Page 7 of Homegrown Magic

“I think I’ll have one more.” Margot pushes her tankard toward Clementine, hoping to lose herself and her responsibilities for a few more minutes at the bottom of it.

3

Yael

Hard as it might seem to fall asleep on the back of a steed whose hoofbeats clang like anvil strikes, Yael manages. Though “falling asleep” feels a little more like passing out—especially when they wake dry-mouthed, shivering, and with a dire headache. Perhaps they should’ve eaten before downing several glasses of wine and flutes of champagne. They left the estate while the kitchen was still preparing its seven-course dinner, supposedly in Yael’s honor. Now the sky has deepened considerably, dark as ink so far from the lantern lights of Ashaway, spattered with stars beyond counting. Yael is no ranger who can tell time by the constellations. But from the hollowness of their stomach—and the fact that they’re sober as well as miserable—they guess it might be past midnight.

They should have waited to flee until after the mutton soup. Or the oysters. Or the cheese and mushroom pie. Or the baked giant toad…

Well, it’s too late now. If the party went on without Yael, as it certainly would have, then the plates have long since been cleared. Besides, would Yael really slink home just for supper?

Supper, and bedclothes, and a warm, safe place to sleep, their patron’s familiar voice (one that sounds very much like Baremon, but deeper, like measuring a lake against an ocean) rumbles inside their mind. Or will you sleep in the weeds and die of the cold? You never do stop to think, Yael.

Hearing that voice when they’d least like to is a consequence of the warlock’s bargain, though thankfully, it’s not a common occurrence. Yael’s patron has only ever paid heed to them when they’ve disappointed him severely. Tonight’s misadventure seems to have won Yael his attention—a most unwelcome prize. Perhaps Baremon or Uncle Mikhil or, who knows, even Araphi has an altogether different relationship with the family patron. Yael’s certainly never asked. Rather, they’ve spent a lifetime trying to avoid their patron’s notice as they avoid his offering altars, even if it means that the roadside weeds are capable of greater magic than Yael.

To prove the voice wrong, Yael flips the levers that bring the mechanical steed to a stop in the middle of the Queens’ Road. This way, at least they can think without the frigid wind in their face and their head pounding in rhythm with Sweet Wind’s gait.

The sensible thing would be to turn around and ride for the capital, as they’d always meant to when they set out. They might even make it back by breakfast. It’ll be a miserable one after a mostly sleepless night, with their father and uncle glaring at them over party leftovers and tea—or, worse, laughing at them. Yael will drag their fork across their plate, trying not to vomit on their cold smoked fish. Probably, they’ll beg to stop the carriage on the ride to the Copper Court to heave up into the gutter. Maybe they can sneak a midday nap in the Records Library, tucked behind a shelf with a pile of profitability analyses for a pillow…

Starting Sweet Wind up again, Yael clucks the steed onward down the Queens’ Road, no matter that it can’t hear. If they’re not going back, they’ll need to find a place to eat and sleep—and soon. The sound of their chattering teeth is starting to rival the steed’s hoofbeats. But they’ve long since passed the first ring of villages beyond Ashaway’s walls, scattered amid farmland and riverland. Higley Brook, Poppler, and a mill town hardly worth naming sit right beside the road but are too close to the city to host an inn. Yael might’ve had to sleep in an empty barnyard stall or rent a bed in some leathersmith’s cottage, and that wouldn’t have been a very comfortable start to an adventure. They’d been sure they’d pass a crossroads eventually, but they must’ve dozed through it. Honestly, it’s lucky they weren’t found by bandits. They’d be lying in the weeds right now without a steed, without the small purse they had on them at the party to tip the hired servants, and probably with a dagger in their empty stomach.

So things could certainly be worse.

Maybe when they finally come across a town, they can barter something. Yael’s watched plenty of bards perform for supper and lodgings in the alehouses, but Yael isn’t what anybody would call gifted. They can’t even conjure a small flame for warmth. Their ineptitude at spellwork without their patron’s favor was never a problem in the capital, nor even at Auximia. But beyond the city and the reach of their family’s credit, how exactly are they going to survive?

They’re on the brink of stopping again when, finally, they see a crossroads ahead in the starlight. No inn, though. The path that cuts across the Queens’ Road—a highway several carriage breadths across and paved with six-sided capstones, which runs from Briarwall, a military outpost positioned between the forests and mountains of the dangerous Northlands and the rest of settled Harrow, down to Lintonbury at its southern tip—is little more than a dirt lane rutted by cart wheels and beast tracks. There’s a weathered signpost with one plank pointing ahead toward Olde Post, a sizable town Yael knows to be at least another day’s ride south. A second plank points east, down the lane that winds off into the dark countryside.

Bloomfield, it reads.

Yael is shocked to realize they know exactly where they are, after all.

“An entire day’s travel just to visit a country estate? What were the Greenwillows thinking, and why the devils did we agree?” Baremon complained to his wife, not for the first or even fifth time since setting out.

