Chapter 5 The Town and the Seeds #2
An old woman was kneeling in the center of the garden, her hands deep in the soil, her back curved like a question mark. She did not look up when Flora approached, but she spoke, her voice cracked and warm like old leather.
"You are early. I expected you yesterday."
"I got lost."
"No, you did not." The woman sat back on her heels and looked up. Her face was a map of wrinkles, deep and numerous, but her eyes were sharp and clear, the blue of cornflowers, and they held Flora's gaze without blinking. "You were avoiding me. It is the same thing."
Flora had no response to that. She stood at the edge of the garden, holding Thorne's honey, and let the old woman look at her.
The old woman did not seem to be in a hurry.
She studied Flora the way she might study a plant she was trying to identify, turning her head slightly, taking in the coat and the boots and the hands that were still stained green from yesterday's arrangement.
"Violet had hands like yours," the old woman said. "Stained. Practical. She never could keep her nails clean, no matter how many times I told her to wear gloves. Said she needed to feel the soil. Said gloves lied to you about what you were touching."
"You knew her."
"I knew everyone. I am the oldest living thing in Thornhaven that is not a tree.
" The old woman pulled herself to her feet with a grunt and a creak of knees.
She was shorter than Flora, bent at the shoulders, but there was nothing frail about her.
Her hands were gnarled, the knuckles swollen, but they moved with a precision that spoke of decades of delicate work. "I am Marigold. I keep seeds."
"Seeds."
"Seeds. The shop has flowers. Thorne has bees. I have what comes before." She gestured at the garden around her. "Every flower you see here started as something smaller than a grain of rice. Every bloom began as a seed. That is what I keep. The beginnings."
She walked to a small shed at the side of the cottage and emerged with a cloth pouch, soft and worn, tied with a leather string.
She held it out to Flora, and Flora took it.
The pouch was warm, as if it had been kept close to Marigold's body, and it had weight.
The weight of something small that contained more than its size suggested.
"Moonpetals," Marigold said. "They bloom only once a decade, on the night of the winter solstice, and their petals are the color of moonlight on snow. Heirlooms. The last of their line. Violet was supposed to plant them, but she never got the chance."
Flora loosened the drawstring and peered inside. The seeds were tiny, dark, unremarkable. They looked like any other seeds she had seen in her years of working with flowers. Small and brown and full of potential that was invisible to the eye.
"They do not look like much," she said.
"No. They never do." Marigold's voice was quiet. "That is the thing about seeds. You cannot see what they will become. You have to trust that they know, and give them what they need, and wait. Most people are not good at waiting."
Flora looked at the seeds in her palm. Tiny. Dark. Full of something she could not see.
"Violet was the best of us," Marigold said. "She gave everything to the forest. Everything she had, everything she was. She would be glad you are here."
Something caught in Flora's chest. A crack she had not known was there, a fault line in the wall she had built over nine years and forty-seven towns. She did not want to be glad she was here. She did not want to be anything but passing through.
"I do not know how long I am staying," she said.
Marigold smiled. It was a knowing smile, the kind that had seen too many winters to be fooled by a few words. "Neither did Violet. Neither did I, when I arrived. Sixty years ago, and I am still here."
"That is not reassuring."
"It is not supposed to be. It is supposed to be true." Marigold turned back to her garden, lowering herself to her knees with a sigh that spoke of bones that had been bending a long time. "Plant them. Water them. Wait. That is all any of us can do."
Flora stood at the edge of the garden. She held the pouch of moonpetal seeds in one hand and the pot of honey in the other.
Behind her, the village was waking up, smoke rising from chimneys, the clatter of a bucket somewhere, the distant sound of Bess's voice calling a greeting to someone passing her bakery.
In front of her, the forest pressed against the edge of the world, dark and patient and full of things she did not understand.
She had arrived two days ago planning to assess, sign, sell, and leave.
She had a provisional closure notice in her pocket, a dead grandmother she had never met, a creature that communicated through color, and a hollow in her chest where something had been taken by a spell she had not known she could cast.
And now she had a pouch of seeds that bloomed once a decade and a pot of honey from a beekeeper whose bees were grieving.
She walked back to the shop.
The shop was quiet when she entered, the hum low and steady, the dried flowers rustling on their shelves as if they were settling themselves. Bloom was on the counter, white, waiting. It turned pink when Flora entered, a warm flush of approval.
"I brought honey," Flora said, setting the pot on the workbench. "And seeds. I have no idea what I am doing."
Bloom rustled. Its pink deepened.
"That is not an answer."
Bloom tilted its head. The expression was unmistakable: I gave you an answer. You just did not like it.
Flora found a small clay pot in the back room, the kind used for starting cuttings, and filled it with soil from the greenhouse.
The soil was gray, the color of the dying plants, but it was damp and dark and still smelled of earth.
She pressed a single moonpetal seed into the soil, covering it with a thin layer, the way she had done a thousand times in a thousand different greenhouses.
She watered it with a few drops from the kettle.
She set the pot on the windowsill, next to the dead arrangement from her first spell.
She stood back and looked at it. A small clay pot. A single seed. The tiniest act of faith she had ever performed.
"Okay," she said to the pot, to the seed, to the shop, to herself. "I do not know if you will grow. But I am going to water you anyway."
Bloom hopped off the counter and landed on the windowsill beside the pot, a warm weight of petals and light. Its color shifted to a soft, steady gold, the color of sunrise, the color of something beginning.
Flora looked at the potted seed on the windowsill. She looked at the dead arrangement beside it, her first spell, her first cost. She looked at the pot of honey on the workbench and the pouch of moonpetal seeds on the counter and the creature of petals and light that had decided to trust her.
She had been in Thornhaven for three days.