It was close enough to walk, but not without hiking boots. By the time I reached the turnoff Russian sage nosed through the eyelets, fighting my shoelaces for sunlight.

Alice was in the back garden, coaxing a ripe heirloom tomato off its heavy stem. Idaho had three gardens: the back was the farm garden, stands of tomato plants and curling cucumber standing sentry between fat and heavy lettuces, patches of collard greens, toddler-fat corn, potatoes. There were four kinds of potatoes. "Well, it's Idaho," she'd said diffidently last summer when I'd first had the tour. Her hands were in the pockets of her dirt-stained jeans, head down and looking just away. She'd been smiling.

She was humming now, a folksong in time with the pull and roll of vegetable flesh. I shifted my feet; I didn't want the sage rooting down in her beds. Its leaves rustled and rubbed against each other, and the noise brought her head up. She smiled again when she saw me, that crooked half-wince which was the closest she ever got.

"Hi," I said, and tripped over a fragrant stand of fresh-bloomed lavender flowers.

Her mouth opened, shaped a syllable. "Let's get you inside."

The light in the farmhouse was orchard-light, coming from the east. Alice shed her ballcap with one hand and settled me in a chair, a carved wooden one that might have come from the Heritage Festival down in Newfane. I picked my way through the brush toward the laces, snapping off green branches as they hardened into wood.

The boots came off in tangles. I worked both feet free and wiggled my toes. They smelled sweet, and sharp, and green.

Alice came back in with scrubbed-clean hands, dirt still hiding under a fingernail. She took my right foot in her palms. "Russian sage," she said mildly. "Good for fevers."

Her hand was cool. The sweaty muscle in the peak of my arch relaxed against it. This close I could smell her shampoo, sharp with tea tree oil and vinegar. "It started growing this morning. There's daffodils in the shower."

I looked out the window instead of down at her, to spare myself the sight of it. It didn't matter. I caught the motion; the line of her mouth pressing together and her head turning down. "Someone put a spell on you," she said, perfectly even.

Because you're mine, my head filled in. Someone. Of course, Alice. I eased my foot away.

She looked up, no change in her face but the oh-so-white whites of her eyes. "Could take a few days," she muttered.

"Mmhmm," I replied. She knew full well I was rotating into town next week.

"Come take these down with me," she asked, barely a question. Eglantine spilled from between my toes onto her polished wood floor. The prickles tugged skin along with it. She winced watching, and I felt cruel.

"All right," I said. I crushed the opening petals when I stood.

We sat side by side on the tailgate at the side of 147 with the sign out, and watched the tourists roar along the highway. LOCAL GROWN, it announced. BEST VEGGIES IN CALEDONIA COUNTY! I had painted it in bright blue and yellow at the end of last autumn. Alice coaxed taut and sweet early squash out of soil the farmers had left for dead, but she was clumsy with things like advertising. I swung my legs back and forth over the muddy shoulder and felt the traffic wind blow, golden dandelions fading and sporing from the creased soles of my feet.

There was no wireless signal here; it was barely a rest stop, just a collection of picnic tables and parking spots where the brush had been hacked away. I rested the laptop on my thighs, half-open against the summer sunshine glare.

Alice watched me from the edges of her eyes, in the way the old men called Indian. "Gonna need a few things."

I clicked the laptop shut.

"To take off the spell," she said. Cars pulled off the highway: sleek family sedans. A thick and sleepy blonde ducked out from a Honda's passenger seat and lit up a cigarette.

"Gonna find out who's enchanting me?" A trio of children tumbled from the Honda's backseat, the oldest dark-haired and pouting, her two little brothers pinching with sly and sloppy grins. I watched them, watched her Indian-style.

"Don't have 'em all in the garden. Have to look around."

The dandelions dropped to the pitted asphalt, their stems baking hot and sweet. Hissing marigolds and daisies sprung up in their place.

"So you're not going to find out." I shifted onto one thigh and turned to look her in the face. She had long, sharp lines in her cheeks, a straight nose. The kind of straightnesses you wanted to touch, which would maybe send the message: give it up. I've known for months. "Have to start sleeping with a rowan cross."

Her hands clasped in her lap, long and strong and dirty. She swallowed, soft.

"Mama," the youngest boy's voice rose over the traffic. "Apricots."

I hadn't seen a flick of the fingers, a whisper of words, anything she could have charmed to turn the kid's head our way. Luck; I bit down on a sigh and swung my legs again. Just a damned coincidence.

"Saved by the bell," I muttered, and the surprise on her face held me over until the kids came barreling across the lot.

They took the apricots, and some new potatoes, red peppers, strawberries, and mint besides. "Good for the stomach," Alice told the stringy-haired blonde, who up close looked too young for three school-age children.

"I get carsick," she winced, looking like she wished the dirt would swallow her. Wondering how Alice had smelled her sour stomach, no doubt, with her breath covered in the smell of cigarettes. Cringing at the touch of a stranger's attention on her for one flat minute.

I turned away.

