Homegrown Magic

Chapter 13 Yael

13

Yael

The end of spring

In the weeks that pass after their triumphant return from Olde Post, spring blushes toward summer. The community garden flourishes, kale and beets and peas giving way to melons and tomatoes, cucumbers and currants. Yael pitches in with the villagers in their off hours to prune and harvest herbs, berries, and all manner of non-magical but delicious plant life. Beyond Greenwillow Greenhouses, the flowers bloom—none as spectacularly as Margot’s, but the grass is splashed with wildflowers and the lilac bushes outside of Clementine’s tavern blossom, their strong, sweet scent drifting upward to perfume Yael’s room each morning. The wife of Astrid the healer returns from her pilgrimage, and the fish in the pond seem to double in size overnight. They shine in the sun through the tea-brown water as though their scales were polished plate armor.

Not that the countryside is a total paradise. The bugs are devils; during summers in Ashaway, they hang spelled braziers about the city to keep pests away, but not in Bloomfield, where pollinators are a necessity and magical objects few and far between. And then there’s Margot and Yael, or the lack thereof.

That night in the Abyssal Chicken, it had seemed as if things might change between them—or perhaps as if things had been changing all along, the two of them sliding from once-upon-a-time friends to failed lovers, to employee and employer, to proper friends who sometimes wondered how the other would taste (at least, Yael wondered), and perhaps, finally, to something else.

But no. Margot doesn’t even invite Yael back to her cottage at night, never mind into her bed. And though Yael happily flirts with tourists and travelers passing through Clementine’s Tavern (and with Clementine occasionally, and once, Mike the librarian) over a late-night ale and games of chess and knucklebone, inevitably, they climb the steps to their room alone. Unlike in Ashaway, there are consequences for dalliances in Bloomfield, where everyone knows the business of everyone. Margot wasn’t wrong about that.

It shouldn’t matter to Yael that Margot would find out. Really, it shouldn’t.

Alas, what Margot thinks of Yael—and whether Margot thinks of Yael at all, and how often—has come to matter. Probably too much, considering how little progress they make after Olde Post. So Yael goes to work in the greenhouses, and goes to bed by themself, and all the while, a new, impossible kind of wanting blooms under Yael’s skin like lilac, scenting and coloring everything around them.

Five weeks after the Spring Fair, Yael is returning from the baker’s with a pouch of yeast for Margot’s home-brewed cherry cider when they see a rider in Ashaway’s courier livery waiting beside a saddled mastiff at the entrance to Greenwillow Greenhouses.

Caught between diving into the bushes that grow along the road or bolting back the way they came, Yael freezes in the middle of the lane. Have their parents tracked them here, after all? Despite her assurances that she would keep her source a secret, did Rastanaya report to Baremon and Menorath immediately upon returning to the capital?

Oh, Yael. You can’t believe you’ve been that hard to find for anyone who wanted to find you. If anyone had wanted to find you.

Yael slaps at their own head to rid it of their patron’s unwelcome voice, and the movement catches the courier’s attention.

“Sir’ram!” the courier hails. “Do you know where I can find…” They peer down at the envelope clutched in their riding glove. “Margot Greenwillow? The young woman at the tavern sent me here, but I’ve been inside the shop, and there’s no one there.”

Likely, Margot is still busy in the perpetually blooming cherry orchard. A local would’ve known to wander deeper into the greenhouses or try again later. “I’ll take the letter,” Yael says, eager for the courier to leave. Whether they’re here for Yael or not, nothing good can possibly be coming from Ashaway.

The courier frowns. “I was paid to give this directly to the proprietor of Greenwillow Greenhouses.”

“Well, you’ve found them,” Yael says with a bright smile and a quick bow.

The courier eyes them up and down.

Just three and a half months ago, few people would’ve believed that Yael had worked a day in their life. Those people would’ve been right. But now Yael stands in the dust in trousers with soil-stained knees, their simple tunic untied in the very late-spring heat. And if they were to run their fingers through their hair, grown nearly to their cheekbones by now, they would probably find a twig or two tangled in the dark strands.

“Very well,” the courier says, handing them an envelope nearly as fancy as the ones sent out for Yael’s graduation party.

“My thanks, sir’ram.” Yael fishes in their trouser pocket for any coins and comes up with two copper denaris and a fistful of cherries, which they’d swiped from the picking baskets in the orchard and were saving for a snack. They drop the whole lot into the courier’s waiting palm.

