Moonlight
Hours later, Violet awoke in her bed with a shout, thorns prickling beneath her skin like seeds about to sprout from soil.
Violet? Guy’s voice was still in her ear, his shock evident as he struggled for breath.
Be good, Karina the Tempest had said. The memory of that day mixed with others.
Go to Silbourne. Take care of the problem.
A ship with purple sails and a woman at the helm whose face she couldn’t see.
Violet’s surprise at the amount of blood from his wound as Guy’s eyes found hers. Run, petal.
There was something in her hand, and she knew without looking what it would be—a long, thick thorn, sharp and deadly like a dagger, an instinctive defense against her ghosts. She crushed her fingers around it, allowing her magic to dissolve the weapon into dust.
Violet took a ragged breath and threw off her quilt, startling Peri, who croaked. Guy was a monster. He’d lied to her, treated her abominably. How was it possible that she still missed him anyway?
“Are you alright?”
She shrieked, panic flooding her all over again. She clutched a hand to her chest and looked around, finding Nathaniel Marsh leaning out of the window next to hers, his face bathed in moonlight.
He clutched his own window frame. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.
” His voice was hoarse with sleep, lower and raspier than it was by day, and he was—oh, three moons, he wasn’t wearing a shirt.
She’d thought knowing he had nice forearms was bad enough, but even as Violet squeaked and averted her eyes, she knew that the sight of his firm chest was far worse.
She’d never be able to get any work done ever again with him in the greenhouse.
She snuck another peek, regretting it immediately.
Had his shoulders always been so broad? The man needed a better tailor with the number of secrets he was keeping beneath his clothes.
Or perhaps that would be even worse for her concentration.
Before her traitorous thoughts could tempt her with wondering just what else he—her landlord!—was hiding beneath his apparel, Nathaniel spoke again. “My bedroom shares a wall with yours…and I heard you cry out.”
The roil of Violet’s emotions turned all at once to embarrassment, settling heavy in the pit of her stomach.
She flushed bright pink and had to physically fight the urge to crawl back into her room and hide under the bed.
She knew she did more than cry out—sometimes she spoke in her sleep.
What if she said something about Guy? What if she revealed herself as the Thornwitch?
What if the image that had suddenly taken up residence in her mind—of him in bed at night, shirtless with that chest and those moons-cursed forearms, only mere inches of wall separating them—refused to vacate?
Gratifyingly, Nathaniel looked mortified as well. His gaze was fixed firmly somewhere just to the right of her as he waited as patiently for her answer as a naturally impatient man unexpectedly awoken from sleep was capable of being.
“I’ll try not to disturb you in the future,” Violet said, her mind already aflame with plans to switch her tiny parlor with her bedroom so she’d be farther from the offending shared wall.
“It’s no trouble,” replied Nathaniel, his eyes on hers. “I only wanted to make sure you were well.”
This stopped her.
“I’ll be fine, thank you,” she said softly.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
She found, to her surprise, that she really, really did. “I don’t know if I know how,” she said, feeling pathetic. “I’m not used to having people to talk to.”
Nathaniel looked out over the moonlight casting warped reflections on the glass roof of the greenhouse as Violet collected her words.
“My adoptive father didn’t really encourage friendships,” she admitted finally.
“Why?”
Violet held her face to the light of the moons and closed her eyes. “I was born on a night when all three moons were full,” she said finally, imagining that she could feel the power of the three sisters lighting her up like a beacon.
“A Convening,” Nathaniel marveled. Sometimes centuries passed before the cycles of all three moons matched up this way. “No wonder you’re so powerful—you’re moonsblessed.”
“Blessed,” she repeated with a humorless laugh. “To most people in my life, I was a commodity, or competition. The man who raised me was…not always kind.”
Nathaniel made a sound she couldn’t decipher.
“I left him recently,” she continued, halting and slow, avoiding the one word her lips wanted to form. Avoiding the word dead. “No going back. But I wonder sometimes if I will ever really be free of him.”
Nathaniel was quiet for a moment. “There is no force so vengeful as a ghost from the past.” His words were laced with some meaning she couldn’t quite parse. “It is no simple thing to rise anew from the ashes of your old life.”
“It is not,” she agreed softly. “The worst part is, until fairly recently I never questioned that everything he told me was true. Isn’t that horrible?”
“No.” The resolve in his voice surprised her. “He raised you. You trusted him. Family is complicated.”
“It stopped being simple a long time ago, but at some point it got too complicated. I don’t know how to move past that.”
“One day at a time,” said Nathaniel, and Violet realized then that he was speaking from experience. “One step, one breath, one heartbeat after another. However slowly, they’ll all move you forward.”
Her look must have been full of consideration, because he smiled wryly and confirmed, “You’re not the only one in this town trying to escape the past.”
Picking through her words like she was sifting a garden plot for stones, she asked, “And what are you trying to escape?”
