Page 8 of Homegrown Magic

“Won’t you get in trouble if your parents can’t find you?” Yael asked, plucking some kind of prickly twig from where it was stuck in Margot’s hastily braided purple hair, the mirror of her mother’s.

Margot blushed, then shrugged. “Only after they find me. So we’d better run away before they do. Granny Fern’s packed me snacks for the road.” She hoisted the checkered cloth sack looped over her shoulder for Yael’s inspection. “Grab your riding boots, quickly, and we’ll be halfway to the coast to board a ship for Locronan before they know we’re gone!”

“Why Locronan?”

“Because they’ve still got dragons there,” she whispered, her rain-cloud-colored eyes glittering.

“They haven’t! There aren’t any dragons anywhere.” The great beasts that used to nest in mountain peaks and forests deep had been hunted down for the magical properties of their bones and scales ages ago, they’d learned at school.

“Well, how will we know if we never go?”

This was what Yael loved about Margot: She made everything feel like an adventure.

They slipped into their velvet dress shoes, perfectly impractical for running away from home. “Father would summon our patron himself to bring me back,” they explained with a sigh. Not that he would try very hard, most likely. Yael heard their patron’s voice about as often as they heard from their father’s father, now retired to the seaside to clear the path for Baremon: on the occasional birthday, or when Yael’s minor high jinks caused enough of a stir to merit a scolding from afar, usually delivered in a formal letter dictated to their grandfather’s footman. Yael would never admit to Margot that they were afraid of the offering altars placed about the Clauneck estate, just as they were of those letters.

“Maybe just the tower, then,” Margot conceded. “We’ll come down in time for the dinner bell. Granny only packed us strawberry jam, anyway.”

“Deal.”

Yael grabbed their coat and slung their tie over their neck, and the two snuck past closed doors and empty rooms full of grand furniture, giggling all the while, until they reached the third floor. A winding stone staircase beyond a door at the end of the hall led them up. When they reached the round chamber at the top, a dozen paces across, the tower was miraculously cool in the summer heat. It must’ve been freezing in any other season without a warming stove up here, which explained why there was no furniture—only a steamer trunk with a strange collection of objects set on top. A little wooden clock carved like a snail. A brass spyglass. A few empty jam jars—still pink and sticky around the rims—containing handfuls of pebbles, and shells, and dried brown leaves.

Yael crossed to the tower window, and Margot swiped the spyglass from the trunk to toss it to them.

“Look down there,” she instructed. “You can see Granny’s cottage, with the chimney.” Then she bent to set her bag on the floor, pulling out a jam jar and a silver spoon. She unwound the twine around the pink cloth lid to peel it back. “There’s a grotto on the north side of the property with a little waterfall, but you can’t really see it from here, with the trees in the way, except sometimes when the light catches the mist in the morning and makes rainbows above the treetops. Granny built it up with magic, and it’s one of my favorite places anywhere. Maybe I can take you there the next time you visit.”

“Next visit,” Yael promised even as their heart sank like a pebble into a pond: Their parents would never bring them back here, they were fairly certain. Menorath and Baremon had sworn as much in the carriage. Besides, they were bound for boarding school in Perpignan at the end of summer and unlikely to be summoned home for holidays—something of a mixed blessing.

“Look a little south,” Margot continued, “and you can see Bloomfield.”

Yael pressed the glass to their eye. “That’s the village, right?”

“Barely,” she said, but fondly. “It’s more of a…collection. Yes, a collection of people who moved there because of Granny. The walls you passed through used to be a military outpost, but it was abandoned years ago to rebuild closer to Olde Post. Granny bought the land when her business took off.”

“Took off” was putting it mildly; Yael didn’t know everything about their parents’ peers, but they knew that much. They’d only met Granny Fern once, because the Greenwillow matriarch never seemed to come to Ashaway, let alone the Copper Court or the Clauneck offices. But nobles and royals and townsfolk alike would travel long distances for her remedies and potions. Fern was the whole reason Yael’s parents were so eager to invest in Iris and Welton, and (no offense to Margot’s parents) Fern alone. On the carriage ride to Bloomfield, they’d speculated as to whether Margot might equal her grandmother’s talents someday—Fern’s gifts had clearly skipped a generation. “We should keep an eye on the girl,” Menorath had suggested, speaking over Yael’s head.

Yael could’ve told them that Margot was already extraordinary, but when had their parents ever taken them seriously?

“So she’s the landlord of Bloomfield?” they asked Margot.

She paused with the spoon in her mouth. “I suppose. But she doesn’t collect taxes or make the laws or anything.”

Yael frowned. “Who does, then?”

“Well, the community, I guess. Which is mostly people who came to live near a famous plant witch, or Granny’s friends. Some from when she was our age. In fact, Granny used her own money to help build their houses and businesses.”

“How did they pay her back?”

“They didn’t. Granny does drink at the tavern for free, though. Shelby insists. But my parents won’t let me go with her.”

Yael had never heard of anything like that, and Baremon and Menorath probably thought Granny Fern was a bag of loose marbles. But Yael liked Margot, who clearly loved her grandmother. So they nodded as though they understood.

She took the spyglass from Yael, trading it for the spoon piled with bright-red strawberry jam.

“Is it magic jam?” Yael asked eagerly.

“People say so. They say it helps if you want to be in love. Or rather, if somebody doesn’t love you back.”

“Are you in love, Margot?” Yael teased. “I heard Sedgewick Wayanette asked you to dance at his birthday celebration. He’s very…tall.”