Chapter 9
It’s completely normal to experience feelings of excess desire, muddled confusion, and hazy passion while rubbing up on the back of someone who happens to be well-built—this does not require a medical diagnosis, please tell no one about it, and barely admit it to yourself.
Word around town is that you’re looking for a new Town Gardener with no luck, is that right?” Helda asked as she pulled up a chair to our table. She glanced at Hesper and gave her a wickedly flirtatious smile. Hesper gave her a grin right back.
Of course, my protector would play into the whims of someone with the last name Ninnus who also happened to be the most beautiful woman in Moss—and probably the entire realm.
If Helda had her sights set on Hesper, there was little I could do to stop the advances other than sneer in the corner and hate my protector.
Fire erupted along my skin.
“Yes, I am looking, and no, I have not had any luck.” I grimaced.
“Well, you’re in luck now!” she chirped, slapping the table with her manicured nails. She gave Hesper another quick smile that ended in biting her lip. Maybe she’d chew right through it.
“How am I in luck, Helda?” I asked tightly.
“Me,” she said proudly.
“You?” I asked.
“Me,” she repeated.
“I don’t understand.” What was she talking about? She looked entirely earnest, and I, entirely dumbfounded.
“I’m your new Town Gardener.” She pointed to her bosom, presumably where her heart beat underneath.
“It can’t be that hard; I mean, you do it.
” She gave a tinkling laugh. I gripped the corners of the table, and Hesper looked on in amusement.
“And I think it’s such a lovely little cottage, and the Town Gardener works with the Goddess herself.
And no offense, Clara, but the position could use someone a little more… like me.”
What did she mean by that? More like me.
“I think it’s no great secret that our magic is different,” she said with a wink.
“You have beauty magic, I have—”
“You have your garden magic, yes. But I know you struggle with it.” She pushed out her bottom lip.
“We’ve lived in the same town for fifteen years.
I’ve seen what can happen if your songs aren’t sung just right, if that little temper of yours isn’t in check.
The entire town suffers. But me? Well, look.
” She waved her hand over the flower I’d worked so hard to revive.
The ash turned back into a bloom, vibrant and full of life. No hint of the destruction I’d caused. She didn’t strain, she didn’t sing, she simply willed it to happen, and it did.
The room began to spin, and hot tears threatened to spill over onto my cheeks.
Helda was right. I’d spent my life struggling for weeks to do what she did in mere moments.
I loved being Town Gardener with everything in me, but maybe that wasn’t enough in the end.
Maybe this town deserved someone better than me.
“Miss Ninnus, pardon me,” Hesper said, pulling the flowerpot to her. She sniffed the bloom, wrinkled her nose, then shoved it away. “Beauty magic makes things look good. And that’s about it. That flower smells of death. And cloying lilac soap.”
Helda gulped beside me. Too-sweet lilac was her signature scent.
“Pardon me.” She copied Hesper’s easy tone. “My magic is—”
“For show,” Hesper finished. “Gardening, though I admittedly can’t even keep a weed alive, requires more than flashy spurts of vapid magic.
” Her voice took on an edge I’d not heard before.
“I don’t know what you’re angling at, but I suggest you leave this booth before you cause any more flowers to wilt. ”
Sure enough, Helda’s flower began to curl in at the edges, but Hesper wasn’t looking at the flower, she was looking at me.
“What are you going to do? Kill me?” Helda laughed.
“No one’s dying here.” Hesper smiled a predator’s grin. “Today.” Heat settled in my stomach, a strange sensation that I decided to blame on the stew.
“Did someone say die?” Ludwig Gudling appeared beside Helda, scaring me so badly I yelped. Everyone feasting at Remi’s fell silent, looking toward the chaos in the back corner. Ludwig looked on with his watery smile and cloudy eyes.
“Ludwig, I can’t really deal with this right now,” I said, but then he grasped me by my dress, tugging me close to him. “What are you—”
“The end awaits you at Dwindle,” he said urgently, spittle collecting on the corners of his paper-thin lips. “The end, you will meet your doom, you will—”
Before he could say another word, Hesper leapt across the table, pivoting between Helda and me, and clobbered Ludwig to the ground. Every patron in Remi’s looked in horror at the sight. Helda and I screamed.
“Why did you do that?” I shot up.
“You are feeling crowded, are you not?” she asked.
