Page 73 of Homegrown Magic

After a few long moments of waiting for an answer from Granny Fern that won’t come, Margot hauls herself to her feet and picks up Harvey.

“Right, let’s get back to the workshop, then,” she says. She blows the tree and Granny Fern’s resting place a kiss and then turns away, resigned to another day of failure.

Hours later and long after sunset, Harvey leaps off the worktable, taking a stack of papers with him. Margot swears as her empty teacup—Yael’s favorite one, the one Margot has taken to drinking from almost exclusively—which was sitting on the papers, goes cascading toward the edge. She just misses it as it falls, and the ceramic cup shatters on the stone floor under the table.

“Harvey!” she cries out, her voice breaking on the last syllable. “That was a special cup!”

Tears of exhaustion and bitter frustration fill her eyes as she gets out of her chair and crouches beneath the table, reaching to pick up the scattered teacup shards. It’s a porcelain map of her shattered relationship with Yael, the buttery-yellow bee-painted pieces starkly laid out in front of her.

Harvey curls around her ankles, meowing, as if in apology.

“Shoo, get out of here,” she says as hot tears roll down her face. “You’re going to cut your paws.”

Harvey insistently nudges her leg, and Margot gently shoves him away. Undeterred, he leaps onto the chair Margot’s just vacated and from there into her arms.

He lands with a thunk against her chest, making her drop the teacup shards again.

“Impossible creature,” Margot says, leaning forward to put him back on the chair. Right as she’s fumbling directly under the center drawer of the worktable, Harvey lets out a yowl and sinks his claws into Margot’s shoulder.

Pain sears through her, and she lurches upward, the top of her head smashing into the bottom of the drawer.

“Ow, Harvey!” she calls out, flinging the cat onto the chair. “What was—?”

The question dies on her lips as she looks at the underside of the drawer. A small piece of wood has sprung open on its bottom, revealing a shallow hidden compartment.

“What in the world?” she murmurs as she reaches into the gap in the wood and pulls out a handful of tightly rolled papers.

Granny Fern’s handwriting fills the pages, and the left edges are torn, as if they’ve been ripped out of a book. The parchment is thick and well worn, exactly like that of Fern’s remedy book.

Margot’s heart flits in her chest like a butterfly near a flowering bush. These have to be the missing pages from Fern’s incomplete Natural Caster Potion notes. Have they really been here all along, just inches from her fingertips as she desperately tried to figure out this potion?

Leaving the broken teacup pieces, Margot clambers out from under the worktable, clutching the pages. She puts them on top of the spellbook and pulls the lantern closer to glance through the diagrams, drawings, and fragments of notes. On the last page is what looks like a journal entry. It’s dated two days before Fern died, and Margot can almost hear Granny Fern’s whiskey-and-tea-toned voice as she begins to read.

On the Natural Caster Potion, some thoughts, from Fern Greenwillow:

I am near my end. Even as I write this, I can feel the sickness eating away at me, as I’ve seen it do to many others. Tired as I am, I cannot leave the world without at least putting down the sum of my greatest project to paper. Even if no one else reads it, I need to feel I’ve finished my work.

For many years now, I’ve been thinking about natural casters in Harrow, and what it means to be born with a reservoir of magic. Is it fair? Is it random? Does it show the favor of a god or some such being from another plane?

I don’t know and, of course, these are questions best left to the scholars and philosophers who have spent centuries debating them. From my time in school, I do know the theories behind how magic operates in our world, but that’s not what got me started. What I wanted to know when I first dug into this potion was this: Is it possible to create something that makes the world a more fair place?

Could something like this Natural Caster Potion give those born in the Rookery for whom magical studies are out of reach a better chance? Could it help to balance the gulf in Harrow between those with resources and those without? Could it help to build stronger communities, where both magical access and the money to compensate without magic are lacking?

It seemed to me that, yes, it might be possible.

Of course, the minute I thought about such things, I also knew that granting a tremendous amount of natural casting ability to those already in power would be reckless, dangerous, deadly. But it seemed something I could control if I could in fact create it.

And so I decided to try.

My experiments took me years, from the first few notes in the spellbook through all of the formulas, failures, and results I’ve recorded in the following pages. They tell the story of a journey—one full of frustration, half starts, and many wonderful remedies and potions discovered and concocted along the way. In fact, those potions helped me build my empire as my curiosity took me down one avenue and then the next. And for that, I’m truly grateful. Through it all, however, I kept looking for some miscalculation or missing ingredient that would help me achieve this dream of equalizing magic in Harrow.

Then one day, without meaning to, I found it.

Here, Margot inhales sharply. This is it! The key to crafting the potion that will save Bloomfield from the Claunecks’ clutches!

Even as excitement swells within her, another fear rises. Wasn’t Fern right that those with power but without stores of magic would do terrible things with such a potion? Margot had seen as much in the dress shop when Menorath’s eyes gleamed at the thought of becoming a powerful natural caster, ungoverned by her family’s patron.

But releasing Yael from their patron’s clutches wouldn’t be the worst thing either—no, Margot doesn’t let herself linger in that thought. She keeps reading.