Page 31 of Violet Thistlewaite Is Not a Villain Anymore
“Aye,” agreed Jerome. “That’s no soil I’d ever sleep in.”
Violet settled the last of the bags on Jerome’s cart, waved goodbye, and ran back across the street to flip the sign on her door so it readBack in a Few!
“Looking to investigate?” Prudence remarked from her perch against the Marsh Apothecary windowsill. “I’ll come with you.”
She hopped down, maneuvering gracefully around Nathaniel’s A-frame sign. Violet tried not to roll her eyes as she read his words again—she suspected she was the only one choosing to see their daily chalkboard exchanges as playful. She thought back to what he’d told her during her first week here.I reckon you’d find more success selling something that’s actually useful.The truth was, his words had struck a match against the flinty surface of her heart and ignited her innermost doubts. What if she couldn’t do this? What if all she was good for was carnage? What business did a villain like her have trying to open a business like this?
Pru followed her gaze to the signs. “Nathaniel’s been in a bit of a mood lately,” she said, clearly noticing Violet’s sudden scowl.
“Only lately?” Violet blurted out before she could stop herself, but Pru only laughed.
“He really is the worst, isn’t he?” she said fondly. “I forget not everyone’s used to him.”
Suddenly Violet felt defensive. “He’s not so bad.”
Pru pressed her lips together, poorly disguising a smile. “No? I suppose he’s put himself under a lot of pressure, not that it’s any excuse. But that’s a story for another day. Shall we suss out the source of the stench?” She smirked. “Say that five times fast.”
Violet wanted to know more about that story for another day, but she shook off her curiosity. It was none of her business, and she wasn’t interested in being branded a gossip by prying. She took Pru’s arm and smiled back at her friend. “Certainly, let us suss.”
The two women traipsed into the park, noses in the air, sniffing at the acrid, damp smell of mold and decay. It didn’t take them long at all to find the patch of black near the platform where Pru performed on market days.
“Oh, it’s awful!” Pru declared, ducking her nose and mouth beneath the neckline of her blouse. “Like a giant’s armpit after a journey through the plains in summertime. Like a bowl of stew left under the bed with unwashed laundry and locked in a windowless room for weeks. It’s like something died covered in its own vomit and then came back to life, swam in a pool of raw sewage, and then died again.”
“That was so…specific,” said Violet, but she didn’t disagree. The smell was much stronger here, and clearly originated from the patch of black rot. The grass hadn’t so much died as been liquefied into strings of sticky-looking goo. She plucked a twig from the ground outside of the patch and poked at the rot, dropping the twig in alarm when it began to blacken as well.
Pru clucked her tongue. “It spreads by touch—that’s not good.”
“No. It’s not.”
“Can you do your whole”—Pru wiggled her fingers in what Violet supposed was an approximation of her magic—“thing?”
Violet concentrated on the spot, drawing some power fromher well, pulling it toward her, and channeling it toward the rot in an encouraging sort of way, thinking,Grow. Heal.
But to her surprise, the rot pulledbackat her, oily and heavy in a way she’d never experienced before even when using dark magic. The smell grew stronger, and Violet gagged, letting her power dissipate around her before she choked on it. Her hands felt like they were on fire, and she looked in horror as the ring of blight grew to encompass more of the grass surrounding it.
“That’s a no,” she gasped, holding her hands in front of her face, half expecting them to be red and blistered. She massaged them, trying to banish the pins and needles that stiffened her fingers.
“What could have caused it?” Pru stared in shock, rubbing circles into Violet’s back as her breathing evened once more.
“A blight that looks like this, smells like this, and apparently spreads to other plant life by touch?” Violet shook her head vehemently. “This reeks of magic.”
“It reeks of something, to be sure.”
Before Pru could launch into another volley of colorful analogies, Violet said, “We should find your brother.”
“You think this could be alchemy?”
“Perhaps?” Violet threw up her hands, at a loss. “I don’t know enough about it to guess, but he might be able to see something we can’t.”
“I’ll go get him.”
Violet stood watch over the patch of blight until Pru returned, her twin brother striding alongside her, looking businesslike as ever. He nodded curtly at Violet and then crouched next to the blight, leaning in to sniff it as though the smell didn’t incite the same nausea in him as it did Prudence and Violet. He too tried prodding at it with a stick, tossing the blighted wood into the circle once the black goo began to spread, then pulled a thinmetal wand from his pocket. He touched it carefully to the rot and frowned when it didn’t spread the way it had on the wood.
“Perhaps it reacts only to organic material,” Violet suggested, and he looked up in surprise, as though he’d forgotten she was there.
“My thoughts exactly.” His eyes met hers, alight with something like interest. Excitement perhaps. Agreement for once. Then he cleared his throat, and his gaze shuttered again, back to his normal mask of stern indifference. “I’ll have to study it further.”
He was back to the Nathaniel she recognized, but it was too late. Violet knew he was under there now, and she knew something about him she suspected he tried to keep hidden: that this kind of work, this kind of scientific question excited him in a way she’d never seen when he was in his role as apothecary. Again, her interest spiked—what was a man like him doing running his family’s business when his passions so clearly lay elsewhere? Their eyes met again, though he quickly averted his as he procured a small glass vial from another pocket and inserted the rot-covered wand.
