Tag: love

Chapter One

The late afternoon sun did not penetrate far into the dim space before me as I opened the door. Inside, the cottage smelled of dust and mildew; the closeness of the air begged me to throw open every window.

I slipped a charm bag from my pocket. The scent of the herbs inside filled my nostrils when I crushed the linen in my hand. The nearly overpowering bite of wintergreen, for protection and sweeping away curses. The musky green of sage, for strength, wisdom, and banishing evil. Juniper to clear the dankness from the air. Lavender, wood rose, merribane, basil, fennel. Love, hope, health, courage, fortitude. Every herb I could think of to bring us good fortune in this new life. I had not tried for finesse and delicacy but for brute strength.

My spell wafted out invisibly as I emptied the pouch into my palm. I rubbed the herbs between my fingers and let the fragments scatter over the floor below. We would have to sweep soon, but in the meantime I hoped some power would seep into our floorboards.

I turned and took one more item from my pocket—a small bundle of straw and a dried rose wrapped together with twine—and hung it over the door, for shelter and love and luck.

All this I did quickly, before the others joined me. Then I brushed the lingering remnants of the leaves from my fingers and sighed. Was it the best I could do? I wasn’t sure anymore.

I turned to watch Amalie step inside, her bare feet dusty, her shoes dangling from her fingertips. It was good luck to approach a new home with bare feet, and with the memory of the past year casting its shadow over us, we needed all the luck we could get. So we’d walked barefoot the last half mile through the outskirts of the village of Verneaux. We’d held hands as we went, clinging to one another. Nobody said it, but I suspect we all felt it: the absence of other hands we wished to hold.

The forest had yielded for a moment to the tiny village, but the trees once again loomed over us, hovering behind the cottage’s bit of land, while a tiny untended ornamental garden crowded the front. No one had come to pull the tangled weeds, to open the house ahead of us, to brush away the air of neglect. There was no one to make us feel welcome. We would have to do that ourselves.

Amalie glanced around. “Not much to look at,” she said flatly.

Claire caught Amalie’s words as she stepped inside and agreed. “No. But at least it’s somewhere new.” She glanced at me. “And there’s plenty of land for Isabel’s garden.”

“As soon as I work blisters into my hands uprooting the mess that’s already here,” I muttered.

Claire smiled. “Better get to work, then.”

“While you sit by the fire stitching, I suppose.” I thought of the plain woolen dress she’d finished during our journey. There was to be no more silk or lace.

“Exactly my plan. I’ll leave all the hard work to you.”

I stuck my tongue out at her, even though she had already turned away and was running her finger along the dust on the window frame.

“I saw that,” she said, and I smiled. At least some things remained the same.

Papa shuffled inside then, his eyes sweeping the room as he twisted in a weary circle. I looked too. Sturdy walls, a small set of stairs to the bedrooms above, and one large room for both kitchen and parlor with a fireplace against the wall.

When his gaze caught on the straw bundle I’d placed over the door, he looked at me with a smile that did not reach his haunted eyes. “Your mother would be proud of you, you know.”

I nodded, though I didn’t believe him.

And even if it were true, making her proud would not protect my family.

***

We spent the last daylight hours airing out the house, brushing the cobwebs from the corners, and making the place as livable as possible. After that, unloading the crates and trunks we’d brought with us was the work of only a few minutes. The friend who’d loaned us a wagon and horse would be sending someone to pick them up in a few days, and then even those last connections to our old life would be gone.

“I’m exhausted.” Claire plopped into a chair once we’d managed to drag the final crate into a corner of the parlor. “I think I’ll get ready for bed now.”

“Yes,” Papa agreed. “A good idea for us all.”

I dug through one of the trunks for our blankets and we retired to the upstairs rooms. We hadn’t kept any of our fine furniture, so we would sleep on the mildewed straw pallets we’d found inside. I lay down, grimacing at the odor. The pallets would have to go soon, or we would smell of mold forever. I added that to the mental list of tasks that needed completing—a list that was growing longer by the minute.