“I—Yes, my thanks to you as well.” Awkwardly, the courier tucks the coppers and the cherries into their breast pocket and remounts their steed.

Yael lets out a breath of relief, not turning their back until the mastiff has galloped down the lane and out of sight.

As they expected, they find Margot in the indoor orchard, still sifting through the picking baskets. “Good, you’re back,” she says without looking up. “Why don’t you start coring these cherries? I’d like to get them in the fermenter this afternoon if this batch is going to be ready by the summer festival.”

They would much rather be elbow-deep in cherries with Margot, their hands accidentally brushing when they plunge them into the same basket, than stand here clutching a message from the capital. Best to get it over with, whatever it is. “You have a letter. It’s from Ashaway; a courier gave it to me outside.”

Margot turns to them and lifts an eyebrow. “Who would be writing to me?”

Yael shrugs. “A secret admirer?”

“Quite a secret, if so.” She takes the envelope, breaking the mulberry-colored wax seal to slide out the parchment.

A familiar seal, now that Yael looks at it, like something they would’ve seen among their mother’s letters—

“It’s from Rastanaya,” Margot announces. “She…gods, she wants to come to Bloomfield!”

“What? What for?”

“Her summer collection,” Margot says as she reads, a slight tremble in her voice. “She wants to preview it here for a small, select audience before its debut in Ashaway. She says…she wants to use the greenhouse’s plants, my plants, as her stage. Something about…about the wild places of Harrow, and my work being magical. She’ll be here in a matter of weeks, and wants my recommendations for a staging ground…”

“ What? ” they ask again. “Margot, let me see.” After a moment, they gently pry the letter from her hand, which has gone limp at her side, to read it themself. “This is amazing! Truly, this is just the opportunity Greenwillow Greenhouses needs. This is going to change everything for you!” they cry even as, selfishly, they’re not sure they want everything to change.

But instead of looking thrilled as she should, Margot looks utterly panicked. “We can’t, Yael. This is impossible. She wants to bring the peers of the realm to Bloomfield ? They won’t come.”

“They came for your parents,” Yael points out. “Even my parents came out that one summer.”

“Sure, to the manor house. But what are we going to do, put Rastanaya and the richest folk in Harrow up in Clementine’s Tavern?”

“Why not? I live there. It’s good enough for me.”

“Well, but…” she splutters. “All right, then where will she have the show, in the sheep fields? If the queens’ personal bard is gored by one of the mammoths, you think that’ll endear me to high society?”

So the weaver does have mammoths, after all.

“Why not host it at the manor house, then?” Yael suggests, making a mental note to wander out to the fields north of the town; they’ve never seen a mammoth up close, not even in Perpignan.

Margot grimaces. “There’s no way. Nobody’s been inside for three years. I’m sure it’s an absolute mess, and anything of value was sold off, the furniture included.”

“So? They’re not coming for dinner. They’re coming to see Rastanaya’s work—and yours too. Let her worry about where to put everyone up for the night. She’s an icon, so if she tells people that it’s the height of fashion to sleep in a potato sack in a hollow tree, they’ll probably believe her. All we need to worry about is a staging ground, and why not use your manor?”

“Because it isn’t mine, for one.”

“All right, maybe it technically belongs to your parents, but I’m sure they’d—”

“It isn’t theirs either.” She turns on them, squaring her shoulders, which makes Yael want to sink into themself on instinct. But she doesn’t tower over them or berate them—of course not, she isn’t Baremon—even if she does speak to them slowly, like they’re a child who’s neglected their lessons. “Why do you think I live in the cottage and not the manor house? Why do you think my parents are in the care home instead of cozy in their grand bedroom with a hired private healer?”

“I…I suppose I thought you preferred it that way. Though nobody could blame you for needing help, Margot. Everybody does.”

“That’s not what I meant!” she snaps, snatching back Rastanaya’s letter and dropping it to the dirt in disgust. But she takes a deep breath and says simply, “The estate doesn’t belong to my parents anymore. It belongs to yours.”

There’s a terrible sensation rising in Yael’s stomach, as though the floor of the greenhouse has fallen away to reveal a whirlpool, and it’s about to pull them down. “To mine?” they repeat helplessly.

“Well, to the Clauneck Company, so as good as.”

“But…how?”

