Research
As the postmaster took her message, some of Violet’s worry disappeared along with it. One week. The letter would be delivered in one week, and then Karina the Tempest would know what to do.
After all, she’d come once before.
Still, Violet’s thoughts were dark as she made her way down the street, shaking out her hands to try to eliminate the ache that had set into them. She kept her eyes on the paved walk before her, her brow furrowed as Sedgwick’s words replayed in her head once again.
You’re nothing alone.
She hated how much she believed him. Shadowfade had given her power and purpose.
Alone, she was useless. Leaving was no longer an option, but Violet was terrified.
She wanted to run. She wanted to believe she could be free of the Thornwitch, and the thought that she might have to be her again, even if just to scare off opportunists like Sedgwick…
That wasn’t what “being good” meant.
But she didn’t know how else to do this.
Stay here with me. Nathaniel’s voice, rough and so close to her ear, rose once more, the only thought that had been able to compete with Sedgwick’s taunts.
She closed her eyes and took a ragged breath, stamping down the complicated turmoil of emotion that threatened to overtake her.
No, she had to stay focused, no matter how tempting the alternative.
Sedgwick had spoken of a legend, so Violet made her way to the town hall building, which also held the community’s small library.
For the past two days, she’d been working her way through the local history section with every moment she could spare.
Anything to help stop Sedgwick, though it also had the added benefit of helping her avoid Nathaniel.
Inside, the musty-sharp scent of paper and ink cast Violet into memories of Shadowfade Castle, happy ones from her childhood before she realized who she’d become, as Guy read to her from ancient spell books and encouraged her to experiment with what she found there.
Violet wound her way through tall shelves of scrolls and books until she found a thick, promising-looking book and brought it to the front desk to sign it out.
“We have other texts on the town’s history,” said the library clerk, who recognized her by now, “older ones that can’t leave the premises. If you don’t find what you’re looking for, you can come back and request them.”
Violet returned to her shop to find Jerome the Gnome outside with his cart, tapping his feet impatiently next to the Marsh Apothecary sign, which was less pointed today than usual.
Although a few half-hearted response options swam weakly through her brain, the sign failed to bring out Violet’s competitive streak, and only brought a blush to her cheeks as thoughts of the other night once again rose unbidden.
Here, in front of their shops—where it would take no more than a dozen steps to stand before him—it was harder to ignore the fact that they’d kissed.
Or the fact that a not-so-small part of her wanted to do it again…
“This is no way to run a business.” Jerome waved his hands at her. “You have hours of operation on your sign, don’t you? Are you going to open or what?”
Violet snapped back into the present and unlocked the door. “Hi, Jerome,” she chirped cheerfully, forcing herself to be Violet the Shopkeeper again. Was this what her future looked like? Bouncing back and forth between identities, constantly trying to keep up? “Give me just a second.”
He grumbled while she opened the window shades and set out her own sign, which would have to bear the same message as yesterday until she was feeling more creative.
“Your door’s hung crooked,” said Jerome, inspecting the door that led upstairs to her living quarters. “Told the Marsh twins not to use Patchett as their carpenter—his prices are cheap for a reason.”
She had noticed she had to lift the door a bit to get it to latch, but she’d never found it troublesome enough to tell Nathaniel or Pru. They had enough to worry about, and she didn’t want to create more problems than she needed to.
Jerome ran a hand over the hinge. “I’ll stop by tomorrow morning with me tool kit and fix it for you,” he promised gruffly.
Violet was taken aback. “You don’t need to do that.”
But the gnome wouldn’t hear otherwise. “We take care of our own here.” Before the words could sink in, he added, “Now take care of me. Am I a customer or not? I’m here for more soil.”
With Jerome close behind, Violet made her way to the back garden and hefted a sack of the soil mixture she’d made specifically for him. She noted his eyes catching on the neat pile of flat, decorative stones she’d just had shipped in.
