Sally and Lavinia found what they were looking for by almost magic good luck.

The great dark green mass beneath them had to be the Black Forest. But they wove here and there, passing wooded hills, winding roads, scenic rivers and little towns. Lavinia complained that everything looked different from the air and she didn’t have a fucking map.

At last, they landed quietly on the outskirts of a touristy, self-consciously charming village with overpriced inns, restaurants and gift shops. Lavinia got dressed, still grumbling. But the town turned out to be the very town where she’d met Helga all those years ago. Helga was the one who’d told her and “Poky” about that dark place in the forest. (They’d also had a threesome, Sally remembered, still burning over it, though it was in another lifetime for Lavinia).

Lavinia poked around and found the side street where Helga had lived. It was impossible that she still lived there but the well-weathered woman with blonde hair and bright blue eyes who opened the door instantly remembered Lavinia and welcomed them in as if she’d last seen Lavinia yesterday.

There was no wife or husband in the picture; Helga Amundsen lived on her own and was a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine. She didn’t have a guest room per se, but she laid two massage tables side by side on the floor of her work room to serve as guest beds. She also reluctantly agreed to take them the next morning to the path she’d told Lavinia about so long ago.

One last night of safety: Sally shivered because they were very close now. She studied Helga’s wall charts with sweet, sad nostalgia: her own father had practiced traditional medicine but had been forced to be a janitor in America.

Helga cheerfully invited them to sleep with her if they wished and left them on their own while Sally’s jaw dropped. Before Skellig Michael, Sally would have burned at how Lavinia watched Helga’s departing form and they would have had a fight. But their bond was now like a living thing which stretched but never broke. She felt Lavinia’s eagerness and moved closer for a hug.

“Do you want to?” she asked in a small voice.

“Nawww, I don’t wanna that bad,” Lavinia said.

It was so exactly the wrong thing to say that Sally, luxuriating in the freedom to get pissed at Lavinia without throwing her out forever, indulged in a few nasty words which even she knew were unreasonable, stopped when she found herself happy over the wrinkles around Helga’s eyes, and cried in Lavinia’s arms.

And came out of it to find herself staring at her pentagram on the wall.

The five-sided star in the wall chart looked nothing like hers and yet it fit with a deeply satisfying mental click.

She stood up and walked to it, Lavinia following with what Sally knew were arched eyebrows.

And there it all was. She pulled out her pentagram, held it up and rotated it to match.

At each corner of the pentagram on the wall was a German word paired up with a Chinese word. Where the little man on Sally’s pentagram sailed in a boat, the wall chart had the word “Wasser.” The little man using wood was matched with “Holz,” which might mean wood. Where the little man cooked over a fire was the word “Feuer.” Where the little man tilled the earth was the word “Erde,” which had to mean “earth” and where the man held a metallic shield was the word “Metall.”

And there were the arrows, just as on hers. In a clockwise circle around the outside, arrows pointed from water to wood to fire to earth to metal and back to water. And along the lines of the star, arrows pointed from metal to wood to earth to water to fire and back to metal.

It was her pentagram, here on the wall of a Norwegian doctor of Chinese medicine in a little town in the Black Forest of Germany.

When her father died, she had found in his stuff a yellowed, rolled-up chart like this, cracking at the edges. The symbols, of course, had been only in Chinese. “Mom, what’s this?” she’d asked, and had been dumbfounded to hear her mother patiently and sadly explain that her father had been a practitioner of traditional medicine in the old country.

The connection she’d felt between the pentagram and her long-ago lover Callista was not because Callista had dated a witch. It was because Sally had been exploring her cultural heritage most deeply during those intense months with Callista.

She turned amazed eyes to Lavinia and tried to explain.