Chapter 10 #2
Rosie came to my door daily only to be turned away with some stupid excuse: “Sorry, I’m packing today,” “Sorry, I’m cleaning the floorboards today,” “Sorry, I’m testing the soil compounds today.”
Sorry, sorry, sorry.
But today, she hadn’t come yet. I doubt she would.
And come sunrise tomorrow, I would leave.
I had been so foolish not telling her after all this time. She probably wouldn’t have cared that I only had magic in Moss. I feared the failure, not her. I worried that, if I wasn’t enough, she would leave. But she was not my life before Moss; she was nothing like those people.
“Clara, why don’t you stop already?” Hesper finally said, crossing her arms.
“Stop what?”
“You’re overworking yourself, you barely eat, you barely sleep, you haven’t spoken to a single soul. You’ve turned away your best friend every day—”
“I don’t need you to tell me what I should or should not do,” I bit back.
“I’m well aware that you don’t need anyone, that’s abundantly clear. But your stubbornness is going to kill you before we even get on the road.” Her voice was calm, but her words were sharp.
“It doesn’t even fucking matter!” I met my end. All my edges were dulled, my patience shot to hell. Too tired to keep any more secrets, too tired to not say exactly what was on my heart—even if it terrified me to do so. “This quest was over the moment it was given to me.”
“How’s that?” Hesper asked.
“Do you not see this?” I asked with a bitter laugh, motioning to the empty garden beds, the dead rosemary bush, the state of myself covered in dirt. “I’m pointless.”
“Don’t say that.”
“No, I will say that, and you will stop telling me what to do. I didn’t even know you existed a month ago and now, here you are, breathing down my neck at all hours of the day.
Asking me questions. Telling me I should ‘try.’ Well, Hesper, I’ve tried.
I’ve been trying. My whole life. You said to try something different with my magic. Guess what? I don’t have magic.”
And even though I’d just exposed my worst fear, the thing I’d buried so deep inside of myself I thought it would take uprooting my soul to say it out loud, I felt strangely relieved to let it pour out of me.
There was nothing left to lose.
“That’s right. Not a drop. When I came to Moss, the town seeped into me or something.
I don’t know how—I don’t know, I just don’t.
I don’t have answers, I don’t have a plan, I don’t even have a home.
” My voice gave a pitiful crack, but I’d cried out all my tears.
“I don’t have the option to stop, I don’t have the choice to stay.
I don’t have anything. And I certainly don’t have magic. ”
“I know you don’t have garden magic,” Hesper said, almost warmly. Almost like she was trying to say, It’s all right, you’ll get ’em next time.
“What?” I asked, partly shocked, mostly dazed.
“Ever since the Goddess Celebration, I knew,” she said, never breaking eye contact with me, her voice as even as ever.
“How?” I knew she knew.
“Garden magic smells like dirt. Your magic doesn’t smell like that.”
Before I could ask her what I smelled like, a torrent of fury hit me.
“How dare you?” I shook my head in disbelief.
Hesper’s eyes grew wide.
“You spent the last weeks torturing me, asking after magic that you knew I didn’t have? Do you realize how awful that has been? How worthless and stupid I’ve felt every day knowing everything you asked, I couldn’t manage, and all along you knew?”
“Clara, I am so sorry, I never meant—”
“It doesn’t matter what you meant! That’s what happened.” Tears streamed down my face. “I have to go,” I said, running for the garden gate. “Do not follow me.”
“I’ll always follow you,” I heard her say. But even so, she stayed and let me go.
I ran all the way down the garden path and into the fields beyond. No companion, no small talk—just me and the rolling fields I loved so well. A single crow flew overhead, the only living being for miles. I soaked in the moment to breathe by myself.
The summer air flooded around me, and I lay down in the warm grass, feeling the earth beneath and the sun above. I closed my eyes, letting everything about the last few weeks wash over me.
Grow a garden.
A few words had changed my life in an instant. Ever since, I had been living and breathing my futile idea. And it wouldn’t even work.