I rolled over, and one particularly sharp piece of straw poked my side. I squealed under my breath as tears pricked my eyes.

“Beauty, is that you?” Amalie whispered from the pallet near mine. She used the family nickname for me—Isabel, bel, belle, beauty.

“Yes,” I whispered back, shifting to find a more comfortable spot.

“Claire must be asleep already.” Her silhouette was silent and unmoving.

“I think so,” I said.

We lay quiet for a moment.

“Sleep well, Beauty. We’ll feel better when morning comes.”

I said nothing, letting the sleep take me.

I woke the next morning to stillness, with only the soft sounds of Claire and Amalie breathing on the pallets next to me. The room was unfamiliar, alien, in the gray moments before dawn. I rose quietly and crept out the back door to breathe in my new world. Being with growing things had always centered me, and I needed that now.

The smell of dirt and dew was strong as I shivered in the chill air and gazed around me at the cottage’s little kitchen garden and the dark forest beyond. This patch of land did not welcome me as the neat garden rows back home had. Everything here felt hostile, choked with weeds and debris.

I shivered again, tempted to go back inside. What would I do if even nature betrayed me? I blinked back the tears that came suddenly. No. I wouldn’t give up. I needed this land. I needed to find my place here. I took in a deep breath.

Sage. The first welcoming thing about the land around me.

I followed the scent and discovered a patch of sage that could be saved and transplanted. Near that was a deep purple vine of grandulint. Then huge swaths of mint—not particularly valuable, and nearly impossible to get rid of once established, but mint tea was Claire’s favorite. I ambled through the overgrowth, a feeling of calm growing within me. Yes, at least a few plants of value were ensnared amid the morass. Possibly the garden was not as intimidating and frightening as it had first seemed. Still… I gazed around once more and suddenly felt overwhelmed. How could I ever overcome the weeds’ momentum and make something of this place?

The breeze changed direction, and I caught a subtle whiff of praganteus. I turned my head toward it. Rare praganteus for clarity and resolve. My nose led me to a dark corner near the woods.

I knelt there and eagerly dug my hands deep into the earth.

Years of neglect had made the soil rich and strong. I lifted my hands to see the dark stains it left on my skin, then brought my fingers up to smell the loamy, comforting brown. With it came the certainty that anything could grow here. I dug down again, pulling at the roots of an archeria plant embedded deep within the soil, prying the weed out of the ground. It was choking the praganteus, but a small patch had somehow managed to cling to life. That praganteus would flourish if I had any say in the matter. I grabbed another tuft of the weedy archeria, then gasped as a burr from its stem caught my finger.

I flung the burr aside and looked at my hand. A tiny drop of bright red blood welled up from my fingertip, glistening in the first rays of the dawning sun.

It hurt.

It hurt, and it was beautiful. For one brief moment, everything else was swept away. We had a new chance to start our lives again. I stayed there, kneeling in the dirt and breathing deeply as the sun slowly lit the world around me. I needed to remember this morning and let the memory anchor my roots deep to keep them from withering in the hard, rocky ground of this new life. The sturdiest plants thrived in even the worst of soils.

Chapter Two

“There is one advantage to poverty,” Claire said, eyeing the contents of a trunk before us.

“Oh yes?” I asked. “Do tell.”

“You have very little to unpack.”

She startled a bark of laughter from me, and I leaned over to hug her. “True.”

I sobered, though, as I set my jars on the single shelf reserved for my herbal supplies. Once, they would have covered at least five of these shelves, but I’d sold all the rarer herbs and spices, keeping mostly seeds and starters to begin my collection again. Still, I had the most important treasure, wrapped in cloth and sitting at the bottom of the trunk. I hefted it out and unwrapped it, finding the tiniest bit of comfort in its weight.

