Homegrown Magic

Chapter 7 Yael

7

Yael

“This is exquisite,” the tailor says, running Yael’s coat through his careful, callused fingers. He traces the embellishments along the left cuff: a wispy branch of velvet oak leaves and acorns with caps of actual spun copper. Thank the gods that, on top of everything else, Margot offered to soakthe coat for them overnight. Otherwise, the tailor would have the grime of the Queens’ Road gathering in his fingerprints right now, and the smell of spilled ale in his nostrils.

“It’s a Rastanaya,” Yael offers.

The tailor—Arnav, they scramble to remember—looks up at them, his bearded brown face alight with wonder.

It should feel good. The whole point of owning a Rastanaya is to be able to tell people, It’s a Rastanaya, and watch their opinion of you rise accordingly. Their mother explained this to them when they were still a child while filling their wardrobe with coats and dress shoes, trousers and even stockings. More than Yael could possibly wear to the parties of the season, all made by the designer whose own career the Clauneck Company had invested in decades earlier.

But Arnav’s adulation for a piece that Yael might’ve drunkenly left in the tavern and never missed makes them feel…not very good.

“I wouldn’t ask much for it,” Yael hurries to add.

Arnav’s brow wrinkles as he sets the garment gently on the counter, smoothing out the silk. “I’ll tell you up front, I couldn’t afford its fair price with a year’s worth of my shop’s profits. We deal in an odd mix of bartered goods, shared village funds, and coinage from folk traveling through.”

Yael can work with that. “If you’ve anything lying around the shop that’s a bit more appropriate for a greenhouse than a manor house, I’d be happy to trade.”

“Are you sure? There’s spellwork in these stitches like I’ve never seen, a boon to the charms of its wearer, and the sheer artistry—”

“I’m positive.”

“Well then, come into my workroom and pick out whatever you like. It’s worth that and more for me to be able to study Rastanaya’s work. And after that, I have a granddaughter, the light of my life, who’ll swoon when I send this to her. That’s her portrait on the wall over there. She’ll be twelve this summer.”

“May she wear it for years to come.”

“Mayhap not, but it’ll fit her until her birthday, at least. What a party outfit that’ll be!”

Yael wrestles a smile into place. “Children do grow so fast.”

They leave the tailor’s shop with a sack full of sensible clothing. Long-sleeved linen shirts and cuffed cotton trousers; sleeveless work tunics with slitted sides for ease of movement, tied with cloth at the throat; a pair of ankle-high leather boots; a waxed wool coat for rainy days. They choose one nicer outfit—a deep-violet shirt with matching dyed wooden buttons, and a fawn-colored vest and pants—just in case there’s somebody they need to impress in this village, or the next. Arnav gives them all of it gladly in exchange for the dress coat, though parting with it hardly bothers Yael at all.

Of course it doesn’t. Not when you have a vast wardrobe at the manor waiting to replace it, the not-quite-Baremon voice drones, like a wasp that’s made its home inside Yael’s head.

It seems Yael’s patron has not forgotten about them as they’d hoped—probably foolishly—that he would.

“It doesn’t matter,” they insist, standing on the unpaved street outside the tailor’s shop, “because I’m not going back to the manor. My parents can give every stitch of my clothing away to whichever twelve-year-olds they like for all I care.” Remembering themself and the minor irritation they are to their very powerful patron, they begrudgingly add, “Sir.”

The voice doesn’t answer.

Maybe that’s worse, as though Yael isn’t worth arguing with.

When they make it back to the tavern, the breakfast crowd is still in full swing. Yael takes this as a sign of their personal growth. Only two days in Bloomfield, and they’re already rising with the working folk. Of which they are now one!

