The Haven

Chapter 2

As a child, Nikolai heard the stamping of feet in rhythmic dance as he listened at the crack under the door to the back room. He heard singing without words and chants whose words he did not understand. He smelled burnt herbs and watched the glow of candles creeping out from under the door. He saw the symbols scratched behind the bookcases and under chair legs.

Magic was his family's secret, but everybody knew it.

Nikolai's parents didn't raise him in their practice. They thought a child should come to magic on his own – or not – as was his decision and destiny. Finding his future was his own responsibility. And so, his parents' magic was their own. Never spoken of. Never taught. Never encouraged. Magic was invisible in the house.

Or, at least as invisible as could be.

Never completely hidden, magic infused the house. Nikolai could always feel it.

Mint tea brewed by his mother for almost any problem – a cold, a stomach bug, even the broken finger he earned climbing the pear tree in the yard – made the whole house smell like Christmas and calmed whatever bothered him. Dandelion roots, similarly boiled and poured like tea, graced his very, very earliest memories. Waking in the middle of the night shaking from a nightmare, he'd come downstairs and his mother would pour out a mug of it (always with lots of sugar because it was bitter.)

"It's just what the doctor ordered," she would say.

But doctors, Nikolai now knew, didn't prescribe dandelions and mint. They probably didn't prescribe any one of the countless remedies and potions his mother cooked up. But the nightmares vanished, the wounds and stomach bugs healed, and the pains went away. And child-Nikolai did not care where the prescriptions came from.

Sometimes when they drank tea together, his mother stared intently into the steaming cup. Nikolai asked, more than once, what she was doing.

"Just trying to see the other side," she said.

"The other side of what?"

"The tea, of course," she said, and laughed – every time, she laughed.

Magic wasn't invisible forever.

Nikolai learned what the other side meant. He learned what just what the doctor ordered meant, and what the mint tea and the dandilion tea meant and the symbols scratched behind the bookshelves and the candlelight under the doors and the rhythmic dance and–

Everything.

Almost overnight, the invisible was visible.

By his teens, Nikolai had grown into a bookworm, quietly sheltering in the school library every chance he got. One day, he picked up a dusty volume all about Victorian flower arrangements. Bored as hell, he put it back. Or, he tried to. Stumbling into the wrong section, he found himself face-to-face with a collection of occult herbals.

They were way more interesting than flower arrangements.

And so it began.

Nikolai pulled out book after book after book – books on plants used for things that Nikolai didn't know plants could be used for, books on plants he'd already used but didn't know he was using, mundane books giving advice Nikolai was sure he'd seen on the covers of health magazines (Clear up your eyes with carrots! Speed up your metabolism with cinnamon! Steady your stomach with ginger!)

And other books.

Some books had advice he'd never seen on the glossy covers in the checkout aisle. Create a protective shield with a sachet of agrimony. Pick out the seeds of a black-eyed-Susan and scatter them into the wind to send a message to a friend. Put the yellow petals in your shoes to never lose your way. Mint had a page all to itself and its all-over restorative energies. The calming effects of the dandilion were given a mention, too.

Day after day, he devoured the books.

There were so many he'd just walked by before!

Beside the herbals, there was the Anthropology section filled with books of rituals – to call rain, to draw a headache out of a head, to protect a person from bullets, to tell if a person was lying. The History section had myths and legends and tall tales and stories about gods he'd never heard of and things people did for the gods so the gods would help them in return and things that gods did for people so the people would worship them in return. The Philosophy shelves gave him books on manifesting wishes and mental discipline.

Nikolai read.

And read.

And read.

He wondered whether even the librarian knew exactly what was in her collection. Most of the books made Nikolai sneeze when he took them off the shelves they were so covered in dust.

His parents were thrilled.

"It's in your genes!" his mother exclaimed when she saw his books.

But when the principle called to tell them that Nikolai had not been in class for a week, they were less happy. That night, they sat him down for a talk.

"You have to go to school, Nikolai," his father said. "Your future is a delicate thing. You have to nurture it or it will fall flat on its face."

"But I am nurturing it," said Nikolai. He held up a book with a smiling guy in a suit on the cover. The Rites for Getting it Right – at Work. He didn't show them the one still in his bag with a smiling girl on the cover, The Rites for Getting it Right – in Love. "I am."

His mother laughed.

She laughed a lot when they talked. It chased out the stress, she always said.

His father didn't laugh. "Magic won't do everything by itself," he said. "You have to help it out."

"But isn't magic supposed to help you?" Nikolai asked. "If you have to help it, then what good is it?"

What good it is?

The question still swirled in Nikolai brain. But this time, there was no laughter, and the house was quiet.

What good is it?