Page 32 of Homegrown Magic

The words cut through Margot, the truth of her life and how her parents ended up in a magical sleep warring with the force of her ambitions to save the people and the village she loves. “I don’t know about that,” she admits. “What if they never wake up?”

“They will.” Yael sounds so sure. So fierce.

“But what will they say when they see I’ve not fixed anything for my family?”

Yael gives her a long, appraising look. They take her hand from where it rests on the mattress beside them, holding it close. “Margot Greenwillow, you hear me. If your parents wouldn’t be proud of the life you’ve built and the people you’ve helped—people like yours truly—then that’s their mistake. You’re allowed to make your own way.”

Tears rise at their words. “Thank you,” she whispers, overcome, even if it can never be true.

“Of course,” Yael says through an enormous yawn. They release Margot’s hand, and she misses the contact immediately. “Now I’m going to sleep. This is enough adventure for one day, even for me.”

Margot turns away, leaning toward the bedside lamp to blow out the flame. Outside, an owl hoots, and noise from the fair and the inn floats upward. As the moments pass, the bedroom fills with the sound of Yael’s steady breathing, their words still dancing through Margot’s mind.

If your parents wouldn’t be proud of the life you’ve built and the people you’ve helped—people like yours truly—then that’s their mistake…

It’s perhaps the most freeing thing she’s ever heard.

“Yael,” she whispers into the dark.

They’re quick to reply. “Yes?”

“I’m glad you’re here.”

And she is. Glad they’re in this bed with her, even with the pillows stacked between them and her own rules firmly in place. Glad to finally tell someone at least some small truth about her. Glad to rest here, in the darkness, with the easy companionship of Yael Clauneck, who somehow understands her better than anyone since Granny Fern.

“I wouldn’t be anywhere else in the world,” Yael says, their voice sleepy but intense.

Margot smiles and pulls the blankets to her chin, fighting herself not to cross the pillow barricade and curl around Yael and just hold on to them until they’re both asleep.

13

Yael

The end of spring

In the weeks that pass after their triumphant return from Olde Post, spring blushes toward summer. The community garden flourishes, kale and beets and peas giving way to melons and tomatoes, cucumbers and currants. Yael pitches in with the villagers in their off hours to prune and harvest herbs, berries, and all manner of non-magical but delicious plant life. Beyond Greenwillow Greenhouses, the flowers bloom—none as spectacularly as Margot’s, but the grass is splashed with wildflowers and the lilac bushes outside of Clementine’s tavern blossom, their strong, sweet scent drifting upward to perfume Yael’s room each morning. The wife of Astrid the healer returns from her pilgrimage, and the fish in the pond seem to double in size overnight. They shine in the sun through the tea-brown water as though their scales were polished plate armor.

Not that the countryside is a total paradise. The bugs are devils; during summers in Ashaway, they hang spelled braziers about the city to keep pests away, but not in Bloomfield, where pollinators are a necessity and magical objects few and far between. And then there’s Margot and Yael, or the lack thereof.

That night in the Abyssal Chicken, it had seemed as if things might change between them—or perhaps as if things had been changing all along, the two of them sliding from once-upon-a-time friends to failed lovers, to employee and employer, to proper friends who sometimes wondered how the other would taste (at least, Yael wondered), and perhaps, finally, to something else.

But no. Margot doesn’t even invite Yael back to her cottage at night, never mind into her bed. And though Yael happily flirts with tourists and travelers passing through Clementine’s Tavern (and with Clementine occasionally, and once, Mike the librarian) over a late-night ale and games of chess and knucklebone, inevitably, they climb the steps to their room alone. Unlike in Ashaway, there are consequences for dalliances in Bloomfield, where everyone knows the business of everyone. Margot wasn’t wrong about that.

It shouldn’t matter to Yael that Margot would find out. Really, it shouldn’t.

Alas, what Margot thinks of Yael—and whether Margot thinks of Yael at all, and how often—has come to matter. Probably too much, considering how little progress they make after Olde Post. So Yael goes to work in the greenhouses, and goes to bed by themself, and all the while, a new, impossible kind of wanting blooms under Yael’s skin like lilac, scenting and coloring everything around them.

Five weeks after the Spring Fair, Yael is returning from the baker’s with a pouch of yeast for Margot’s home-brewed cherry cider when they see a rider in Ashaway’s courier livery waiting beside a saddled mastiff at the entrance to Greenwillow Greenhouses.

Caught between diving into the bushes that grow along the road or bolting back the way they came, Yael freezes in the middle of the lane. Have their parents tracked them here, after all? Despite her assurances that she would keep her source a secret, did Rastanaya report to Baremon and Menorath immediately upon returning to the capital?

Oh, Yael. You can’t believe you’ve been that hard to find for anyone who wanted to find you. If anyone had wanted to find you.

Yael slaps at their own head to rid it of their patron’s unwelcome voice, and the movement catches the courier’s attention.

“Sir’ram!” the courier hails. “Do you know where I can find…” They peer down at the envelope clutched in their riding glove. “Margot Greenwillow? The young woman at the tavern sent me here, but I’ve been inside the shop, and there’s no one there.”

Likely, Margot is still busy in the perpetually blooming cherry orchard. A local would’ve known to wander deeper into the greenhouses or try again later. “I’ll take the letter,” Yael says, eager for the courier to leave. Whether they’re here for Yael or not, nothing good can possibly be coming from Ashaway.