Blight #2
Pru followed her gaze to the signs. “Nathaniel’s been in a bit of a mood lately,” she said, clearly noticing Violet’s sudden scowl.
“Only lately?” Violet blurted out before she could stop herself, but Pru only laughed.
“He really is the worst, isn’t he?” she said fondly. “I forget not everyone’s used to him.”
Suddenly Violet felt defensive. “He’s not so bad.”
Pru pressed her lips together, poorly disguising a smile. “No? I suppose he’s put himself under a lot of pressure, not that it’s any excuse. But that’s a story for another day. Shall we suss out the source of the stench?” She smirked. “Say that five times fast.”
Violet wanted to know more about that story for another day, but she shook off her curiosity. It was none of her business, and she wasn’t interested in being branded a gossip by prying. She took Pru’s arm and smiled back at her friend. “Certainly, let us suss.”
The two women traipsed into the park, noses in the air, sniffing at the acrid, damp smell of mold and decay. It didn’t take them long at all to find the patch of black near the platform where Pru performed on market days.
“Oh, it’s awful!” Pru declared, ducking her nose and mouth beneath the neckline of her blouse.
“Like a giant’s armpit after a journey through the plains in summertime.
Like a bowl of stew left under the bed with unwashed laundry and locked in a windowless room for weeks.
It’s like something died covered in its own vomit and then came back to life, swam in a pool of raw sewage, and then died again. ”
“That was so…specific,” said Violet, but she didn’t disagree.
The smell was much stronger here, and clearly originated from the patch of black rot.
The grass hadn’t so much died as been liquefied into strings of sticky-looking goo.
She plucked a twig from the ground outside of the patch and poked at the rot, dropping the twig in alarm when it began to blacken as well.
Pru clucked her tongue. “It spreads by touch—that’s not good.”
“No. It’s not.”
“Can you do your whole”—Pru wiggled her fingers in what Violet supposed was an approximation of her magic—“thing?”
Violet concentrated on the spot, drawing some power from her well, pulling it toward her, and channeling it toward the rot in an encouraging sort of way, thinking, Grow. Heal.
But to her surprise, the rot pulled back at her, oily and heavy in a way she’d never experienced before even when using dark magic.
The smell grew stronger, and Violet gagged, letting her power dissipate around her before she choked on it.
Her hands felt like they were on fire, and she looked in horror as the ring of blight grew to encompass more of the grass surrounding it.
“That’s a no,” she gasped, holding her hands in front of her face, half expecting them to be red and blistered. She massaged them, trying to banish the pins and needles that stiffened her fingers.
“What could have caused it?” Pru stared in shock, rubbing circles into Violet’s back as her breathing evened once more.
“A blight that looks like this, smells like this, and apparently spreads to other plant life by touch?” Violet shook her head vehemently. “This reeks of magic.”
“It reeks of something, to be sure.”
Before Pru could launch into another volley of colorful analogies, Violet said, “We should find your brother.”
“You think this could be alchemy?”
“Perhaps?” Violet threw up her hands, at a loss. “I don’t know enough about it to guess, but he might be able to see something we can’t.”
“I’ll go get him.”
Violet stood watch over the patch of blight until Pru returned, her twin brother striding alongside her, looking businesslike as ever.
He nodded curtly at Violet and then crouched next to the blight, leaning in to sniff it as though the smell didn’t incite the same nausea in him as it did Prudence and Violet.
He too tried prodding at it with a stick, tossing the blighted wood into the circle once the black goo began to spread, then pulled a thin metal wand from his pocket.
He touched it carefully to the rot and frowned when it didn’t spread the way it had on the wood.
“Perhaps it reacts only to organic material,” Violet suggested, and he looked up in surprise, as though he’d forgotten she was there.
“My thoughts exactly.” His eyes met hers, alight with something like interest. Excitement perhaps. Agreement for once. Then he cleared his throat, and his gaze shuttered again, back to his normal mask of stern indifference. “I’ll have to study it further.”
He was back to the Nathaniel she recognized, but it was too late.
Violet knew he was under there now, and she knew something about him she suspected he tried to keep hidden: that this kind of work, this kind of scientific question excited him in a way she’d never seen when he was in his role as apothecary.
Again, her interest spiked—what was a man like him doing running his family’s business when his passions so clearly lay elsewhere?
Their eyes met again, though he quickly averted his as he procured a small glass vial from another pocket and inserted the rot-covered wand.
