Homegrown Magic

Chapter 2 Margot

2

Margot

You’d think a plant witch with a degree from the Olde Post Community Magical School wouldn’t have a weevil problem. Yes, Margot Greenwillow can mostly manage affordable, prepared-while-you-wait love potions out of dried lavender and a secret. And, yes, she’s known in her small village of Bloomfield for coaxing night-blooming orchids to open up during the day. But weevils are another beast entirely.

“I’m begging you,” Margot says, glaring down at the annoying little charcoal-colored bugs gnawing at the roots of her strawberry plants. There are just so damn many of them and only one of her. “Please save me a few strawberries.”

Whether she’s beseeching the weevils or whichever goddess of plant or animal magic is listening through the planes at the moment, Margot isn’t sure. She just wants a reprieve from the nasty little bugs, especially since spring is right around the corner. The busiest season at the Greenwillow Greenhouses, it’s when regulars from the village and folk from the surrounding areas visit the herb garden, the indoor perpetually blooming cherry trees that are in a constant cycle of flowers and fruit, the succulent grotto, the wild fern alcove, and the mushroom ring. It’s nothing like busy seasons past, when Margot’s grandmother’s name had tourists flocking to the greenhouses from all over the realm, but Margot’s strawberry jam is popular. Rumor in Bloomfield has it that a scoop can cure a broken heart, and Margot can barely keep it in stock.

Thanks to the weevils, it’s looking like this year she’ll barely have enough strawberries to make a few dozen jars. Well, people can fight over those at the Spring Fair, just two months away, and maybe Margot can charge enough to finally get out of the greenhouses for a while. Or find her parents medical care tothe standard they’d approve of. Or restore the lost fortunes of their once powerful family…

Or not.

A few jars of strawberry jam aren’t going to do all that. Not by a long shot.

How Margot has grown weary of strawberries. And weevils. And trying to single-handedly keep up the entire sprawling greenhouse complex, which was built decades ago by her grandmother Fern Greenwillow and mercifully not taken in the settlement that stripped Margot’s family of their assets. (Of course, Margot knows it’s not mercy but rather a keen interest in her alleged potential that’s kept the greenhouses in her possession.)

Sighing, Margot takes off her cardigan, exposing some of her many tattoos—a teapot, a snail, some blossoms, two birds, and a few strawberries—and she whispers a small enchantment to charm the weevils into believing they’d rather be outside in the fields than feasting on her strawberry roots. They shouldn’t even be here—growing strawberries indoors should keep most pests at bay—but Margot has been so overwhelmed with work, she didn’t catch the invasion soon enough. There’s a flash of shiny purple light as Margot’s magic coats the stalks of the plants like maple syrup sticking to a fork. The weevils scatter for a moment, some of them hurrying away while others dig more deeply into the soil, determined.

Well, she tried.

Adding “find another weevil deterrent” to her endless mental list of tasks, Margot wipes dirt-covered fingers across her forehead, brushing aside a strand of her naturally purple hair. Her feet hurt; her back hurts. There’s still so very much to do, and she’s been going since before dawn already.

“Perhaps it’s time for a cup of tea,” Margot says out loud to Harvey, the munchkin cat who decided to move into her cottage this winter, not bothering to ask Margot her opinion about it. He’s curled up around a bronze watering can like a tiny furry dragon guarding a hoard. Harvey gives a grumpy meow.

Temperamental old cuss.

Scritching Harvey behind the ears, Margot looks at the long rows of strawberry-plant-filled troughs in front of her, mind running through the day’s chores. Suddenly, she wants nothing more than to go back to bed and sleep for a month. If only she had a potion for endless energy that actually worked. But she doesn’t. Not yet, at least.

Margot shifts her shoulders as if making room for the many responsibilities she’s carrying. “Right, yes. First tea, then onward.”

After several cups of tea (all made with fortifying lemon balm and ginger) and a remarkable number of cookies, Margot resumes work. Her sensible green garden boots pick up bits of mud, mulch, flower petals, and other garden detritus as she tramps among the eight greenhouses, the front store and counter, and the outdoor shed where she keeps potting soil, large tools, and her favorite wheelbarrow.

“See you later today,” Margot says to the wheelbarrow, patting it, because of course she’s now talking to garden tools. It’s not an improvement from the long chats with Harvey she has daily. She looks around the shed, more items piling onto her to-do list with each glance.

There’s no way she’s ever going to get it all done.

