Page 41 of Violet Thistlewaite Is Not a Villain Anymore
N
P.S. Strictly out of curiosity, do your conjured vegetables provide any nutritional value or do they only taste like they do?
P.P.S. Between you and me, Quinn and her wife have a storage shed full of extra furniture. I suspect she’d be inordinately thrilled to donate an end table, a sofa, or a whole bloody dining room set complete with silverware if you asked.
She didn’t write back that day, and his nails carved grooves into his palms at the thought that he’d offended her with the inquiry into her magic. He scolded himself the whole walk to the site of the new patch of blight, and the whole way home again too, clutching his sample vials almost tight enough to break them. He shouldn’t have asked. He should have left well enough alone, even though hewasextremely curious about the answer. He did have to blink away a suspicious stinging in the corners of his eyes when he returned home and noticed his father’s vegetable garden had been cleared and tilled. But there was still no sign of the witch herself.
It wasn’t as though he was waiting on her response. He was simply visiting the greenhouse twice an hour until midnight so he could check on his experiments until he gave up and went to bed.
But in the morning, relief rushed through him when he came downstairs to find on his worktable a small wicker basket of lettuce, carrots, and the promised tomatoes, as well as a folded letter in her handwriting.
What I think of you is that you’re a person who feels the mantle of blame is yours to wear and who bears the weight of a responsibility you never wanted with admirable grace.
I won’t try to convince you that what happened to your parents is not your fault, because even if some part of you knows it, I know that logic is seldom welcome at the table of our emotions, particularly when they disagree. I understand what it is to feel responsible for your own misery.
I failed to mention the other night that my adoptive father took me in very young, and I spent most of my life with the knowledge that my magic was the reason I had been abandoned by my mother. She left me, he said, because she was afraid of what I could do, and perhaps she was right to be. I know what it is to feel like there is something deeply broken at the core of you, and I know that whether or not the blame is earned, we wear it, and not a soul can take it from us no matter how we might wish for it.
It helped me a bit to hear your story, and to know I am not alone. I thought perhaps it might help you too.
There. Now we have both told stories we don’t often discuss.
—Violet
P.S. I don’t know about nutritional value, but perhaps that’s something to experiment with. I promise they are fully edible and delicious—and besides, tomatoes won’t be in season for months yet anywhere else.
Nathaniel blinked at the letter, unsure of where to begin. The situations weren’t the same at all, not really—Violet had been achild, and made to feel responsible for things entirely outside of her control—but the thread of understanding wove itself into a strong braid inside of him. She understood what it meant to have power that could hurt people, even unintentionally. She understood what it was to be eaten alive by guilt. A knot built in his throat.
When Nathaniel had been a student at university, a professor had once told him that they worked in pairs their first year so they could learn from each other and share in their failures.
“It makes you a better alchemist,” his teacher had said, when explaining why Nathaniel had also received poor marks for a mistake that had been his partner’s. “More precise in your actions and much more in control of your work because you don’t want to fail your partner.”
But what the professor had neglected to mention was that sometimes failure could not be controlled, no matter how tightly one held to command. Nathaniel was surprised to find that he didn’t feel ashamed for sharing his experience with Violet. He didn’t feel like he’d failed her or Pru or anyone else. In fact, he felt his burden lessened somehow, as if by telling her, and by learning that she’d understood, he’d taken some of it off his shoulders and laid it on the ground. The knowledge of what he’d done didn’t magically disappear—it just sort of sat there at his feet—but at least he wasn’t holding it anymore.
The thought followed him through his day (“Tomatoes!” cried Pru with delight, immediately eating half of them the moment he brought them inside), and as he headed into the greenhouse one more time that evening, he wondered if Violet felt the same. Perhaps her own burden would lessen by sharing it with him. He supposed a heavy load was much easier to carry with two sets of arms than one.
Damn it all, he realized with a start, hewantedto help her carry her burden.
Putting his thoughts into words felt easy with her, like the cost of baring himself was lower than it was with other people. He could let himself free of his self-made bindings, knowing she’d see him without putting him through the discomfort of having to feel observed.
Sometime in the past day or so, Nathaniel had stopped pretending that he didn’t want Violet Thistlewaite to know him.
The realization, when it came, shocked him. Nathaniel Marsh was not much in the business of being known by anyone but Pru, who had been grandfathered in by right of having shared a womb. He preferred to spend his days at a safe distance from people, specifically the width of his counter at the apothecary at a bare minimum. But he’d read Violet’s words again and again, the paper already creased and worn inside his breast pocket.Whether or not the blame is earned, we wear it, she’d written, and suddenly he wanted to know more, to extract her past from her like a distillation and learn the myriad other ways he was beginning to suspect they were more similar than they were different.
Nathaniel wafted the concoction in the cauldron he’d been working on all week, smiling at the scent of spearmint and lemongrass and rose petal and magic. The sense of peace that swept over Nathaniel told him he’d gotten his old invention just right. He carefully spooned some of the mixture into a vial and screwed the lid on tight, and then he pulled out his pen and wrote one more note for Violet.
V—
It does help, thank you.
And now it is my turn, I hope, to help you. This is a tincture I invented for restful sleep and to eradicate nightmares. It’s quite safe, I promise.
Add two drops to a cup of hot tea each night before bed.
I call it the Sweet Dreams Elixir.
Sleep well, Violet.
—N
