Chapter 30 Margot
30
Margot
Middle of summer
On a Saturday morning with little more than a month before summer’s end, Margot stands under the oak tree behind her cottage, her feet rooted in the soil, her heart as fragile as it has been since Yael left her on the balcony of their manor six weeks ago. In that time, much to her surprise and despair, she’s had no letters or messages from them. It’s a resounding silence, which has clipped any tendrils of hope Margot had that things between them might work out. The silence said, loudly, that perhaps Yael was telling the truth and couldn’t forgive her. That they didn’t need her or want a life together. That she was foolish to hope for anything at all from them.
At least there’s been an official extension notice from the Clauneck Company, which arrived a few days after she got home. Menorath has kept to her word and granted Margot another year’s postponement, which should be a relief, but it feels like a weight. Especially since Margot is no closer to finishing the Natural Caster Potion despite all these long nights she’s spent in her workshop poring over Fern’s remedy book.
And so this morning, with the greenhouses closed for the day, Margot decided to talk to Fern herself to see if that might help.
An absurd wish, of course, to believe that Granny Fern will give her a sign or a clue, but desperation haunts Margot’s waking hours after years of failure, and she has to try something.
“Hi, Granny Fern,” Margot says, kneeling at the base of a large tree root and running her hands over it. The sun beats down on her neck, and a small bead of sweat trickles over her temple. “It’s been too long, I know, but I’ve been busy.” She smooths her hand along the root, letting the rough edges bite into her skin, remembering how Fern would tuck Margot’swild hair behind her ears when she was a child.
Fern’s ashes are scattered among these roots. At her insistence, there’s no marker, but over the years, Margot has hung things from the tree to remember her by. Small wind chimes, interesting feathers, wreaths woven with dried flowers, stones and shells tied with ribbons, metal spoons, some colored glass pieces, a few jam jars. All little trinkets to mark the resting place of a woman who was so much more than she seemed. A woman who was everything to Margot, and who was everything Margot can never be.
“I don’t know how to do it,” Margot confesses to the tree, putting her forehead against its rough trunk like Granny Fern taught her to do as a small child, so she could listen for the heart of a living thing. “I’ve tried everything I can think of—everything in the book too! But nothing works.”
For the last six weeks, Margot has been desperately working on the Natural Caster Potion to keep her mind off her own heartbreak and to be rid of any obligation to the Claunecks once and for all, extension or no. She’s gone through all the recipes in the book, making each remedy to the best of her abilities. Staying up into the early hours of the morning—often sleeping in the workshop or greenhouse—as pots of green or purple potions bubble away. All to no avail. Every spoonful of the Natural Caster Potion she’s cautiously tasted has given her unsettling rashes, made her lose her voice, or knocked her out for the better part of the day. Granted, she’s not even sure what the potion should taste like when it’s done, but she suspects it would feel a certain way, even as a natural caster herself. Like her reservoir of magic was refilled in an instant.
“What am I missing, Granny Fern?” Margot implores the tree. “Is there more to the recipe that you figured out? Something else I can try? I need your help, please! I…I can’t let everyone down. I can’t let you down.”
The only answer is the wind through the oak leaves, the tinkling of the chimes, and the bees buzzing in the wildflowers. Harvey slinks up to Margot’s side and nudges her hand. Margot strokes his back, and he purrs happily.
After a few long moments of waiting for an answer from Granny Fern that won’t come, Margot hauls herself to her feet and picks up Harvey.
“Right, let’s get back to the workshop, then,” she says. She blows the tree and Granny Fern’s resting place a kiss and then turns away, resigned to another day of failure.
Hours later and long after sunset, Harvey leaps off the worktable, taking a stack of papers with him. Margot swears as her empty teacup—Yael’s favorite one, the one Margot has taken to drinking from almost exclusively—which was sitting on the papers, goes cascading toward the edge. She just misses it as it falls, and the ceramic cup shatters on the stone floor under the table.
“Harvey!” she cries out, her voice breaking on the last syllable. “That was a special cup!”
Tears of exhaustion and bitter frustration fill her eyes as she gets out of her chair and crouches beneath the table, reaching to pick up the scattered teacup shards. It’s a porcelain map of her shattered relationship with Yael, the buttery-yellow bee-painted pieces starkly laid out in front of her.
Harvey curls around her ankles, meowing, as if in apology.
“Shoo, get out of here,” she says as hot tears roll down her face. “You’re going to cut your paws.”
Harvey insistently nudges her leg, and Margot gently shoves him away. Undeterred, he leaps onto the chair Margot’s just vacated and from there into her arms.
He lands with a thunk against her chest, making her drop the teacup shards again.
“Impossible creature,” Margot says, leaning forward to put him back on the chair. Right as she’s fumbling directly under the center drawer of the worktable, Harvey lets out a yowl and sinks his claws into Margot’s shoulder.
Pain sears through her, and she lurches upward, the top of her head smashing into the bottom of the drawer.
“Ow, Harvey!” she calls out, flinging the cat onto the chair. “What was—?”
The question dies on her lips as she looks at the underside of the drawer. A small piece of wood has sprung open on its bottom, revealing a shallow hidden compartment.
“What in the world?” she murmurs as she reaches into the gap in the wood and pulls out a handful of tightly rolled papers.
Granny Fern’s handwriting fills the pages, and the left edges are torn, as if they’ve been ripped out of a book. The parchment is thick and well worn, exactly like that of Fern’s remedy book.
Margot’s heart flits in her chest like a butterfly near a flowering bush. These have to be the missing pages from Fern’s incomplete Natural Caster Potion notes. Have they really been here all along, just inches from her fingertips as she desperately tried to figure out this potion?