The leather cover of the herbarium was scratched and worn with time. I traced my fingers over a deep gouge, the product of a thorn that had scraped its surface when I was ten. As I opened the cover, the fragrance of cherry blossoms wafted up, sweet and gentle like the early spring breezes that shook the petals from the trees in our garden. I closed my eyes, breathed in, and imagined my mother dancing in the delicate petals as they rained around her, covering the grass in a foamy pink icing.

Like most texts of its kind, my herbarium was filled with a variety of formulas—simple healing spells and tonics, charms for the mind, even a few soups and teas. Most were originally printed in the book long before I was born, but additions had been made. Slips of parchment with additional recipes handed down to me were scattered through the pages, and recipes I’d invented myself were written in the margins. This herbarium had belonged to my mother before me, and her mentor before her.

I brushed my fingers over leaves and petals pressed into the pages of the book and traced the looped cursive of Maman’s notes and the spiky patterns of my own inelegant scrawls. I tried, once again, to remember her face—but it never worked. I had to lean on Papa’s stories.

Whenever I would ask him about Maman, he always started with the story of my infancy. He said I was a miserable baby, wailing through my first weeks of life and driving everyone in the house to sleepless frustration. Merchant that he was, Papa even tried to bargain with me, offering me future sweets and toys if I would just go to sleep.

Then one day, as everyone’s patience was wearing thin, Maman discovered a solution.

She had been in her drying room, making a potion for a neighbor. She swept into the nursery, a hint of angelica clinging to her, and picked me up with fingers still dusted in myrtle. “Hush, my sweet Isabel,” she said, stroking my reddened cheek with her silky skin as I cried. “Hush, Beauty, my girl.”

And though I gasped in a breath in preparation for another wail, a strange thing happened. I fell silent. I swiveled my head back and forth like a hound on a scent, then nestled my face against her stroking hand.

“And that’s when we knew you would be just like her,” Papa said, smiling indulgently.

Papa told me other stories too—of how Maman and I played games in the garden, how we hid in the hedges or spent hours identifying plants, how she laughed when I jumped from the bushes to startle people passing by.

I wish we’d had more time, but when I was six, sickness swept through the city. My sister Mae was the first to succumb. Before we had time to mourn her, my mother fell ill.

In her last days, she tossed and turned in fever, delirious, but in her lucid moments she called my brothers and sisters to her one by one. I don’t know what she said to them, but I remember her words to me. They are my only true memory of her.

“Isabel, my Beauty,” she said, beckoning to me from her bed, where her dark hair lay damp on the pillow. “Come closer.” I didn’t understand death then, so I did not fear the shine in her eyes or the heightened red in her cheeks. I would have jumped on the bed as I’d done so often, but I had been sternly warned that I must be quiet and gentle. So I stepped daintily toward her, the lace of my dress brushing against the bed as I approached.

“I have something to give you,” she said.

“A gift?” I clapped, forgetting my solemnity in anticipation. “What is it?”

“Look, on my table.” She gestured to the stand next to her bed. There lay her herbarium, its beautiful leather still soft and unmarred. “This is for you. I wish I had more time to teach you myself, my sweet girl. I wish… so many things.” She squeezed her eyes shut.

I still remember how my stomach roiled as unease washed over me.

“You must keep this book and learn from it and use it to care for our family, just as I have. Take it, and remember.”

This book was important. It mattered to her. She should not be giving it to me. But I loved Maman, and I wanted to make her happy with me.

“Yes, Maman,” I told her.

“And I want you to remember this,” she said. “You have such talent. Such a gift. I know you will use it well. You will do great things with your magic, my Isabel. But magic cannot do everything, nor can you.” She picked her head up from her pillow, straining with the little energy she had left. “Remember that, and simply do the best you can.”

I nodded without comprehension.

She slumped back onto her pillow, breathing heavily with exertion. “I love you, my Beauty,” she whispered. Then she closed her eyes and fell asleep.

