Page 51 of Violet Thistlewaite Is Not a Villain Anymore
Violet snapped back into the present and unlocked the door. “Hi, Jerome,” she chirped cheerfully, forcing herself to be Violet the Shopkeeper again. Was this what her future looked like? Bouncing back and forth between identities, constantly trying to keep up? “Give me just a second.”
He grumbled while she opened the window shades and set out her own sign, which would have to bear the same message as yesterday until she was feeling more creative.
“Your door’s hung crooked,” said Jerome, inspecting the door that led upstairs to her living quarters. “Told the Marsh twins not to use Patchett as their carpenter—his prices are cheap for a reason.”
She had noticed she had to lift the door a bit to get it to latch, but she’d never found it troublesome enough to tell Nathaniel or Pru. They had enough to worry about, and she didn’t want to create more problems than she needed to.
Jerome ran a hand over the hinge. “I’ll stop by tomorrow morning with me tool kit and fix it for you,” he promised gruffly.
Violet was taken aback. “You don’t need to do that.”
But the gnome wouldn’t hear otherwise. “We take care of our own here.” Before the words could sink in, he added, “Now take care ofme. Am I a customer or not? I’m here for more soil.”
With Jerome close behind, Violet made her way to the back garden and hefted a sack of the soil mixture she’d made specifically for him. She noted his eyes catching on the neat pile of flat, decorative stones she’d just had shipped in.
“They’re for folks whose lawns or fields have been marred by blight,” she explained. “So they can cover the area and stop it spreading.”
“You heard about the Feldspar farm, then?”
Violet stopped in her tracks. The Feldspars were one of the biggest farming families in Dragon’s Rest and supplied nearly half of the town’s grain. Horror tinged her voice as she asked, “Not the blight?”
Jerome nodded. “Took about ten percent of the crop. A field hand noticed and they were able to contain it, but we’re looking at a hard summer of high prices.”
“It’s getting worse,” whispered Violet. “Spreading faster than before.”
“Aye. We’re all facing ruin, and your—” He sneezed as if to punctuate his point. “Your flowers won’t help.”
She ignored his jab at her business. “A tree nearly killed Mr.Marsh and me. It wasn’t directly next to a spot of blight, but its roots must have touched it beneath the ground.”
“I heard he was working on some type o’ fix for it.”
“As far as I know, still no luck.” She glanced at the greenhouse. It was empty at the moment, but she knew he had about four different experiments going. It had smelled absolutely foul in there this morning, and she hoped that meant good news, despite olfactory evidence to the contrary.
“It’s bad.” Jerome’s voice was as serious as she’d ever heard it. “Folk are starting to talk, wondering if it’s a result of Shadowfade being gone. Some curse he put on us in his dying moments. The timing, you know? Feels like revenge.”
Anger hummed to life in Violet’s veins. It was too similar to what Sedgwick had implied. Was he spreading that drivel? There couldn’t be truth to it, could there?
“This has nothing to do with Shadowfade,” she said acidly, noting as she did how the grass beneath her feet shriveled and died. “What reason would he have to take revenge on a town like Dragon’s Rest?”
“Right.” Jerome stared nervously at the dead grass, as though it would turn to blight before his eyes.
“Sorry.” Violet shook herself and breathed life into the grass, which sprung back up, green and lively as ever. “I just can’t bear the thought of that monster.”
He watched her, thoughtful. “You’re not alone in that.”
She helped Jerome load the soil into his cart. “We’re going to fix this,” she promised, sounding more confident than she felt. “You send anyone who needs help containing the blight to me, alright?”
The gnome nodded solemnly. “We’ll pave the whole town in stones before long, and then what?”
She let her expression fall. “I haven’t the foggiest, I’m afraid.”
As soon as she was back in her shop, Violet slumped. This was bad. A blighted food supply meant trouble. Violet could help the farmers regrow their crops in an instant, but Nathaniel had struck fear into her about her conjured plants. She’d eaten apples from trees she’d created, and vegetables from the garden out back, but as Nathaniel had pointed out, did they provide any real nutritional value? Would conjured grain keep a town’s worth of bellies full if it was all they had? She’d told him in their notes that she would experiment. Perhaps it was time to do so.
“Experiment!” she muttered, unable to keep a smirk from pulling at her lips. “That man is rubbing off on me.”
There was no one else in the shop, and she’d already finished the arrangements that were due for pickup today, so Violet pulled out one of the books from the library and spread it open on the counter. She’d never been much interested in reading anything that wasn’t about plants, and the long, dry accounts of the town’s history as home to an exiled prince and of musty depictions of battles fought by people long dead weren’t exactly riveting. In between customers she flipped through the pages, keeping hereyes open for the wordsartifactorlegendor anything that might lead her to understand what Sedgwick had been on about, but the book appeared to be rooted firmly in dates and figures, with no sign of any lore that might help her.
All the while, Sedgwick’s words repeated on a loop.You’re nothing alone. You’re nothing alone.
