Violet Thistlewaite Is Not a Villain Anymore by Emily Krempholtz - 11

Marsh Apothecary , read the A-frame sign in elegant, curling handwriting. Today Only, 10% Off All Teas.

Violet sidestepped the sign—she’d need one of her own, she decided, adding it to her mental to-do list—and slipped in through the front door, smiling cheerfully at her landlord behind the counter. “Good morning,” she said. “I wonder if I might have that shipment you so graciously received for me?”

She’d awoken before the sun this morning after a sleepless night, sure she must be the first one in all of Dragon’s Rest out of bed, only to find a note on her worktable in the greenhouse in the same neat script that was on the sign:

A crate for you was delivered to my shop yesterday evening. In future, please be more precise when indicating your address.

Sincerely yours,

N. Marsh

The N. Marsh in question was visibly repressing a scowl at the sight of her now. He wore a sweater vest today, bottle green over a cream, collared shirt that lay unbuttoned at the neck, just enough for Violet to notice the way his throat flexed as he strained to be civil around her. Was it really so difficult for him to be friendly? She’d worked for Guy Shadowfade most of her life, and even she was having an easier time of it. Violet recalled Pru’s words from last weekend— He’s always been a bit rough around the edges . With an internal grumble, she wondered how long it would take her to get past that gruff exterior. She didn’t want him to dislike her. Moons, she was supposed to be good now! Being good meant being likable, didn’t it? Maybe she needed to try harder.

“I’ve put it in the back room,” Nathaniel said now, his tone clipped. He spoke to her the way he always did, with a voice like velvet rubbed against the grain: a bit prickly, and enough to make her body flash with the sense she’d done something wrong. “One moment, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” she said sweetly, and he disappeared through a doorway. Violet contented herself looking around the apothecary. It smelled pleasantly of herbs in here, a cacophony of scents both familiar and foreign. She browsed through the shelves and display tables, delighting at the names of ingredients she’d never heard of before and opening a jar of skin cream marked SAMPLE so she could inhale the eucalyptus and lavender scent. She dipped a finger into the pot and rubbed some onto the underside of her wrist, savoring the creamy feel of the lotion on her skin.

When Nathaniel reemerged from the back room, a bulky crate in his arms, Violet was just putting the lid back on the jar.

“This is lovely,” she said, holding it up so he could see what she meant.

“Thank you.” He cleared his throat. “It’s my mother’s recipe.”

She almost cracked a smile at managing to squeeze civility out of him. Maybe compliments about his family were the way out of the pit of derision he’d clearly dropped her into. “Is she an apothecary as well?”

His expression soured. “Was. She and my father owned this store until their passing last year.”

“Oh.” She swallowed. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

The words tasted foreign on Violet’s tongue—she’d been around her share of death but never the aftermath, never the expression on Nathaniel’s face now, fleeting pain quickly bricked up behind his usual mask of indifference. It was enough, though, for Violet to see what she must have done to those left standing after she decimated fields of crops or destroyed someone’s home.

You’re good now , she reminded herself like a mantra. Be good. Be better than before.

“I’d like to buy it,” she blurted, holding up the pot of cream when Nathaniel’s brows furrowed. “Please.”

“Oh. Well, yes. Alright.”

She met him at the front counter, where she slipped a few coins his way. He left them where they were and rolled up his sleeves, exposing surprisingly muscular forearms as he wrapped her purchase neatly in brown paper and twine. Violet froze, staring. It stood to reason, of course, that he’d always had nice arms, that they’d always been there just beneath his sleeves. But she’d had no cause to look at them before. Now she knew they were there, and something about the way he flexed as he tied the package with a length of twine and slipped a sprig of dried lavender through the bow suggested to Violet that she would always be aware of them now, whether she liked it or not.

She turned her attention nervously to the shelves behind him. Think about something else, Violet , she urged herself.

“So many empty jars,” she blurted. It seemed much better than exclaiming, You have surprisingly attractive arms , but he stiffened as if she’d said it anyway. She hastily added, “You must do good business to be so low on stock.”

Judging by his expression, she might have been better off making the arms comment.

“Some of our ingredients are quite costly to replace,” he said coldly, all but throwing her purchase at her. “Not all of us can grow our stock from thin air.”

Just like that, the brief allure she’d felt turned right back to frustration. Violet fought the thorns that rippled suddenly beneath her skin. Control, Violet. No dark magic. Be good. “I only meant to pay you a compliment.”

“Then you should choose your words more carefully.”

Magic bubbled up inside of her like soap suds. “What is it that you want from me?” Violet snapped. “What can I possibly do to make you happy?”

She focused on one of the jars behind her and concentrated hard, pulling magic like a stubborn weed whose roots clung to the soil. She swung her arm toward the counter where he stood, her fist clenched around a thick handful of fresh mugwort, its root system bare from the air in which she’d conjured it.

Nathaniel stared at it, then at her. “I…” he said weakly. She didn’t move, still holding it out to him. When he finally reached for it, she clasped her fingers around his, holding the mugwort between them.

