Violet Thistlewaite Is Not a Villain Anymore by Emily Krempholtz - 34

Hunches had preoccupied Nathaniel his entire career. It was part of being a scientist, this endless questioning of his circumstances and the need to follow those questions to a solution. The problem was, sometimes those hunches led nowhere, and sometimes he knew they would lead him nowhere, but they wouldn’t leave him alone until he tested them anyway. And sometimes he dismissed a hunch entirely only to discover, after testing every other avenue, that it was indeed the answer.

The former was what he’d thought was happening with his current experiment.

He couldn’t wrap his head around the latter.

All day, this hunch had haunted him: the vials Violet had taken from Sedgwick were leading him to dead end after dead end. If Sedgwick were truly behind the hindrance to Violet’s magic, Nathaniel would be able to find a magical signature in the flowers she conjured, but there was nothing there except Violet; he was sure of it.

And then there was the matter of the blight.

The blight had started after Sedgwick came to town. He had a motive, and through alchemy, he had the means. It also didn’t hurt that Nathaniel disliked the man and was quick to assign blame to his corner. But his feelings had gotten in the way, for there was another new arrival to Dragon’s Rest at that time—Violet herself.

Nathaniel was loath to think that Violet could have anything to do with the blight. He believed she truly loved Dragon’s Rest and wanted to make a home here. But the fact that he had ignored the timing of her arrival carved a deep pit of anxiety in Nathaniel’s stomach, one he remembered from his days in the Crucible whenever he realized he had missed something big. Even if he hated this thought, he needed to test it, just to get it out of his system.

It would come to nothing, of course. Coincidences happened all the time. But why had Violet’s hands begun hurting the way that they did? And at the time that they did? And she never had explained to him just why she thought her magic was evil…

Nathaniel mentally cataloged what he knew about Violet’s past. Complicated childhood, no knowledge of her own heritage, adoptive father who did a real number on her self-image. Powerful magic, but no formal education in it. She had run away from something, but what? There was still so much he didn’t know about her. While even hours ago he had been content to let her share herself slowly, now Nathaniel was struck by impatience. Was he really entertaining the idea that there could be more nefarious reasons for her hesitation?

He assembled the samples before he quite knew what he was doing—plants, both Violet’s and not, and blight from a variety of sources. Nothing will come of this , he told himself again as he filled a dropper with the solution he had created to test for Sedgwick’s magical signature.

Now, hours and dozens of tests later, Nathaniel stared at the empty jar on his worktable, which moments ago had contained blight.

“I did it,” he said aloud to the empty greenhouse. He had managed to eradicate the blight, but he felt none of the satisfaction he thought he would, only disappointment that he had allowed his own feelings to blind him to the truth. Sedgwick wasn’t behind the blight at all.

It was Violet.

All of the samples he tested, even the blight that had formed from plants she had never so much as looked at, contained her magical signature. Even now, the blackberry-and-almond scent he had grown to love permeated the air, taunting him.

It had to be a mistake, Nathaniel thought for the thousandth time. Violet wouldn’t. She was working with him against the blight!

But she was convinced her magic was evil, Nathaniel reminded himself. Why would she think that? This couldn’t be a coincidence.

That was why the blight had pushed back against her magic, he realized. Because it was made of her magic. That was why it had appeared only after Violet had settled in Dragon’s Rest. How could he have been so stupid?

Nathaniel’s thoughts were a complicated roil of emotion and anxiety as he made his way over to her shop. The town meeting wouldn’t start for another hour, so she’d probably still be working. He could just picture her, cheerful smile as she greeted a customer, watching them with light in her eyes as they took in the colorful flowers and plants she’d arrayed artfully around her shop. It couldn’t be a lie, because then what else was a lie? Was she only pretending to care for him? Nathaniel squeezed his eyes shut; more than anything else, he found, he didn’t want to believe that. She would have an explanation. He knew she would. His Violet wouldn’t have done this on purpose.

The door was unlocked, which was not unusual, but the shop was dark, and there was a terrible smell Nathaniel recognized immediately: blight. Every muscle in his body tensed, and something crunched beneath his feet as stepped inside. Broken pottery, he realized, squinting in the dim light.

“Violet?” he called, but there was no response. All his suspicions turned to ash in his stomach, replaced by concern for Violet. Something was seriously wrong.

Nathaniel looked around him at the blighted remains of her flowers. Bartleby cowered in his corner, apparently unharmed, though his vines were curled up into his pot in a tight ball, like he was hiding from the blight that surrounded him. Nathaniel lifted him from his shelf, and Bartleby didn’t even try to choke him after he set him down on the counter, which Nathaniel took as gratitude.

“Where is she?” he asked the plant, and for a moment, it didn’t look like Bartleby would answer, but then he stretched out a vine toward a shelf that had fallen near the counter. Beneath it, curled in a heap, was Violet.

Nathaniel rushed to her, dropping to his knees and ignoring the crunch of more broken pots as he lifted the shelf and shoved it away from her. “Violet, what happened? Are you alright?” His heart pounded. Please, love , he thought, frantic, please be alright.

But as he rolled her onto her back, brushing her hair from her face, he recoiled in horror, for it wasn’t Violet he found, but a monster.

Nathaniel snatched his hands back, taking note of the viny tendrils coming from her hair and the nasty-looking thorns protruding from her skin like some macabre beast. The Thornwitch, he realized with a spike of fear. Shadowfade’s trusted second-in-command. But what on earth was she doing here? And what had she done with Violet?

Horror of a completely different kind set in when Nathaniel recognized his own shirt, shredded by thorns, on the witch’s body, and only deepened when he looked past her monstrous features to find Violet’s own.

Like solving a formula on a blackboard, Nathaniel began to work the variables in front of him until the answer became clear.

Violet, his Violet, hadn’t just caused the blight.

She was also the Thornwitch.