Okay so this might be incredibly niche, but my sister and I need help finding the name and author of a book series we used to read and love as kids, but all we have to go off of are very dicey memories of specific chapters.
From what I remember, this/these book(s) are about a small coven of witches whose name has “nettle” in it, who are too small to be a “real” coven. A boy(?) is traveling to this town and on the train ride he’s sitting by a beautiful woman with red lipstick who has a cat carrier, but inside the cat carrier he says there seem to be two large rats. When he gets to this town, he accidentally discovers the youngest witch of this tiny coven and finds out that they’re magic. They write letters on fallen leaves in gold ink that only the witches can read, there’s a night market where he gets the youngest witch a cat as a gift (he thinks he bought her an amber-eyed black cat but then realizes the shop keeper enchanted a regular black cat and scammed him) and they go on adventures together.
Does this ring any bells for anyone?
by KingSah_