Certainly, she could ask some of the people in the village to help her, but they’re so busy with their own projects and community activities, she hates to do that. Besides, admitting to them that she needs help means admitting to herself that she can’t do it all. Which she refuses to acknowledge. Because she has to do it all.

Her stomach twists with guilt at the thought. The whole village is relying on her to be competent, to figure things out, to make it all work. Not that they know it. And if she told them? Well…

She shoves the thought aside along with a pile of empty seed bags. Telling them the truth of things is simply not an option. Exhaling sharply through the familiar wash of anxiety that always chases guilt when she thinks about the village and its future, she picks up a stack of pots and shifts them into the wheelbarrow. Spider silk coats her fingers as she does so, making them sticky. Margot swears, brushing the clinging threads off on her skirt.

Of course, if she did hire some help, she might get a day off. Or the chance to linger in bed past dawn or just have a few minutes to herself.

But there’s no money to hire someone. And besides, how would she teach them everything they’d need to know? What if they overwatered the rowan saplings or forgot to prune the spider plants or flubbed a spell that Margot could perform easily, turning them into actual spiders intent on taking over the greenhouse?

Not worth the risk.

As Margot shifts around garden tools in the shed, looking for the spade she knows she left back here, her mind drifts toher plans for the evening. Her best friend, Sage Wilderstone, will be in town tonight. It’s just a quick visit—Sage is passing through Bloomfield before she heads out on her next adventure—but the thought of talking to her best friend, not awheelbarrow or a plant or a cat, is delicious. They’re meeting for drinks in Clementine’s Tavern at nine o’clock, which should give Margot enough time for a bath and change of clothes.

Pausing in her pursuit of the spade, Margot considers her soil-smeared strawberry-print dress. It’s her least favorite, but since she didn’t get to do laundry yesterday, it’s also her second-to-last clean one. When she dressed in the dark this morning, she hadn’t known she’d be meeting Sage tonight, and it’s not like they’re going somewhere fancy. There are no fancy places in Bloomfield. Still, she really should change into something less grimy and strawberry-forward.

Right, yes. She will make time to go home first.

Margot resumes her search for the spade, fingers scraping over empty clay pots and bags of mulch. How her parents would hate to see her now: dirt under her fingernails, garden boots on, looking so much like Granny Fern.

A pang of grief, sharp and sudden, sends Margot stumbling backward. She catches herself against the wheelbarrow, sitting heavily on the edge, letting the metal bite into the back of her thighs. How has it been more than four years already?

Granny Fern was a legendary plant witch—a natural caster too—whose remedies, magical plants, and many potions made the Greenwillow family a tremendous fortune. Over the years, even as her fame grew, Granny Fern stayed the same. Her home was the gardener’s cottage she grew up in—the same one Margot lives in now—and she donated money and shared her land generously, including the fields, lake, and forests around her greenhouses. The community of Bloomfield had sprung up on that land, slowly growing from a few houses and families struggling together to carve out a life in the middle of the countryside into a thriving village of about two hundred people, built around the principle of mutual care for neighbors and the small joys of building and growing, books, tea, and a slow afternoon spent chatting with a friend.

None of which appealed to Margot’s parents. They were cut from a different vine, and they hated how easily Granny Fern gave her money away. Unlike her own mother, Margot grew up in Ashaway among high society, and when Margot’s parents could be bothered to visit Granny Fern, they insisted on staying in the enormous manor house they’d built near Granny Fern’s cottage. Rare though they were, Margot loved those visits to Bloomfield. During summers and occasional long weekends in her childhood, Margot learned how to help green things grow over many cups of tea with Granny Fern. She even learned how to make a few simple potions, though she was nowhere near as good at them as Granny Fern.

But the summer Margot turned eighteen, Granny Fern got sick with something even her most famous remedies couldn’t cure. She was gone before Margot could catch a coach to Bloomfield. Granny Fern’s ashes were scattered under her favorite tree behind the gardener’s cottage, and while Margot grieved by working in the greenhouses, Margot’s parents giddily dug their hands deep in the family coffers. Which soon went spectacularly wrong…

Tears rise in Margot’s eyes. Feel your feelings, little Daisy, then get back to work, Granny Fern always used to say.

