Homegrown Magic

Chapter 11 Yael

11

Yael

On the morning the market opens, Olde Post is busy as a beetle colony. Up even earlier than they would be in Bloomfield, Yael watches the sunrise between bites of a cheese and chive scone and sips of strong black tea. It bursts over the canvas-covered wagons and striped silk tops of the vendors’ booths into a gold-and-lilac sky, sparkling diamond-bright off the dew-covered grass. They tip their face up toward the warming light, which does a better job of waking them than the tea. “Margot, come and look at this!”

Behind them in the tent, Margot sets a crate of jam on the counter with a tinkling of glass and a grunt of frustration. “We open in an hour, Yael.”

“Sunrise will be over by then!”

“There’ll be another tomorrow, fingers crossed. But there won’t be another chance to catch this season’s opening of the market square. I do a lot of business with the tavern owners and grocers and merchants who show up first thing, and every missed sale hurts the greenhouses for the rest of the year.”

Regretfully, Yael drains their mug and stuffs the last half of the scone between their teeth, then turns back to the work at hand. Margot seems particularly anxious this morning. A shame when last night at the fair was such fun: the colorful blur of the crowd, the music of the fiddlers, the fruit tarts and chili cones and glass jugs of honeyed mead, not to mention their ax-throwing competition. Yael suspects that plant magic was involved in Margot’s victory—some whispered plea to the moss or the bark still clinging to the outside of the slabs—but they didn’t press. It was nice enough to fall asleep in a nest of spare blankets on the floor, listening to another person’s breathing in their small room at the Abyssal Chicken. Yael can’t say they truly miss any of the socialites or heirs or princelings they tumbled with during their years at Auximia, but it turns out, they’ve missed that a bit.

Not that Margot is just another person.

Anyway, they woke alone, with Margot gone already to the communal washroom down the hall and an ache in their hips from rolling off the blankets and onto the floorboards in the night. Now it’s back to business as usual.

“Did you come here when you were little?” Yael asks, lifting a crate of jars out of the cart. Their hips twinge in protest.

“Sometimes, when Granny Fern could steal me from Ashaway.” Margot takes the crate from them to set it on the ground beside the tent for sorting. She has a system going. In addition to the jam, there’s crate after crate of plants both common and exotic, mundane and magical, with rolled linen packed between the pots to keep them safe for the journey, and narrow-necked water jugs with cut flowers in every color of the rainbow. They’ll be sold alone or by the bouquet to anybody hoping to woo a companion at the fair. ( Woo was Margot’s word for it, and she rejected every word Yael countered with.) “But it wasn’t so big back then. I like to think Granny helped it grow, as she did Bloomfield; a famous plant witch selling her potions definitely drew people in. And by the time she…Well, when I took over a few years ago, it had turned into a real event. Now we’re a little fish in a big pond, which is why everything has to be perfect.”

“It will be perfect,” Yael insists. “You’re Margot Greenwillow!”

“Exactly.” She rubs a palm across her forehead, frowning down at her own wares. “I’m not Fern Greenwillow. My name doesn’t sell products the way hers did. We’re not spoken of by the elite and the wealthy the way we once were, and I’m so busy keeping the business afloat, I haven’t been able to get it back there. I’m not…The merchants don’t know or respect me like they did Granny. They know I don’t have her gift for potion making.”

“Not yet, ” Yael insists. They reach for her but pause just short of laying a hand on Margot’s. “But they won’t be able to stop talking about you after this week. Not even the so-called elite, who wouldn’t know a rose from a…a kind of flower that isn’t a rose.”

For just a moment, Margot’s berry-colored lips tug up in a faint smile. “I suppose with you as our barker, we stand a chance.”

Yael bows elaborately. “My skills and services are yours, Daisy.”

“Stop flattering and start unloading,” Margot says, but she struggles and fails to stop a full smile from lighting her face like the sunrise.

