Page 24 of Homegrown Magic

All afternoon, the rain persists, so that Margot and Yael have to dash through it to get to the meeting hall. Community dinners are held on the village green beside the hall, weather permitting, but when it isn’t, the hall is the only building in Bloomfield large enough to hold its modest population. They scrape their boots against the threshold so as not to track mud and grass inside, then carry in their offerings: stoppered ceramic flagons of mint lemonade, juiced from the lemons left over from jam making, and pouches of herbs picked fresh from the greenhouses. They set them on the rough wood table the full length of a tree trunk, already piled with bread from the bakery, bowls of salad greens and asparagus spears and snow peas from the village garden, foraged fiddleheads, pitchers of ale and wine and water, and steaming meat pies prepared in the tavern with the help of the butcher. Most of the villagers are gathered already, soggy with rain but chatting happily. Poppy and Clementine chat in a cluster with neighbors Kate and Eric as they work together to arrange a motley collection of chairs. The handful of young children in the village dash about, chasing one another around the table, scream-laughing as children do.

Yael pauses to watch, thinking of themself and Margot and their pack when they were little. The freedom they didn’t have, and the people they all might’ve become had they lived in Bloomfield. Margot had summers here, at least; perhaps those summers were why she grew up to be the best of all of them.

“There’s Javril,” Margot says at their side, and Yael lets the memory of the children they’d been fade away again. She waves to Bloomfield’s cobbler, who stands across the room. “I’ve arranged for us to borrow Sunny for the trip, and—”

“Wait, not Sunny!” Yael protests. Javril’s stocky, gray-haired cart horse is known for escaping his paddock—really just a mossy, knee-high stone wall—and ranging the length of Bloomfield until somebody leads him back, where he can stand around munching grass until the next jailbreak. “Why don’t we take Sweet Wind instead?”

Her lips pucker, perhaps remembering the circumstances of her one and only ride on Sweet Wind. “I don’t trust it. I’m not a tinkerer, and I’ve no idea the spellwork required to keep it going or how to fix it if it breaks on the way.”

“What if Sunny slips his lead and gallops off a cliffside while grazing? Can you fix that?”

“Maybe I could.” Margot lifts her chin.

Yael wouldn’t put it past her; Margot can do almost anything, it seems. Grow an orchard indoors, mend hearts with jam, find room and board and employment for a runaway heir with no practical skills to speak of, boil water…

“All right,” Yael concedes. “How about we take both? If Sweet Wind throws a shoe halfway to Olde Post—or a bolt—we’ve still got Sunny to get us there. Hopefully.”

“Sunny’s never been a problem before,” Margot insists, bristling, “and we can’t just leave a mechanical steed on the roadside. How will you get back to—” She cuts herself off, but Yael hears the rest of her question anyhow: How will you get back to Ashaway?

Overhead, the rain begins to beat even harder against the roof.

“I don’t intend to go back.” They step closer to be heard over the storm and the surrounding village chatter, close enough to count the faint springtime freckles on the bridge of Margot’s nose.

Margot looks away, glancing around them, perhaps anxious that they’re being watched. “Not today, you don’t. But, Yael, do you really think you can stay away from home forever? I know life here seems easy, but—”

“You think cleaning eight greenhouses in a single day is easy?” They grin. “Not to mention the sheer amount of potting soil that washes off me in the bath each day. I swear it gets everywhere.”

“Yes, all right, I just…” Margot stammers, flustered, searching for the words. “I mean that you might like your life here now, while all of this is still an adventure to you, but eventually—”

“Isn’t it to you? Everything used to be an adventure for Margot Greenwillow.”

Emotions shift across her face like the fluttering pages of a book, moving too quickly for Yael to read. “There has to be something you miss about Ashaway,” she insists, peering at Yael as though she can see the capital city through the dark window glass of their eyes. “You can’t just be perfectly fine with leaving it all behind.”

Does she think Yael fled Ashaway lightly, on a whim (fair enough, they did), and so will flee Bloomfield just as lightly? Is Margot actually worried that they’ll leave? Promising, if true.

“Whatever I left in Ashaway, it comes with a higher price than I’d pay to get it back,” Yael vows over the storm, certain that they mean it. Pretty certain.

Margot blinks down at them, still unreadable.

“We’ll leave Sweet Wind here, all right?” Yael surrenders. “Probably a magnet for highwaymen and marauders, anyhow. I’m sure Sunny will be…great. It’ll be an adventure of a different sort, ey?”

“Yes, right. An adventure.” Margot clears her throat and nods sharply, taking several steps back before crossing to Javril. Of course she doesn’t believe them.

Fine, then. Yael will just have to prove it on the road to Olde Post. Prove that they can be useful; that they can be serious; that they can succeed at this life. Or if not this exact life (because who can promise to remain forever in a place they drunkenly stumbled into two months ago, no matter how lovely the community dinners, and the local wine, and the…Margot?), then at least a life of their choosing. Any life but the one that’s been picked out for them since birth and never tailored to fit them even as they failed to grow into it.

They are almost completely, deathly certain they can do that.

10

Margot

Despite the storms of yesterday, the morning they set out for Olde Post surprises Margot. The sun shines golden and warm, dappling the forest path that winds through a deep ravine. A soft breeze caresses her cheek, and birdsong surrounds the wagon in a curtain of music. Everything is perfectly lovely—except for the mud. The inches-deep, sticky-as-glue mud that is currently slathered on their cart wheels.

“Oh gods,” Margot says as their progress grinds to a halt yet again. Sunny snorts, stomping his heels, either unable or unwilling to go a step farther in the muck that’s up to his fetlocks.

“Maybe we shouldn’t have taken the shortcut?” Yael offers unhelpfully, peering down from the wagon’s seat. They’ve got a flask of tea in hand and biscuit crumbs on their vest. “Or perhaps we should’ve taken Sweet Wind, after all. Bet it could’ve gotten through this mud.”

“Mechanical horses still get stuck in mud.”