Page 75 of Homegrown Magic

Nothing about any of this feels good. The Claunecks are locusts, consuming beyond their own appetites whether they have the right to it or not. Yael knows this now. And perhaps…

Perhaps there is some way to prove it.

The belowground levels of the Clauneck Company offices replace polished wood with cold, impenetrable stone and iron doors. There are guard warlocks posted at every entrance and wards carved into every corridor and door. The safeguards require powerful spellwork far beyond Yael’s capability to breach, even with patronage.

Or they would, if Yael weren’t a Clauneck.

Their blood is the key that opens every arcane lock, and they needn’t even spill it to use it. All they need is their face, known by everyone in the offices, and a purposeful stride to bypass the guards. Each nods deferentially to Yael as they pass. It might not be enough to get them into the vault on the very lowest level—a dragon hoard’s worth of coins and valuable goods in trade—but that’s not a problem.

The Records Library is their objective.

There are wards branded heavily up and down and across the frame of the library door, and a pair of warlocks standing sentry to either side, with orders to halt anyone coming to claim entry. But here too the blood in Yael’s veins is all they need. A cog they may be, but Yael’s parents have done everything possible to keep their brokenness a secret. They lift the portfolio they’ve carried down to suggest a project under way—no further explanation owed—and press their palm to the iron. The door gives way for them, and in a moment they’re alone, the door shut and the wards raised again by the warlocks behind them.

Yael turns their attention to the shelves that stretch far down into the frigid air of the Records Library’s long aisles. Here are centuries’ worth of records detailing every purchase, sale, exchange, and secret of the Clauneck Company, all contained inside thousands of ledgers and files and portfolios such as the one they brought with them for cover.

They had better get to work.

Skimming their fingers along the shelves as they pass, they head for the account files from the past few years. Among them should be a file for the Greenwillows, including ledger entries tallying Margot’s parents’ many debts from when they went belly-up against the sums of assets seized. If Yael can find it, then…

What?

They aren’t sure what they hope to accomplish. Even if there is some miraculous difference between the amount of the Greenwillows’ debt and the total value of their seized assets (gods help them, they’re thinking like a banker), it can’t be a village’s worth of difference. And knowing the full sum of the debt won’t change anything. Margot doesn’t have the money to pay it off, and Yael doesn’t really have anything but the clothes on their back, absent their jewelry now. But there has to be something they can do. Find some loophole in the initial four-year extension. Get word to Margot with as much information as they can gather, at least. They might have left her, but that doesn’t change the fact that they love—

Love who? The woman who would’ve kept you from claiming your place in this world?

Yael stumbles in the aisle. “That isn’t true,” they say aloud in the cold, echoing hush of the library.

Is it not?

They linger for another moment, then push on down the aisle. This is what Clauneck wants: to distract them from their mission.

What I want, Yael, is your obedience to the family that made you, in every way possible. The family that honored their contract with you despite your years of unproductive floundering.

“You flatter me, great-great-great-great-grandfather. But I signed no such contract.”

Your contract was entered upon birth, signed with Clauneck blood. Would you break it to live with a failed plant witch in a ramshackle cottage in the woods, forever in fear of the day you’ll inevitably lose it all?

“Better to love a plant witch in a cottage than worship a petty devil in a manor house,” they mutter back, and how could they ever have believed otherwise?

They shouldn’t be here. This isn’t where they belong. It isn’t right.

None of this is right.

And there it is at last: the Greenwillow file, miraculously at eye level instead of on some higher shelf, out of sight and out of reach.

Stop this NOW, Yael.

They move all the quicker for Clauneck’s demands, opening the expected ledger and flipping through to the entries made just under four years ago; success! They find the list of assets seized to settle the Greenwillows’ debt: the mansion in Ashaway, their remaining stocks of potions and remedies in the city, the scant profits from one of their few mildly successful ventures…

Not the manor house in Bloomfield, though, or the greenhouses. Of course, if they never formalized the seizure or started the procedure before offering the extension, that makes sense. Damn.

For years now, you’ve failed in your duty to this family. Fail us now, disobey me now, and I will abjure you as your patron. Your family will abjure you as an heir at my command. And you will be alone in this world without a scrap of magic or a single copper to your name.

Clauneck’s words are daggers; they ought to draw blood.

But it’s Margot’s words, spoken in their shared bed at the Abyssal Chicken, that float back to them:

Your deviation from your parents’ expectations of you is not a failure on your part. It’s a failure of imagination on theirs, if they can’t see you for who you are.