Page 18 of Homegrown Magic

She looks at Yael from beneath knitted brows. “Can you cast an expulsion spell?”

“Well…no.” Yael gnaws on their bottom lip. “I’m not actually great with magic.”

“You said that, after—” She cuts herself off, flushing pink beneath a streak of soil on her cheek.

“After I woke up in your bed,” Yael finishes with a teasing smile.

Her blush deepens. “Speaking of which…Yael, we both understand that can’t happen again, yes? If we’re going to work together, if you’re actually going to stay, we won’t be repeating what we, um, almost accomplished.”

This feels like a tremendous waste to Yael. The few kisses they managed the other night were nice, if a little fuzzy in Yael’s memory, and Margot seemed to enjoy them at the time. She hasn’t mentioned a partner in Bloomfield, and the gods know Yael doesn’t have anyone waiting in Ashaway except for their family, certainly growing more and more furious with them by the day. Past flings, yes. There’ve been plenty of friends and classmates and fancy strangers they kissed and danced with and tumbled into bed with after a night at the alehouses.

But when the whole world (or at least the whole of Harrow) knows you take nothing seriously, they expect nothing serious from you. So nobody is sitting up at night in their family’s mansion, awake yet dreaming of a future with Yael. Or if they are, it’s the Clauneck name they dream of, rather than the Clauneck heir.

Apparently, Margot doesn’t want the name or the heir. And that’s fine; perhaps she too is waiting for something serious.

“Of course,” Yael says, fighting to keep the smile on their face. “Never let it be said that I mix business with pleasure.”

“Right. Anyway, that’s not how expulsion works.” Margot hurries to change the subject. “Or it is, but I’d have to cast it on every individual gnat in every individual pot. It gives me a nosebleed just thinking about it.” With a grunt of disgust, she shoves the pot away. “I’ll teach you how to make honey traps. A couple dozen will take care of the worst of them without magic. But the strawberry plants are the priority at this time of year. Come on, I’ll show you.”

In the chamber beyond the shop, a round, domed greenhouse holds rows of shallow clay troughs full to bursting with small, serrated green leaves and delicate white blossoms.

Beneath the troughs, palm-sized bonfires in their own pots burn every few yards, turning the room a subtle pink to match the flames. “We have smokeless kindling to keep them going,” Margot explains. “They help keep out fungus and pests; we’ve had a weevil problem. The plants need watering whenever the soil feels dry a fingertip length below the surface. And I give them food for every phase: the blooming food now, the harvest food in two weeks. In an outdoor strawberry patch, it’d be too early for blossoms, and even in the greenhouse of your average non-magical non-plant-witch, it would take a month or more for the plants to fruit after they flower. But not here. They’ll be ready to harvest in half that time, and I’ll have the first fresh heartbreak jam of the season.” She gazes out across the plants with a deep and obvious pride.

Yael would love to feel that way about…well, something. Anything.

“You know, I actually can do magic,” they say, reaching out to run a finger along a strawberry trough. The clay is pleasantly warm, and the soil too. “Or I could. A little, anyway. It’s just that I need to ask the family’s, um, patron”—they whisper that word still, after all these years—“and I always put that off.”

“If all you have to do is ask, then why don’t you?” Margot turns to them with curiosity.

They shake the dirt from their hand to rub the back of their neck, already lightly misted with sweat in the hot greenhouse air. “Every warlock’s patron is different, but ours requires…promises. Bargains. He makes requests and gives us tasks here and there—usually in service of the family business. You know, send an inquiry to this timber baron, invest in this inventor, take a meeting with this judge’s mistress. That sort of thing. You could say that we’re his greatest investment. But anyway, a person doesn’t really need magic for law, not even arcana and transmutation law. You just need to know how Harrow manages and regulates its magic users. How it stops folk from turning potatoes into gold or gold into potatoes, thereby ruining the market.”

“The potato market?”

“I suppose, but also the general market, which is of more concern to the crown and, thus, the Claunecks.”

She snorts. “Sounds like a thrilling program.”

“Orgasmically so.”

Margot covers her mouth—to hide a smile, they think. They hope.

Encouraged, Yael decides to confess, “When I was at Auximia, we always hoped you’d come back to the capital to study, you know.”

Crossing her arms, swathed in an oatmeal-colored cardigan already sprinkled with soil, Margot raises an eyebrow. “Who’s ‘we’?”

“You know, our old crowd.”

“Huh. I suppose Sedgewick Wayanette was just dying to have me back.”

Yael grins. “All right, I was hoping you’d come back. Why didn’t you?”

She squints at them as though some message might be scrawled across their face in invisible script that only she can see. “Yael, can I ask…why do you think my family left the capital? I mean, did you wonder?”

They try very hard to remember any explanation they might’ve heard—any scraps of gossip going around the city, any conversation between Baremon and Menorath. Alas, Yael’s never been great at paying attention to the troubles of others, especially while preoccupied with their own. Maybe they should work on that. “I—Of course I wondered. If you wanted to tell me, I would—”

“Never mind, Yael. That was a very long time ago.” She looks down at her hands, where Yael can see the soil deeply engraved in the lines of her palms. Margot lets her long fingers curl closed, and when she looks back up, she doesn’t meet their eyes. Instead, she turns and marches forward between the strawberry troughs. “I’ll give you the rest of the tour and then show you where that mix is. Also, the cleaning supplies. All of the glass could use a scrubbing so the light can get in, and I never have the time to spare. Keep up, please. The Spring Fair—that’s the festival to celebrate the annual opening of the market square in Olde Post—is in two months’ time, and I never miss the opening weekend. Even with both of us working, we’ll need every moment to prepare.”

Closing their mouth around the question they never had the chance to finish asking, Yael follows.