Margot would love to, but who has time for feelings when there’s so much to do? The thought makes her reach into her dress pocket, as she’s done so often over the last few years, her fingers brushing over the well-worn letter she has memorized by now. It’s from the Claunecks, her parents’ onetime friends and eventual creditors. Official Clauneck Company letterhead fills the top of the page: the distinctive outline of their towered offices in the Copper Court, with a C turned sideways atop its crenellated roof. When Margot first found the letter among her parents’ things—almost a year after Granny Fern had died and soon after her parents had been moved to the Bloomfield Care Cottage—she nearly tore it up in rage. By now, the words are familiar, and they are the heaviest of weights. She reads them again:

Dear Iris and Welton,

Regarding your request, we feel it unwise to invest further in your ventures until we have fully recouped your considerable debts to the Clauneck Company, the sum of which the heretofore seized assets have not begun to erase. However, we are impressed by your generous estimations of your daughter’s talents and intrigued by the Natural Caster Restoration Potion you claim she is close to perfecting. In remembrance of Fern—whose legacy looms large over Harrow and its economy still—we have seen fit to offer an extension on said debts. For a period of four years until that summer’s end, we will delay the seizure of Bloomfield. We will allow you to occupy Fern’s cottage on your former estate, and to continue to manage Greenwillow Greenhouses. It is our hope that Margot will inherit her grandmother’s prodigious abilities and redeem the Greenwillow brand.

Following this four-year period, should your daughter’s potential fail to bear out, then your remaining assets—the cottage, the greenhouses, and the land upon which Bloomfield sits—will be subject to immediate seizure, which we shall take no pleasure in. (Please know, it’s nothing personal. It’s just business.)

We look forward to witnessing all that Margot will achieve during this grace period and remain cordially yours,

Baremon and Menorath Clauneck

As she does every time she reads the letter, Margot wishes her parents hadn’t desperately seized upon the one incomplete potion in Granny Fern’s remedy book. It was an impossible potion, meant to give someone born with the shallowest pool of magic an infinite spring of power. Faced with utter financial ruin, they had wildly overpromised the Claunecks that Margot was capable of finishing the recipe, which was ridiculous. She’s been trying for years to work it out—and now that it’s mere weeks away from winter’s end, with half a year out of the promised four remining, she’s still no closer to completing it. She hasn’t heard anything more from the Claunecks (it should be a relief, though sometimes she wonders about her childhood friend Yael, the Clauneck heir, who hasn’t written to her in years), but that doesn’t mean they’ve forgotten her.

Please know, it’s nothing personal. It’s just business.

Except it is personal. Extremely. Because if Margot can’t figure out this recipe, then it’s not just her home and greenhouses she stands to lose. It’s the entire village of Bloomfield, though none of the villagers know it.

They still believe what Margot’s parents told them—that despite losing the manor house to pay off their debts, nothing more would change after Fern’s death. And Margot hasn’t been able to bring herself to tell them that the village is also subject to seizure. How could she admit to her friends and community that Fern didn’t leave a will, so if she’d meant for the land to go to anybody but Margot’s parents, no one would ever know? It was so like Fern, who was a touch scatterbrained and more focused on plants and potions than lawyers and contracts. Or, in her words, as Margot found in one of Fern’s journals, dated the day before her death, I always thought I’d have more time.

Now, after all these years of keeping her parents’ secret, how can Margot tell the people of Bloomfield that their homes and businesses depend on her questionable potion-making abilities?

Margot shoves the letter back into her pocket, glaring around the shed. As if the bags of potting mix could fix all of her problems but refuse to.

“You still have nearly seven months,” Margot whispers to herself. “That’s more than enough time.”

It will be. It has to be.

Tonight, despite her aching back and the need to go home and change clothes before meeting Sage, she’ll squeeze some remedy making in after the day’s work is done. The entire town is counting on her, even if they don’t know it. Underlining “save the town by way of an impossible potion” on her mental to-do list, because it’s always there at the very top, Margot moves a collection of empty plant pots aside and digs deeper in the shed for the spade. There it is, behind a sack of strawberry seeds. She grabs it and stomps back into the greenhouses.

As the day passes, Margot repots daylilies that shine golden with a bit of ensorcelled sunlight. She encourages the ivy plants to weave their long tresses, strong and true. She recites poetry to the annuals, a great riot of flowers filling an entire corner of the east greenhouse (they’re blooming quite well now that Margot has discovered the power of iambic pentameter). This is growing magic, the kind that makes the power in her blood sing. It’s different from remedy magic, at which Granny Fern was brilliant and Margot is barely passable. She feeds the koi in the small fishpond, keeps up with the few customers who come into the greenhouse, and chats with Ms. Estelle Willver, elderly owner of Bloomfield’s bakery, who wants to preorder three jars of strawberry jam and purchase a simple love potion: a bottled spell that Estelle will take to help open herself up to love. The love potion is hope; the jars of heartbreak-healing jam, insurance against disaster.

