Violet Thistlewaite Is Not a Villain Anymore by Emily Krempholtz - 5

“What,” said the man calmly, though his words hissed with underlying steam, like a kettle about to boil over, “do you think you are doing?”

“I…” Violet cleared her throat. “Pru said I was free to explore. I only wanted to see if the floor was dirt or stone. I was going to move the boxes back. I didn’t expect…” She trailed off, thinking that calling out this man, whoever he was, on his own part in the mess—the door would never have knocked over the crates if he hadn’t opened it, after all—would only deepen that crease between his brows.

She took in the stranger’s lean height and long limbs beneath the worn sleeves of a forest-green coat, and the thick black hair that swept tidily back from his forehead, as though he’d run a hand through it that morning and told it sternly to stay put in that low voice that brooked no argument. He surveyed the mess before them and said, “Those flasks won’t be easy to replace.”

“I’ll pay for them,” she said quickly, feeling small as his gaze landed, unblinking, upon her once more. His scrutiny unsettled her, like he was taking note of every feature and every flaw, and Violet felt thoroughly stripped bare by the analysis, as if he could sense all the thorns of her past and prick her with their sharp points. She drew a shaky breath and set the crate in her arms on top of another stack, which collapsed under the added strain. Of course it did. Violet clenched her eyes shut in an extended, horrified wince as another chorus of shattering glass detonated among them.

“You will,” he agreed, his glare sharper than any of the shards that lay smashed around them. “How could you be so careless, and with someone else’s belongings no less?”

Violet bristled at his cold tone. How dare he speak to you like this , said a voice in her head that sounded an awful lot like Shadowfade’s. You are the Thornwitch. You could tear him to shreds where he stands. The thought triggered a reflex, one that filled her to the brim with power. The energy inside her clambered to escape, to make, to create, to grow. Thorns, vines, it didn’t matter—Violet’s body was a conduit for roots and leaves, a seedbed for natural destruction, just as Guy had taught her.

Her limbs buzzed with unspent magic, begging her to grow vines that would tear his arms from his torso, tempting her with sweet promises about opening the ground and swallowing him whole, pulling him into the dirt with strong, grasping roots so she could be left in peace. She could make him regret looking at her with such patronizing scorn.

No. Violet forced those thoughts down and screwed a lid tight over them. Hadn’t she just vowed to be done with dark magic when she was back in the park with Pru?

Holding this much energy made her feel like the very seams of her were ready to burst. Her vision sharpened, and she knew her eyes were glowing green.

Oh no.

Violet sometimes imagined herself like a sieve—she could slap her hand over the mesh all she wanted, but magic would still find places to seep from her pores. She could feel it coming now whether she liked it or not, plants and poisons budding from the power within her, the only thing she was ever any good at. But what else could you do? Karina the Tempest’s voice was still fresh in her ears. Violet squeezed her eyes shut against the onslaught of magic pushing its way out, until— there!— in her mind’s eye she sensed a glimmer, like sunlight winking from the shimmering surface of another spring. Power that was pure, uncorrupted. Power that was good.

Violet reached for the new spring, barely a puddle compared to the deep well of the other one, but what plant could grow after a lifetime of being starved for air and light? She yanked her thoughts away from thorns and poisons and breathed relief as the Thornwitch’s power dissipated, spreading back into her body. Violet focused on that other spring, pulling it through her fingers like a rope, and thought, Be good.

Now hollyhocks in shades of red and pink exploded from the ground, tall and towering where they burst between the other stacks of crates, and blue clematis began to climb the walls of the greenhouse, wrapping its vines tight around the legs of a table. Bright yellow dahlias with their thick masses of raylike petals burst to life, shards of glass trapped between some of the blooms from the force of their growth, and delicate pink-and-white phlox sprung to soften the ground beneath her feet, the shattered instruments glittering among their leaves. Tall sunflowers and fragrant lilacs completed the scene, splashes of color at strange odds with the detritus of broken glass and dusty boxes.

It stung, this new magic, like nettles against her skin, but perhaps this was Violet’s price after so many years of doing evil. She kept her hands in the air for a second longer than necessary, marveling at the difference, the way the new magic receded without complaint. Then she turned to face the man who was gaping at her with something between anger and shock.

She looked around sheepishly; she hadn’t expected the garden she created to be quite so…much. It was beautiful, at least—and didn’t seem likely to try to murder anyone, so that was promising. “I’ll pay for the damage,” she told him. “And I can clean this up.”

It would hurt a bit to cut it down, this wild and beautiful thing she’d made, but she could use the flowers for bouquets and arrangements. That was why she was here, after all. One could not open a flower shop without cutting a few stems.

His jaw was hanging open like a door with a broken hinge, eyes scanning the garden she’d created. “You’re the new tenant, then.”

“Violet Thistlewaite,” she said, brushing her hands over her shirt. “And you must be Prudence’s…” She trailed off, and when he didn’t fill in the blank, she tried, “Husband?”

He barked out a sound that might have been a laugh. “Brother.”

“Ah.” Another landlord, then, and this one not quite so impressed with her as his sister.

Now that she thought about it, he did look an awful lot like Prudence, if someone had dressed her in drab colors, dusted a layer of stubble over her brown cheeks, and removed any trace of humor from her expression. He and his sister were both tall, with the same eyes like an ink spill, framed by the same thick lashes and bold brows, though his were pinched in distaste. But unlike Pru’s open warmth, there was a sharp, elegant clarity to her brother’s features, as if he’d been drawn in sure strokes and angles rather than the smudged, shadowy pencil sketch of her own silhouette. If not for the scowl that twisted his mouth, Violet might even have called him beautiful.