The little girl was standing by the back tire of the truck, watching her shouting, bouncing brothers. "There's flowers on your feet," she informed me, mild. Her own feet were encased in plastic sandals.

"So there are," I replied.

"Are you magic?"

"No," I told her. "Just enchanted."

Alice plucked a daisy from my toes and tucked it behind the little girl's ear, her hands as careful as with her carrots.

When I got home the daffodils were blooming, and Alice had said not a word more. Butterflies nested along the kitchen counter, following the train and twist of flowering mint. I eased them off and into the air with the hem of my shirt. My mother taught me young about touching butterfly's wings: so delicate the valleys of your skin would strip their scales away.

They fluttered through the open windows into the growing evening, while I tapped and cropped away at the job manual for next summer's crop of state park guides. They tickled my toes, drifting to the floor, attracted by my sweat and the scent of roses. I walked like a sworn Jain monk across my sea-green kitchen tiles, placing every toe gently to avoid crushing living wings. Tiger lilies seeded in my wake, pushing uselessly at the solid floors.

I had brushed my teeth with Alice's homemade mint toothpaste and tucked into sheets scented with her lavender before I remembered my hiking boots, still at Idaho, abandoned for the tingle of her hands upon my skin.

She woke me late morning from butterfly dreams, with the sun coming hard through the window. "Lisbet?" the leaves said, sawing one on the other like cricket legs. They smelled rich: sunlight on soft, hot veins, life churning and spreading into the summer skies. The smell of Alice's skin, I thought, and shivered.

"Oh gods, Lizzie-"

A branch snapped. I opened an eye.

There were flowers in my mattress, curling around the springs. Ivy had strangled my alarm clock sometime before eight-forty-five a.m., and all around me, opening, were roses, roses.

And above them Alice, hands twisting in each other like drowning worms.

"G'morning," I told her, and her hands stilled.

"I'll fix the door," she blurted, and reached out for the woody tangle around the nightstand. Ivy curled around her finger. She pulled her hand back.

"You broke in?" I mumbled, still half-asleep and pollen-drunk. There were no break-ins this far up, by the border. Everyone was neighbors here. I still locked my door come nightfall.

"You didn't answer the door," she said breathily, windy enough that I opened my other eye. Her mouth was twisted, not a wince, but pained like I'd never seen before. "It looked like a bier," she said, and dropped into my wicker chair.

"Let-" I tugged with one leg "-let me make you some coffee."

The rose-roots caressed my calf and ankle and held on fast.

"Oh," I said, and my heart sped up to panicking.

"Shh," Alice said, one hand flat on my forehead, cool and a little damp and smelling sharp like tea tree. "Breathe for me, that's right, that's good-"

She parted the roses with her pocketknife, murmuring an apology for every pruned-out life. Blossoms drifted down the comforter to the floor, parting and bruising on the hand-knotted rug that covered wood that stayed cold even in summertime. "Stay still for me," she soothed. The knife blade touched my outer thigh.

I breathed.

The shade peeled off my legs like a long morning, inching down to full noon. When I felt the sun on my ankles Alice said, "Okay, up," and thrust arms under my armpits, rolled and lifted and I was standing on the battered old rug. Underfoot was satin; underfoot were petals, ankle-high, delicate. Like walking on butterfly wings.

I stared at my rose-grown bedsheets, split with thorns and staining deepest red. My chest stuttered again. "Coffee," I said, pressing a hand against my breastbone, and fled into the kitchen.

I leaned over the coffeepot and breathed it in, real, until the steam was too hot. Alice was in the doorway when I looked up. My old Christy Moore tour T-shirt hung over her arm. She held it out with a face red as roses, eyes fast on the floor where my trail of desperate bud blooms scrabbled, sent out roots, and died. I took it and slipped it on over goose-pimpled skin.

"We go up into the woods today," she said when I was decent. My hiking boots were toes-to-the-wall by the kitchen door.

"I have to have this manual done for when I rotate in-"

My right leg tickled. Butterflies, I thought, and looked down at a thin trail of blood. Thorn-scratched. The gouge looked like a cat's-claw, or a woman's. "Today," she said fixedly, and took my broom to the aborted flowers.

The daffodils were gone from the shower drain. In their place grew a cluster of impatiens, touch-me-not, a bright raspberry-puff of a bloom whose name I didn't know. I washed my hair thoroughly. The shampoo poisoned them on its way to the septic tank.

The bedroom was clean of roses when I tiptoed in to dress. The mattress was stripped, spring-marks and sweat stains laid open. I looked away from it and thought about shorts, underwear. A T-shirt not the color of roses.

"I couldn't find spare sheets," Alice said when I crept back into the kitchen. The dead buds had vanished, and there was toast on a plate in the centre of my table, a bowl of sectioned oranges. Shipped in from Florida: something that'd never see the inside of Alice's fridge. She hadn't touched them. Her hands were clean and scratched raw where they cradled the chipped old mug.

"I don't have any," I said, and poured myself some coffee. She'd laid out a teaspoon for me: two cream, two sugar. My hand had stopped shaking. That was good.