Many hours and many cups of tea later, the day’s work is done. But of course Margot has to do it all over again tomorrow. And she needs to work on the Natural Caster Potion a bit too. Because tomorrow morning, she’ll be one day closer to the Claunecks’ deadline.

With that thought heavier than the sacks of potting soil she carted into the greenhouse that afternoon, Margot locks the front door and slumps into the chair behind her workshop table.

The workshop is a small room with tall shelves lining the walls, each of them stuffed with glass bottles full of colored liquids, old books, stacks of silver bowls, dried herbs, strange-looking brass instruments, piles of notes bound in ribbon, a few vining plants that spill down the sides of the shelves, and dozens of teacups. A table sits in the middle of the room, covered in books, scrolls, dried leaves, and pencils. It’s got an immense center drawer and dozens of smaller drawers in each leg, all of them filled with more ingredients, plant cuttings, and papers.

The workshop smells like mint leaves and burnt toast with the tiniest hint of cinnamon from the tea Granny Fern loved best. On the table, beside a tiny oval painted portrait of her and Granny Fern, Margot still keeps a few cinnamon sticks, so the room always smells like Granny Fern has just left it, cup of tea in hand. She pulls Granny Fern’s spellbook toward her, flipping to the last entry.

The Natural Caster Potion is written across the top of the page, and under that are a mere five lines of notes in Granny Fern’s cramped handwriting, giving some thoughts on the potion and some ideas Fern had for creating it. She believed it could be made up of a few individual potions, perhaps ones representing the different affinities natural casters had for magical specialties such as enchantment, conjuration, divination, and elemental magic—which involved air, water, earth, or fire—and a dozen more. The end result, she thought, would be much greater than the sum of its parts. It was tricky and, according to one of the notes, gave Fern a lot of trouble, but she had high hopes for it.

Margot runs her finger along the short descriptions of each potion part. All of them note what it is and should do, but none include ingredients or instructions. Like the letter from the Claunecks, she’s read this page hundreds of times, but she’s no closer to figuring it out either. For years, she’s been practicing by making the other remedies in Fern’s book using her own magical education and experimentation, hoping those will at least improve her skills at remedy magic. According to the date at the top of the last page in the book, Fern had been working on this potion the week before she died, but there are pages torn out of the end of the spellbook. What had been written on them? Who tore them out? Margot has no idea, and there are so many questions she wants to ask her grandmother but never will.

A clock in the workshop chimes eight, and her stomach rumbles, reminding her she hasn’t eaten since the cookies hours ago. But she’s so tired. Perhaps that remedy she’d been working on last week—the one she’d brewed based on the description of the energy spell in Granny Fern’s book—is ready. If Margot’s calculations are correct, it should ease her aching muscles and grant her a burst of energy—enough to stay awake and alert for her evening ahead, so Sage and anyone else Margot runs into at the tavern don’t suspect how run-down she actually is.

Margot pulls open a wooden table drawer, where the potion has been curing beside fifteen rose petals, two tears wrapped in spider’s silk, and a tiny bag of red-and-white mushrooms. She holds the small bottle of liquid to the flickering flame of her candle. It sparkles emerald green, just like it’s supposed to. There’s a tint of purple at the edges that Granny Fern’s notes didn’t mention, but surely that’s her own magic at work, which isn’t exactly like her grandmother’s (even as she wishes it was).

Margot uncorks the bottle, inhaling slowly as the smell of honey and lilac fills the air. She tips a few drops into her mouth. It’s sweet on her tongue, a bit fizzy, and it fills her with something warm. She closes her eyes for a moment, feeling like a flower, stretching toward the golden energy of the sun…

She wakes minutes (hours? a whole day?) later. Swearing, Margot scrambles to her feet. So much for her glorious magical potential. She’s drooled on the workshop table, and her neck has a crick in it from sleeping in a terrible position. Grabbing her tiny clock—the wooden one shaped like a snail that Granny Fern gave her for her twelfth birthday—she lets out a long sigh. It’s only nine fifteen. She’s not that late, though she doesn’t have time to go home to bathe or change.

Strawberry dress and garden boots it is, then.

Throwing a hand-knitted purple cardigan over her dress and scowling at the disaster of an energy potion that put her to sleep, Margot runs out the door.