“They’re for folks whose lawns or fields have been marred by blight,” she explained. “So they can cover the area and stop it spreading.”
“You heard about the Feldspar farm, then?”
Violet stopped in her tracks. The Feldspars were one of the biggest farming families in Dragon’s Rest and supplied nearly half of the town’s grain. Horror tinged her voice as she asked, “Not the blight?”
Jerome nodded. “Took about ten percent of the crop. A field hand noticed and they were able to contain it, but we’re looking at a hard summer of high prices.”
“It’s getting worse,” whispered Violet. “Spreading faster than before.”
“Aye. We’re all facing ruin, and your—” He sneezed as if to punctuate his point. “Your flowers won’t help.”
She ignored his jab at her business. “A tree nearly killed Mr. Marsh and me. It wasn’t directly next to a spot of blight, but its roots must have touched it beneath the ground.”
“I heard he was working on some type o’ fix for it.”
“As far as I know, still no luck.” She glanced at the greenhouse. It was empty at the moment, but she knew he had about four different experiments going. It had smelled absolutely foul in there this morning, and she hoped that meant good news, despite olfactory evidence to the contrary.
“It’s bad.” Jerome’s voice was as serious as she’d ever heard it. “Folk are starting to talk, wondering if it’s a result of Shadowfade being gone. Some curse he put on us in his dying moments. The timing, you know? Feels like revenge.”
Anger hummed to life in Violet’s veins. It was too similar to what Sedgwick had implied. Was he spreading that drivel? There couldn’t be truth to it, could there?
“This has nothing to do with Shadowfade,” she said acidly, noting as she did how the grass beneath her feet shriveled and died. “What reason would he have to take revenge on a town like Dragon’s Rest?”
“Right.” Jerome stared nervously at the dead grass, as though it would turn to blight before his eyes.
“Sorry.” Violet shook herself and breathed life into the grass, which sprung back up, green and lively as ever. “I just can’t bear the thought of that monster.”
He watched her, thoughtful. “You’re not alone in that.”
She helped Jerome load the soil into his cart. “We’re going to fix this,” she promised, sounding more confident than she felt. “You send anyone who needs help containing the blight to me, alright?”
The gnome nodded solemnly. “We’ll pave the whole town in stones before long, and then what?”
She let her expression fall. “I haven’t the foggiest, I’m afraid.”
As soon as she was back in her shop, Violet slumped.
This was bad. A blighted food supply meant trouble.
Violet could help the farmers regrow their crops in an instant, but Nathaniel had struck fear into her about her conjured plants.
She’d eaten apples from trees she’d created, and vegetables from the garden out back, but as Nathaniel had pointed out, did they provide any real nutritional value?
Would conjured grain keep a town’s worth of bellies full if it was all they had?
She’d told him in their notes that she would experiment. Perhaps it was time to do so.
“Experiment!” she muttered, unable to keep a smirk from pulling at her lips. “That man is rubbing off on me.”
There was no one else in the shop, and she’d already finished the arrangements that were due for pickup today, so Violet pulled out one of the books from the library and spread it open on the counter.
She’d never been much interested in reading anything that wasn’t about plants, and the long, dry accounts of the town’s history as home to an exiled prince and of musty depictions of battles fought by people long dead weren’t exactly riveting.
In between customers she flipped through the pages, keeping her eyes open for the words artifact or legend or anything that might lead her to understand what Sedgwick had been on about, but the book appeared to be rooted firmly in dates and figures, with no sign of any lore that might help her.
All the while, Sedgwick’s words repeated on a loop. You’re nothing alone. You’re nothing alone.
You’re nothing.
This was never going to work. Not only did she have no idea what she was looking for, but Sedgwick was right—her powers wouldn’t help her here.
Violet turned the page and swatted Bartleby away when he tried to flick back to the previous one. “Are you trying to read with me or just being annoying?” she snapped, but left him to his own devices when the front door opened. More customers—perfect. She needed a distraction.