“Soon after Granny Fern died, my parents gambled the fortune they’d inherited on ventures that were meant to expand Greenwillow Remedies—she’d died without a will, you see, so everything had gone to them—but it all went bust. They commissioned adventuring parties to chase down rumors of supposed cure-all plants that only grew in the coldest and most desolate pine forests of Thorn, and the parties came back with nothing time and time again. They bought huge amounts of stock from a so-called plant witch for a strengthening potion that turned out to be mostly fermented yeti piss. Within a year, her remedies business was mostly dismantled, and the manor house was sold off and stripped for anything of value to pay down their debts. But it wasn’t enough. So they reached out to the Claunecks to beg for an extension. We all moved into the cottage together, and I tried to help them salvage Greenwillow Remedies before…before they got sick. And I haven’t been able to do it on my own since. So that, Yael, is why I live in a cottage. And that is why my parents are in a care home. And that is why I can’t throw a fashion show in an estate that should’ve been my birthright but now belongs to a company that scraped it for parts and abandoned the shell.”

By the time Margot finishes, her chest is heaving and her cheeks have gone bright red, and Yael feels a kind of kinship with that hollow shell of a once grand house out in the woods.

Everything is their family’s fault.

Margot’s quiet country existence, which Yael had envied and thought of as some quaint little storybook life, is simply what’s left after the havoc their own family wreaked. This whole time, Yael’s fairy tale has been Margot’s unhappy ending. They feel numb, and foolish, and despise themself just as much as their family’s company for daring to feel sorry for themself.

“Margot, I—I didn’t know.”

Margot sighs and sags back against the worktable, winding down from her anger. “I wondered when you first came to town, but I believe you. And I didn’t mean to blame you. You aren’t your parents, Yael. I know you aren’t responsible for their actions. You’re just doing the best you can.”

It is more gracious than Yael deserves, and in that moment, they decide to be worthy of Margot’s grace. “Well.” They straighten their tunic as though it’s a fine silk suit. “I may notbe my parents, but I am their heir, as they keep insisting. The heir to the Clauneck Company and a representative of the bank, as its employee.” That Yael has yet to work a single day at the bank (and never intends to) is another technicality. “So,as the heir and representative, I hereby give you permission to use the company’s ill-gotten assets. They are at your disposal, as am I.” Yael holds out a hand for hers. “You’re going to put Greenwillow Greenhouses back on the map, Margot, so let’s get started.”

In truth, the house isn’t nearly as bad as Yael thought it would be. The front walkway is overgrown with grass and weeds, and the steps are plastered with forest debris. Climbing ivy has crawled its way up the bricks, which could certainly use a washing. But inside the wide front doors, it’s simply dusty and empty. Yael’s sneeze echoes wildly around the marble foyer when they enter and stir up dust bunnies, as does Margot’s nervous giggle. After that, they walk through the rooms stripped of their fine woven rugs and carved furnishings and collected treasures. Only small piles of useless things remain—a chair badly broken by hasty agents of the bank here, a gray discarded mop there.

“Well, I suppose there’s room to fit everyone in,” Margot jokes sourly.

Yael is silent beside her, touring the remains of her former life.

They wander from room to room, peeking into what might’ve been a sitting parlor, the way it’s traditionally positioned in the house. On the far end is a pair of stained-glass doors, the pictures of climbing roses and briars lit from without.

“What’s through there?” Yael asks.

“My mother’s private courtyard. She wanted to throw garden parties out there, though the garden party set would rarely travel so far to see her. I know it disappointed her.”

Yael crosses to the doors then looks back to Margot for permission. She shrugs, and they push through.

Out in the courtyard, a set of marble stairs leads down to a small terrace made of the same, heavily scattered with dried leaf litter and dirt. From there, a narrow walkway winds around the garden, though its exact path is hard to trace as it vanishes into shin-high grass dotted with wildflowers. (Or perhaps they’re weeds; Yael never can tell the difference.) In raised beds, rosebushes burst from the earth. Years without pruning have left them thick and tangled at ground level, long-dead canes spilling out. Some have overgrown their own beds and matted together. But they’re flowering and still beautiful, the blossoms varied among deep wine red, and peach, and pale lemon, and blush pink. An arched trellis in the middle of the courtyard has practically become a private chamber, with tendrils hanging down in a flowering curtain, swaying gently in the breeze.