The bright sun painted my vision gold even though my eyes were shut. The day raced by, but the viscous need to not waste a drop of time had vanished. All I was left with was the hollowed-out feeling of failure and the heat of the sun.
Just focus on all the light.
Almost immediately, the gold vanished, replaced with a murky gray.
Of course, a cloud…
“Clara?” a voice asked.
“Rosie?” I opened my eyes, and there she stood, hulking over me. “Hesper told me you were out here,” she said, then lay down beside me. “I’m surprised she let you out of her sight.”
“Well, perhaps she sensed it was either leave me alone or die,” I said, and I meant every word. Rosie chuckled. We lay in silence for a while, watching the clouds drift by the way only two people who have seen storms together can.
“You’ve been avoiding me,” she said gently.
No hint of pain in her voice. Her kindness lanced my heart right open.
Not talking to her these last few weeks was ruinous, ripping open and scabbing up my heart in all the wrong ways.
I didn’t want to hold anything from her.
If it meant she would be mad at me forever, so be it.
Hesper knew, Rosie should, too. She deserved to know the truth—she deserved to know all of me.
“I’m not magic, Rosie,” I said. “I never have been.”
“I know you’re upset right now, Clara, but you do have magic—”
“No, I don’t. I promise,” I told her. “It wasn’t me, it was something else.”
“But your garden magic—”
“It’s not really garden magic. I don’t know what it is. When I came here, I had no magic. Then, it was like Moss seeped into me, and suddenly I could grow things. Not extremely well but enough to be the Town Gardener.”
“So that’s why you never traveled.” Rosie clicked her tongue together as if she’d finally found that pesky last puzzle piece that seemingly gets up and runs away at precisely the wrong moment.
“I’m so sorry, Rosie.” My voice broke around the edges. “I should have told you sooner.”
Rosie went quiet for a while, her eyes narrowing in and then widening, as if she was weighing each thought carefully.
“We have been friends for a very long time, Clara. Whether you want to admit it or not, I know you. I know you have issues expressing your feelings in the way that most people consider to be the norm. I know you’d rather die under the porch than admit that you need help.
And I also know that you took time to learn my favorite teas for when I’m sad, contented, or tired; which sweater makes me the happiest so you can knit me backups when the others fray; which flowers I lean down to smell and which I do not so that your garden only has those I enjoy sniffing. ”
My heart crunched in on itself and reformed again.
What shape should it be now? There was something secretive in love.
Something strange and unattainable to me, I had never understood it in the way others did.
I did what I knew, what made the most sense, which were often the tiny pieces of someone they didn’t know anyone else could see.
Their small, unknown secrets were what I could read clearly, whereas the typical way folks spoke of showing love—grand, sweeping emotions and feelings of knowing—I couldn’t read at all.
It felt like sandpaper on my brain when I tried to understand, which only made me fussy; thus, I knitted and gardened and did things for people.
“You love in a quiet way, like a shade tree in the summer. I know you keep things to yourself, and I do not hold that against you. Whatever reason you have for never telling me about your magic is perfectly understandable. But I do want you to know that I will not love you less because you don’t have magic.
I suspect Moss will not care that much, either. ”
“Town Gardeners are meant to have garden magic; that’s the requirement. What would they say if they knew that all along—”
“That all along they had ample harvests for their homes and shoppes?”
“Yes, but—”
“Clara, sometimes the rules you hold closely are not held by everyone.”
She gave my hand a squeeze and left it at that.
“I suppose that means that growing a garden in a month will be—”
“Impossible?” I let out a bemused laugh. Ah, doom, it really brings out the humor at inappropriate times.
“Possibly very difficult,” she offered. “Maybe Dwindle has enchanted soil, and everything will grow just fine.”
“Yes, perhaps the village surrounded by Shadow Woods and a stone’s throw away from the Witherings will have the most fertile soil in the land.” I laughed bitterly.
