Chapter 25
When life gives you lemons, make an absolute fool of yourself.
Here’s the plan.” I slapped a piece of paper down on the wooden table in the kitchen.
Watery sunlight poured through the windows, casting pale light over our morning.
Edge was leafing (er—clawing) through a tome he had placed on the kitchen sink.
Warty sat atop the pages, nibbling a cracker.
When Edge needed to turn the page, he flapped the crumbs off with his wings, plucked Warty up, turned to the next page, then set him back down again.
Hesper stood across from me, sipping her morning tea; I opted for a morning coffee, of course.
She braced her forearms on either side of the table, her tunic sleeves rolled up, her hair still tousled from a good night’s rest, and she thumbed at the scar above her lip.
I wonder what her lips taste like in the morning, my heart pondered.
“For the week?” Hesper’s eyes were still on the paper, so filled with inky scribbling it puddled onto the table.
“Like honey and lemons,” I heard myself say, answering my heart’s question. Out loud. Very much into the air. Where Hesper very much heard it.
The flipping of pages ceased. The munching of crackers disappeared.
Fuck.
“What?” Hesper asked, because of course, that’s the natural question.
“Uh—oh—it’s the—” I scratched the back of my head, but I unfortunately forgot my mug was still in that hand and dumped a bit (a lot) of coffee all over myself.
Which then set off a sequence of unfortunate events because I then dropped the mug, and when I went down to grab it, I bumped my head on the sink, which caused Edge to fly away and Warty to throw his crackers on the ground in surprise.
So.
“Are you all right?” Hesper rushed over, checking my head.
“I have genuinely, and I mean this, never been better,” I said, sporting an eerily large smile.
“Are you sure?” Hesper looked at me as if I were a strange, peculiar being who fell from the stars and had no idea how to interact with the earth. Let alone people.
“Yes!” I forced out. “And anyway, it’s for the day.” I rubbed at the front of my aching head.
“Honey and lemons for the day?” Hesper attempted to clarify.
I let out a girlish squeak. A sound that made me wonder if my existence on earth was entirely merited.
“Oh, you.” I slapped her arm.
What the hells? Was I broken?
“No, honey and lemons is the name of the”—say something, anything—“of the day! Yes, I’m naming the days here!
Because I name things. It’s like—uh—writing a chapter.
I always name the chapter first, then I write the chapter.
So here, in Dwindle, I’m going to name the day, and then we will do that day. ”
I blinked.
Hesper also blinked.
“Okay,” she said slowly.
I audibly gulped.
“So that list of nearly one hundred tasks is just for today?” Hesper crossed her arms, an incredulous look on her face.
“Yes, of course,” I said, because, out of all the things that had just happened, a too long to-do list was the least worrisome. Or surprising. Twenty-nine days and counting were all we had.
“All right then, put me where you want me.”
Oh, I will, my heart sighed.
Will you stop it? I begged.
Never, it replied. Happily.
Repairing a thatched roof. In one day.
That should be easy, right?
A host of things were growing on the roof.
Well, growing was a stretch. They once had grown there, then they’d died up there, and now they matted themselves into the long straw.
But clearing them away had to be done unless Hesper and I wanted to run the risk of pesky leaks and unwelcome creatures finding their way through the cracks and into the cottage.
Obviously, I couldn’t do the repair. I had an overrun garden to tend.
Hesper surveyed the cottage, her arms crossed, her mouth pursed.
“I’m going to need a ladder,” she finally said.
“I can go into town and ask Angus. I’m sure someone has one,” I offered.
“No need. I can build one myself.”
“You can?”
“Yes, I enjoy building things.”
“Oh, well, good on you then,” I replied.
This was more temptation than I could bear. People who can build things had always been a weakness for me.
We set to our respective tasks for the day.
I donned the old hat and apron that hung outside the cottage while Hesper found an axe in a discarded pile of mostly broken tools behind the cottage.
She sat down on a tree stump as she sharpened the blade—grunting with each strike of the whetstone. Right next to me.
Excellent. I loved her grunts first things in the morning; it was almost as peaceful as the lute music from Moss. Not at all distracting!
Meanwhile, I got to work on the garden beds.
They were in terrible disarray. The wood was splintering, roots had broken through wherever they could.
The soil was lifeless and needed extensive loosening.
Luckily, Angus and Murt had dropped off a menacingly large kitchen fork, which would have to do.
A broad fork would have been the best for the job, but that would have been impossible to come by anytime soon. So I hunched over and began.
The first garden bed took me three full hours to completely turn over.
There were hundreds of rocks and a seemingly endless number of gnarled roots that, while very much dead, certainly gripped the earth below for dear life.
I wrenched, pulled, and even began to sing to the roots like I used to back in Moss. Soon enough, they released their hold.
My shoulder muscles ached and sweat dripped down every part of me. But the work felt good, familiar.
