Notes
Shame bubbled in Nathaniel like a cauldron beginning to boil.
For more than a year, he’d kept these emotions at a low simmer, even among the people who knew him best. Pru had begged him to let her in, and old Guy—who had been so close with his parents—had sat with him more than once while he cried, but he’d never talked about it.
He saw the wreckage of the workroom whenever he closed his eyes, as though it had been tattooed to the inside of his eyelids against his consent.
He felt his mother’s cold skin whenever he shook hands with a customer.
Even the smell of the elixir he worked on now—a pet project, and nothing unsafe—brought to mind the scent after the explosion, the acrid sharpness of alchemist’s fire so strong that even experimenting on the blight made Nathaniel have to step outside more than once to settle his nausea.
But he’d prided himself on his ability to keep it all together, to hold steady so not a drop spilled where it shouldn’t. So why in the name of the three sisters had he chosen to overturn the whole damn flask? To his bloody tenant?
The witch was anathema to his self-control.
A distraction he didn’t need or want at a time when he certainly couldn’t afford the disruption.
Nathaniel had far too much to worry about—his struggling business, the new competition, his sister, and now this blasted blight—to be letting Violet worm her way through the protective structure he’d built inside himself.
Nothing good lay inside those walls, he knew, only rotting, empty buildings haunted by old ghosts best left undisturbed.
He was spent, past his prime, a broken thing.
There would be no point to letting her in; he would only cut her on his edges.
For two days, he changed his schedule or conveniently popped back into the apothecary whenever she came to the greenhouse.
He was subtle about it, of course; he didn’t want to offend her.
But on the third morning after their conversation, he came down to the greenhouse an hour earlier than usual, while Violet was sure to still be asleep, to find a note on his worktable, next to his glass box of blight and the simmering cauldron that held his other work.
In her blocky script, it said,
Are you finished avoiding me yet?—Violet
Shame warmed his cheeks for entirely new reasons.
Not so subtle after all. She’d called him out, and what’s more, she was entirely correct.
Nathaniel raked a hand through his hair and looked around as though she might be waiting in the shadows, hiding behind the ridiculously large hydrangea bush she’d installed in the corner by her door.
But of course the sun wouldn’t be up for another hour or so yet, and she was likely fast asleep in her bed.
The bed that was just on the other side of the wall from his, where he could hear her toss and turn each night. Where he spent more and more of his own evenings wondering if he could—
Get it together, Nathaniel.
Still, he supposed he owed her an answer. Calmly, Nathaniel tore a leaf of paper from one of his notepads and wrote back.
V—
Apologies. I’ve been very busy.
—N
He rushed it to the other side of the greenhouse and set it on her messy worktable next to a pungent bucket of compost, feeling guilty about the lie, then went about his day, adding a dash of goblin bane to his cauldron and stirring for precisely three and a half minutes before setting it back to simmer and heading inside to take inventory in the shop.
He was delighted when the bell rang moments after he unlocked the door, but the woman who came into the shop wasn’t looking to buy anything at all. “Quinn says you’re the one to talk to about this blight business,” she said.
“Yes,” said Nathaniel, glancing out the window to Wingspan Green, where he could just see the pile of rock goblins. “We have it contained, and I’m working on—”
“Contained?” The woman laughed. “You’re mistaken. The hedge separating my yard from my neighbor’s is black and rotted.”
Nathaniel’s heart sank as he promised the woman he’d investigate and gave her instructions about what to do.
About midday, after he’d served all of three customers for the morning—one of whom had asked him outright whether he knew that Sedgwick’s charged half as much for witch’s burr (half!) as Marsh’s did—Nathaniel went back to the greenhouse to check on the blight.
Sedgwick’s was coming for Marsh’s, that much was clear, but it would have to wait, even if his deadline with the bank was looming closer with each day.
If the blight was spreading, it needed to take priority.
The flower Violet had grown between their windows had given him the idea that he could try an infusion of lady’s favor and soil from one of the Darktide Isles, which only existed at the lowest tide when all three moons hid their faces.
The balance between the two ingredients, one that only appeared under the moons and one that never saw their light, might—
There was another note waiting for him.
Liar.—Violet
P.S. I know it’s not part of my lease but I noticed the remains of a vegetable bed along the fence in your half of the garden. Would you mind terribly if I revived it? I shall pay you in fresh tomatoes.
He sighed and ran a hand through his hair before penning a response.
V—
I don’t suppose you would believe I’ve been kidnapped or called away on business or, I don’t know, accidentally turned myself into a decorative end table with one of my experiments, would you?
—N
P.S. Do as you wish. Pru and I certainly aren’t using it.
An hour later, after he went inside for a cup of tea, another reply appeared.
I saw you flee (FLEE, Nathaniel! Like a rabbit!) back into the apothecary yesterday when I came out to the greenhouse. Am I truly so frightening?
—Violet
P.S. Thank you. Do let me know if you have requests for produce.
P.P.S. What kind of decorative end table? With shelves? Drawers? I’m still in the market for good furniture for my parlor.
Nathaniel felt ashamed all over again; he hadn’t realized Violet had seen him duck out of sight.
She obviously didn’t hold his confession against him, or if she did, she was playing it awfully close to the chest until she could berate him in person.
But nothing he knew about Violet Thistlewaite suggested she would do such a thing.
She was clever and stubborn and determined and creative and kind, but never, to his knowledge, judgmental.
He picked up his pen and tore a new scrap of paper from his notebook.
V—
You caught me. My distance had nothing to do with you. The story I shared with you is not one I often discuss. What you must think of me.
