Homegrown Magic

Chapter 31 Yael

31

Yael

Leaving Bloomfield behind was the right thing to do, even if it meant leaving Margot.

Joining the company and rejoining the family was the right thing to do.

On their walk back to the office from the perfumery greenhouse, Yael sifts through these notions like the gemstone specialist on the fifth floor inspecting twinkling piles of jewels for flaws or curses.

Or for fakes.

Because they’re thinking of Margot again. The smell of her: earthy, like rain on good warm soil, and the clean scent of the herbs she adds to her tea, and the lightly sweet sage she grows for cooking and for spellwork. Her habit of tucking berries into her dress pockets to toss to the chickens that wander the lanes of Bloomfield. The titles of her favorite books, and the tunes she’d hum while potting plants at the workbench. How it felt to fall asleep with Margot wrapped around their body, her long legs braided with theirs, and how it felt to wake up to Margot blinking sleepily down at them, her clear gray eyes soft in the morning. Each of these memories feel so much more true than a palmful of hollow ideas about Yael’s place in the family, or in the company, or in the world.

Yael may be their parents’ heir, but they’re still just a cog jammed into the machinery the Claunecks built to benefit themselves. The fact that Yael never fit—a failure of the part, according to their family, rather than a failure of the machinery—was why Yael left Ashaway in the first place. They’re sure of that much, at least.

Yael’s family doesn’t care that Miriam’s family goes hungry while farmable land lies within walking distance, yet far beyond reach. No more than the Claunecks care about Bloomfield, itself a living thing, like a garden that constantly reshapes itself to support what’s fragile and discover its strengths. Yael’s family would rip the whole town and everyone in it out by the roots to make space for foul-smelling factories and ornamental lawns, and never let it trouble their sleep.

So how can Yael’s obedience to them possibly be good ?

Nothing about any of this feels good. The Claunecks are locusts, consuming beyond their own appetites whether they have the right to it or not. Yael knows this now. And perhaps…

Perhaps there is some way to prove it.

The belowground levels of the Clauneck Company offices replace polished wood with cold, impenetrable stone and iron doors. There are guard warlocks posted at every entrance and wards carved into every corridor and door. The safeguards require powerful spellwork far beyond Yael’s capability to breach, even with patronage.

Or they would, if Yael weren’t a Clauneck.

Their blood is the key that opens every arcane lock, and they needn’t even spill it to use it. All they need is their face, known by everyone in the offices, and a purposeful stride to bypass the guards. Each nods deferentially to Yael as they pass. It might not be enough to get them into the vault on the very lowest level—a dragon hoard’s worth of coins and valuable goods in trade—but that’s not a problem.

The Records Library is their objective.

There are wards branded heavily up and down and across the frame of the library door, and a pair of warlocks standing sentry to either side, with orders to halt anyone coming to claim entry. But here too the blood in Yael’s veins is all they need. A cog they may be, but Yael’s parents have done everything possible to keep their brokenness a secret. They lift the portfolio they’ve carried down to suggest a project under way—no further explanation owed—and press their palm to the iron. The door gives way for them, and in a moment they’re alone, the door shut and the wards raised again by the warlocks behind them.

Yael turns their attention to the shelves that stretch far down into the frigid air of the Records Library’s long aisles. Here are centuries’ worth of records detailing every purchase, sale, exchange, and secret of the Clauneck Company, all contained inside thousands of ledgers and files and portfolios such as the one they brought with them for cover.

They had better get to work.

Skimming their fingers along the shelves as they pass, they head for the account files from the past few years. Among them should be a file for the Greenwillows, including ledger entries tallying Margot’s parents’ many debts from when they went belly-up against the sums of assets seized. If Yael can find it, then…

What?

They aren’t sure what they hope to accomplish. Even if there is some miraculous difference between the amount of the Greenwillows’ debt and the total value of their seized assets (gods help them, they’re thinking like a banker), it can’t be a village’s worth of difference. And knowing the full sum of the debt won’t change anything. Margot doesn’t have the money to pay it off, and Yael doesn’t really have anything but the clothes on their back, absent their jewelry now. But there has to be something they can do. Find some loophole in the initial four-year extension. Get word to Margot with as much information as they can gather, at least. They might have left her, but that doesn’t change the fact that they love—

Love who? The woman who would’ve kept you from claiming your place in this world?

Yael stumbles in the aisle. “That isn’t true,” they say aloud in the cold, echoing hush of the library.

Is it not?

They linger for another moment, then push on down the aisle. This is what Clauneck wants: to distract them from their mission.

What I want, Yael, is your obedience to the family that made you, in every way possible. The family that honored their contract with you despite your years of unproductive floundering.

“You flatter me, great-great-great-great-grandfather. But I signed no such contract.”

