Violet Thistlewaite Is Not a Villain Anymore by Emily Krempholtz - 4

“You did what?” Nathaniel Marsh pinched the bridge of his nose and mentally recited alchemical laws to stop himself from strangling his twin sister.

“She saved my life,” Pru argued.

“From a slide of rock goblins?” Nathaniel snorted. “Hardly.”

“Excuse you.” Pru huffed like he’d delivered some great offense. “I could have been crushed! To death!”

“The worst they would have done was build a wall around you for a few hours until they got bored.”

“They could have turned me to stone!”

“That’s a myth, Prudence.”

“No, it’s not. A few of them got into Corrin’s glass studio just last week and turned half a dozen vases to stone before she found them! And there’s that table at the Claw & Hoard with the stone leg, that was them too!”

“There has never been proven evidence of a rock goblin having enough power to turn a sentient, living being to stone,” he corrected impatiently.

“But the stories—”

“—are just stories, and you know it.”

She stuck out her tongue at him. “Well, it was getting cold! I didn’t want to be out there for hours.”

This was so like Pru, being magnanimous for the sheer sake of it, despite the fact that she knew quite well the state of their finances. “Be that as it may, it was no excuse to offer her a discount on her rent. We can’t afford to be charitable if we want to keep the shop open.”

“Any rent is more than what we’re making right now,” said Pru, flapping a hand in his face. Nathaniel resisted the urge to swat at her, knowing it would only fan the flame of his sister’s drive to irritate him. “And besides, you should have seen them scatter, Nat. The poor woman’s going to be recovering for days after a display like that. Now she’ll be doing it from the warmth of a bed.”

He rolled his eyes. “She could recover from magic burn just as well from the bed she is renting at the asking price to which she already agreed .”

“Pah!” Pru flapped a hand. “We’re too young for you to be such a curmudgeon already.”

“On the contrary, thirty-one feels an entirely appropriate time to begin the journey to curmudgeonhood.”

“By thirty-five you’ll be a bona fide grump,” she teased, rolling her eyes. “And by forty you’ll be the terror of every child in Dragon’s Rest. Oh, and speaking of terrors, I need you to clear your mess out of half the greenhouse.”

“What?” His attention sharpened. “Why?”

“Well, I mentioned the greenhouse in the lease posting, and that’s why she was interested. She’s opening a flower shop, isn’t that sweet?”

“Prudence,” Nathaniel said slowly. “We are an apothecary.”

She looked around in mock astonishment, her eyes widening at the bundles of herbs hanging from the rafters and carefully measured vials of ingredients lining the shelves. “Is that why we’re surrounded by so many medicinal teas?”

He glared at her. “I use that greenhouse, Pru. We need somewhere to dry herbs and plants.”

“Well, yes, that’s why I only offered her half of it.”

Nathaniel gritted his teeth. He should never have left this to his sister. He knew she couldn’t handle it, that she’d get distracted or miss the point, and clearly he was right. But of course Pru had insisted. She wanted to help. She could contribute, she’d argued, if only he’d let her. And this was what had come of it!

He found himself suddenly very glad he’d decided not to show her the letter he’d received last week from the bank, which even now weighed like a bar of iron in his pocket. He couldn’t imagine what sort of preposterous mess Pru would get them into—under the guise of “helping,” of course—if he told her about the debt they’d inherited from their parents.

“She’s kind, and very sweet,” continued Pru, pulling a little leather purse from her bag. “A bit shy. You’ll love her, I just know it. Won’t even notice she’s there. Besides, she paid up front for her first three months. In soli!”

Any tenant who could afford to pay in gold soli, thought Nathaniel as he took the purse from his sister and recorded the currency in the ledger, didn’t need a discount on their rent.

“I finished clearing out the upstairs rooms on the western half of the house,” Pru called out as she locked the front door, lowering the shades so they could no longer see the words Marsh Apothecary painted on the windows in their father’s sure hand. “And locked the hallway door separating her half from ours. All that’s left is the greenhouse, and I’m not touching your potion-making toys.”

“Alchemical instruments,” snapped Nathaniel automatically, the next lyric in an oft-sung duet between the twins.

“Mmm,” hummed Pru musically, then swung a graceful leg over the dusty velvet rope that blocked customers from the stairs and disappeared up them.

