Page 5 of Homegrown Magic

As she does every time she reads the letter, Margot wishes her parents hadn’t desperately seized upon the one incomplete potion in Granny Fern’s remedy book. It was an impossible potion, meant to give someone born with the shallowest pool of magic an infinite spring of power. Faced with utter financial ruin, they had wildly overpromised the Claunecks that Margot was capable of finishing the recipe, which was ridiculous. She’s been trying for years to work it out—and now that it’s mere weeks away from winter’s end, with half a year out of the promised four remining, she’s still no closer to completing it. She hasn’t heard anything more from the Claunecks (it should be a relief, though sometimes she wonders about her childhood friend Yael, the Clauneck heir, who hasn’t written to her in years), but that doesn’t mean they’ve forgotten her.

Please know, it’s nothing personal. It’s just business.

Except it is personal. Extremely. Because if Margot can’t figure out this recipe, then it’s not just her home and greenhouses she stands to lose. It’s the entire village of Bloomfield, though none of the villagers know it.

They still believe what Margot’s parents told them—that despite losing the manor house to pay off their debts, nothing more would change after Fern’s death. And Margot hasn’t been able to bring herself to tell them that the village is also subject to seizure. How could she admit to her friends and community that Fern didn’t leave a will, so if she’d meant for the land to go to anybody but Margot’s parents, no one would ever know? It was so like Fern, who was a touch scatterbrained and more focused on plants and potions than lawyers and contracts. Or, in her words, as Margot found in one of Fern’s journals, dated the day before her death, I always thought I’d have more time.

Now, after all these years of keeping her parents’ secret, how can Margot tell the people of Bloomfield that their homes and businesses depend on her questionable potion-making abilities?

Margot shoves the letter back into her pocket, glaring around the shed. As if the bags of potting mix could fix all of her problems but refuse to.

“You still have nearly seven months,” Margot whispers to herself. “That’s more than enough time.”

It will be. It has to be.

Tonight, despite her aching back and the need to go home and change clothes before meeting Sage, she’ll squeeze some remedy making in after the day’s work is done. The entire town is counting on her, even if they don’t know it. Underlining “save the town by way of an impossible potion” on her mental to-do list, because it’s always there at the very top, Margot moves a collection of empty plant pots aside and digs deeper in the shed for the spade. There it is, behind a sack of strawberry seeds. She grabs it and stomps back into the greenhouses.

As the day passes, Margot repots daylilies that shine golden with a bit of ensorcelled sunlight. She encourages the ivy plants to weave their long tresses, strong and true. She recites poetry to the annuals, a great riot of flowers filling an entire corner of the east greenhouse (they’re blooming quite well now that Margot has discovered the power of iambic pentameter). This is growing magic, the kind that makes the power in her blood sing. It’s different from remedy magic, at which Granny Fern was brilliant and Margot is barely passable. She feeds the koi in the small fishpond, keeps up with the few customers who come into the greenhouse, and chats with Ms. Estelle Willver, elderly owner of Bloomfield’s bakery, who wants to preorder three jars of strawberry jam and purchase a simple love potion: a bottled spell that Estelle will take to help open herself up to love. The love potion is hope; the jars of heartbreak-healing jam, insurance against disaster.

Many hours and many cups of tea later, the day’s work is done. But of course Margot has to do it all over again tomorrow. And she needs to work on the Natural Caster Potion a bit too. Because tomorrow morning, she’ll be one day closer to the Claunecks’ deadline.

With that thought heavier than the sacks of potting soil she carted into the greenhouse that afternoon, Margot locks the front door and slumps into the chair behind her workshop table.

The workshop is a small room with tall shelves lining the walls, each of them stuffed with glass bottles full of colored liquids, old books, stacks of silver bowls, dried herbs, strange-looking brass instruments, piles of notes bound in ribbon, a few vining plants that spill down the sides of the shelves, and dozens of teacups. A table sits in the middle of the room, covered in books, scrolls, dried leaves, and pencils. It’s got an immense center drawer and dozens of smaller drawers in each leg, all of them filled with more ingredients, plant cuttings, and papers.

The workshop smells like mint leaves and burnt toast with the tiniest hint of cinnamon from the tea Granny Fern loved best. On the table, beside a tiny oval painted portrait of her and Granny Fern, Margot still keeps a few cinnamon sticks, so the room always smells like Granny Fern has just left it, cup of tea in hand. She pulls Granny Fern’s spellbook toward her, flipping to the last entry.

The Natural Caster Potion is written across the top of the page, and under that are a mere five lines of notes in Granny Fern’s cramped handwriting, giving some thoughts on the potion and some ideas Fern had for creating it. She believed it could be made up of a few individual potions, perhaps ones representing the different affinities natural casters had for magical specialties such as enchantment, conjuration, divination, and elemental magic—which involved air, water, earth, or fire—and a dozen more. The end result, she thought, would be much greater than the sum of its parts. It was tricky and, according to one of the notes, gave Fern a lot of trouble, but she had high hopes for it.

Margot runs her finger along the short descriptions of each potion part. All of them note what it is and should do, but none include ingredients or instructions. Like the letter from the Claunecks, she’s read this page hundreds of times, but she’s no closer to figuring it out either. For years, she’s been practicing by making the other remedies in Fern’s book using her own magical education and experimentation, hoping those will at least improve her skills at remedy magic. According to the date at the top of the last page in the book, Fern had been working on this potion the week before she died, but there are pages torn out of the end of the spellbook. What had been written on them? Who tore them out? Margot has no idea, and there are so many questions she wants to ask her grandmother but never will.

