Page 35 of Of Potions and Honey
“I know. I’ve seen it. So many children on a Friday afternoon.” Mira touched the brim of her hat. “Thanks. I’ll get going now.”
“Mhm.” A sudden, awkward expression settled on Yoni’s face, and she shifted the basket from one hand to the other. “I’m going there, too.” She didn’t quite meet Mira’s eyes. “We can go together, I suppose.”
“Really?” Mira beamed at her. “I’d like that.” When Yoni’s expression didn’t change, she tried to rein herself in a little, as well as the looming disappointment. “Just if you really want to. I wouldn’t want to impose.”
“You’re not.” It came out strangely quickly. “I just thought it would be weird if I followed you all the way there and never said a thing.”
“Not in Willow Harbour, it’s not,” Mira replied lightly. Well, if Yoni wanted to be so vague, she’d just have to grab the bull by the horns. If she never talked to Mira again after today, at least she’d given it a good try. “Let’s go together, then!”
They set off on what was – hopefully – the Blackberry Bramble trail leading to the spring. Mira simply had to trust Yoni on that one. At least the first sign they passed, discreetly nailed to a tree next to the trail, featured the same blue blob, which was promising, in a manner of speaking.
“How far is it to the spring?” Mira watched a critter too fast to make out features scurry underneath a bush. “I know I’ve been before, when I was little, but I barely remember anything.”
“An hour, give or take.” Yoni was quiet for a moment. “Give, I think.”
Mira grimaced. “I’ve been working on my stamina, I promise. I’ve never done so much walking in life as I’ve done since Imoved here, and I worked in an emporium with four floors before that!”
“That’s not what I meant.” Yoni looked down at her. “Your legs are short.”
“Oh.” As if to confirm, Mira looked at her feet. She was a little shorter than Yoni, though notthatmuch. “Listen, we can’t all be tall, dark and handsome.”
There was an oddly pregnant pause. “No, I suppose not.” Another brief silence. “The world does need variety though.”
Mira liked to think that, during their admittedly sparse interactions, she had gained a bit of a read on Yoni. Right now, she wasfairlycertain that Yoni was, in fact, amused.
“Sometimes variety is exhausting,” she replied. “I’ve come to appreciate the steady things in life, I think.” She chuckled weakly. “Steady incomes, for once.”
“Is the shop not going well?”
“Oh, no! I think it’s going amazing for what it is.” Which was a barely coordinated venture by someone with no training and slightly more than no experience in the subject. That was to say, it was going splendidly as long as she sold anything at all. “It’ll just be a while until things… even out, I suppose.” She stuck her hands in her pockets and studied the splotches of sunlight filtering through the canopy, dotting the path ahead. “I’ll just have to be patient. And if I keep telling myself that, maybe it’ll be easier at some point.”
“It will,” Yoni said. “Took me maybe a year to get comfortable after I took over the greenhouse from my parents.”
“A year!” Mira sputtered a little before she found her voice again. “Oh. All right. I suppose I can work with that.”
A year sounded… daunting. Scary, even, if she tried to reconcile that prospect with her ever-dwindling savings and slow to grow income. Could she even afford a year of fumbling around at this rate?
“You know what, it’s fine. I’ll deal with that later.” Mira pointedly gestured ahead. “I’m here for a break from all of that.”
Yoni laughed, a deep, melodious sound. “You take a break, I get some work done, and we’ll call it balanced.”
Mira glanced sideways at her, and for a moment admired the way the light under the trees highlighted Yoni’s eyes. Among all the green, they were almost the same unnatural shade as Poppy’s.
“Are you out here for work?”
“I am.”
After a moment of silence, Mira prompted: “What kind of work do you do out here? I thought you grow everything yourself.”
“Almost,” Yoni said. “There are some plants that are highly sought after, but they’re hard to cultivate. Some people do, if they don’t live near a natural source, but the area around the spring is full of them, so I just go and harvest what I need every now and again.”
Mira thought back to all the times she’d gone to restock her honey, and how much she had learned about said honey against her will.
“Is it the spring water? I heard that’s the reason why the local honey is so good.”
“Kian still likes to lecture, huh.” Yoni smiled. “Yes, it is. The water is… special.”
“Special how?”
