Page 35 of Violet Thistlewaite Is Not a Villain Anymore
He’d never considered howintimateher work could be.
Violet refocused those honeyed eyes on Nathaniel. “Have you made any progress? With the balancing?”
He sighed and leaned back against his worktable, careful notto jostle the glass box. “Not yet. It’s as we suspected; the substance infects surrounding organic matter and eventually slows a bit, like it’s eating away at other plants until it starts to get full. I haven’t worked out a safe way to find out whether that extends past plant matter.” If the blight could hurt living, breathing creatures, Nathaniel didn’t know what he would do. “It only comes to a full stop when it reaches an inorganic barrier, like stone, metal, or glass. And while the blight does affect your conjured plants to a point, it doesn’t seem to destroy them entirely in the same way as natural plants.”
Violet looked over his shoulder at the stalk of mugwort, still partially black. He could feel the puff of her breath on his skin as shehmmed in thought. “I wonder if I could conjure a wall of thorns—or any plant at all would do, of course, it doesn’t have to bethorns—to strengthen the defense by the rock goblins.”
He shook his head. “Since your plants are at least partially organic, it wouldn’t be a perfect system. If even a speck of rot reached the outside of the circle, it would spread.”
“Why don’t we just burn it all?” Pru asked. “The blight, I mean.”
Nathaniel scraped a hand through his hair. “I tried to incinerate a pair of gloves that became contaminated last night and all it did was create a horrid black smoke. Took ages to get rid of it. I was afraid it would spread.”
“What did you do with the gloves?” Pru asked.
“Nothing yet.” He jerked a thumb behind his shoulder so they could see the blackened leather in a glass jar where he’d shoved them until he could figure out how to dispose of them.
“It’s good you’re taking precautions,” said Violet, eyeing the setup with approval. “I assume the glass box on your desk is the one we discussed that would protect against contamination?”
“Yes.” He felt suddenly nervous under her scrutiny, wanting toassure her he’d been careful to protect her plants in their shared space as he’d promised. “The box remains tightly closed when I’m not actively working inside it. It’s spelled against breaking, and even the air vents are designed to filter what comes out.”
“Incredible.” She leaned closer, examining it.
“It was designed originally for experimenting on alchemical bombs.”
She glanced at him. “And is that entirely necessary? Is there a risk of them exploding?”
His mouth tightened, his memory full of the smell of smoke and chemicals. “It’s not a risk I’m willing to take.”
“Well done then,” she said, homing in on the hard expression he wore. He watched her next thought as it occurred to her and dreaded the question even before it left her mouth. “Are you well acquainted with experimenting on bombs?”
He hesitated. “Much of my work in the Crucible was contracted by the royal military.”
She took in this information with a slow nod. “And what would the royal military make of our discovery yesterday, do you think? What would they do to destroy the blight?”
“They wouldn’t,” he said immediately. “They’d find a way to weaponize it.”
“Villains, the lot of them,” Pru added. “No offense, Nathaniel.”
Nathaniel rolled his eyes. After his time in the Crucible, his relationship with his country had grown complicated, to say the very least. He’d led projects that still kept him up at night worrying about how the science had since been applied. So it was safe to say that his sister wasn’t exactly wrong.
“Villains,” he agreed quietly.
Violet’s eyes had shuttered at some point in the conversation in a way he worried meant they’d start arguing soon. Anxietyrose in his chest; he found he did not want to quarrel with her anymore. Perhaps it was the blight, or the memories of the Crucible, but Nathaniel was sick of fighting. She’d offered him olive branch after olive branch, and he wished he’d been wise enough to accept one.
Luckily, Pru was there to step in before things escalated. “Nathaniel will find a way, don’t you worry. He’s the smartest person I know—when it comes to alchemy, anyway.” Her words had the intended effect, and the tension in the greenhouse dissolved.
“We’ll fix this,” Nathaniel said awkwardly to Violet, clenching a fist at his side so he wouldn’t do something foolish like pat her on the shoulder or push back the lock of hair that had sprung in front of her face. “And I’ll answer any questions you have.”
Her throat flexed as she swallowed whatever emotion had tightened her expression. “Thank you,” she said finally in a soft voice. “I have every faith in you, Nathaniel.”
The wave of shocked longing that racked his body at the sound of his name on her lips was entirely inappropriate for polite society; his fingernails dug brutally into his palm while the other hand clamped down on the mug of tea Pru had brought him. They held eye contact, and though Nathaniel had long since perfected the (complicated, expensive) alchemical practice of turning a material to gold, he had a ridiculous notion then that he’d been doing it wrong all this time, because he’d never in his life seen a result so lustrous as the shade of her eyes.
Pru, the monster, chose then to clear her throat, and the moment fell away like untempered glass cracking in hot water.
“I should get going.” She leaned in to hug her brother and said low in his ear, “Not your anything, eh?”
“Don’t,” he growled, returning the embrace, but his sister only laughed.