On Yael’s first day in the village, Margot brought them back to the tavern to speak with Clementine—a figure they somewhat remembered from the night prior as a halo of pale-blond curls floating above mug after mug of ale. It was Margot who bartered with her for Yael’s room and board. Apparently, Clementine had been trying to refuse payment from Margot for years in honor of Granny Fern and Fern’s long friendship with Clementine’s own grandmother Shelby, the tavern’s original owner. A deal was quickly struck. Margot would give Clementine the first pick of her mushroom crops and would visit the vineyard where grapes for the tavern’s good wine were grown; a late-winter frost damaged a number of vines just as they were about to bud, and they required a plant witch’s touch. From Clementine’s knowing smile, Yael suspected she would’ve done as much anyway, but perhaps a bargain was easier for Margot Greenwillow to accept than a favor.

Now they wave to Clementine and with a deep bow accept the saucer-sized sweet bun she tosses to them from behind the counter. Her laughter rings in their ears as they climb the staircase to the corridor of rooms above, tearing off a mouthful of cinnamon and candied nuts with their teeth. The bun is already gone and they’re licking their fingertips by the time they reach their door. There isn’t much waiting for them inside. The bed is little more than a pallet with a mattress and a clean, soft quilt. There’s a chest, which their new clothes fit into easily once they’ve folded them all (or rather, dumped the sack directly into the trunk and smashed it all as flat as possible).

Highly pleased with themself, they cross to the basin and pitcher. A small pile of toiletries sits on the washstand, including a bar of rosemary mint soap from the apothecary that looks and smells like a petit four and would probably sell like a drug in Ashaway. Margot spent the rest of yesterday taking them around Bloomfield to acquire things, bartering and bargaining as they went.

Yael washes the last traces of breakfast from their hands, cleans their teeth, then scrubs their wet fingers through their hair in the little round, speckled mirror hung on the wall. Bracing their palms against the wall planks on either side of the mirror, they give their reflection a rallying pep talk. “If you can steal a mechanical steed and sell your last worldly possession, then you can learn to use gardening shears without stabbing yourself in the leg. You will be of use to another person today, Yael.”

They might be lying to themself.

Still, the line between believing one’s own lies and believing in oneself seems pretty thin, so Yael will take what they can get.

Before they parted ways, Margot gave them directions from the tavern to the greenhouse along the lines of, “Walk out of the tavern and into the town, not toward the trees. Stop before you walk off into the trees on the other side.”

It’s more than enough. Encircled by the forest that’s regrown inside the walls since the outpost was abandoned, the whole village is barely a dozen acres across. There’s one main road, which runs from the tavern past the shops and to Granny Fern’s greenhouses. Little dirt paths branch off from the road like the roots of a plant, leading to clusters of cottages, the community gardens, the small pastures farther off, and, in the distance, a lake that serves as a water supply and fishing grounds. Everything in Bloomfield seems to have been cobbled from materials available in the moment: native trees with their red-hued wood, bricks that were probably pried out of former military barracks, and stones ripped up from an old parade ground to make way for fields. Some shops are painted with murals to reflect their wares. On the apothecary’s facade, a mortar and pestle. On the wall of the weaver’s shop, a green field dotted with sheep and a pair of tusked mammoths. (Yael doubts that a shop in Bloomfield can actually claim mammoth wool, but they’re not going to be an ass about it.)

Seems strange that Granny Fern built her own greenhouses as far from the gardener’s cottage as possible, on opposite ends of the village. But maybe she wanted to walk the whole length of the village every day. Maybe she liked talking to the townsfolk, now greeting and gossiping with one another over mugs of steaming tea. They pause on the road, watching Yael pass.

Yael adjusts their tunic, pulling at the ties of their collar. Blend, they command themself. “Lovely morning!” they call out to the baker and the butcher—identifiable by the stains on their respective aprons—as if they belong here too.

It’s impossible to mistake the greenhouses when they reach them. Margot described them as “my whole life and a never-ending fuckload of work,” and Yael can see why. They’d imagined a neat set of cylindrical greenhouses, like the ones packed into Ashaway that nurture exotic plants for ornamental gardens, for potions, and for other industrial purposes. Of course, anybody wealthy enough for ornamental gardens has a groundskeeper to attend them, so Yael has never set foot inside.

