Chapter 14
Fourteen
You order supper because you haven’t eaten all day.
Cyrus wanted to feed you, but you told him Granny fed you first. One day you’ve known him, and already you’ve lied.
Since you didn’t eat at his table, he sent you on your way with vegetables from his garden, and a pouch of seeds.
If you like my garden so much, he’d said after you complimented it for the tenth time, take these, you can start one of your own!
The pouch in your palm contains so many promises.
When you untie it, the seeds stare up at you.
There was a time in your life when a handful of seeds and fertile soil in which to plant them might have saved you.
When you think of how hungry you were, how barren the earth, those hours in the woods spent foraging—foraging with Cyrus…
And now you’ve survived to see a full-circle conclusion.
A child of famine now grows a garden; the swan who loved eelgrass now loves alfalfa.
You chuckle.
You hate your chuckling.
Silencing yourself, you discard your cloak. Slide off your boots. Unbutton your shirt.
Yes, it’s very sweet, Cyrus’s whole life. But is it the kind of life you could have? What are you going to do with a packet full of seeds? Your hands would come to that work as strangers; you’d kill a turnip as easily as you killed—
Besides, you’d need land to plant them. You don’t have land. You have a room at the inn.
But land can be acquired. Purchased, rented.
Stop it. Stop dreaming.
You exhale loudly. You reach for your vial, but your hand falls short. Your stew smells inviting; the skin on his vegetables is firm and fresh. What if you… just this once…
No. No. It’ll send you right back to the gingerbread house. Cyrus wouldn’t want anything from his garden to hurt you.
You take a drop from the vial to protect yourself, the way you have since you were a child, and eat in peace.
Well, no. Not peace.
But as close to peace as you can make it.