He cleared his throat, his dark eyes still caught on the garden that had bloomed to life around them. “Nathaniel Marsh.”

“It’s a pleasure to—”

But he interrupted her as though she hadn’t even begun to speak. “Miss Thistlewaite, I must ask that you refrain from treating the equipment in this room as your own. I conduct delicate work in here, and Pru should never have offered the space to you.” He strode to the other side of the greenhouse, where a large, metal worktable held a collection of meticulously organized vials as well as a small cauldron that had been upended by the creeping clematis, which was still, she noticed, growing throughout the space, tangling with a small potted mint that had been carefully pruned into submission on the corner of his table.

With a small yelp of dismay, he leapt back and turned his glare on her.

“This is exactly what I mean!” Violet shrunk from his anger, her thoughts turning to Guy and his punishments when she’d displeased him. Shadowfade is gone , she thought. And who is this? You are the Thornwitch. Why should you cower from him?

She huffed and straightened her shoulders, drawing herself to her full height. Thorns prickled beneath her skin, threatening to burst from her like the claws and horns that had for so long made her a monster. Her mind flashed with ways to scare him, to stop his disdain and questions in their tracks, but they were Guy’s solutions, folded into the steel of her being after decades at his side, and with him gone, she felt like an impure metal, a forge long grown cold.

Violet wasn’t sure what her own solutions might look like, but she knew they didn’t involve using the clematis—which was creeping ever closer to her new landlord—to string him up from the rafters until he apologized. She was good now, and what her instincts begged of her was decidedly not.

“I’m sorry,” she said carefully, tasting the foreign word on her tongue. Guy had never allowed her to apologize for her failures. He preferred for her to atone for disappointing him by proving her worth in other ways. Once, she had blinded one of his enemies using the thorns of a rosebush and felt relief when her master smiled. Now the memory made her sick. “As I said, I’ll replace whatever was broken.”

“Can you replace the weeks I’ve spent working on it?” he snapped, and tension filled Violet at his tone. This man had no intention of keeping the peace, and Violet strained to hold on to the frayed rope of her own fractured manners.

“I cannot.”

“Then perhaps next time you won’t be so careless. You had no idea what was in that cauldron! What if it had been volatile? What if someone had been hurt?” He scolded her like a child, and she clenched her fists.

“Mr. Marsh,” she said carefully, “I have apologized, explained the accident, and offered to help as much as I can. But I won’t be spoken to like that.” Not anymore. Violet could feel her temper rising. She searched for that new spring once more, and with a stinging twitch of her fingers, the clematis lunged down to reach for the broken glass, sweeping it into the empty crates and setting them upright.

He swallowed whatever he had been about to say. “I apologize for my frustration. I could have paid closer attention when opening the door.”

Violet nodded. “I’ll put everything back exactly as it was.” She glanced at the garden now around her and amended, “ Almost exactly as it was. But I was promised half of this space, and I need it if I’m to do the work I have planned. Work that will allow me to pay you rent.” She eyed him with disdain, allowing just a touch of the Thornwitch to show in her expression.

His jaw flexed, but he said nothing.

“We must come to some sort of understanding here,” she said, her scorn collapsing into a plea. This was not how she wanted to begin her relationship with her neighbor—her landlord . He could make her life very difficult, which was the exact opposite of what Violet wanted.

“Clean the rest of this up,” he said finally. “And try not to break anything else. I’ll have your half of the space cleared out tomorrow.” He scrubbed a hand through his hair, and she toyed with whether to tell him that a single lock had escaped the rough comb of his fingers, curling outward like a ram’s horn. She pressed her lips together, deciding against it as, nose in the air, Nathaniel Marsh stalked back out the door.

Well, this was just great. Violet waved aside the phlox that wound around her ankles.

“Stay,” she told the plants. “We’ve caused enough trouble.”

At least “trouble” was a good deal less serious an accusation than “Thornwitch, right hand to Guy Shadowfade and Scourge of Silbourne,” though neither worked in her favor. She set Bartleby and the clematis to cleaning up the broken glass and began restacking the fallen crates, careful not to jostle the contents any further. She could sense plants inside some of them, dried herbs and medicines for the apothecary, but others moved with the sound of clinking glass. Violet winced, knowing this meant she’d likely broken more than what littered the ground. An apothecary needed plenty of vials, she supposed, though looking over at the ruined solution on the worktable, perhaps it was more than that.

She’d never heard of an apothecary who brewed potions any more complicated than a cup of medicinal tea or a tincture enchanted to cure a cold. They sold potion ingredients, not potions themselves. That was alchemy, not medicine.

Violet had known a few alchemists in her time with Shadowfade. Nasty pieces of work, the lot of them, concerned only with their explosives. One had thought it would be funny to mix one of his powders with her plant fertilizers, and when she had fed her garden, he’d blown the whole thing up as a lark. He and the others had laughed, though not for long.

The Thornwitch didn’t have a reputation for nothing.

Over near the glass wall, Bartleby reached out a vine and poked one of the crates she’d just set right.

“Stop that,” Violet snapped. “You won’t find anything explosive in there—and if you do, you’ll just hurt yourself.” His nosiness successfully plucked out her own curiosity by the roots like a weed. She’d made enough of a mess, and as she shouldered her bag and headed back to the empty building that would soon become her shop, she vowed to keep her head down from now on.

The sting in her hands had faded, and Violet itched to try that new magic again with an excitement she hadn’t felt since Guy had given her free rein over the castle grounds landscaping. There was another well inside of her, she thought happily, searching for it again, though the glimmer she’d sensed before was nowhere to be found. It wasn’t as strong as her dark magic, she suspected, but if she could learn to harness it, she didn’t need it to be.

Tomorrow , she promised herself. Tomorrow she would try again.