Chapter 10
Okay, MAYBE sharing your feelings is not the WORST thing that could happen to a person… MAYBE.
The tenuous peace that Hesper and I’d found that night shredded to pieces come morning.
I had sequestered myself in the garden, minding my own business, having myself a proper panic that none of my seed songs were doing a lick of anything, when out strode Hesper. Healed, grinning, and ready to irk me.
“Singing your songs?” she asked, looming over me like an unwanted pest.
“I was,” I murmured.
“What are you trying to grow?”
“A few carrots that I let go to seed from the Goddess Celebration,” I replied curtly.
“Go on then.” She motioned to the empty bed.
“I don’t need an audience.” I glared at her.
“Well, you’ve got one.” She shrugged and proceeded to plop down beside the garden bed, making herself at home.
I tried to keep on, but her presence was distracting at best, deeply upsetting at worst. And it was always “worst” for me.
Her attention only caused me to lose whatever slippery hold I had on the magic anyhow.
I couldn’t shake the thought that she knew something was off, and it corroded me to my core.
I finally threw my hands up in the air and marched inside, holing myself in my room for the rest of the day.
That morning was a dalliance in the meadow compared to the ones that followed. The next, I went out to the garden bed, a renewed sense of hope. Then out she came, strutting in the morning light.
“More songs today?”
“Yes.”
“More attempts at growing?”
Attempts. I clenched my jaw, grinding down on my teeth. Letting my anger get the best of me would do nothing for growing. If I didn’t maintain balance, the magic would be impossible to harness.
“Yes, I will be attempting, as you say.” I squeezed my eyes shut, steadying my breath.
“Try something else,” she said simply, walking around each garden bed, inspecting them all closely.
“What?” I asked, incredulous.
“You always do the same thing. You sing, you strain. Why don’t you try something else?” she said it so easy, like her ask was nothing at all.
I had lived with this weird, difficult version of magic for years. She had known me all of three days, and she had the audacity to tell me what to try?
“You have no idea what you are talking about,” I seethed. The anger bubbled up, causing my heart to seize with fire. The fresh soil in the garden bed began to crack. I couldn’t grow shite, but I could certainly kill it.
Calm yourself, I repeated over and over, but it didn’t help at all.
“Clara, please don’t take offense to this, but I do know what I’m talking about. Your magic doesn’t work like any other garden magic I have ever seen.”
Because it isn’t mine, I wanted to scream at her. Throw it in her face. She didn’t, in fact, know everything. Unless she did. Unless she saw right through me.
“And how would you know? You said yourself, you can’t even keep a weed alive. Are you an expert on magic?” I meant to say it evenly. Instead, I yelled so loudly, the crows flew from their perches in the oak tree. One in particular remained high above, casting ominous shadows on the cottage.
“When you’ve been around as long as I have, you pick up on a few things, princess,” she said, not matching my volume.
I wanted her to, I desperately wanted to brawl, to get this anger up and out.
But she remained persistently unbothered—a constant reminder of why I chose to be alone.
People like her undid me; there was no facade I could put on that she wouldn’t see right through.
Everything I threw her way, she let fly, and I was left floundering for purchase.
It made me irate; it made me everything I tried not to be.
“Don’t. Call. Me. Princess. And how long is that?” She wasn’t the only one who could ask a slew of questions.
“A while.” She smiled. I rolled my eyes, biting on my cheek.
But her words struck a chord in me, our earlier conversations slowly piecing themselves together.
The first night she stayed here, she avoided answering who or what she was.
When Helda interrupted our lunch, Hesper smelled her magic.
She traveled with Eldrene’s Forest Train, all of whom were centuries old at least. She always seemed shrouded in shadow, even in the blaring sun.
And that tattoo of hers that she avoided speaking of—could they have all been intertwined?
“What are you?” I asked. At that, Hesper ceased her relentless inspection of the garden.
“I am many things, Clara Thorne.”
“Quit being mysterious.” I walked up to her, examining her just as closely as she had me these last few days. Her eyes met mine, and for a moment, I forgot why I’d come over to her. The world ebbed away, the anger in me settling down. Then she winked, and I remembered.