A clock in the workshop chimes eight, and her stomach rumbles, reminding her she hasn’t eaten since the cookies hours ago. But she’s so tired. Perhaps that remedy she’d been working on last week—the one she’d brewed based on the description of the energy spell in Granny Fern’s book—is ready. If Margot’s calculations are correct, it should ease her aching muscles and grant her a burst of energy—enough to stay awake and alert for her evening ahead, so Sage and anyone else Margot runs into at the tavern don’t suspect how run-down she actually is.

Margot pulls open a wooden table drawer, where the potion has been curing beside fifteen rose petals, two tears wrapped in spider’s silk, and a tiny bag of red-and-white mushrooms. She holds the small bottle of liquid to the flickering flame of her candle. It sparkles emerald green, just like it’s supposed to. There’s a tint of purple at the edges that Granny Fern’s notes didn’t mention, but surely that’s her own magic at work, which isn’t exactly like her grandmother’s (even as she wishes it was).

Margot uncorks the bottle, inhaling slowly as the smell of honey and lilac fills the air. She tips a few drops into her mouth. It’s sweet on her tongue, a bit fizzy, and it fills her with something warm. She closes her eyes for a moment, feeling like a flower, stretching toward the golden energy of the sun…

She wakes minutes (hours? a whole day?) later. Swearing, Margot scrambles to her feet. So much for her glorious magical potential. She’s drooled on the workshop table, and her neck has a crick in it from sleeping in a terrible position. Grabbing her tiny clock—the wooden one shaped like a snail that Granny Fern gave her for her twelfth birthday—she lets out a long sigh. It’s only nine fifteen. She’s not that late, though she doesn’t have time to go home to bathe or change.

Strawberry dress and garden boots it is, then.

Throwing a hand-knitted purple cardigan over her dress and scowling at the disaster of an energy potion that put her to sleep, Margot runs out the door.

Margot met Sage Wilderstone—professional ranger and adventurer extraordinaire—three years ago, on her first day of college. Sage had been sprawled in a chair at a table near the back of their carnivorous plant management seminar, comfortable in her long-limbed body like no one else Margot had ever seen. There were no other open chairs in the room, and Margot was grateful for the chance to slide into the seat next to the stranger with short blond hair styled in a dangerous-looking undercut. She, at least, seemed like she knew what to do as the professor brought out three-foot-tall, snapping Venus flytraps.

“Ready for an adventure?” Sage said, her wide grin showing her remarkably straight teeth as the professor put a flytrap on their table and wished them luck.

Margot had nodded and smoothed out the next page in her notebook. As it turned out, she took no notes that day, and she and Sage failed miserably at the flytrap exercise, but they became fast friends.

Tonight, as Margot enters Clementine’s Tavern—a two-story stone-and-timber building with several generously sized common rooms, an inviting hearth with a blazing fire, and tables full of townspeople—she sees Sage immediately. Long rows of candles dripping wax over their iron sconces cast a golden glow over the room, and Sage sits at the tavern bar, limned in their light. Her long legs are swathed in fitted trousers and knee-high boots, which she props on the chair in front of her. Her white linen shirt is open at the throat, showing her suntanned skin and collarbone, while her sword rests on the bar beside three empty flagons of ale. Her fingers tap along to the melody played by a traveling bard as she talks with Clementine, the curly-haired young woman who owns the tavern. Sage leans in closer across the bar counter, whispering something, and a blush rises on Clem’s cheeks. Yep. They’re most definitely flirting. Margot grins. Sage leaves a string of yearning hearts behind in every town she passes through, just as she did when she quit college months before their graduation, eager to set out on her next adventure. It looks like her brief time in Bloomfield will be no different. Margot is deeply grateful that one of her core rules is never to sleep with her friends; so much better to miss out on a one-night affair than to lose one of the few people she holds close.

As Margot strolls toward the bar, she waves to Mike, the enthusiastic collector of volumes for the town’s library who also runs Honey and Wax, the town’s bookshop. He’s got a stack of stories on the table in front of him. Dara, the town’s chicken witch, sits across from him with a pint of ale, her nose deep in a book as well. Beside her is her younger sister, Poppy, who runs a small workshop in town selling gadgets of her own invention.

“See you at the community dinner tomorrow!” calls Rosiee, the town’s unofficial organizer, who’s always got a cat or a funny story (or often both) on hand. Community dinner is a weekly Bloomfield custom—a time when everyone sets aside their work and chores and worries to spend a few hours with their neighbors. It’s held in the courtyard at the town center when it isn’t raining or snowing, and all of Bloomfield’s residents settle around long trestle tables piled high with food brought by everyone, drink loads of ale and wine, and spend the evening catching up, laughing together, and making plans for the town. It’s one of Margot’s favorite community traditions and one more reason out of a million why she has to save Bloomfield. The thought of there being no more community dinners two seasons from now because Margot didn’t figure out the Natural Caster Potion is unthinkable, and utterly not worth entertaining. Even if it’s a very real possibility.

“I’m bringing roasted carrots and a fruit salad,” Margot manages as more guilt twists her stomach. “Wouldn’t miss it for anything.”

Rosiee raises a tankard to that alongside Beryl, who runs the town’s brewery, and Margot keeps walking toward the bar. She passes a few people clearly not from Bloomfield, who wear silk coats or dresses, and frowns in their direction. As much as she needs occasional tourists and passers-through to keep the greenhouse afloat—there are only so many heartbreaks to tend to in a small town—they can be a nuisance. They gawk at Bloomfield as though it’s some quaint storybook place. As though the idea of a peaceful, supportive community is as adorable as it is unattainable.