The corners of her mouth firmed. I watched her around my coffee. There'd be sheets on my doorstep by nightfall.

I laced up my hiking boots when the breakfast was gone. The leather was scratched where the sage had groped along sole and arch for live earth. "All right," I said to Alice, looked up at her seated at the table.

She looked away.

"We go up," she said.

I closed my broken-lock door behind us. We went up.

There were honeybees in the woods above Idaho. They made the stepping treacherous as butterflies, gathered in my bootprints to roll in virgin pollen. "Wild swarm," Alice volunteered. The sun was hot on my back. She shaded her eyes to watch me. Her face reflected ruddy sunlight; I couldn't see if she was smiling. "Jailbreak from an apiary down in the valley."

"What if I was allergic to beestings?" I put another foot down, narrowly missing a flash of yellow.

"I'd save you." Diffident. Not a speck of feeling.

Perhaps I was making up the whole thing.

There was no path this far onto the mountain. Instead I walked in Alice's footsteps, around prickly tree-branches and their slender young. Crushed leaves from last autumn's fall muffled her light tread, my heavy. The branches leaned in to touch my hair. Alice put a rough hand on bark, and they stilled.

"Don't mind 'em," she said, and led deeper on. Plucked a stem of grass here, a fingernail of bark there.

We stopped in front of a blossoming brush tree, all flat green leaves and straggling yellow flowers. The bees bobbed around it giddily, dancing buzzing maypole steps between the forking branches. "Here," she said. Tugged out a bucket, and handed it over. It was a kid's bucket, the kind they sell at beachside stalls with little plastic shovels attached. It was blue; the appliqued white daisies were scratched halfway off. "Halfway full."

"What's this?" I ran my right hand along the branch. Stringy yellow flowers crumpled into my cupped left palm.

"Witch hazel," Alice said, and for the first time ever I saw her crooked-tooth grin.

She came back with wild raspberries; we ate them when the bucket was half full, leaned against the deer-nibbled bark of a knotty old birch. The tickle between my toes was lazy strawberry vine, rambling curled across the busy earth. Alice reached down and plucked a ripening berry.

"It'll taste like feet," I warned.

She popped it in her mouth. It felt like being kissed. I breathed out, soft, and she heard it; I saw her sit up straighter, out of the corner of my eye.

I looked up at her.

She looked away.

We emerged from the woods with the sun falling, thick light moving slantwise through the muttering trees. "How long before it's fixed?" I asked.

"Soon," she murmured, a caress of the hair. And Idaho rose from the horizons, its gardens spread out before us like the breeding ground of stars.

The stove was cold in Idaho. It was chilly, even with the rugs and woven tapestries, the seam-free joints of the floor, the double-leaded windows that blurred the view of the stars. Northern mountain summer: a breath of strawberry-wind across the cheeks, and then leaves falling before you knew it. I sat at the kitchen table and Alice stirred up the fire. The chimney was older than the rest of the house; it leaked. Alice's furniture smelled of loam and old maple smoke.

She made up two plates-apricots and sage cheddar, her own brown bread-and we ate quiet as the night crept in. When the moon came through the window Alice got up, padded barefoot to the door for her water pail, and went out to the pump. "Time to start," she said as she came back in. "Need the big pot."

Alice had deep cabinets. I opened them by firelight, one and then the next, feeling for the lip of a pot bigger than the others. When I brushed it my hand tingled. The room was warm; its lip was hot like hearthlight. I reached in and tugged it out, short unmuscular jerks. It was prickly black iron, weathered down on the rim.

"You have a witch pot," I said, half-smiling. She didn't reply.

I rested it on my belly and levered it up to the stove. The weight bore on my stomach like I imagined children did from the other way in: steady and thick. Warm. It clanked when it cleared the edge of the stovetop.

In the bottom, snagged on the iron, was a single rose petal.

I put the pot down on the stove. I went back to the table. I sat.

Alice poured her bucket of water in and wicked the petal into the fire. It had dried out in the cupboard, in the bottom of the forever-warm pot. It burned fast. She stirred something into the water with a stained-smooth wooden spoon. It rang out seconds against the rim of the pot.

"Pass me the witch hazel?" she said. Didn't look up. I sat. Something rough pushed through a hole in my battered socks and snaked into the world. I didn't care to identify it.

"Lisbet?" she said, and turned her head.

"It was you." I leaned my head on my knuckles. I couldn't look at her. "I knew, okay?"

The wood-on-iron sound stopped. After the shifts of the woodstove, the house was as silent as winter.

"There's only one hedgewoman in the next three towns. People'd talk if there were more. They talk about you at the post office." I closed my hands tight so the nails pinched my palms. I was babbling. Stupid. Angry.

She put the spoon down. It clanked on the cloudy glass rest. "Yeah," she said soft.

"That's all you have to say?" I got to my feet, and pain pierced the skin of the arches. I was standing on briars. They had scored the soft polished wood of Alice's floor. "I know. I know you did this, and I got a good idea why, and that's all you have to say to me."