Margot met Sage Wilderstone—professional ranger and adventurer extraordinaire—three years ago, on her first day of college. Sage had been sprawled in a chair at a table near the back of their carnivorous plant management seminar, comfortable in her long-limbed body like no one else Margot had ever seen. There were no other open chairs in the room, and Margot was grateful for the chance to slide into the seat next to the stranger with short blond hair styled in a dangerous-looking undercut. She, at least, seemed like she knew what to do as the professor brought out three-foot-tall, snapping Venus flytraps.

“Ready for an adventure?” Sage said, her wide grin showing her remarkably straight teeth as the professor put a flytrap on their table and wished them luck.

Margot had nodded and smoothed out the next page in her notebook. As it turned out, she took no notes that day, and she and Sage failed miserably at the flytrap exercise, but they became fast friends.

Tonight, as Margot enters Clementine’s Tavern—a two-story stone-and-timber building with several generously sized common rooms, an inviting hearth with a blazing fire, and tables full of townspeople—she sees Sage immediately. Long rows of candles dripping wax over their iron sconces cast a golden glow over the room, and Sage sits at the tavern bar, limned in their light. Her long legs are swathed in fitted trousers and knee-high boots, which she props on the chair in front of her. Her white linen shirt is open at the throat, showing her suntanned skin and collarbone, while her sword rests on the bar beside three empty flagons of ale. Her fingers tap along to the melody played by a traveling bard as she talks with Clementine, the curly-haired young woman who owns the tavern. Sage leans in closer across the bar counter, whispering something, and a blush rises on Clem’s cheeks. Yep. They’re most definitely flirting. Margot grins. Sage leaves a string of yearning hearts behind in every town she passes through, just as she did when she quit college months before their graduation, eager to set out on her next adventure. It looks like her brief time in Bloomfield will be no different. Margot is deeply grateful that one of her core rules is never to sleep with her friends; so much better to miss out on a one-night affair than to lose one of the few people she holds close.

As Margot strolls toward the bar, she waves to Mike, the enthusiastic collector of volumes for the town’s library who also runs Honey and Wax, the town’s bookshop. He’s got a stack of stories on the table in front of him. Dara, the town’s chicken witch, sits across from him with a pint of ale, her nose deep in a book as well. Beside her is her younger sister, Poppy, who runs a small workshop in town selling gadgets of her own invention.

“See you at the community dinner tomorrow!” calls Rosiee, the town’s unofficial organizer, who’s always got a cat or a funny story (or often both) on hand. Community dinner is a weekly Bloomfield custom—a time when everyone sets aside their work and chores and worries to spend a few hours with their neighbors. It’s held in the courtyard at the town center when it isn’t raining or snowing, and all of Bloomfield’s residents settle around long trestle tables piled high with food brought by everyone, drink loads of ale and wine, and spend the evening catching up, laughing together, and making plans for the town. It’s one of Margot’s favorite community traditions and one more reason out of a million why she has to save Bloomfield. The thought of there being no more community dinners two seasons from now because Margot didn’t figure out the Natural Caster Potion is unthinkable, and utterly not worth entertaining. Even if it’s a very real possibility.

“I’m bringing roasted carrots and a fruit salad,” Margot manages as more guilt twists her stomach. “Wouldn’t miss it for anything.”

Rosiee raises a tankard to that alongside Beryl, who runs the town’s brewery, and Margot keeps walking toward the bar. She passes a few people clearly not from Bloomfield, who wear silk coats or dresses, and frowns in their direction. As much as she needs occasional tourists and passers-through to keep the greenhouse afloat—there are only so many heartbreaks to tend to in a small town—they can be a nuisance. They gawk at Bloomfield as though it’s some quaint storybook place. As though the idea of a peaceful, supportive community is as adorable as it is unattainable.

“Margot Greenwillow!” booms Sage as Margot reaches the bar. Sage’s delight dances through her words. “As I live and breathe, we’d almost given up on you.”

Margot throws a sheepish smile in Sage’s direction. “Sorry. I fell asleep.”

Sage raises one eyebrow, the silvered whisper of a scar running through it. “Well, you’re here now. That’s all that counts!” She stands and pulls Margot into a tight hug and, despite their similar heights, lifts her slightly. A gasp of surprise escapes Margot’s lips, and she hugs Sage back, then wriggles out of the embrace.

“I love the garden boots,” Sage says, studying Margot’s outfit.

Margot snorts. “I think they go well with this lovely, high-fashion frock.”