“What does that have to do anything?” My voice went shrill.
“Just answer the question!”
“Okay! Yes!”
“No harm done then,” she said, shaking her knuckles as if ridding herself of the blow.
“But, Ludwig, he’s—”
“Completely fine. He shouldn’t have touched you.
And you—” She eyed Helda. “Get out. Leave Clara alone. And please, for the love of Haven’s Halls, change your perfume.
As for everyone else,” Hesper addressed the café, “if you want me to wake the old man back up and have him tell you stories during your lunch, say aye.”
The room stayed silent for a moment, then all at once, people resumed their conversations as if nothing had happened.
“The Town Gardener position needs filling.” Helda tried and failed to re-up her earlier point. With one look from Hesper, though, she scurried out the door just as Rosie came bursting in, almost buzzing with excitement.
No, no, no. I can’t see her. Not now.
“Clara!” she shouted across the patrons. Remi may never forgive me for the multiple loud scenes caused today.
“I can’t really talk right now.” I made to leave, Hesper right behind me. “Sorry, we’ll catch up soon!” Rosie looked momentarily hurt, but then she grabbed my hand and pulled me right back out the door.
“I have your new Town Gardener!” She set off in a run.
“Rosie, wait!” She paid me no mind and kept dragging me along with her, Hesper in hot pursuit.
Well, I couldn’t avoid her now.
After five minutes of sprinting, my stamina was waning. Rosie had let go of my hand and sped down the last hilled street of Moss, the steepest hill in town, finally slowing her pace after the crest. I ran down to meet her and tripped over an upturned cobblestone, my body flying through the air.
I tensed, waiting for the inevitable crunch that accompanied shooting pain and broken bones.
It never came.
Instead, I fell right into the arms of Hesper.
But even her physical prowess couldn’t stop us from tumbling the rest of the way down the hill.
We rolled down together, her entire body enveloping me as she took most of the hits, her arms shielding my head from any stones.
The only way I knew she felt pain was through her grunts each time a bony part of her hit the hard ground.
We landed right at Rosie’s feet, who looked down at us with a mix of amusement and terror.
I fought my way out of Hesper’s arms. My back ached from the tumble, but I wasn’t in too much pain. Rosie lifted me up from the ground with ease, but when she offered a helping hand to Hesper, it went unused.
Hesper had taken a beating. A split lip, oozing blood, painted her teeth red. One of her eyes had already swelled shut, and the other had a cut right underneath the socket. Her knuckles and elbows were bloody as well from protecting my head from hitting anything.
She spat the blood out on the ground and wiped what remained with her torn tunic sleeve.
Rosie let out a low whistle. “Let’s get you to a healer.”
“Yes, good idea,” I replied.
“No,” Hesper said flatly.
Rosie and I looked at her in confusion.
“But you’re bleeding and probably have a broken bone—or two—after a fall like that,” I chided.
“No,” she repeated. “You need a new Town Gardener. We are getting a new Town Gardener. I’ve had far worse than this, trust me.” She’d had far worse than this? What life had Hesper Altanfall lived before now?
“All right then!” Rosie replied with an attempt at cheeriness, but she sounded wary. She motioned for us to follow her to the very last shoppe on Moss’s main street.
Brambles & Ivy.
Pattie Larkthorn’s flower shoppe.
She would be perfect for the Town Gardener position, so perfect the town might opt for her to continue even if I were to survive and come back home. She was knowledgeable, magical, and, most importantly, loved her work.
But she had a shoppe she couldn’t leave.
“Rosie, have you talked to Patti about this?” I asked.
“What? Oh, uh, no, I haven’t. I got the idea and then found you, and now we’re here.” She rubbed the back of her head.
“But she has a shoppe.”
Rosie turned toward me, her eyes beseeching me to give her idea a try.
This whole thing might have been an elaborate excuse for her to talk to Patti.
And if that were true, then I should help my best friend.
There were only two more weeks that I could play perpetual wingman anyhow.
And I was all out of leads for the position.
If anything, maybe Patti knew someone who might be interested.
Brambles & Ivy was unassuming from the outside.
It had the typical thatched roof, wooden beams crossing over white plaster, and plain wooden shutters.
It was the smallest and squattest building in town, barely taller than Rosie’s full stature at seven feet.
Rosie opened the robin’s-egg-blue door, and Hesper and I were transported into Larkthorn’s world.