Leaving the broken teacup pieces, Margot clambers out from under the worktable, clutching the pages. She puts them on top of the spellbook and pulls the lantern closer to glance through the diagrams, drawings, and fragments of notes. On the last page is what looks like a journal entry. It’s dated two days before Fern died, and Margot can almost hear Granny Fern’s whiskey-and-tea-toned voice as she begins to read.
On the Natural Caster Potion, some thoughts, from Fern Greenwillow:
I am near my end. Even as I write this, I can feel the sickness eating away at me, as I’ve seen it do to many others. Tired as I am, I cannot leave the world without at least putting down the sum of my greatest project to paper. Even if no one else reads it, I need to feel I’ve finished my work.
For many years now, I’ve been thinking about natural casters in Harrow, and what it means to be born with a reservoir of magic. Is it fair? Is it random? Does it show the favor of a god or some such being from another plane?
I don’t know and, of course, these are questions best left to the scholars and philosophers who have spent centuries debating them. From my time in school, I do know the theories behind how magic operates in our world, but that’s not what got me started. What I wanted to know when I first dug into this potion was this: Is it possible to create something that makes the world a more fair place?
Could something like this Natural Caster Potion give those born in the Rookery for whom magical studies are out of reach a better chance? Could it help to balance the gulf in Harrow between those with resources and those without? Could it help to build stronger communities, where both magical access and the money to compensate without magic are lacking?
It seemed to me that, yes, it might be possible.
Of course, the minute I thought about such things, I also knew that granting a tremendous amount of natural casting ability to those already in power would be reckless, dangerous, deadly. But it seemed something I could control if I could in fact create it.
And so I decided to try.
My experiments took me years, from the first few notes in the spellbook through all of the formulas, failures, and results I’ve recorded in the following pages. They tell the story of a journey—one full of frustration, half starts, and many wonderful remedies and potions discovered and concocted along the way. In fact, those potions helped me build my empire as my curiosity took me down one avenue and then the next. And for that, I’m truly grateful. Through it all, however, I kept looking for some miscalculation or missing ingredient that would help me achieve this dream of equalizing magic in Harrow.
Then one day, without meaning to, I found it.
Here, Margot inhales sharply. This is it! The key to crafting the potion that will save Bloomfield from the Claunecks’ clutches!
Even as excitement swells within her, another fear rises. Wasn’t Fern right that those with power but without stores of magic would do terrible things with such a potion? Margot had seen as much in the dress shop when Menorath’s eyes gleamed at the thought of becoming a powerful natural caster, ungoverned by her family’s patron.
But releasing Yael from their patron’s clutches wouldn’t be the worst thing either—no, Margot doesn’t let herself linger in that thought. She keeps reading.
I won’t go into how I discovered the secret, though I will admit it originated from a clue in a book I found in a library on one of my rare visits to Ashaway. (A book that is no longer in that library, nor anything but ashes in a faraway hearth.) From that clue, however, a new trail emerged. One that only recently led me to an awful, grim truth:
The only way that I have found to make the Natural Caster Potion is to grind up the bones of a natural caster— all of them are necessary for a permanent effect—then mix the resulting material into a three-part potion. Drinking it will forever fill the well of magic in a person, and give them the ability the other natural caster possessed.
Margot stops reading, clapping a hand over her mouth. Has she read that right? To make the potion, she must grind up the bones of a natural caster ?
Her small supper of bread and cheese threatens to come back up. Suddenly, the workshop is too small. Her head is pounding. She rises, stepping backward and nearly tripping over Harvey.
“I just—” she says to the cat before pushing open the workshop door and stumbling into the greenhouse. The smell of plants, earth, and growing things fills her nose, offering instant comfort.
“The bones of a natural caster,” she murmurs to herself as she clenches the bottom of her cardigan with shaking fingers.
What an absolutely terrible truth. And yet, if that’s the only way to make the potion—and the only way to save Bloomfield…
No. She cannot possibly create a potion that requires the bones of another person.
Can she?
Of course not. Perhaps there is some other way. There must be another way!
Margot takes a few more deep breaths and then returns to her workshop table to keep reading.
It’s a terrible thing, this knowledge. To know I could change the lives of so many people for the better. Perhaps in some hypothetical world, aged natural casters would donate their bodies after death to give others their magic. But I also know all too well the measure of my fellow man. They are impatient and hungry for power. If they knew how this potion worked, it wouldn’t be long before natural casters were murdered for the magical potential in their bones.
I cannot let that happen. I will not, and so I’m tearing these pages from my spellbook. I know I should burn them, but I haven’t the strength right now to light a candle, let alone a fire. I need to rest, and so I’ll hide them until I’ve regained enough strength to properly dispose of them—
Here, Fern’s handwriting trails off, and her words stop. Margot can almost see her beloved grandmother, stumbling upon this terrible secret even while her own body crumpled.
But now the secret isn’t just hers. It’s Margot’s too. And she can never reveal it. As Granny Fern wrote, the only thing this potion would bring—no matter the good intentions it might carry—is suffering and misery.
Slowly, Margot feeds the page with Fern’s written confession to the candle flame. The fire eats the ink, not knowing it’s devouring her only hope for saving Bloomfield.
Granny Fern was right: This potion isn’t the way. It’s neverbeen the way. Margot isn’t sure what she’s going to do orhow she can save Bloomfield, but she’ll find another path. Sage’s words echo in Margot’s ears: Talk to the people who care about you in Bloomfield, okay? This isn’t something you should carry alone!
Yes, talking to the town—after a good night’s sleep—is exactly what she must do. Granny Fern would’ve wanted her to.
“Thank you, Granny Fern,” she whispers, touching the small painted portrait of her and her grandmother on the workshop table. “For guiding me still.”
Margot can almost hear the gentle voice of Granny Fern, as if from the next room, as she blows out the candle and heads for home.