“It’s a pleasure to—”
But he interrupted her as though she hadn’t even begun to speak. “Miss Thistlewaite, I must ask that you refrain from treating the equipment in this room as your own. I conduct delicate work in here, and Pru should never have offered the space to you.” He strode to the other side of the greenhouse, where a large, metal worktable held a collection of meticulously organized vials as well as a small cauldron that had been upended by the creeping clematis, which was still, she noticed, growing throughout the space, tangling with a small potted mint that had been carefully pruned into submission on the corner of his table.
With a small yelp of dismay, he leapt back and turned his glare on her.
“This is exactly what I mean!” Violet shrunk from his anger, her thoughts turning to Guy and his punishments when she’d displeased him.Shadowfade is gone, she thought.And who is this? You are the Thornwitch. Why should you cower from him?
She huffed and straightened her shoulders, drawing herself to her full height. Thorns prickled beneath her skin, threatening to burst from her like the claws and horns that had for so long made her a monster. Her mind flashed with ways to scare him, to stop his disdain and questions in their tracks, but they were Guy’s solutions, folded into the steel of her being after decades at his side, and with him gone, she felt like an impure metal, a forge long grown cold.
Violet wasn’t sure what her own solutions might look like, but she knew they didn’t involve using the clematis—which was creeping ever closer to her new landlord—to string him up from the rafters until he apologized. She wasgoodnow, and what her instincts begged of her was decidedly not.
“I’m sorry,” she said carefully, tasting the foreign word on her tongue. Guy had never allowed her to apologize for her failures. He preferred for her to atone for disappointing him by proving her worth in other ways. Once, she had blinded one of his enemies using the thorns of a rosebush and felt relief when her master smiled. Now the memory made her sick. “As I said, I’ll replace whatever was broken.”
“Can you replace the weeks I’ve spent working on it?” he snapped, and tension filled Violet at his tone. This man had no intention of keeping the peace, and Violet strained to hold on to the frayed rope of her own fractured manners.
“I cannot.”
“Then perhaps next time you won’t be so careless. You had no idea what was in that cauldron! What if it had been volatile? What if someone had been hurt?” He scolded her like a child, and she clenched her fists.
“Mr.Marsh,” she said carefully, “I have apologized, explained the accident, and offered to help as much as I can. But I won’t be spoken to like that.” Not anymore. Violet could feel her temper rising. She searched for that new spring once more, and with a stinging twitch of her fingers, the clematis lunged down to reach for the broken glass, sweeping it into the empty crates and setting them upright.
He swallowed whatever he had been about to say. “I apologize for my frustration. I could have paid closer attention when opening the door.”
Violet nodded. “I’ll put everything back exactly as it was.” She glanced at the garden now around her and amended, “Almostexactly as it was. But I was promised half of this space, and I need it if I’m to do the work I have planned. Work that will allow me to pay you rent.” She eyed him with disdain, allowing just a touch of the Thornwitch to show in her expression.
His jaw flexed, but he said nothing.
“We must come to some sort of understanding here,” she said, her scorn collapsing into a plea. This was not how she wanted to begin her relationship with her neighbor—herlandlord. He could make her life very difficult, which was the exact opposite of what Violet wanted.
“Clean the rest of this up,” he said finally. “And try not to break anything else. I’ll have your half of the space cleared out tomorrow.” He scrubbed a hand through his hair, and she toyed with whether to tell him that a single lock had escaped the rough comb of his fingers, curling outward like a ram’s horn. She pressed her lips together, deciding against it as, nose in the air, Nathaniel Marsh stalked back out the door.
Well, this was just great. Violet waved aside the phlox that wound around her ankles.
“Stay,” she told the plants. “We’ve caused enough trouble.”
At least “trouble” was a good deal less serious an accusation than “Thornwitch, right hand to Guy Shadowfade and Scourge of Silbourne,” though neither worked in her favor. She set Bartleby and the clematis to cleaning up the broken glass and began restacking the fallen crates, careful not to jostle the contents any further. She could sense plants inside some of them, dried herbs and medicines for the apothecary, but others moved with the sound of clinking glass. Violet winced, knowing this meant she’d likely broken more than what littered the ground. An apothecary needed plenty of vials, she supposed, though looking over at the ruined solution on the worktable, perhaps it was more than that.
She’d never heard of an apothecary who brewed potions any more complicated than a cup of medicinal tea or a tincture enchanted to cure a cold. They sold potion ingredients, not potions themselves. That was alchemy, not medicine.
Violet had known a few alchemists in her time withShadowfade. Nasty pieces of work, the lot of them, concerned only with their explosives. One had thought it would be funny to mix one of his powders with her plant fertilizers, and when she had fed her garden, he’d blown the whole thing up as a lark. He and the others had laughed, though not for long.
The Thornwitch didn’t have a reputation for nothing.
Over near the glass wall, Bartleby reached out a vine and poked one of the crates she’d just set right.
“Stop that,” Violet snapped. “You won’t find anything explosive in there—and if you do, you’ll just hurt yourself.” His nosiness successfully plucked out her own curiosity by the roots like a weed. She’d made enough of a mess, and as she shouldered her bag and headed back to the empty building that would soon become her shop, she vowed to keep her head down from now on.
The sting in her hands had faded, and Violet itched to try that new magic again with an excitement she hadn’t felt since Guy had given her free rein over the castle grounds landscaping. There wasanotherwell inside of her, she thought happily, searching for it again, though the glimmer she’d sensed before was nowhere to be found. It wasn’t as strong as her dark magic, she suspected, but if she could learn to harness it, she didn’t need it to be.
Tomorrow, she promised herself. Tomorrow she would try again.
Useful
Nathaniel straightened his shoulders before knocking on the door to the new tenant’s half of the shared storefront. He felt uneasy, just as he had every day since he’d paid the carpenter to build a wall splitting the apothecary in half. Was he really to be a guest in part of the building he’d called home since he first learned the meaning of the word? What would his parents think if they knew he and Pru had been forced to rent out half the shop and the rooms above, where his own childhood bedroom had once been?
Nathaniel could practically hear his father’s booming laugh. “We do what we must for family,” he always said. “And we do it with pride, because family is everything.”
He was certainly doing what he must for his family, Nathaniel thought, but he couldn’t drum up much to be proud about.