By the time the gates of the square open and the first merchants pour down the rows of booths, they’re more than ready. Between customers, of which there are a decent number, Margot continues to fuss with their wares and adjust the flowers in the archway. Folk who haven’t been to the fair every year might not recognize the young woman behind the counter, but plenty pause when they see the sign for Greenwillow Remedies and Blooms on the booth. And Yael likes to think they’re helping. They stand outside the tent, calling to passersby the way they’ve heard proper barkers call out to them at fairs and festivals.

Back at Auximia, Yael once piled into Barnabus Silverly’s carriage with some friends to attend a sheep-shearing festival in one of the villages just outside Ashaway’s walls. They drove into tiny Higley Brook, where the streets were barely wide enough to accommodate their war-camel-drawn carriage. It was a joke, really—something to do when they’d declared themselves bored of the alehouses and art galleries of the capital. So they amused themselves by dropping ridiculous amounts of gold into the villagers’ palms for an ear of corn or a hand-knitted cooking pot cozy, though none of them owned a cooking pot. Yael had bought a little glass orb with a stuffed silk goldfish inside, spelled to move as though it were swimming, and to blow occasional bubbles. A child’s enchantment, but Yael was genuinely sad to discover it had somehow fallen out of their pocket once they got back to the capital. They’d never had a pet of their own.

Olde Post’s Spring Fair is nothing so big as Ashaway’s street festivals, with their silk merchant tents full of goods from every kingdom with a port to its name, but it’s the closest Yael’s come to city life in weeks. And it’s exciting. Around noon, Yael heads off down the rows to find lunch for them both, and they spend altogether too much time drinking in the sights. On their side of the village square, the booths are staffed by cobblers and leathersmiths, tinkerers and inventors, weavers and glassmakers, blood witches and bone readers, booksmiths and soapmakers. To the west are the livestock stalls and tents, where Margot says that beasts ranging from snarling worgs to snow rabbits are shown and sold. But Yael heads east to the food booths and the lanes full of fairgoers holding roasted potatoes and pickles, pies-on-a-stick, honeyed fruits, and fried giant spider legs.

Yael pauses in their quest to admire a butter sculpture of the royal family of Harrow—the likeness truly isn’t bad, given that the butter is starting to sweat and melt under the midday sun—when their blood goes cold as cream. Just beyond the dairy princex’s shoulder stands their cousin Araphi.

What in the devils is a Clauneck doing in Olde Post?

Araphi hasn’t spotted them yet; their cousin stands arm in arm with one of the younger daughters of Yael’s parents’ peers (Marisol? Marigold? It hardly matters), both gaping openmouthed at the booth selling giant spider legs. Perhaps they’re here for the same reason Yael and their classmates went to Higley Brook, though it’s a much farther journey for the sake of a joke. And truly, the Spring Fair isn’t that funny. Not when Yael knows how the cooks and craftsfolk and the artisans from small surrounding villages count on their income from opening weekend year-round.

Though maybe the sheep-shearing festival wasn’t funny either, in hindsight. Maybe Yael was just being an ass.

Whatever brought Araphi to Olde Post, Yael isn’t about to be seen here. Their cousin is decent enough (for a Clauneck) but still under her parents’ thumbs. If Baremon and Menorath find out they were in Olde Post, they mightn’t think to look in such a small and faraway place as Bloomfield. But if Yael’s presence here were traced back to Margot…Well, they would like to keep Margot as far from their family as possible.

The Claunecks have a tendency to salt and burn where they can’t purchase and profit.

Ducking low behind the butter royals, Yael makes a beeline down the lane in the opposite direction. They squeeze between a wagon selling frybread and a bright-blue tent with a sign posted for an upcoming oyster-eating contest, spilling out into the next aisle over…

Where they find themself face-to-face with Rastanaya.

