Page 38 of Violet Thistlewaite Is Not a Villain Anymore
“I’ll be fine, thank you,” she said softly.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
She found, to her surprise, that she really,reallydid. “I don’t know if I know how,” she said, feeling pathetic. “I’m not used to having people to talk to.”
Nathaniel looked out over the moonlight casting warped reflections on the glass roof of the greenhouse as Violet collected her words.
“My adoptive father didn’t really encourage friendships,” she admitted finally.
“Why?”
Violet held her face to the light of the moons and closed her eyes. “I was born on a night when all three moons were full,” she said finally, imagining that she could feel the power of the three sisters lighting her up like a beacon.
“A Convening,” Nathaniel marveled. Sometimes centuries passed before the cycles of all three moons matched up this way. “No wonder you’re so powerful—you’re moonsblessed.”
“Blessed,” she repeated with a humorless laugh. “To most people in my life, I was a commodity, or competition. The man who raised me was…not always kind.”
Nathaniel made a sound she couldn’t decipher.
“I left him recently,” she continued, halting and slow, avoiding the one word her lips wanted to form. Avoiding the worddead. “No going back. But I wonder sometimes if I will ever really be free of him.”
Nathaniel was quiet for a moment. “There is no force so vengeful as a ghost from the past.” His words were laced with some meaning she couldn’t quite parse. “It is no simple thing to rise anew from the ashes of your old life.”
“It is not,” she agreed softly. “The worst part is, until fairly recently I never questioned that everything he told me was true. Isn’t that horrible?”
“No.” The resolve in his voice surprised her. “He raised you. You trusted him. Family is complicated.”
“It stopped being simple a long time ago, but at some point it gottoocomplicated. I don’t know how to move past that.”
“One day at a time,” said Nathaniel, and Violet realized then that he was speaking from experience. “One step, one breath, oneheartbeat after another. However slowly, they’ll all move you forward.”
Her look must have been full of consideration, because he smiled wryly and confirmed, “You’re not the only one in this town trying to escape the past.”
Picking through her words like she was sifting a garden plot for stones, she asked, “And what are you trying to escape?”
He was quiet for so long that Violet began to regret asking, but then he said, “I don’t suppose it’s a secret to you that being an apothecary was never my ambition.”
“No,” she admitted. “I don’t suppose it is.”
“I’ve always wanted to be an alchemist. I was quite well respected in the Crucible, if that’s not too presumptuous of me to say.”
Violet made a sound somewhere just shy of a chuckle.
“I loved it,” he continued after a long moment. “Thescholarshipof it all. Themagic.But some of the things we were doing…some of the things we were creating for the Queen and her war…”
It was a dangerous topic of conversation, and Violet recognized the vulnerability of even broaching it. She waited for him to continue.
“I left the Crucible and came home to focus on finding ways to make my family’s business better. I’m aware my field has traditionally been used for warfare or parlor tricks. But my goal was always to invent new medicines, improve upon the ones my family had been selling for generations. Alchemy and herbal medicine, I thought, could have been a powerful combination. I could have invented an entirely new branch of medicine.”
The past tense confused her. “I don’t know much about alchemy, but it seems to me there’s incredible potential there.”
“I thought so too.”
“What happened?”
Nathaniel’s voice was hushed like he was telling a secret. “I failed. I came home, as I’d promised. The apothecary used the whole building then, and the half where your shop is now was the workspace where my parents mixed herbs and made balms and medicines. My father made room on his worktable for me and my experiments alongside him. I’d had some early successes with concoctions for headaches and the flu, but I knew I could do more.” He ran his fingertips along the window frame, watching them closely. “I was brewing the base for a solution I thought might be able to ease the symptoms of fire-cough.”
She waited as he paused again, gathering himself.