“And your magic is entirely gone outside of Moss?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“So do you have any ideas?”
“Well—” I sat up, curling my knees into my chest. “I did, but then it didn’t work. My heart, I think, broke irreparably about leaving and the magic leaked out.”
She gave a soft hmm.
“And Hesper knew,” I said ruefully, wiping tears from my cheek.
“That you didn’t have magic?”
“Yep. She knew all along I didn’t have garden magic, and she behaved as if I did, asking me to try different ways to use my magic. What an ass.”
“Well, did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Try.”
“Whose side are you on?” I playfully slapped her arm, and despite the whirlwind of terror the last two weeks had been, I laughed. Because Rosie was here beside me, and my heart thrummed with something deep. Something pure.
“I just think you need to give her a chance,” Rosie said gently, tucking a sweaty strand of hair behind my ear.
“She is a good person. Which is amazing because she’s so hot, she could totally be an asshole if she really wanted to be.
” We both chuckled. “Maybe she thinks you have a different kind of magic,” she offered.
“Yes, the kind that is almost as stubborn as me, impossible to use, and dries up at the slightest hint of emotional turmoil?”
“That’s the one!” Rosie grinned. “Just try, Clara. What’s the worst that can happen?”
Just try, Clara.
Maybe I would. For Rosie.
“I love you,” Rosie said softly.
“I love you, too.”
I hadn’t said those words aloud in too long.
A heavy feeling of hopelessness threatened to surround me—even with the sun shining and Rosie beside me. Because it was our last afternoon together, and all the unsaid I love yous would never fit into the time we had left. But at least I said them now, at least she knew the truth.
“Not to ruin this sweet moment, but you have plants growing around your ankles and it’s freaking me out.”
Sure enough, intertwining all around me were tiny vines, vibrant blooms bursting into life the farther they crept up my legs.
Thornless roses.
Just like how I felt with Rosie: all blooms, no bite.
“Rosie, come with me.”
We ran, hand in hand, all the way back to the cottage. I did not rush, though; I knew it would work. The plan wouldn’t fail after all. There was hope.
I didn’t even try to punch Hesper as I ran past her reading in my kitchen chair. My anger didn’t flare when she followed us and clambered up the ladder into my bedroom.
Rosie and I smooshed onto my bed together, the seed packet in between us.
Hesper stood sentinel by the attic floor’s opening, her face inscrutable.
I held Rosie’s hand as I sang the seeds to life, willing quick, steady growth, abundant life, and protection from decay.
The magic flowed easily with Rosie there, the chasm in my chest filling up with a gentle hum that reminded me of Sylvie’s bees that first day I arrived here in Moss.
“Did it work?” Rosie asked, trying to hide the worry in her voice.
Nothing spectacular happened to the seeds, no special glowing aura surrounded them to let us know the magic was successful.
But I knew deep within myself that it had, indeed, worked.
The seeds were ready. As long as I got them to Dwindle safely and into the earth, I had hope.
“It did,” Hesper answered for me.
“How do you know?” Rosie and I asked in unison.
“Because I smell sunshine.” She grinned widely, elation filling her eyes. Without another word, she climbed down the ladder to leave Rosie and me alone.
“Okay, what the hells does that mean?” Rosie asked, her eyebrows knitting together. “Does Hesper have a super smeller or something?”
“Not quite.” I giggled. “She can smell magic apparently. How? I still have yet to find out. Is there such a thing as scent magic, where a person can smell anything and everything?”
“I can’t imagine that exists, but you never know. I wonder what magic smells like sunshine,” Rosie mused.
“Moss’s,” I said simply. It only made sense that a town so full of light and love would smell like the sun.
“Perhaps,” Rosie said. “Or perhaps, you smell like sunshine. That’s what I think.”
I had no interest in arguing with her.
Tomorrow would bring change. So tonight, I wanted to spend it how we usually did: talking about nothing at all, sipping on tea, and feeling utterly, perfectly happy.