“I’ll run some tests on it in the greenhouse,” he said, pocketing the vial.
“Near all my plants?” Violet was horrified. “If one of your experiments gets even a drop of that substance on my—”
“I’ll take precautions. You can approve them before I so much as unstopper the vial.”
She searched his face and found sincerity. “Thank you.”
Nathaniel held her eye, nodding.
“We should make a sign warning people to stay away from this,” said Pru, gesturing to the plot of black.
“I think the smell will do most of the work, but yes, you’re right,” agreed Nathaniel, breaking Violet’s gaze. “Can you take care of that?”
“Of course. I’ll—”
A rumbling, scraping sound had thorns prickling at Violet’s skin before she whirled around to find the rock goblin from the Smokewood, the one with the big greenish stone in his chest, ambling slowly toward them on legs of jointed granite.
“Oy!” Pru wasn’t so pleased to see him. “It’s one of the little bastards that chases me around the park!”
“I don’t think it wants to hurt anyone,” said Violet, watching him carefully. “I saw this one in the woods the other day, before we found Daisy.”
“Where’s the rest of his slide?” Nathaniel asked, looking around.
But Violet only crouched down, ignoring Nathaniel’s and Pru’s sputtering as she held out a hand, waiting patiently until the rock goblin approached, sniffed, and gently butted her fingers with the top of his head.
He was warmer than she expected, like sun-drenched stone in summertime, and as he rubbed against her hand, she scratched a bit with her fingertips, which he seemed to like.
“I wonder if the rock goblins caused this,” Pru mused darkly. Violet looked up, surprised at the thought.
“I doubt it.” Nathaniel’s eyes were fixed on Violet and the rock goblin, expression unreadable. “Their magic is limited to stonecraft.”
“Maybe they escaped from Shadowfade’s castle. Maybe he experimented on them and they—”
“He didn’t,” said Violet, more sharply than she intended. “I mean, look at this one. He’s like a cat.” She looked down at the rock goblin, who was now softly gnawing on the edge of her sleeve. “You didn’t do this, did you?”
The rock goblin bleated at her again.
“That’s a peridot, isn’t it?” Pru asked, pointing to the gemstone in his chest.
The rock goblin looked sharply up at her, his black eyes brightening as he bleated again.
“I think that’s a yes,” Violet said with a little smile. “Hi there, little peridot goblin.”
“I think he likes you,” said Pru. “I’m almost jealous.”
“Thought you were the only one who could attract pests?” Nathaniel teased.
“I said almost, didn’t I?”
The peridot goblin—Peri, Violet had already decided she’d call him—peered around Violet to the ring of rot.
He released her sleeve and trotted over to it, head moving as though sniffing the air.
He opened his mouth again and let out a different sound, lower and louder all at once.
The ground rumbled. From the roots of trees and the base of the platform and the edges of garden beds, more rock goblins began to appear.
Violet watched them in amazement. They were all shapes and sizes, made of smooth, round river stones and others of jagged chunks of granite.
Some were as small as mice, and the largest was about the size of a sheep.
Some had strange markings and textures, and a few hinted at shapes that just escaped her recognition.
Peri let out that sound again, which Violet suspected was for the other rock goblins in the same way she suspected his croaking little bleat was especially for human ears, and the rest of the slide gathered around the blighted spot of land, flowing around the humans’ legs while Pru hopped and squealed nervously.
The peridot goblin rubbed against Violet’s ankle, scratching her skin in a not-entirely-unpleasant way until she got the hint and dutifully stepped back.
Almost immediately, the space where she’d been standing filled with rock goblins, who launched themselves atop one another until they were near indistinguishable.
They formed a ring around the blight, climbing and melding together into a spiraling shape like a snake coiled over itself, enough that Violet convinced herself she could even see scales.
It was a wall of rock tighter and cleaner than any mason could replicate.
“They’re covering the rot,” said Nathaniel wonderingly.
Sure enough, in a matter of minutes the rock goblins had built a stony dome over the blight, blocking it from the rest of the park.
Peri stood aside from the pile and stared up at Violet with onyx eyes.
He croaked again in the sound she now recognized was for her.
She bent to pat his head, and he leaned into her hand, letting out a rumbling sort of purr. “You did very well.”
“He did,” Pru agreed.
But Nathaniel wasn’t so optimistic. “It doesn’t solve our problem.”
“I know.” Violet frowned at the rock goblins, and the rot hidden beneath them. “What was that stuff?”
Their eyes met. “And what do we do if there’s more?”