“Hi, neighbor,” said Pru. “You’ve been making yourself scarce, haven’t you? I figured I’d come and check that Nathaniel didn’t melt you into a puddle the other night.”
Violet could feel her blush down to her toes. “Pardon?”
“With his magic soap,” clarified Pru, her brow furrowing. “For the blight. You used it, right?”
“Oh. That. Yes!” Of course Pru wouldn’t know about the kiss.
Of course she couldn’t possibly know the tangle of emotion that knotted in Violet’s chest. She’d been far too open, and though letting the Thornwitch out in front of Sedgwick had been a calculated and necessary move, there was no denying that Nathaniel had seen far too much of her to make Violet comfortable.
She stood by her decision to pull away from him, but now that she’d resolved to stay in Dragon’s Rest, it felt— No, she needed to stay on task.
Outsmarting Sedgwick would take all her energy.
Now more than ever, she needed to put her former life under lock and key if she intended to stick around, and spending more time around a man who made her want to spill all her secrets was not the way to do that. No matter how much she longed to.
Banishing her thoughts, she asked Pru, “How are you?”
Pru hummed, her face serious. “Frustrated. Did you hear the news about the Feldspar farm?”
Violet nodded. “Jerome mentioned it.”
“Did he also mention one of the field hands accidentally tracked it on her boot and it spread to a second field?”
Violet groaned. “He did not.”
“Idiot,” cursed Pru. “It’s common knowledge now that it spreads—what were they thinking?”
“People are scared,” said Violet, “and when they’re scared, sometimes it’s easier to pretend problems don’t exist.”
“Well, I hope they’ve learned their lesson over there,” said Pru with uncharacteristic bitterness.
Violet grimaced. “I suspect we’ll all learn the lesson of their mistake.”
Prudence leaned against the counter, propping her head with her hands. “What do we do?”
“I’m working on something,” she said, gesturing to the useless book open in front of her.
“For the blight?”
She hesitated. If her suspicions were correct, then stopping Sedgwick was stopping the blight. “Yes. Do you know anything about ancient artifacts in Dragon’s Rest?”
Pru’s dark brow furrowed. “Artifacts? Oh, you mean the legend? Sure, everyone does.”
“Seriously?” Violet threw her hands up and glared at the book like this was its fault. “This town’s library is useless.”
Pru laughed good-naturedly. “Well, don’t judge us too much for it. All our good books ended up at Shadowfade Castle. Not that we had much to offer in the first place.”
“Right.” She supposed that made sense—Shadowfade Castle did have an extensive library full of books and scrolls about magic and history.
As the years had passed, Guy had made sure to build the collection of books on botany, gardening, and herbalism to satiate Violet’s endless appetite for plants.
It was in those books she’d discovered her penchant for poisonous plants and the exact species of carnivorous flowers that she could work to her advantage—but she’d also pored over books on vegetable gardening and propagating and greenhouse cultivation.
It was where she’d learned the basics of flower arrangements (of course, it was for the purpose of sneaking blades into the bouquets for an enemy’s gala) and how to grow plants by hand rather than by magic (that one was meant for a rival sorcerer who could sense magic on plants, so she’d started the vines the old-fashioned way before sneaking them into the garden beneath his bedroom window and using them to— Never mind).
How she wished for the resources of that library now.
Violet was ashamed to realize she’d never given any thought to where all those texts had come from. But if the books that would have proven useful to her were missing from Dragon’s Rest, it carried a sort of logic that she was on the right track if Guy had found value in them as well.
“We could break in and steal them all back…” Pru was musing. “No one’s using them now, and as far as I know the castle’s sat empty since all his minions cleared out.”
The very thought of returning to that place pumped ice into Violet’s veins, but she forced the feeling away. “Before we go committing any crimes, I’d love to start with that legend,” she said with a strained smile. “What can you tell me?”
Pru’s expression turned thoughtful. “How much do you want to know?”
“As much as you’ve got.”
“Well, the story goes a bit like this…”