Your contract was entered upon birth, signed with Clauneck blood. Would you break it to live with a failed plant witch in a ramshackle cottage in the woods, forever in fear of the day you’ll inevitably lose it all?

“Better to love a plant witch in a cottage than worship a petty devil in a manor house,” they mutter back, and how could they ever have believed otherwise?

They shouldn’t be here. This isn’t where they belong. It isn’t right.

None of this is right.

And there it is at last: the Greenwillow file, miraculously at eye level instead of on some higher shelf, out of sight and out of reach.

Stop this NOW, Yael.

They move all the quicker for Clauneck’s demands, opening the expected ledger and flipping through to the entries made just under four years ago; success! They find the list of assets seized to settle the Greenwillows’ debt: the mansion in Ashaway, their remaining stocks of potions and remedies in the city, the scant profits from one of their few mildly successful ventures…

Not the manor house in Bloomfield, though, or the greenhouses. Of course, if they never formalized the seizure or started the procedure before offering the extension, that makes sense. Damn.

For years now, you’ve failed in your duty to this family. Fail us now, disobey me now, and I will abjure you as your patron. Your family will abjure you as an heir at my command. And you will be alone in this world without a scrap of magic or a single copper to your name.

Clauneck’s words are daggers; they ought to draw blood.

But it’s Margot’s words, spoken in their shared bed at the Abyssal Chicken, that float back to them:

Your deviation from your parents’ expectations of you is not a failure on your part. It’s a failure of imagination on theirs, if they can’t see you for who you are.

Could that really be true?

Yael thinks once more of a spindle press inside Harrow’s mint. Really, how can a mighty machine be such a marvel if one little, apparently unimportant piece might spell its doom? That seems a lot less like a failure of the part than a failure in the machine’s design.

“It’s been a pleasure doing business these past twenty-three years,” they tell their once-patron, tucking the Greenwillow ledger against their chest, “but I think I shall be withdrawing my account from the Clauneck Company.”

Yael has spent those twenty-three years listening to their patron berate and bully them, whispering poisonous thoughts into being. But they’ve never heard Clauneck howl, sounding very like the devil he is. Their eardrums ring with it, and their bones vibrate like violin strings, boiling their blood inside their body. They drop to their knees, afraid that they’re shattering apart.

Then the violent clamor is gone.

Clauneck is gone.

Yael is more completely alone than they’ve ever been, and suddenly, the thing they’ve always feared feels like the greatest possible gift.

It won’t last. Having abandoned Yael for good (and Yael knows with every part of their being that it’s for good), Clauneck will muster Baremon and Menorath, who must have arrived for the scheduled meeting by now. Their parents will come running to stop them. Which means that Yael will need to get moving and then keep running until they’re well out of reach of the Claunecks.

They set the ledger aside and dip back into the file, pulling out what they recognize immediately as a profitability analysis, same as the one on the fields neighboring the Rookery that came across Yael’s desk last week. They loosen the leather thong and pull back the portfolio flap to take a look at the contents, flipping through the opening pages until a map drawn into quadrants and annotated with measurements and proposed sums catches their eye. They recognize it by its shape, encircled by a thick, inked stone wall, and by its coordinates.

This is Bloomfield. Or Bloomfield as it was four years ago, judging by the written dates. This report was compiled while the Claunecks were weighing their options, deciding whether Margot might become an asset of greater value than the land itself, worth granting an extension. The map is followed by sheets of some anonymous number cruncher’s notes on the past appreciation of property values, and at the very back of the folder…

Yael finds the last thing they expect, but exactly what they need.

It’s funny, really. The Claunecks were so afraid that Yael, ill fitting as they’ve always been in the family apparatus, might bring the whole thing down.

Which means that, just maybe, Yael can bring the whole thing down.

They tuck all of their findings into their coat, then rush toward the door that opens for them at their touch. The wards can’t tell the difference between blood and family, after all.

On the Queens’ Road dead center of the three courts, there is a public stable that lets out mounts, bridles, and carriages to renters according to their wealth and needs. To Auximia students wanting to impress one another during the courting season; to merchants, couriers, and cabmen who can’t afford to purchase and keep a mount or cart; to poorer folk with a rare patch of land that needs plowing in spring. The Claunecks have no need for an account there with a stable of their own, and Yael has nothing to pay nor barter with, having given away whatever jewelry they had on them hours before. All they have now are the papers and plans stolen from the office.

That, and a very fine suit.

Not quite as fine as the suit they traded to Arnav the tailor for a rough wardrobe and work boots, but then, they knew at the time that they were far underselling it. This one—a plum-colored frock coat, vest, and trousers—has buttons of pure gold, and luck spellwork stitched into the lining.

Which is how they came to be galloping through the southern gates of Ashaway on a mechanical steed-for-hire named Gloom Stalker, wearing only their undershorts and linen bindings, their socked feet in the iron stirrups, and the ledger and two portfolios strapped to the saddle.