“Your tattoo then, you at least owe me an explanation for why you have it,” I pressed. There was no way I would let her leave this garden without answering at least one of my questions.
“Always looking at my arms, are you, princess?”
“Don’t change the subject.” I was getting used to Hesper’s keen ability to charm her way out of questions. “You owe me. You have asked me at least one million questions. So what’s it for?”
Hesper bit at her lip; her fingers fiddled with her wrist leathers.
“It’s a bargain, Clara,” she said, her tone attempting lightness, but there was weight in every word.
“What kind?” I asked. “Before, in Remi’s, you said ‘duties.’ What duties?”
She kicked at the dirt, and for the first time, I witnessed Hesper fumble for words. “I am—I am bound to Eldrene until her power is restored. My only reprieve from her Train is when there are quests she sends me on, but I must always return.”
“Why did you strike the bargain in the first place?”
“For reasons.” She shrugged.
My fingers itched to punch this woman in the face.
“Are you even human?” I asked, eyes narrowed.
“Depends on how you look at it.”
“Oh my Goddess, you are so vexing.” I looked up toward the Havens, inwardly cursing them for bestowing upon me an unruly fate and an even more unruly protector. “Tell me something, anything. Where are you from? Do you have family?”
Her eyes went dark, the perpetual openness snuffed out.
“You’ve dried your soil up, princess,” she said, pointing to the garden beds behind me. I blinked, having momentarily forgotten about them. But her words got through, and I looked to see the damage I’d done.
The damage she caused me to do.
My garden beds were sickly pale, every ounce of health leeched out of them.
Shite.
The days began to fall into each other, the sun and moon rising before I’d had the wherewithal to grasp either. I was trapped in the middle of an hourglass—drowning in the sand, hoping it would pass, and longing for it to go back up again.
More time, I needed more time. I needed to clear my head, hear my own thoughts, but I couldn’t even manage to snag one second alone.
My thoughts were scattered seeds in the wind, and my attic room became a den of every gardening theory imaginable that might grow a harvest in one month with no magic.
And by theory, I mean deranged scribblings plastering my walls that easily could have pinned me as someone interested in creative ways to mince up not-for-eating mushrooms and have an outer-realm experience.
Townsfolk began coming by at all hours of the day. Some to wish me farewell, others to look upon me as if I were in my casket. Ludwig, of course, dropped by, leaving behind parting words: “You will meet your end in Dwindle.”
I very well might have met the “end” right here in Moss.
Then there was the Hesper of it all.
Always asking questions, always insisting I try something else, always there.
At first, I thought my hatred of her was a tad misdirected.
I should have hated the Fates and Eldrene, but Hesper was right in front of me and sent from both of them, so she would do.
But now? Oh, I despised her. She needled me.
She had to have known by now that she had been sent to protect a fraud, that our quest was doomed. No magic worked the way mine did.
And the magic wasn’t working at all now. The seed pack lay dormant in the middle of the room. The magic was a leaking cup; the more I looked for it, the less I could find.
I could feel every emotion I had decidedly not felt these past days bubbling up to the surface.
Hesper butting in where she shouldn’t, me being entirely ill-equipped to handle anything, needing help and not asking for it, not seeing Rosie, passing the time away without anything to show for it at all, leaving Moss.
Everything frayed at the edges, too lost, too broken, too new. Too much of everything all at once.
Then the day came when I finally broke.
I frolicked out into the garden like the whimsical, magic creature inside of me always longed to.
Just kidding.
I had turned into a feral, warped hag—chanting, spiraling, clawing at my heart, praying to unknown deities, weighing how poor of a decision it would be to make a deal with a demon, or conversely, to run away.
I was unsure when I’d last brushed my teeth.
Undoubtedly, I smelled of radishes and regret.
And Hesper just had to say something.
“Rosie stopped by yesterday,” Hesper said, emerging out of nowhere.
I grunted in response, which was actually more than my average reply to her.
“She dropped off some food for you.” I kept ignoring her, staring at the dirt.
It had been a lovely twenty-four hours not speaking with Hesper and instead hacking at the earth.
It was too risky to work with Gristle’s seeds in such a state, so the garden beds became sacrificial offerings. “She said she misses you.”
My heart crunched in, my legs went wobbly.