Greenwillow Greenhouses, by contrast, are a block of glass-roof buildings of differing structures and shapes, some round or square or octagonal, all interconnected like a crystal beehive.

They find Margot in the entrance to the strange complex, which looks to be the shop proper. She stands at the counter peering into the pot of a large jade plant, its trunk as thick as Yael’s wrist.

“Abyssal gnats in the soil,” she grumbles as a greeting. “Every spring, it seems we get them overnight, and they’ve arrived ahead of schedule this year.”

“Why don’t you magic them away? Cast an expulsion spell on them or something?”

She looks at Yael from beneath knitted brows. “Can you cast an expulsion spell?”

“Well…no.” Yael gnaws on their bottom lip. “I’m not actually great with magic.”

“You said that, after—” She cuts herself off, flushing pink beneath a streak of soil on her cheek.

“After I woke up in your bed,” Yael finishes with a teasing smile.

Her blush deepens. “Speaking of which…Yael, we both understand that can’t happen again, yes? If we’re going to work together, if you’re actually going to stay, we won’t be repeating what we, um, almost accomplished.”

This feels like a tremendous waste to Yael. The few kisses they managed the other night were nice, if a little fuzzy in Yael’s memory, and Margot seemed to enjoy them at the time. She hasn’t mentioned a partner in Bloomfield, and the gods know Yael doesn’t have anyone waiting in Ashaway except for their family, certainly growing more and more furious with them by the day. Past flings, yes. There’ve been plenty of friends and classmates and fancy strangers they kissed and danced with and tumbled into bed with after a night at the alehouses.

But when the whole world (or at least the whole of Harrow) knows you take nothing seriously, they expect nothing serious from you. So nobody is sitting up at night in their family’s mansion, awake yet dreaming of a future with Yael. Or if they are, it’s the Clauneck name they dream of, rather than the Clauneck heir.

Apparently, Margot doesn’t want the name or the heir. And that’s fine; perhaps she too is waiting for something serious.

“Of course,” Yael says, fighting to keep the smile on their face. “Never let it be said that I mix business with pleasure.”

“Right. Anyway, that’s not how expulsion works.” Margot hurries to change the subject. “Or it is, but I’d have to cast it on every individual gnat in every individual pot. It gives me a nosebleed just thinking about it.” With a grunt of disgust, she shoves the pot away. “I’ll teach you how to make honey traps. A couple dozen will take care of the worst of them without magic. But the strawberry plants are the priority at this time of year. Come on, I’ll show you.”

In the chamber beyond the shop, a round, domed greenhouse holds rows of shallow clay troughs full to bursting with small, serrated green leaves and delicate white blossoms.

Beneath the troughs, palm-sized bonfires in their own pots burn every few yards, turning the room a subtle pink to match the flames. “We have smokeless kindling to keep them going,” Margot explains. “They help keep out fungus and pests; we’ve had a weevil problem. The plants need watering whenever the soil feels dry a fingertip length below the surface. And I give them food for every phase: the blooming food now, the harvest food in two weeks. In an outdoor strawberry patch, it’d be too early for blossoms, and even in the greenhouse of your average non-magical non-plant-witch, it would take a month or more for the plants to fruit after they flower. But not here. They’ll be ready to harvest in half that time, and I’ll have the first fresh heartbreak jam of the season.” She gazes out across the plants with a deep and obvious pride.

Yael would love to feel that way about…well, something. Anything.

“You know, I actually can do magic,” they say, reaching out to run a finger along a strawberry trough. The clay is pleasantly warm, and the soil too. “Or I could. A little, anyway. It’s just that I need to ask the family’s, um, patron ”—they whisper that word still, after all these years—“and I always put that off.”

“If all you have to do is ask, then why don’t you?” Margot turns to them with curiosity.