I set onto the second and third, each with their own collection of issues.
The second bed had been home to corn, which notoriously has the bad habit of decomposing slowly before leaving behind much residue.
The third had deep-rooted legumes, which wasn’t inherently a bad thing.
They were often good crops for soil health.
But everything was too dead for me to keep much of anything.
I piled all the decayed roots and leaves in the back garden near the willow tree—the only bit of green in the whole place. For now.
The fourth bed took me completely by surprise.
Instead of rocks and roots, I found leftover radish seeds.
Their flat-oval shape and reddish hue stood out starkly against the depleted soil.
At first, I thought it might have been just a few seeds.
But as I gently broke apart the top layer of soil, I saw seeds set an inch apart in neat rows—perfectly suspended in their sowing pattern.
They had forgotten to die like everything else. Or maybe withering magic could only access life, and the seeds chose not to grow so as to avoid such a fate.
A seed has the potential of life—it’s just dormant.
That’s where my magic came into play in Moss. I would activate the sleeping life within, encouraging it to awaken.
Images of buttercups, strange flowers in odd places, and the like popped into my head.
I wonder… my heart mused.
No, I was being ridiculous. How many times had I reached for magic before Moss and after?
Those flowers along the way couldn’t have been me.
If they were, I would have felt it, right?
But the steely resolve I had in thinking I was foolish for giving anything a shot was becoming less like steel and more like thread.
And that kernel in my chest was warming again as I looked out at this garden, still in disarray but changing, as I listened to Hesper humming to herself as she repaired a roof on a ladder she’d built from wood that more than likely assumed it would turn to dust before ever being of use again (wood has feelings, too).
Just try, Clara.
So I did.
I sang to the seeds as I would have before. I pretended that I had magic again. Instead of reaching, I assumed it was already there.
Nothing happened. The seeds didn’t budge. I didn’t feel the usual tug from my heart to the seeds in my hand. But I had to admit, believing something could work felt a bit better than knowing it wouldn’t.
I placed the seeds tenderly back into their garden bed and covered them up.
“Back to sleep you go,” I sang.
By the end of the day, the garden beds were entirely cleared out, repaired, and ready for planting. I also cleared out the front of the cottage, which was completely overgrown with briars and brambles.
Everything looked empty and a little sad—because even dead, it still offered the memory of life.
But now there was room for growth.
Somehow.
Some way.
Hesper had done a miraculous job repairing the roof.
The thatching went from bedraggled to quite quaint.
She managed to repair the chimney, too, unclogging it from years of plants and animals residing within.
In her spare time, she also tore away the ivy that was encroaching too close to the cottage door, uncovering crescent-moon-shaped shutters adorning the front windows.
I squealed in delight.
“You like moons, princess?” Hesper asked, her eyes on me.
“Very much,” I said, looking only at her.
The gray, hot day was morphing into a somewhat pleasant evening, a sliver of orange sky peeping through the clouds. Maybe it was the sunset that caused my heart to burn in my chest. Maybe it was something else.
Hesper turned toward the garden beds, and her eyebrows shot up in surprise.
“Now that, even you can’t deny.” She pointed toward the back of the garden. I had been staring at her the entire time, so I didn’t know what she was talking about at first. But I followed her finger to the fourth garden bed.
“What?” I asked. There was nothing there. Just an empty—
Oh my Goddess.
I ran down the hill, skidding to a harsh stop just above the bed.
In the midst of the newly upturned earth grew a single sprout.
The radishes. The seeds must have been closer to germinating than I thought. Was that even possible, given the state of the garden?
Or?
Or maybe… my heart treacherously hoped.
Impossible, I said.
“Clara Thorne, will you please acknowledge that you did that?” Hesper beseeched and knelt down by the garden bed, inspecting the new little life growing in the garden.
A shot of anger ran through me. I was so sick of having these conversations with her.
I knew what magic felt like, and I knew intimately when I had expended magic.
Nothing like that had been even close to happening ever since I left Moss.
When I tried, I couldn’t get anywhere. Even now, when I sang to those seeds, there was no emptying of myself.
Everything was silent, unmoved.
Did Dwindle have magic? Like Moss?
“I think it might be a coincidence,” I said, even though I barely believed that. “Or maybe it’s—”
“It’s you,” she cut in. “How long are you going to be in denial about this?” Her voice rose as she stood to her full height.
The bliss of the day shattered all at once. The warmth in my chest blew out like a candle.
“Hesper, you have watched me try. I have been trying.”
“No, you have been planning, you have been controlling, you have been rationing. You have not been letting anything go.”
Never enough, I thought. My old ways of thinking crept back up like poison ivy.
I’d just spent the day doing back-breaking work for her to say the equivalent of relax.
I marched back inside the cottage without another word, letting a perfectly honey-and-lemons-lovely day turn to ash come nightfall.
The next morning, I saw the sprout had died.