“Which goes perfectly with the cardigan, so I’d say you’re winning.” Sage takes a full mug of ale off the counter and hands it to Margot. “You look like a woman who needs several of these. Sit, drink, tell me everything.”

Relief tastes like frothy ale, sounds like Sage’s laughter, and feels like settling onto one of the high barstools. The night unwinds in a cozy blur of music, friendship, and many drinks. Sage gives Margot a present: a pair of enchanted, mirrored compacts she picked up from a trader on the Queens’ Road, which they can use to talk to each other across long distances; one of them need only scribble a short note on a slip of paper and close it up inside the compact, and the message will write itself across the mirror of the opposite one. Clementine keeps flirting with Sage, who tells them both about her next adventure, a mission to the Swamplands on the southeastern coast of the kingdom, where a network of marshes, mudflats, and ponds flood regularly with saltwater from the Serpentine Sea.

“I’ve always wanted to see the Swamplands,” Margot says, her voice lighter from the ale and the thought of sleeping under the stars, the nearby sounds of the sea whispering into her dreams.

“Come with me!” Sage says, clapping Margot enthusiastically on the shoulder. “Our leader is still building the party—”

“Tell me this isn’t going to be one of those shady adventure parties put together by a company out to exploit and destroy magical habitats?” Margot’s parents had hired several of those after Granny Fern died, each of them promising wildly profitable discoveries, and each of them running away with her parents’ money, never to be heard from again.

“You know me better than that. We’re out to discover, not destroy or exploit. A trader in Ashaway told our client about a grove on the coast where no one has been able to venture more than twenty feet in on account of, well, probably monsters. But we’re looking for a rare specimen of sea fern, and we could use a plant witch like you along for the journey.”

“I would love to, but—”

“Think about it, it’s perfect! We’ll be back by midsummer, so you’ll be home in plenty of time for community apple bobbing or whatever charming activities Bloomfield gets up to in autumn.”

For a moment, with the ale making her brain fuzzy, Margot lets the fantasy wrap around her. She could wear an adventurer’s outfit, like Sage’s, instead of garden boots and muddy dresses. They’d pore over the map and then step outside it. Sage would pick through waist-deep mud and monstrous leeches to get to this rare fern, and Margot would study it, finding uses that she couldn’t even imagine in her greenhouses. Maybe she could create the potion that snapped her parents out of—

Right, no. The thought of her parents is a pair of gardening shears chopping the buds of this fantasy to pieces.

“I can’t, Sage.” Margot takes another long swig of ale, finishing it. She slips a hand into her pocket, running her fingers over the letter from the Claunecks; she keeps it with her wherever she goes, partly to root herself in moments like these when she’s tempted to drift into dreams of what could be. “I have to stay here. My parents need me. The greenhouses need me. I can’t just run off.”

She tries to keep the longing from her voice, but Sage shoots her a sympathetic look. “You’re doing too much, love. You know that.”

Margot just shrugs. Maybe she is. But lingering too long on the truth doesn’t mark items off her to-do list. Or concoct magical Natural Caster Potions that will pay down her parents’ massive debts and save Bloomfield.

The clock behind the bar chimes midnight. Sage finishes her drink and stands, buckling her short sword to her waist.

“Are you sure you don’t want to stay the night?” Margot asks, suddenly desperate for her friend not to leave.

Clementine also looks eager for Sage to stay.

“I would love to, but I have to make up some time tonight.” Sage shoots them both an apologetic half smile. “Need to get at least a few hours of riding in before I bunk up. There’s an inn I can stay at about three hours from here.”

Margot wants to say more, but there’s no stopping Sage when her mind is made up. She’s perfectly free to do what she wants, sleep where she wants, chase whatever adventure she wants.

What would such freedom feel like?

Margot can’t even imagine.

“Take good care of yourself,” Margot says, pulling Sage into a hug. “Please don’t get eaten.”

“I won’t,” Sage promises. “And you try to have a little fun, okay?”

Margot won’t, but that isn’t the point. Sage squeezes her fiercely and then says goodbye. As the tavern door closes behind her, a deep loneliness settles over Margot.

“All done, then?” Clementine wipes the bar in front of her.

Margot looks toward the door, considering her empty cottage, the work in store for her tomorrow, and all of the adventures Sage has in front of her.

“I think I’ll have one more.” Margot pushes her tankard toward Clementine, hoping to lose herself and her responsibilities for a few more minutes at the bottom of it.