Page 10 of Violet Thistlewaite Is Not a Villain Anymore
But no. As Violet left the greenhouse that morning, shaking off the weight of his stare, she reminded herself that shewasa nobody now. And being a nobody in this town—being a nobody to Nathaniel Marsh—was a good thing.
Violet pushed open the back door to her shop and forcibly pruned away further thoughts of her inscrutable landlord and his inkwell eyes—they couldn’t watch her here. She took a deep breath and looked around the open space, marveling again that she was really giving this dream a go.
Potential bloomed in every corner of Violet’s new shop. The rounded oriel window with its mullioned panes was lined with shelves that would let in the perfect amount of light for plants, and the beams above her head looked plenty strong enough to hold more of them as soon as she had time to make some woven hangers. The space was airy and bright, with plenty of room for her to work—and now if Violet could only master the skill of conjuring plants without drawing on dark magic, she’d be up and running in a matter of weeks.
It turned out that while using the Thornwitch’s near-inexhaustible spring of power was like dunking her head beneath a waterfall to drink her fill, Violet the Recovering Villain had to haul this new magic up by the heavy bucketful from a deep well. It was growing easier the more she practiced, but there was no eager jolt of magic through her veins, no flood of vicious joy like she usually felt. She hadn’t realized until she left Shadowfade Castle just how much she’d come to revel in the evil within her. Being good felt hollow by comparison.
She held out a hand to try it once more, picturing a lily, imagining silky, freckled petals and a long stamen dusty with pollen. The Thornwitch’s magic leapt to her fingertips, eager and thrilling, but with it came the familiar sensation of thorns that prickled beneath her skin. Violet stanched it and forced her eyes to remain their golden brown, but it was like a tap had been turned off.
“Come on,” she muttered. Finding the other spring took concentration. It helped to imagine she was running her hands along a rope in a dark room, her fingers blindly but methodically searching for a place where it knotted.
There.
Violet grabbed hold of the knot and hauled on the rope, bringing the magic into her and bracing against the sudden sting in her fingers. After a moment, a lily appeared dutifully in her hand, though its petals were a touch wilted. Violet stared at it, wondering if she couldsupplementwith dark magic, at least until she got better at going without. But no—that was the point. She was done with all that. No exceptions.
Using this morally virtuous brand of magic felt like she was exercising a muscle she hadn’t realized she even had.
“I just need to practice,” she reasoned aloud to Bartleby, who was idly attempting to juggle a letter opener. She flexed her hands, trying to rid them of the nettle-like sensation, and squinted at the lily, breathing a bit of life into it until the wilted petals perked up.There.She conjured a full bouquet of colorful blooms, each a little easier than the last, though the stinging in her hands increased to a dull burn.
“See?” she said through gritted teeth, showing the flowers to Bartleby, who had begun using the letter opener to fence with an invisible opponent. “Practice! A bit of that every day and I’ll be ready.”
She arranged the bouquet in a little glass vase and placed it inthe window, smiling at her handiwork. She’d have to find a supplier for pots and vases, she realized. And for ribbons and paper and twine and all the other supplies she couldn’t just grow from the ground with her magic. How much would that cost? And how much would she have to charge for her floral arrangements to turn a profit anyway? That seemed the sort of thing a proper non-evil shopkeeper needed to think about.
Violet wasn’t too worried about funds—the jewels she’d taken from Guy’s treasury would tide her over for years, once she was able to trade them for coin at the bank. Oh dear, she’d have to set up an account in town, wouldn’t she? Violet had never had a bank account before. Would she need a letter from one of her landlords to vouch that she lived here?
And speaking of living, the sparsely furnished little rooms above the shop that she now called her own could use a touch of something. The tiny sitting room had an armchair and a writing desk where she could do her bookkeeping, and the kitchen, clearly converted from some other purpose, had a woodstove and a little round breakfast table, with a hutch she planned to fill with colorful, mismatched dishware and as many varieties of tea as she could get her hands on. The bedroom with its big double window and faded quilt on the bed, and the cramped copper tub in the washroom, were nothing compared to Violet’s apartments at Shadowfade Castle, but they werehersin a way nothing had ever been before. Perhaps she should brighten them up a bit and put her own stamp on them.