“This is it,” Yael declares, their footsteps echoing off the marble as they take the stairs down to stand amid the lovely mess of it all. “Rastanaya said she wants to evoke the wild places of Harrow, right? The magic we haven’t mastered? The show has to happen here. This is magical, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know.” Margot glances around the courtyard from the top of the steps, and Yael can tell she’s trying to see it as the designer might, or as the peers of Harrow might. “It feels strange. This was my home, at least in the summer. And then for a while before the bank came to claim it. Maybe it never felt exactly like a home, but to let rich and famous people come traipsing through, talking about how ruined and wild it is, like my family manor is some kind of art project or statement piece…I just don’t know, Yael.”

When she puts it like that, it does sound horrible. Yael hurries back up to stand on the step below Margot and slips their hands into hers so she’s looking down on them and not the untended garden. “We’ll fix it up. I’ll fix it up. Clear a path from the front entrance to the courtyard. I’ll come here after work each day. We’ll put your flowers everywhere, and nobody will see what this place used to be. They’ll only see you, and everything you can do, and how everything you touch grows better because of you.”

“Not everything.” Margot’s eyes turn shadowed in the bright sunlight, and though she presses her lips together to steady them, her chin trembles.

Somehow, Yael has made Margot Greenwillow cry—made the strongest person they know cry—and it feels like the worst thing they’ve ever done. “I’m sorry, Margot, I shouldn’t have pushed. I should’ve thought…Gods, I’m an idiot.” You never do stop to think, Yael. “Here I am blathering when this is all my family’s fault.”

“No, it’s not. Not all of it. It’s…” She looks around the courtyard one more time. “There’s something I need to tell you. But not here, all right?”

“Anywhere,” Yael promises.

She sighs and drops their hand, turning toward the manor’s interior, the dark and dusty halls, the empty rooms.

Yael follows Margot up to the second floor, then the familiar stone staircase spiraling up into the tower they stood in ten years ago. It feels smaller than it was, even if Yael hasn’t grown much bigger since then. It’s empty now too. Of course it is; Margot wouldn’t have left her strange prized possessions behind.

She crosses the circular floor and stands at the window with her back to them, looking down on the treetops between the mansion and the town. Her shadowed silhouette against the bright-blue sky outside is an actual work of art, cardigan and all. But this is clearly not the time to say so.

Be sensitive, Yael commands themself, stepping on their own foot with the other, grinding the boot heel down on their toes. Be serious, for once. Do something right.

It’s unnerving how that last part might’ve been someone else’s words echoing in Yael’s head. But no, the words are their own.

“This isn’t all your family’s fault,” Margot says again. “A lot of it was, obviously. But my parents made their choices. And your parents didn’t put mine in comas in the care home. That…that was all me.”

“What do you mean?”

Margot turns halfway toward Yael so her profile is outlined in the window as she exhales. It’s an ancient sound—somehow decades older than her twenty-two years—and carries more grief than Yael has felt in their entire life.

“It happened a few months after we moved into Granny Fern’s cottage,” Margot says, staring intently at a patch of wall, “after we were kicked out of the manor house. My parents were a mess—arguing constantly about whose fault it was that they’d lost the fortune, spinning from one scheme to the next, dashing off letters and sendings to old ‘friends’ who wouldn’t write or speak to them. I remember my mother sobbing as they had to sell the last of the jewels and furs they’d smuggled out of the estate.” Margot turns to Yael at last, meeting their eyes. “I couldn’t stand to be around them, so I fled to the greenhouses as much as I could, sleeping there sometimes. I was trying to help. I thought I could…find something in myself that Granny Fern always swore she saw in me. I started messing around, hoping to discover some new remedy that would recapture the world’s attention. It was a silly dream, but it was something to do.

“Meanwhile, I didn’t know my parents were begging for time by talking me up to the Clauneck Company, claiming I was as powerful a plant witch as Granny Fern, and that I was this close to cracking a brand-new remedy they thought would be of particular interest to your family. They swore I was capable of finishing this potion that even Granny Fern hadn’t been able to crack.”

“What sort of potion?”

Margot hesitates, biting her cheek. “I don’t, um, I don’t really like to talk about my work in progress until it’s ready. Though I don’t think it ever will be.” She laughs, quick and brutal. “My parents were lying, obviously. I never had Granny Fern’s talents. And without investors or the assets my parents had lost, I didn’t have her resources. But I was desperate, so I tried to complete her work anyhow. I shouldn’t have done that.” Margot turns to stare out the window again, fiddling nervously with her braid.