I was the youngest child and the last one she spoke to. I went to sleep that night with the book in my bed and dreamed of magic. When I awoke the next morning she was dead.

Now I smoothed my hand across the book’s cover again, feeling every scratch it had acquired in the thirteen years since her death. I breathed in the cherry blossom perfume of my mother and tried to believe I had followed Maman’s last admonitions, but I could never quite convince myself I had done the best I could. There had to be more.

“Isabel?” Claire nudged me gently. “Are you all right?”

My eyes popped open—I hadn’t realized they were closed—and I set the book aside. “Yes, sorry. Just thinking.”

“Were you planning on making something for Papa and Amalie before they leave for the village?”

I sighed. “Will it matter if I do?” It didn’t seem likely my potions would do any good. We’d had plenty of proof in the last year that my skills were of little use.

“Of course it matters.” She stopped unpacking to reach over and squeeze my hand. “It was not your fault, Beauty. Magic cannot do everything.” She always seemed to know what I was thinking.

I turned away, swallowing my sorrow. Of course I knew that. Herbal magic was so slight, especially compared to the old powers. But there was more I could have done. I could have discovered better potions or sent them with more protective mixtures. I could have found a way to… well, do something.

Ever observant, Claire must have seen my thoughts, and this time when she squeezed my hand, it was more demanding. “No, Isabel. There is nothing more you could have done. You did your best to protect them.”

Them. Our brothers Henri, Luc, and Raoul. Amalie’s husband, Arnaud. The people I had failed to protect, whom we would never see again.

“Henri would say I could have come up with stronger protection potions if I had only worked at it more.” He was always the one who saw through me, who knew when I gave up because magic got hard, who told me never to quit. We’d even fought about it the last morning I saw him.

“Henri would not want you suffering.”

I shrugged and rearranged a few of the bottles on the shelf. “Perhaps. But he would also say I had to do better now.”

“Maybe. I guess that means you should get to work.” She smiled, and her optimistic calm radiated over me. She could always bring me out of my melancholy, though this one would certainly return.

“Yes, milady.” I took a deep breath to clear my head, then pulled two small bowls off the shelf. I pointed to the row of bottles. “Pass me that one, will you?”

She held up a jar of tiny brown seeds. “This?”

“No, not the columbine seeds. Next to it, the bay leaves.”

She passed me the right jar, and I pulled out two leaves, one for each bowl. “Now, go sit and work on your sewing samples. Leave me to focus.” She nodded gratefully, looking tired from all the work we had done, and I made a mental note to brew her something later.

I would start with the potion for Papa. Bay for protection—I always started with bay leaves now. For Papa I added yarrow for confidence, mooncap for self-possession. Other herbs for trustworthiness and friendliness, luck and success. I poured out ingredients and ground them together, forgetting the world around me. I lifted the bowl to my nose, breathing in the pale gold fragrance wafting from it.

When I’d first started learning herbalism, I’d followed Maman’s recipes meticulously, never varying from what she’d written in the book. But by the time I was twelve, I’d begun listening to my instincts instead. I couldn’t explain how the air vibrated in the moments that a salve came together or how the dried leaves felt right in my hands when I had combined the proper ingredients for a packet. It had been confusing at first, the way I felt nudged or pulled toward certain ingredients and scents, but I’d learned to trust those urges.

I wrinkled my nose. Something was still off in the mixture for Papa. I broke off half of another leaf of eyebright and added it. This time when I sniffed, green and gold mingled perfectly. I made a note in the herbarium. Most of Maman’s recipes were by formula, and they were good, but I eventually realized I had a magical knack that she simply hadn’t, and that knack gave my formulas a little extra power.

Not that it would do any good. My magic was still too small, despite my skill.

I sniffed at the powder in the bowl once more, to make sure it was right. Well, it was the best I could do.

For Amalie I started with many of the same ingredients, but I added heartsease as well, to soften the sadness in her eyes and to bring her back to herself. She had been bright and full of life before losing Arnaud, and I still saw glimmers of that vibrancy within her; I only had to call it out.