“I’ll tell you what I want,” she said forcefully. “I want to make a home here in Dragon’s Rest. I want to stop stepping on your toes with every move I make.”

His expression was void of emotion, a handsome statue upon which she wished she could read a smile, some kindness, even pity— anything. Her voice was softer, woven with a plea when she asked, “Moons, can’t you find it in you to at least try to like me, even a little bit? I’m certainly trying.”

“I…” he said again, staring at their conjoined hands. His skin was warm, and his strong fingers tightened around hers in a way that wasn’t entirely unpleasant. Violet suddenly remembered his stupid gorgeous forearms and realized just as suddenly that she didn’t remember the last time she’d held someone’s hand.

Nathaniel withdrew from her grasp with a stiff sort of urgency and examined the mugwort. Violet ignored the way her palm felt cold without the contact. After close inspection, he said, “I don’t believe your plants will have the same level of medicinal efficacy, if any, as true herbs.”

Oh, not the “useless” argument again.

Any goodwill she had mustered for him withered away. “There is no pleasing you, I see,” she snapped, piling her purchase atop the crate she’d come for in the first place. “Good day, Mr. Marsh.”

His face flashed with alarm, as if realizing at last that he’d been a royal ass, but he said nothing, only watched her as she turned tail and left the shop.

Back in the safety of her own store, Violet let loose a growl, and a wave of power rippled from her, knocking over a display of seeds she’d set up only that morning. Bartleby shuddered and brandished a knife at her, but Violet was too irritated to do more than roll her eyes at him.

“Do me a favor and throw that at the bad-tempered apothecary next door,” she snarled, but when Bartleby’s aim turned rather enthusiastically toward the wall that separated her shop from Nathaniel’s, she relented.

“I didn’t mean it,” she said with a sigh, disarming the petulant pothos before she became an accessory to murder. “We’re good now, remember? That means no homicide.” Bartleby grasped angrily at her wrists, swiping for the knife back as she danced out of his reach. He had never promised to renounce his ways, she supposed.

She set her newly retrieved blade to the task of levering open the crate.

“He’s an infuriating man, though,” Violet grumbled. “Rough around the edges, indeed.”

But Bartleby had retreated to his pot, curling his vines into a tight ball as he pouted. Just as well. He was a terrible conversationalist anyway.

Having a landlord, Violet was beginning to discover, was a lot like working for an evil sorcerer. They were always watching for her to make a wrong move. Always showing up right when she was in the middle of something and demanding she do something else, because of course they were smarter than her and had better ideas. Granted, her landlord wasn’t demanding that she destroy entire villages or extort resources from local nobility or threaten people in his name, so perhaps the analogy wasn’t quite as apt as Violet first thought.

Idly, Violet practiced growing peonies, sprouting half a dozen from her fingers before she realized their petals were sharply pointed, as though her angry thoughts had fed tainted water to their roots.

She much preferred flowers to people anyway, she thought as she tried again. Flowers were simple. They were beautiful and made one smile. They didn’t go out of their way to antagonize the poor woman who was just trying to start a business, and they didn’t—well, it was quite possible Violet was once more getting a touch too personal with that line of thinking.

She tossed the peonies on her worktable and turned to the crate of supplies she’d ordered. Wires thick and thin for shaping and supporting her arrangements, rolls of paper for wrapping bouquets, and small glass tubes for keeping stems hydrated. Violet ran her fingers over a box of decorative floral pins, her anger softening. This week she hoped to receive the order she’d placed with Fallon, a local potter she’d met at last weekend’s market, for clay pots that she could sell live arrangements in, and any day now, she was expecting her shipment of glass vases from Corrin, the quiet, kindhearted dwarf who ran the glassworker’s studio.

Violet hadn’t lied to Nathaniel; she wished for nothing more than to make a home here in Dragon’s Rest. She’d taken more than her fair share of riches from Shadowfade Castle, and after seeing the havoc Guy’s rule had wreaked upon the town, she felt there would be no better way to supply her own shop than by supporting the local artisans of the town. Her bouquets would be resplendent in Corrin’s vases, just as the garden soil she planned to sell would use composted manure from a local farmer and her flowers would be pollinated by Quinn’s bees.

She wanted to be a part of this community; she did. But there was more to Dragon’s Rest than Nathaniel Marsh, and Violet was done trying to make him like her. He wanted nothing more than to put down her business and make her feel small? Well, she’d let him have his way then, but she’d not give him the satisfaction of any more reactions. She needed to prune Nathaniel Marsh from the garden of her mind before he took over and strangled the rest of the flowers that were slowly beginning to sprout there.

Dragon’s Rest was supposed to be a new start. Violet was still trying to figure out who she could become without Guy there to guide her path, and she didn’t want to let Nathaniel provoke her into being someone she no longer wanted to be.

Violet supposed, after all, that she was a bit rough around the hedges too.