They’d left Ashaway just after morning tea—Baremon, Menorath, and thirteen-year-old Yael, along with their coachman, a footman, and Menorath’s maid—in order to reach their destination by evening. The party had stopped once along the Queens’ Road for the coachman to feed and water the horses (not as impressive as the pair of griffins they’d left in the stable, but better suited for summer travel), and even then Yael had to sit in the stifling carriage with their parents. It had only grown hotter as the day grew longer.

“We agreed to visit as their major investor and as a personal favor to Iris,” Menorath calmly reminded her husband. She had a knack for weathering Baremon’s tempers; her own were much subtler, sometimes passing over Yael’s head like a cloud, gone on the breeze before they looked up with no explanation for their accompanying chills. “Perhaps it won’t be so bad. The estate was built with her mother’s fortune after all, and I’m told it’s comfortable, if…cozy.” She made no effort to hide the distasteful twist of her sweating upper lip.

What with the heat, the faint tang of Clauneck magic in the carriage, and their proximity to their parents, Yael was more than ready to burst out the door by the time they passed through the high outer wall of Bloomfield, but there was still a ways to go. They jostled down the lane toward the turnoff to the manor—the first sign of human inhabitants in the village, and it was only an entrance gate to another path cutting farther into the woods. The open gate was flanked on either side by a pair of stone beasts, hooved and antlered, with beards of stone leaves. In the deep shade under trees taller than any they had in Ashaway, the statues seemed about to spring to life.

Little as Yael wanted to agree with their father, it was strange to see a fancy manor house way out in the woods, so many hours from anything important. The Claunecks had no real interest in being anywhere but the very heart of Ashaway, though they had estates in Lintonbury, the southernmost point on the Queens’ Road where the royal summer palace stood, and on the shore of the Jade Sea in Kingfisher, with its vital trading ports. Proper cities. Yael had never even heard of Bloomfield before the invitation to dine with the Greenwillows arrived.

The house was very nice, though. Where Clauneck Manor was a solid, towering block of gray stone with its own ramparts, arrow-slit windows, and gable-roof towers tall enough to pierce the clouds, the Greenwillows’ country estate was lower to the earth, three stories built of stone the same reddish brown as the surrounding tree trunks. Only one tower rose above the giant treetops, more like a fairy tale than a fortification.

On the grand front steps stood the Greenwillows, flanked by a small household staff and waiting to greet them; some enchantment on the gate must’ve alerted them to the Claunecks’ arrival. Iris Greenwillow was high-cheekboned and beautifully plump, with violet hair plaited into a crown. Her hair color was a quirk she’d been born with, same as her mother, Fern’s hair, and some said it was a sign of prodigious magical talents. Yael had heard their mother tittering with her landed friends over the fact that if such talent existed, it had yet to bloom in Iris. Her husband, Welton Sameshoe, stood about her height but stockier, beaming at them through a dark-brown beard. Their daughter, Margot—Yael’s friend since they were old enough to be towed along to social functions like small pets or purses—was nowhere to be seen.

Perhaps Margot’s absence had carved the worry lines between Iris’s brows, even as she exclaimed, “Friends, welcome to our home! How pleasing it is to see you.” As though the Claunecks’ arrival was a most wonderful surprise and not an event the Greenwillows had doubtlessly been planning and scrambling over for weeks.

Menorath nodded graciously. “How pleasing it is to be here. We aren’t given an excuse to leave the city often enough for my liking. And your estate—how quaint!”

Yael was attuned enough to the moods of grown-ups to guess that “quaint” was not the impression the Greenwillows wished to make. There was nothing quaint about their manner of dress. They were outfitted far more formally than the Claunecks in their traveling clothes. Of course, the Claunecks’ traveling clothes were sewn of the finest silks and leathers, only giving the appearance of simplicity, while Iris’s gown was encrusted with jewels. Vines of cut emeralds climbed her velvet skirt, blossoming into sunflowers with petals of lemon quartz and citrine. Welton wore a burgundy velvet suit to match, with a high ruffled collar. It seemed far too hot for such heavy finery, and in contrast with Yael’s family, the pair looked…overdone.

If they noticed, neither Greenwillow let on. “Come, come,” Welton cheered, “and make yourselves at home. What’s ours is yours.”

While their coachman and footman and maid were led away to the servants’ quarters, the flock of waiting staff showed Yael and their parents through the arched main entrance and up a broad stonework staircase to their separate chambers. It was some time yet until dinner, and the Claunecks would be staying overnight. Yael had just finished unraveling the sweated-through linen bindings around their new and unwelcome chest to replace before dressing for dinner when a rapid knocking sounded at the door.

A voice called urgently through the keyhole, “Yael, let me in! Before Mama finds me and makes me wash!”

They grinned, hurrying to pin fresh bindings in place before tossing on a shirt. Not bothering with a vest or coat, they threw open the door, and Margot rushed inside. No wonder she was hiding out. She wore a plain brown dress that might’ve been long enough a growth spurt ago, a sweater that looked as if it had been knitted for someone Baremon’s size instead of a skinny twelve-year-old girl, and garden boots splattered with drying mud.