Page 4 of Homegrown Magic

Well, she tried.

Adding “find another weevil deterrent” to her endless mental list of tasks, Margot wipes dirt-covered fingers across her forehead, brushing aside a strand of her naturally purple hair. Her feet hurt; her back hurts. There’s still so very much to do, and she’s been going since before dawn already.

“Perhaps it’s time for a cup of tea,” Margot says out loud to Harvey, the munchkin cat who decided to move into her cottage this winter, not bothering to ask Margot her opinion about it. He’s curled up around a bronze watering can like a tiny furry dragon guarding a hoard. Harvey gives a grumpy meow.

Temperamental old cuss.

Scritching Harvey behind the ears, Margot looks at the long rows of strawberry-plant-filled troughs in front of her, mind running through the day’s chores. Suddenly, she wants nothing more than to go back to bed and sleep for a month. If only she had a potion for endless energy that actually worked. But she doesn’t. Not yet, at least.

Margot shifts her shoulders as if making room for the many responsibilities she’s carrying. “Right, yes. First tea, then onward.”

After several cups of tea (all made with fortifying lemon balm and ginger) and a remarkable number of cookies, Margot resumes work. Her sensible green garden boots pick up bits of mud, mulch, flower petals, and other garden detritus as she tramps among the eight greenhouses, the front store and counter, and the outdoor shed where she keeps potting soil, large tools, and her favorite wheelbarrow.

“See you later today,” Margot says to the wheelbarrow, patting it, because of course she’s now talking to garden tools. It’s not an improvement from the long chats with Harvey she has daily. She looks around the shed, more items piling onto her to-do list with each glance.

There’s no way she’s ever going to get it all done.

Certainly, she could ask some of the people in the village to help her, but they’re so busy with their own projects and community activities, she hates to do that. Besides, admitting to them that she needs help means admitting to herself that she can’t do it all. Which she refuses to acknowledge. Because she has to do it all.

Her stomach twists with guilt at the thought. The whole village is relying on her to be competent, to figure things out, to make it all work. Not that they know it. And if she told them? Well…

She shoves the thought aside along with a pile of empty seed bags. Telling them the truth of things is simply not an option. Exhaling sharply through the familiar wash of anxiety that always chases guilt when she thinks about the village and its future, she picks up a stack of pots and shifts them into the wheelbarrow. Spider silk coats her fingers as she does so, making them sticky. Margot swears, brushing the clinging threads off on her skirt.

Of course, if she did hire some help, she might get a day off. Or the chance to linger in bed past dawn or just have a few minutes to herself.

But there’s no money to hire someone. And besides, how would she teach them everything they’d need to know? What if they overwatered the rowan saplings or forgot to prune the spider plants or flubbed a spell that Margot could perform easily, turning them into actual spiders intent on taking over the greenhouse?

Not worth the risk.

As Margot shifts around garden tools in the shed, looking for the spade she knows she left back here, her mind drifts to her plans for the evening. Her best friend, Sage Wilderstone, will be in town tonight. It’s just a quick visit—Sage is passing through Bloomfield before she heads out on her next adventure—but the thought of talking to her best friend, not a wheelbarrow or a plant or a cat, is delicious. They’re meeting for drinks in Clementine’s Tavern at nine o’clock, which should give Margot enough time for a bath and change of clothes.

Pausing in her pursuit of the spade, Margot considers her soil-smeared strawberry-print dress. It’s her least favorite, but since she didn’t get to do laundry yesterday, it’s also her second-to-last clean one. When she dressed in the dark this morning, she hadn’t known she’d be meeting Sage tonight, and it’s not like they’re going somewhere fancy. There are no fancy places in Bloomfield. Still, she really should change into something less grimy and strawberry-forward.

Right, yes. She will make time to go home first.

Margot resumes her search for the spade, fingers scraping over empty clay pots and bags of mulch. How her parents would hate to see her now: dirt under her fingernails, garden boots on, looking so much like Granny Fern.

A pang of grief, sharp and sudden, sends Margot stumbling backward. She catches herself against the wheelbarrow, sitting heavily on the edge, letting the metal bite into the back of her thighs. How has it been more than four years already?

Granny Fern was a legendary plant witch—a natural caster too—whose remedies, magical plants, and many potions made the Greenwillow family a tremendous fortune. Over the years, even as her fame grew, Granny Fern stayed the same. Her home was the gardener’s cottage she grew up in—the same one Margot lives in now—and she donated money and shared her land generously, including the fields, lake, and forests around her greenhouses. The community of Bloomfield had sprung up on that land, slowly growing from a few houses and families struggling together to carve out a life in the middle of the countryside into a thriving village of about two hundred people, built around the principle of mutual care for neighbors and the small joys of building and growing, books, tea, and a slow afternoon spent chatting with a friend.

None of which appealed to Margot’s parents. They were cut from a different vine, and they hated how easily Granny Fern gave her money away. Unlike her own mother, Margot grew up in Ashaway among high society, and when Margot’s parents could be bothered to visit Granny Fern, they insisted on staying in the enormous manor house they’d built near Granny Fern’s cottage. Rare though they were, Margot loved those visits to Bloomfield. During summers and occasional long weekends in her childhood, Margot learned how to help green things grow over many cups of tea with Granny Fern. She even learned how to make a few simple potions, though she was nowhere near as good at them as Granny Fern.

But the summer Margot turned eighteen, Granny Fern got sick with something even her most famous remedies couldn’t cure. She was gone before Margot could catch a coach to Bloomfield. Granny Fern’s ashes were scattered under her favorite tree behind the gardener’s cottage, and while Margot grieved by working in the greenhouses, Margot’s parents giddily dug their hands deep in the family coffers. Which soon went spectacularly wrong…

Tears rise in Margot’s eyes. Feel your feelings, little Daisy, then get back to work, Granny Fern always used to say.

Margot would love to, but who has time for feelings when there’s so much to do? The thought makes her reach into her dress pocket, as she’s done so often over the last few years, her fingers brushing over the well-worn letter she has memorized by now. It’s from the Claunecks, her parents’ onetime friends and eventual creditors. Official Clauneck Company letterhead fills the top of the page: the distinctive outline of their towered offices in the Copper Court, with a C turned sideways atop its crenellated roof. When Margot first found the letter among her parents’ things—almost a year after Granny Fern had died and soon after her parents had been moved to the Bloomfield Care Cottage—she nearly tore it up in rage. By now, the words are familiar, and they are the heaviest of weights. She reads them again:

Dear Iris and Welton,

Regarding your request, we feel it unwise to invest further in your ventures until we have fully recouped your considerable debts to the Clauneck Company, the sum of which the heretofore seized assets have not begun to erase. However, we are impressed by your generous estimations of your daughter’s talents and intrigued by the Natural Caster Restoration Potion you claim she is close to perfecting. In remembrance of Fern—whose legacy looms large over Harrow and its economy still—we have seen fit to offer an extension on said debts. For a period of four years until that summer’s end, we will delay the seizure of Bloomfield. We will allow you to occupy Fern’s cottage on your former estate, and to continue to manage Greenwillow Greenhouses. It is our hope that Margot will inherit her grandmother’s prodigious abilities and redeem the Greenwillow brand.

Following this four-year period, should your daughter’s potential fail to bear out, then your remaining assets—the cottage, the greenhouses, and the land upon which Bloomfield sits—will be subject to immediate seizure, which we shall take no pleasure in. (Please know, it’s nothing personal. It’s just business.)

We look forward to witnessing all that Margot will achieve during this grace period and remain cordially yours,

Baremon and Menorath Clauneck