Papa and Amalie would need to head into the village soon if they were to make the calls they’d planned, so I worked swiftly. Claire would stay home and finish her sewing samples so she could advertise her handwork and embroidery later. And me? I would stay here, digging and planting and starting a garden.

I finished Amalie’s powder and poured each mixture into a mug before adding water. “Amalie! Papa!” I called. “They’re ready.”

Amalie bustled in, wearing her best dress. It was out of style, but thanks to Claire’s needlework it was still presentable and lacking holes. “Shhh,” she whispered. “Claire has fallen asleep in her chair.” A ghost of Amalie’s former smile crossed her face. “Poor dear, exhausted from all the work.”

I nodded. “I’ll be quiet.” Claire had never had Amalie’s energy or even mine.

Amalie gestured to the two earthenware mugs. “Which one’s mine?”

I pointed, and she picked it up.

She stared into the mug and sniffed at it, then grimaced. “Is it going to taste the way it smells?”

I scowled, stiffening at the insult. “You always complain. I’m doing my best.”

She pursed her lips, opened them to say something, then seemed to think better of it. Instead she nodded and took a sip.

I surreptitiously sniffed the sachet I always kept inside my sleeve—for patience and peacemaking—and deliberately relaxed my shoulders. As the herbs worked their calming magic, it became easier to let go of Amalie’s complaints. She was under at least as much strain as I was; she deserved my grace.

“I’m sorry, Beauty. You do so much for us.”

She took another sip, and I watched her carefully as she swallowed. Sometimes you could immediately tell how well the magic worked.

“What’s this one for?” she asked. Was her voice more lively?

“Success and luck and wealth.” I paused, not sure if I should continue. “And, um, something for a bit of charm.”

She snorted at that. “I’m going to need it.”

I rolled my eyes. “You have charm in abundance. This is just to remind you.”

She smiled, but it was sad. “Thank you, then, I suppose.”

Papa came in then, looking as well-dressed as he could manage in an old suit coat and cravat. He glanced at the remaining mug on the table and then at me. I nodded, and he drank. He didn’t even ask what was in it, and I wondered if that was because he believed in me or because he didn’t.

“Thank you, Beauty,” he said wearily.

I missed the way he used to say everything with a hint of mischief, like the world was filled with tricks and he knew every single one of them. I nodded and went to him to straighten his cravat. “Ready to go?” I asked.

Papa looked at Amalie, who nodded. “We hope to be back by dinnertime,” he said.

I walked into the overgrown yard to see them off, down the road we’d barely noticed the day before. Surely by nightfall we’d have a future to look forward to. I turned to the garden and went to work.

The next several hours passed with the tedious task of preparing the ground. The early autumn sun beat down on my head as I ripped up the weeds, venting all my frustration and worry on the poor plants.

Claire was still asleep when I went inside to check on her. I shook my head, surprised at her sleepiness. The travel must truly have worn her down.

A noise from outside pulled me to the window. Papa and Amalie trudged up the dusty road, their eyes downcast. No success then.

I curled my fingers into fists and kicked at the wall. Blast. What was the point of anything I did? My magic was no help to them at all, and what little I’d accomplished in the garden could have been done by anyone.

My only purpose seemed to be to keep pretending that things would get better—but Claire was better at optimism than I, so I was even unnecessary in that task. Still, I would do my best. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, then plastered on a smile and went outside to greet them.

“Any luck?” I asked.

Papa only shook his head, his steps dragging with exhaustion.

“The inn has no need of us at present,” Amalie said, her voice clipped. “Neither does the bakery or the manor house. But we’ll try again tomorrow.” She paused. “Where’s Claire?”

“Inside sleeping still.”

Amalie bustled inside and poked at Claire, who rose slowly and helped us prepare our evening meal. We fell into our beds that night exhausted.