who keeps it still remembers how to be a host. To travelers, she offers honeyed bread, cold wine, ripe fruit out of season, and when they’ve licked the last of that sweetness from their fingers, she tells them with a smile that they may stay and sleep for as long as sleep has need of them.

Some lie there still, it’s said, with blankets of fragrant petals and pollen dusting their hair, and there they’ll lie until they crumble too – for witches’ gardens require strange fertilizer, and dreams and bones are richer sustenance than most.