Lucent Academy: Trinity Awakens

CHAPTER ONE THE GARDENER’S DAUGHTER

CHAPTER ONE: THE GARDENER'S DAUGHTER

I woke to the sound of my brothers trying to kill each other with wooden swords, which meant it was a perfectly ordinary Tuesday morning in the Wood household.

Their battle cries drifted up through the floorboards, followed by a crash that was probably the kitchen stool and definitely going to earn them both a scolding from Mother.

"Boys!" Her voice cut through the chaos. "If I have to come out there, you're both mucking the pig pen for a week!"

Silence. I smiled into my pillow and counted to three before the fighting resumed, quieter this time, with exaggerated whispers that somehow carried even better than the shouting had.

Samuel and Simon were seven years old, identical in face and temperament, and they had not yet learned the art of subtlety. I doubted they ever would.

I pushed back my quilt and dressed quickly in the gray light of early morning, pulling on my brown work dress and tying my hair back with a strip of faded ribbon.

The mirror on my wall showed me what it always showed me: a plain girl with brown hair and brown eyes and the kind of face that people called "pleasant" when they were being generous and "forgettable" when they weren't. I didn't mind.

There were worse things to be than forgettable.

The kitchen was warm with hearth-fire and the smell of baking bread when I came downstairs.

Mother stood at the long table with flour on her hands and a streak of it across her forehead, and she looked up when I entered with that particular expression that meant she was glad to see me and also that there was work to be done. There was always work to be done.

"Leah, thank the gods. Can you watch Lily while I finish these loaves? And check on your brothers before they bring the house down around our ears."

"I heard them plotting to storm the baron's castle and claim it for their own," I said, crossing to the basin to wash my hands. "Should I be concerned?"

"Only if they actually manage it. Then we'd have to move, and I just got the garden the way I like it."

I laughed and took Lily from her basket near the fire.

My sister was three years old, small for her age, with dark serious eyes that watched everything and gave nothing away.

She was the opposite of the twins in almost every respect, quiet where they were loud, still where they were constantly in motion, and I sometimes wondered if she had simply decided, upon being born into our chaotic household, that someone needed to provide a counterbalance.

"Good morning, little bird," I said, settling her on my hip. "Did you sleep well?"

Lily considered this question with the gravity of a scholar contemplating a philosophical problem. "Samuel snores," she finally said.

"He does. Like a pig with a head cold."

"What's a head cold?"

"It's when your nose gets stuffy and you sound funny when you talk. Remember when Simon had one last winter?"

Lily nodded slowly, processing this information, then pointed at the window. "Garden?"

I carried her outside into the morning sunshine, where the twins had abandoned their swords in favor of a new game involving sticks and an overturned bucket. They looked up when they heard us coming, their faces wearing matching expressions of innocence that fooled absolutely no one.

"We weren't doing anything," Samuel said immediately.

"I didn't ask."

"But if you were going to ask, we weren't."

"Good to know." I set Lily down on the grass and watched her toddle toward the bean plants with the focused determination of a tiny explorer. "What exactly weren't you doing?"

Simon, who had never been able to resist an opportunity to explain himself, launched into an elaborate account of their morning activities.

It involved pirates, a sea monster, at least two betrayals, and what sounded like a minor war crime.

I listened with half my attention while keeping my eyes on Lily, who had found a ladybug and was conducting what appeared to be a very serious conversation with it.

Our garden stretched out around us in the early light, neat rows of vegetables bordered by herbs and flowers, with the old apple tree standing watch at the center like a benevolent guardian.

Father said the tree had been there when his grandfather was a boy, already ancient then, its trunk wider than I could wrap my arms around and its branches spreading out in all directions.

The apples it produced were small and misshapen, not fit for the baron's table, but they had a sweetness to them that I had never tasted in any other fruit.

Every autumn we gathered them, and every winter we lived on the preserves and cider Mother made from them, and somehow the taste of those apples had become, for me, the taste of home itself.

Beyond the garden walls, I could hear the town waking up around us.

Hartwick was a proper town, one of the largest in the northern provinces, with nearly a hundred thousand souls living within its walls and the surrounding districts.

The baron's estate where we lived and worked sat on the eastern edge, where the residential quarters gave way to orchards and farmland, but the sounds of the city still reached us: the distant rumble of carts on cobblestones, the bells of the trading houses marking the hour, the faint hum of a hundred thousand people going about their daily business.

Sometimes, when the wind was right, I could smell the bakeries on Merchant Street or hear the calls of the fishmongers down by the river docks.