Nathaniel checked the front door to make sure it was locked, then glared at the new wall that cut the shop in half, as though this was its fault and not his own for ordering it constructed in the first place. He shrugged on his coat and stepped out the back door into the neglected garden behind the shop.

His parents had built the greenhouse back when the apothecary was successful enough to warrant occupying the entire ground floor of the building. His mother had commissioned the wrought iron metal vines that curled over the panes, and the green-and-yellow stained glass panels that checkered the space above the doors. Outside, his father had grown a beautiful garden, full of vegetables they ate throughout the summer and colorful flowers he cut early in the morning so he could surprise Nathaniel’s mother with bouquets when she awoke. Inside the greenhouse, pots of medicinal herbs had grown year-round with the help of an annual weatherproofing spell from a traveling warlock. The enchantment was enough to keep out even the worst of the harsh mountain winds that thrashed Dragon’s Rest each winter.

Nathaniel remembered sitting on the floor of the greenhouse with Pru when they were children, watching their mother bundle herbs and hang them from the beams above their heads even as snow swirled outside the warped glass.

“Dried, these herbs are more potent,” she taught them as they played in the dirt, her voice low and sure. “But it’s more than plucking the stems and leaving them to dry. We harvest our herbs in the morning, after the dew has dried but before the sun has a chance to diffuse the oils from the leaves back into the stem. Then we bundle them at the stalk like this, see?”

Nathaniel remembered running his fingers over the twine while Mum held his hands and guided him through the process, laughing softly when he experimented with different knots and made a mess of his bundle of feverfew.

“Be gentle, my love,” she said when he dropped the bunch in frustration. “Or you’ll bruise the leaves. Here, like this, see? Try it again.”

Now, his breath puffing in a cloud before him in the cool night, his father’s garden was little more than some scrubby grass and stubborn mint that still poked its head from the ground each spring. He pulled the letter from his pocket and smoothed the paper as he unfolded it, his eyes skimming the neat, orderly words he’d practically memorized by now. Phrases jumped out at him, phrases like condolences and grace period is ending and three months and apothecary and collateral .

He shoved the letter into his pocket and looked up at the moons in the sky. Rava would wane and wax three more times before he had to start making the new payments. A bit less, now, because he’d felt absolutely frozen in the week and a half since he received the letter.

Nathaniel was trying his best to follow his mother’s example, but he didn’t have her patience or knowledge, and besides, the warlock who bespelled their greenhouse had disappeared a few years back, probably a victim of Shadowfade’s paranoia. He still had a few potted plants, but most of their supplies came from merchants these days, though Nathaniel still insisted on blending the teas and tinctures himself. It was what they’d always done, which meant it was what his mother would have wanted. Besides, it was the closest he’d come to alchemy in the apothecary.

He feared, with the kind of dread that weakened everything it touched, that he wasn’t cut out for this. Nathaniel didn’t have his mother’s skill with herbal medicines or her ability to charm customers. His original plan for saving the apothecary had failed with the kind of epic tragedy that had his neighbors trailing off their sentences and grimacing rather than speaking of it, and now he was barely holding his head above water. Pru was insistent that downsizing the shop and taking on a tenant was the answer.

He hoped for both their sakes that she was right.

Light spilled through the warped glass of the greenhouse already, and Nathaniel eyed the dark silhouette inside, preparing himself for the unpleasant task of interacting with the new tenant. His mouth tensed with the smile of a man held hostage by propriety, but the door caught on something as he opened it—a stack of boxes that shouldn’t have been in its path.

As if in slow motion, Nathaniel watched, horrified, as the tower of crates wobbled and then toppled over, spilling glass vials and flasks that crashed and shattered on the ground. One crate struck a pile of boxes, knocking those over too and creating a clamoring eruption of sound and shattering that seemed endless.

A small “Oh!” of surprise cut through the crash, but Nathaniel could only stand frozen, his hand still on the doorknob. Amidst the chaos, he dimly registered a pale face, a tangle of brown curls, a pair of lips slack with dismay. Eventually the cacophony came to an end, and his eyes swept the mess before landing on the woman who stood, hands clutching another crate, amidst the destruction.