Yours in cowardice,
N
P.S. Strictly out of curiosity, do your conjured vegetables provide any nutritional value or do they only taste like they do?
P.P.S. Between you and me, Quinn and her wife have a storage shed full of extra furniture. I suspect she’d be inordinately thrilled to donate an end table, a sofa, or a whole bloody dining room set complete with silverware if you asked.
She didn’t write back that day, and his nails carved grooves into his palms at the thought that he’d offended her with the inquiry into her magic.
He scolded himself the whole walk to the site of the new patch of blight, and the whole way home again too, clutching his sample vials almost tight enough to break them.
He shouldn’t have asked. He should have left well enough alone, even though he was extremely curious about the answer.
He did have to blink away a suspicious stinging in the corners of his eyes when he returned home and noticed his father’s vegetable garden had been cleared and tilled.
But there was still no sign of the witch herself.
It wasn’t as though he was waiting on her response. He was simply visiting the greenhouse twice an hour until midnight so he could check on his experiments until he gave up and went to bed.
But in the morning, relief rushed through him when he came downstairs to find on his worktable a small wicker basket of lettuce, carrots, and the promised tomatoes, as well as a folded letter in her handwriting.
What I think of you is that you’re a person who feels the mantle of blame is yours to wear and who bears the weight of a responsibility you never wanted with admirable grace.
I won’t try to convince you that what happened to your parents is not your fault, because even if some part of you knows it, I know that logic is seldom welcome at the table of our emotions, particularly when they disagree. I understand what it is to feel responsible for your own misery.
I failed to mention the other night that my adoptive father took me in very young, and I spent most of my life with the knowledge that my magic was the reason I had been abandoned by my mother.
She left me, he said, because she was afraid of what I could do, and perhaps she was right to be.
I know what it is to feel like there is something deeply broken at the core of you, and I know that whether or not the blame is earned, we wear it, and not a soul can take it from us no matter how we might wish for it.
It helped me a bit to hear your story, and to know I am not alone. I thought perhaps it might help you too.
There. Now we have both told stories we don’t often discuss.
—Violet
P.S. I don’t know about nutritional value, but perhaps that’s something to experiment with. I promise they are fully edible and delicious—and besides, tomatoes won’t be in season for months yet anywhere else.
Nathaniel blinked at the letter, unsure of where to begin.
The situations weren’t the same at all, not really—Violet had been a child, and made to feel responsible for things entirely outside of her control—but the thread of understanding wove itself into a strong braid inside of him.
She understood what it meant to have power that could hurt people, even unintentionally.
She understood what it was to be eaten alive by guilt. A knot built in his throat.
When Nathaniel had been a student at university, a professor had once told him that they worked in pairs their first year so they could learn from each other and share in their failures.
“It makes you a better alchemist,” his teacher had said, when explaining why Nathaniel had also received poor marks for a mistake that had been his partner’s. “More precise in your actions and much more in control of your work because you don’t want to fail your partner.”
But what the professor had neglected to mention was that sometimes failure could not be controlled, no matter how tightly one held to command.
Nathaniel was surprised to find that he didn’t feel ashamed for sharing his experience with Violet.
He didn’t feel like he’d failed her or Pru or anyone else.
In fact, he felt his burden lessened somehow, as if by telling her, and by learning that she’d understood, he’d taken some of it off his shoulders and laid it on the ground.
The knowledge of what he’d done didn’t magically disappear—it just sort of sat there at his feet—but at least he wasn’t holding it anymore.
The thought followed him through his day (“Tomatoes!” cried Pru with delight, immediately eating half of them the moment he brought them inside), and as he headed into the greenhouse one more time that evening, he wondered if Violet felt the same.
Perhaps her own burden would lessen by sharing it with him.
He supposed a heavy load was much easier to carry with two sets of arms than one.
Damn it all, he realized with a start, he wanted to help her carry her burden.
Putting his thoughts into words felt easy with her, like the cost of baring himself was lower than it was with other people. He could let himself free of his self-made bindings, knowing she’d see him without putting him through the discomfort of having to feel observed.
Sometime in the past day or so, Nathaniel had stopped pretending that he didn’t want Violet Thistlewaite to know him.
The realization, when it came, shocked him.
Nathaniel Marsh was not much in the business of being known by anyone but Pru, who had been grandfathered in by right of having shared a womb.
He preferred to spend his days at a safe distance from people, specifically the width of his counter at the apothecary at a bare minimum.
But he’d read Violet’s words again and again, the paper already creased and worn inside his breast pocket.
Whether or not the blame is earned, we wear it, she’d written, and suddenly he wanted to know more, to extract her past from her like a distillation and learn the myriad other ways he was beginning to suspect they were more similar than they were different.
Nathaniel wafted the concoction in the cauldron he’d been working on all week, smiling at the scent of spearmint and lemongrass and rose petal and magic.
The sense of peace that swept over Nathaniel told him he’d gotten his old invention just right.
He carefully spooned some of the mixture into a vial and screwed the lid on tight, and then he pulled out his pen and wrote one more note for Violet.
V—
It does help, thank you.
And now it is my turn, I hope, to help you. This is a tincture I invented for restful sleep and to eradicate nightmares. It’s quite safe, I promise.
Add two drops to a cup of hot tea each night before bed.
I call it the Sweet Dreams Elixir.
Sleep well, Violet.
—N
He wrote hurriedly, his handwriting growing messy as his nerves spiked. With an anxious smile, he walked the bottle over to her side of the greenhouse and set it down alongside the note.
Yes, he thought as he doused the lamp and left the greenhouse, his eyes darting to the leafy vine that stitched together the space between their bedroom windows, he rather hoped he could lessen her burden too.