He was quiet for so long that Violet began to regret asking, but then he said, “I don’t suppose it’s a secret to you that being an apothecary was never my ambition.”
“No,” she admitted. “I don’t suppose it is.”
“I’ve always wanted to be an alchemist. I was quite well respected in the Crucible, if that’s not too presumptuous of me to say.”
Violet made a sound somewhere just shy of a chuckle.
“I loved it,” he continued after a long moment. “The scholarship of it all. The magic. But some of the things we were doing…some of the things we were creating for the Queen and her war…”
It was a dangerous topic of conversation, and Violet recognized the vulnerability of even broaching it. She waited for him to continue.
“I left the Crucible and came home to focus on finding ways to make my family’s business better.
I’m aware my field has traditionally been used for warfare or parlor tricks.
But my goal was always to invent new medicines, improve upon the ones my family had been selling for generations.
Alchemy and herbal medicine, I thought, could have been a powerful combination.
I could have invented an entirely new branch of medicine. ”
The past tense confused her. “I don’t know much about alchemy, but it seems to me there’s incredible potential there.”
“I thought so too.”
“What happened?”
Nathaniel’s voice was hushed like he was telling a secret.
“I failed. I came home, as I’d promised.
The apothecary used the whole building then, and the half where your shop is now was the workspace where my parents mixed herbs and made balms and medicines.
My father made room on his worktable for me and my experiments alongside him.
I’d had some early successes with concoctions for headaches and the flu, but I knew I could do more.
” He ran his fingertips along the window frame, watching them closely.
“I was brewing the base for a solution I thought might be able to ease the symptoms of fire-cough.”
She waited as he paused again, gathering himself.
“It was…volatile. I should have been clearer with them about that.” He turned his head, but he wasn’t really looking at her at all, or at least not really seeing her.
No force so vengeful as a ghost from the past, she thought wryly.
She understood the look in his eyes, for it mirrored her own in the weeks since Guy’s death.
Unbidden, delicate tendrils of vines sprouted from her fingertips and clung to the rough stone exterior of the building, gently reaching toward Nathaniel’s window in a way that could almost be accidental.
“I don’t know what they were doing,” he said.
“If they touched it or tried to move it, or if it exploded on its own. If it was a stupid bloody accident no one could have prevented.” She watched his face harden to anguished stone.
“I never got to ask, because they were dead by the time I found them.”
Violet couldn’t help herself; she gasped softly. The creeping vines froze in place.
She imagined Nathaniel coming home. Discovering—
“So now I’m here,” he continued, “running the apothecary like they always wanted. Trying to keep their legacy alive even though I’m the reason they’re gone.
” He raised his eyes to hers at last, searching her face.
“And who am I now to be delving into that field again? To delude myself into thinking I can reverse this blight?”
“Everything you’re doing is trying to help.” She kept her voice soft. “Why diminish your own skills when Dragon’s Rest needs you, and you have the expertise and knowledge of alchemy that no one else here has?”
He grumbled something in response that she didn’t quite catch.
“Pardon?”
“Nothing,” he said dismissively. “Just some new competition in town. It’ll be fine.”
“Another alchemist?”
“Yes. It’s made me realize just how much I miss it,” he admitted.
“Following the trail set out for me by nothing but my own ambition and creativity. Researching, experimenting, the thrill when I find the perfect balance…I hadn’t realized how much it had become a part of me until I opened that door again to try and reverse the blight. ”
“Then why not let that part of yourself out once more?” She kept her eyes on the moons while he gathered his thoughts.
“What if I make another mistake?” he whispered finally. “What if I hurt someone else?”
Violet considered his fears, his passions, the raw way he was laying himself open to her right now. “It’s terrifying to know you have the power to hurt someone,” she acknowledged, “and it’s tempting to lock that part of yourself away entirely. But that doesn’t make it disappear.”
She paused, thinking of her flower shop, of the smiles on her customers’ faces, of Karina the Tempest in the garden that horrible day.
You could be good. “That power of yours goes both ways, though. Perhaps it’s not a matter of asking, ‘What if I hurt someone?’ Perhaps it’s about asking, ‘What if I could help someone?’ ”
Between them, a delicate white flower budded and unfolded, glowing almost blue in the moonlight.
Lady’s favor, she recognized, the flower that had been given to the goddess Cesenne by her lover as a symbol of hope in impossible circumstances.
It only bloomed at night, under the light of Cesenne herself.
Nathaniel froze, watching it grow, but when he spoke next, she knew by his tone and the way he was back to the stiff, formal shopkeeper that she’d lost him. “That is an admirable thought,” he said politely. “But I suspect this is something you couldn’t possibly understand.”
I do understand, she wanted to say. I know what it is to carry power that can destroy everything you love.
I know what it is to feel the weight of death on your shoulders.
With urgency now, she ignored the pain in her fingers and coaxed the vine closer to his window, the flower like a ship bobbing on the waves.
But he was already closing the shutters, already telling her, “Good night, Violet.”
Already gone.