Quite literally, at that. One of the most sought-after designers in Harrow is of near-equal height to Yael, though the top of her halo-like crown of tight curls far exceeds Yael’s hair at its most fluffed up. The pale-purple blossoms studded throughout her curls match her dress—a frosty lavender silk with a tight bodice and a bell-shaped skirt propped up by layers of petticoats, all hemmed at the calf to keep them out of the dust. It perfectly complements her cool, deep-brown skin even as it takes up half the lane. The crowd is forced to flow around this small woman in her forties, like a stream split by a boulder, which might be the whole point. “Sweetheart!” she shrieks, clasping her hands beneath her chin. “You’ve recovered!”

“I’ve…What?”

“Did your parents pass along my well wishes? I heard you’d taken a horrible fall from one of Oreborn’s steeds at his compound and were recovering in the country, but I’m so pleased to see you up and about. And, well, here. ” Rastanaya trails off, probably realizing the unlikeliness of their meeting. She eyes Yael’s unadorned violet shirt and plain brown vest and trousers: the finest of the clothes they bought in Bloomfield. “You look…at ease.”

“Yes, er, the healers thought the country air would be restorative,” they’re quick to respond; they can guess what’s happened. If word is circulating that Yael was injured, it can only have come from Baremon and Menorath, who would’ve stamped out any rumors that didn’t benefit them. This must be the story they’ve told, rather than facing the shame and scandal of the Clauneck heir galloping off from their own graduation party. “But it’s not been nearly so restorative as seeing you, darling.”

Rastanaya’s plum-painted lips curl into a knowing smile. “Flatterer. Keep going; it will get you everywhere.” She holds out an arm and Yael obediently takes it, though the bell skirt prevents them from walking directly side by side.

“Now that we know what I’m doing here,” Yael says, leading her toward what they hope is the opposite end of the lane from their cousin, “whatever are you doing here?”

“I’ve come with Araphi, would you believe it?”

“I would not!”

“We’ve just had a fitting for her engagement banquet, but of course you’ll know about that.”

“Of course.”

But Yael did not know. How could the little girl who once swallowed a lightning bug, hoping to glow, be ready to wed? Has she truly fallen in love in the two months that Yael’s been gone?

Or was the family so eager to distract from Yael’s failures that they turned to their next eldest asset?

“Araphi mentioned her plans to get away from the fuss of wedding planning for the weekend with a friend or two,” Rastanaya continues. “Well, I’m in the midst of arranging the debut of my summer collection, and I decided I could do worse than a weekend’s adventure for inspiration. Our theme is the wild places, you see. I’ve drawn my aesthetics from those still untamed pockets of Harrow. The Dire Swamp where the bog creepers grow, the forests in the Northlands, the gardens of the fae where even rangers won’t tread. And so on. There’s no place untamed in Ashaway, so I thought, why not? Alas, there doesn’t seem to be a surplus of magic in Olde Post either.” She frowns as she looks about. “They say there are fewer natural casters born in Harrow with each generation, and it seems it’s true. We’ve plundered and conquered what we ought to have let grow wild and die wild and grow anew, and now there’s little left. Or so they say.” Rastanaya waves a hand.

“There’s still magic if you know where to look,” Yael protests. “There’s a natural spellcaster just a few aisles over, at the Greenwillow Greenhouses booth.”

“Not Fern?” Rastanaya gasps. “I’ve based an embroidery pattern or ten on her creations, especially when I was coming up. But I’d heard she passed away years ago, out in the middle of nowhere.”

It was very much somewhere, Yael wants to object, though it would mean little to Rastanaya. But now Yael’s wheels are turning. Because didn’t they promise that soon people would recognize and respect the name Margot Greenwillow? And apparently, their parents are more concerned with covering up their absence than tracking them down, anyway. “Not Fern, no, but her granddaughter, an equally talented plant witch. With living creations worthy of your summer collection, I’d wager. If you promise not to tell the world where you heard of her—I’d rather not be found by my many admirers until I’m back at peak form, you see—I’ll show you.”

Rastanaya raises an immaculately shaped brow, brown eyes glittering. “Show me, and I’ll keep your secrets. Only I insist you let me dress you once you are back at peak form. You look happy, my love, but the rustic look doesn’t quite suit your skin tone.”

Yael wrinkles their nose and leads the way.