Yael takes a few steps closer. “It sounds like an awful time to live through,” they say softly, “but hardly your—”

“One day,” Margot cuts in, “I got up before dawn and left the cottage. My parents were sleeping off their night at the tavern—they were always there in those days, and Clementine had to cut them off more than once. That morning, I had a particularly volatile potion brewing, something I thought might crack it at last. I buried myself in my notes and lost track of time; then it was midday and my parents were strolling into the workshop. My mother asked how it was going, and without paying them much mind, I explained my latest theory. When I looked up, she and my father had goblets in their hands.”

“Margot…”

“I told her not to drink it! That it wasn’t ready. I hadn’t tested it properly. But my mother…gods, she trusted in me, if you can believe that. She thought it was exactly what she and my father needed to get back on track and revive their business. She—she said if it came from me, it was as good as a Granny Fern recipe, and the Claunecks would be thrilled.”

“What happened?” Yael hardly dares to ask.

A long silence fills the tower as Margot swipes angrily at the tears gathering on her cheeks. “My parents drank. They went wild over it at first—the way they felt invigorated, the confidence they’d regained all at once. And then they promptly collapsed, and have been asleep for the past three years.”

Yael considers this. “That’s…that’s a lot to deal with,” they say inadequately.

“It is.” Her voice is flat, lifeless. “Their ambitions and my failure were a deadly combination. Or nearly deadly.”

“But Margot—and I don’t mean to make light of how hard this has been on you—did you demolish the empire your grandmother built, or squander the fortune she didn’t seem to want, anyway?”

“No, but—”

“And were you truly trying to help your parents with your experiments?”

“Yes, but it doesn’t change—”

“And listen, Margot, because this is an important one: Areyou, in fact, Iris Greenwillow or Welton Sameshoe in disguise?”

She sniffs, letting out one strangled burst of laughter in the same breath. “No, Yael. Where is this going?”

“Here, where I tell you that you aren’t your parents.” They repeat her own words back to her, carefully and deliberately. “And you aren’t responsible for their actions. You’re just doing the best you can.”

Margot gives a little sob, slumping forward to rest her forehead on Yael’s shoulder, and Yael plants their boots on the floor to support them both. But they want to do more.

They can’t give her back what the Claunecks took, but they can give her some part of themself, at least. Margot’s perfectly positioned for Yael to whisper in her ear, “Now that you’ve told me a secret, it seems only fair that I tell you one. My patron’s name, it’s…”

Perking up, Margot peers at them through tear-clumped lashes but with curiosity in her cool gray eyes. “Yes?”

“It’s…Clauneck,” they confess with a full-body shudder.

Margot’s brow furrows. “It’s what?”

They clear their throat. “It’s Clauneck. My family patron is, well, my family. Or my ancestor, anyway. Seems there’s some demonic blood way back in the line—way, way back, too far to cast with magic of our own—and that’s who we beseech. The more prosperous our family, the more our empire grows, the more we spread his name across the kingdoms, quite literally. He gets the worship, even if our clients and admirers aren’t entirely aware of the nature of the relationship, and we get his patronage and the ability to do spellwork.”

“So…sort of your great-great-great-great-grandfather is your patron?”

“Yes. But I don’t like to call on him. He’s not very nice. I hear his voice in my head sometimes—I have since I was a child, as all Claunecks do, or so I assume—usually when I’ve disappointed him in some significant way. I suppose that running away from home to become a greenhouse assistant qualifies.”

For whatever reason, this sends Margot into a fit of hysterical laughter, until she falls against Yael for support once more. Only Yael wasn’t braced this time. The two of them go tumbling to the tower floor, Margot still cackling. Yael leans back on their elbows to watch her, their heart swelling even as their rear end aches from the impact.

“It isn’t funny,” they giggle.

“It is a little.” Margot wipes the tears from her cheeks, flopping over to lie on her back on the floor and gaze up at the conical rafters of the tower roof.

Lying back, Yael joins her. They decide that they could lie here next to Margot for hours. For days. For another decade, happily surviving on strawberry jam while the world spun onward without them. Yael has all the world they need up here, and Margot Greenwillow has somehow become its core.