salt to fix,

"Grandma always just said, 'salt is a fae material'," Teige explained, "but practically, it fixes the dye in the thread."

Yoshi's face lit and she nodded. "Ah, but only in plant fibres."

"You see."

"I do see!"

elder for a spark,

toadstool to cross,

"Elder is the base of a lot of fae spells. Hold this," he added, handing Yoshi a strainer with a handle. "Mint root is the base of a lot of Aetherian spells. Et voila."

Yoshi held the strainer over another pot, and Teige poured the contents of the pot that had been simmering on the stove through it, resulting in a fresh cloud of steam. He continued casually, "The toadstools are meant to come from fairy rings. They symbolise a threshold, a turning. We'll use climbing sevril instead, since it grows on door frames here. The meaning is the same."

They both bent over the pot as Teige stirred the thread in it.

"Elderberries make a pink dye," he said, "so I wonder..."

He lifted some of the thread out of the liquid using the spoon.

"Ah," Yoshi remarked. "It's green."

the daughter, the mother, the matriarch.

On the corner of the page, Teige had drawn a simple shape made up of pointed ovals that interlinked to form something like a three-petaled flower.

"This is called a triquetra," he said. "This is the shape we'll stitch into our clothes to form the spell tag."