Violet stopped, broom in hand, pile of dust unswept on the floor. She had dreamed of finding a place to call home, of course—a cottage deep in the woods, perhaps, with a cheerful fire in the hearth and a gated garden out back. An apartment in a bustling city and shopkeepers who knew her name and greeted her with a smile. A ship with purple sails and a captain who— But no. Homehad never been anywhere but her master’s castle. Nerves grew over her like weeds then, and their taproot dug deep. What was she doing?
Guy had told her dozens of times: She was good for one thing and one thing only, and this? Opening a flower shop? This was not it.
She looked at the broom, which was beginning to sprout thorns that pricked at her palms. She startled and they disappeared, the handle budding with leaves instead.
“Just be abroom,” she grumbled, huffing until the broomstick was just a broomstick once more.
This was what happened when she stopped paying attention. Her magic was always itching to leak from her, as if all her broken bits could never mend and the darkness at her core was constantly oozing from the cracks. She was trying to stop, buthow, when it was so easy to let it out?
Violet was evil, and Guy had known it from the moment he found her.Four years old and abandoned by your mother on an island in the Stained Glass Sea, he’d told her.You were too powerful, and you couldn’t control it. She must have thought you too much of a risk to keep.As she grew up under his care, Guy reminded her often that if she didn’t master her dark magic, it would master her instead.
Your mother didn’t understand you, Guy had cooed.The rest of the world will never understand you.
But he had. He’d kept her isolated throughout much of her childhood until they were certain Violet could control her powers, and then her training had really begun. Violet had lived among other murderers, ones who were proud of their deeds, who would laugh at her if she showed shame for her own. By all rights, Violet should have grown to be just like them, and for a while it seemed like she might have.
She was an angry young woman with an incredible amount of magic, and Guy had encouraged her to use it to his advantage.
We are building our future, petal. Securing our power. With you by my side, we’ll be unstoppable.
It was all he wanted—to be unstoppable, to defeat even the threat of death. In exchange for helping him hunt down legendary artifacts like the Tideheart and the Eye of the Serpent, he’d offered Violet exactly what she wanted most in the world: A place where she wouldn’t be alone anymore. A place to belong.
So she’d worked for him, using her magic as he taught her to. No siege could stand against an enemy who could putrefy the food supply, after all, and the dreaded Thornwitch, who could destroy a way of life with a twitch of her fingers, quickly became Shadowfade’s most trusted pet. There was a time when Violet even liked it, found that she could channel out all the busy thoughts in her head while she was using dark magic. Violet had been horrible enough to drive away her own family, but she didn’t have to be Violet when she was the Thornwitch.
Then came the sack of Silbourne and the collapse of everything Violet had thought she knew. And now Guy Shadowfade was gone. All his talk of immortality, his quests for greatness, his experiments with alchemy and his endless hunt for the Eye of the Serpent—gone.
Violet could feel her dark magic calling to her as always, seductive as a ripe berry on the vine, singing sweet sounds of despair and the euphoria that would come from letting loose a volley of the power she knew lived within her. She wanted to be good, like the Tempest had told her to be. To try for something more. To create happiness rather than misery and to grow roots rather than rot, and if this new magic hurtherinstead of other people, then she would accept that. She didn’twantto be the Thornwitch anymore, and so she wouldn’t be. Maybe it was as simple as that.
Maybe Violet Thistlewaite could simply live out her days here. At peace.
A crash from outside the shop broke her from her thoughts. For a moment, her body tensed, the broom falling at her feet as she freed her hands, her mind halfway to conjuring thorns beneath her skin or calling the roots of the trees in the Green to lift from the ground and crush the life from her attackers.