Hartwick had theaters and libraries and a university that drew scholars from across the Empire, and I had lived my entire life on its outskirts without ever feeling the need to explore any of it.

Everything I wanted was right here, in this garden, with these people.

"Leah," Simon said, tugging at my sleeve. "Leah, are you listening?"

"Absolutely. Pirates, sea monster, you defeated the kraken single-handedly."

"It was a two-headed kraken," he corrected, offended. "And Samuel helped. A little."

"I helped a lot," Samuel protested. "I was the one who—"

"Boys." I knelt down so I was at their level. "I need you to do something very important for me."

They both straightened, eager. The twins loved being given important tasks almost as much as they loved causing chaos, and I had learned early that the key to managing them was to channel their energy rather than trying to suppress it.

"I need you to watch Lily while I help Mother with the bread. Can you do that? Keep her out of the vegetables and make sure she doesn't eat any bugs."

"She ate a beetle last week," Samuel reported solemnly.

"I know. That's why we're trying to prevent a repeat performance. Do you accept this mission?"

They exchanged a look, conducting one of those silent twin conversations that I had never quite learned to interpret, and then nodded in unison. "We accept."

"Excellent. I'm counting on you."

I left them to their task and returned to the kitchen, where Mother had moved on from bread to the day's stew.

She handed me a knife and a pile of carrots without a word, and we worked side by side in comfortable silence, the kind of silence that only comes from years of shared labor and shared space.

Through the window I could see the spires of Hartwick's central district rising in the distance, the grand cathedral and the clock tower and the glittering dome of the Merchant's Guild, all of it beautiful and impressive and utterly irrelevant to the life I had built for myself here.

"Your father's speaking with the baron today," she said after a while. "About the orchard expansion."

"Do you think he'll agree?"

"The baron? He's agreed to everything Thomas has suggested for the past twenty years. I don't see why he'd start refusing now." She smiled, but there was something behind it, some worry that she was trying not to show. "Though I suppose we should be grateful for that. The baron's been good to us."

I nodded, focusing on my carrots. The baron was good to us, it was true.

He paid Father fairly and allowed us to live in the cottage rent-free and had never once, in all my years, treated us as anything less than valued members of his household.

But there was always a distance there, an invisible line between his family and ours that everyone understood and no one spoke about.

His daughter Seraphina was my age exactly, born on the same day in the same year, but we had never been friends.

We had never been anything. She looked through me as though I were made of glass, and I had learned, long ago, to stay out of her way.

I'd see her sometimes in town, shopping on the fashionable avenues with her friends, and she never so much as glanced in my direction.

That was fine. We lived in different worlds, she and I, even though we lived in the same town.

"Mother," I said, "do you ever wish things were different?"

She stopped stirring and looked at me with an expression I couldn't quite read. "Different how?"

"I don't know. Just... different. If Father were a merchant instead of a groundskeeper, or if we lived in the city center, or if..."

"If we were rich?" She laughed, but it wasn't unkind.

"Leah, I have a husband who loves me, four healthy children, food on the table, and a roof over my head.

I have a garden that grows what I plant and neighbors who help when times are hard.

What exactly would 'different' give me that I don't already have? "

"Adventure?" I suggested, though even as I said it, I knew it sounded foolish. "Excitement? A life that's... bigger, somehow?"

Mother set down her spoon and took my face in her flour-dusted hands, the way she used to do when I was small.

"Listen to me, Leah. There's nothing wrong with wanting a big life.

Some people are made for adventure, for excitement, for great deeds and grand stories.

But there's nothing wrong with wanting a small life either.

A good life isn't measured by its size. It's measured by its fullness.

" She kissed my forehead and went back to her stew.

"Besides, adventure has a way of finding people whether they want it or not.

Best to enjoy the quiet while you have it. "

I thought about her words as I finished the carrots and moved on to the onions, as I set the table for the midday meal and called the children in from the garden, as I sat at my usual place and watched my family gather around the food we had made together.

Father came in from his work smelling of earth and green growing things, and Lily climbed into his lap before he could even sit down properly, and the twins argued about whose turn it was to say the blessing until Mother silenced them with a look.

It was all so ordinary, so familiar, so exactly the same as every other day of my life, and I felt a sudden fierce surge of love for all of it, for these people and this place and this simple, small, full life.

I was seventeen years and eleven months old on that sunny morning in our garden. In three weeks I would turn eighteen, and everything would change.

But I didn't know that yet, so I ate my soup and laughed at Simon's jokes and helped Mother clear the dishes when the meal was done, and I was happy in the way that only people who don't know what's coming can be happy: completely, carelessly, and without a single thought for the future.