They shake the dirt from their hand to rub the back of their neck, already lightly misted with sweat in the hot greenhouse air. “Every warlock’s patron is different, but ours requires…promises. Bargains. He makes requests and gives us tasks here and there—usually in service of the family business. You know, send an inquiry to this timber baron, invest in this inventor, take a meeting with this judge’s mistress. That sort of thing. You could say that we’re his greatest investment. But anyway, a person doesn’t really need magic for law, not even arcana and transmutation law. You just need to know how Harrow manages and regulates its magic users. How it stops folk from turning potatoes into gold or gold into potatoes, thereby ruining the market.”

“The potato market?”

“I suppose, but also the general market, which is of more concern to the crown and, thus, the Claunecks.”

She snorts. “Sounds like a thrilling program.”

“Orgasmically so.”

Margot covers her mouth—to hide a smile, they think. They hope.

Encouraged, Yael decides to confess, “When I was at Auximia, we always hoped you’d come back to the capital to study, you know.”

Crossing her arms, swathed in an oatmeal-colored cardigan already sprinkled with soil, Margot raises an eyebrow. “Who’s ‘we’?”

“You know, our old crowd.”

“Huh. I suppose Sedgewick Wayanette was just dying to have me back.”

Yael grins. “All right, I was hoping you’d come back. Why didn’t you?”

She squints at them as though some message might be scrawled across their face in invisible script that only she can see. “Yael, can I ask…why do you think my family left the capital? I mean, did you wonder?”

They try very hard to remember any explanation they might’ve heard—any scraps of gossip going around the city, any conversation between Baremon and Menorath. Alas, Yael’s never been great at paying attention to the troubles of others, especially while preoccupied with their own. Maybe they should work on that. “I—Of course I wondered. If you wanted to tell me, I would—”

“Never mind, Yael. That was a very long time ago.” She looks down at her hands, where Yael can see the soil deeply engraved in the lines of her palms. Margot lets her long fingers curl closed, and when she looks back up, she doesn’t meet their eyes. Instead, she turns and marches forward between the strawberry troughs. “I’ll give you the rest of the tour and then show you where that mix is. Also, the cleaning supplies. All of the glass could use a scrubbing so the light can get in, and I never have the time to spare. Keep up, please. The Spring Fair—that’s the festival to celebrate the annual opening of the market square in Olde Post—is in two months’ time, and I never miss the opening weekend. Even with both of us working, we’ll need every moment to prepare.”

Closing their mouth around the question they never had the chance to finish asking, Yael follows.

By the time Yael makes it back to their room at the tavern, the sun has set and every muscle in their body has wilted. At least, it feels that way.

After a tour of the remaining greenhouses—the herb garden and the succulent grotto, the tropical garden and the butterfly garden, the mushroom ring and the perpetually blooming cherry orchard (but not Margot’s private workshop, the door to which remained closed)—Yael was put to work cleaning dirt and debris and sap from the outside of hundreds of glass panes. Even the chilly morning soon turned warm under the sun, and hauling a bucket of soapy water and a wooden ladder between greenhouses was surely the most physical labor Yael has ever done in a day. Probably the most they’ve done collectively in a lifetime.

They’ve earned the dinner waiting for them downstairs in the tavern, but it’s all they can do to haul themself up the stairs, peel off their filthy new clothes, and lie naked atop the quilt on their mattress with the cold evening breeze blowing in through their window. Even the pitcher of water on the other side of the room seems miles away, never mind the tub in the bathing chamber down the hall. So they decide to lie here stinking for a bit longer.

If they were in Ashaway, their second day in the office in the Copper Court would just be coming to an end. There would be dinner at the manor afterward, or in town. Drinking with major investors and high-profile customers, talk of partnerships, shipments, and exchange rates over platters of roast pheasant and gingered pears. Concepts Yael barely understands, yet they would be expected to nod along and agree with every awful or tedious opinion, as they’ve been trained to do. Instead of lying alone in their small room, Yael would be sitting at a table with every seat occupied, pretending not to be desperately lonely and lost all the while.

When they think of the alternative, their little room above a tavern feels more like a home already.