She peered up from the rose bush she was examining, looking almost guilty —like I was the parent, and I’d caught her doing something she knew she shouldn’t be doing. But then the expression softened again, and her lips curled into a rueful little smile.
“Wren. You found me,” she said. “I was… hiding.”
A sharp emotion shot through me, something with an edge of pain to it. “Oh. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to… I can go.”
“No, sweetie, don’t go. I just… I wasn’t sure how I’d feel, having you here.”
I frowned. “I’ve already been here, remember?”
“Yes, but you didn’t know what this place was then, and I didn’t tell you. A holdover from all those years of secrecy, I guess,” she said with an embarrassed little shrug. She pointed to a tree just to her left. There was a plaque affixed to it, one I hadn’t noticed the last time I was here, sneaking around and spying in the dark. It said, “Kerridwen’s Garden.”
“Oh. This… this isyourspace.”
“It used to be,” she said, her voice little more than a broken whisper.
“Mom, seriously, it’s fine. If you want to be alone, I totally get it,” I said, wanting to run from the vulnerability on her face. I didn’t want her to have to open up parts of herself she wasn’t ready to open, just so I could peer inside. She didn’t owe me that. Well, maybe she did, but I wouldn’t collect. I’d already forgiven her for lying to me.
“No,” she said, and the guilt was gone. She sounded a little more in control of herself. “No, it’s fine, Wren, honestly. I do want you to see this place. I’ve been working up the courage to ask you to come here with me— I guess that’s what I was trying to say. So, thank you for finding me here. If we’d waited for me to work up that courage, you might never have seen it.”
I’d been so focused on my mother that I’d barely glanced at our surroundings, other than the plaque. Now I took a long moment to gaze around me, and my mouth fell open.
The word “garden” could hardly do justice to the beauty of this place. Gardens were neat and orderly, trimmed and pruned and mowed. This place felt like the wild version of that kind of garden; a place where the plants themselves decided where they loved best to grow, and were just free to do it. Vines tangled up trees, and draped from their branches. Peonies were poking their fluffy heads up between the branches of rose bushes. Herbs seemed to spring from the ground in bouquets, a dozen fragrant plants all mingling happily.
And the colors… oh my goodness, the colors.
A memory shot to the surface of my mind. I was six years old, and my mother snuggled up with me on our worn sofa and introduced me to The Wizard of Oz. Now, I was a kid of the modern world: every video I’d ever seen was in color. But when Dorothy left the dull, dreary sepia tones of Kansas behindand stepped into the vibrant Land of the Munchkins, I was awestruck, like it was the first time I’d ever seen color on a screen.
That’s what I felt like in this moment: Dorothy stumbling into Technicolor.
“Does this mean that your magic is… that you’re a…”
“A green witch, like Asteria was? Yes. It seems, despite my best efforts, that is still true,” she said. There was the strangest tone in her voice, a searing combination of wonder and sadness. She reached out a tentative hand, and touched a rose that hovered an inch or two from her fingers. As she did, another layer of brilliant petals unfurled around it. It put a lump in my throat that I had to swallow against before I could speak again. But my mom continued before I had the chance to fully compose myself.
“I spent almost all my time in this garden, Wren. As a girl, I followed Asteria around her gardens, tending to the plants and my budding magic at the same time. I know Asteria was so happy that one of her daughters had finally inherited her gift. She would never have admitted it out loud, but I knew she was disappointed that Rhi and Persi had never shown any inclination for the garden. I couldn’t get enough of it. Sometimes, I would fall asleep under a bush or in a tree, and Asteria would have to come find me and carry me inside to bed. But when she woke in the morning, my bed would be empty, and I’d be snoozing in the branches somewhere. Eventually, she gave up trying to bring me inside, and just brought me a blanket instead.”
She smiled, and it wasn’t as sad now. I found I could smile back. It sounded like the kind of mad thing Asteria would do, letting a toddler sleep in the flowerbeds all night.
“When my gift began to emerge, Asteria decided I needed a garden of my own. The one next to the house—that was hers.It was full of her magic. There was no real way to know what I could do unless I could start with a blank canvas. And so she gave me one. She walled off this little patch of land for me, and set me free in it. There was instruction—it wasn’t complete chaos all the time, though probably more often than not. She let me experiment. She let me test and practice and plant and tend and dig up and try again. This place was… my little magical laboratory. All mine.”
I could see it in my mind, my mother as a wild, barefoot child with dirty fingernails and flushed cheeks, flowers tucked in her curls, vines wound around her limbs like living jewelry. I felt the smile spread across my face. My mother saw it, and smiled back, as though in acknowledgment of that same little girl she used to be.
“It went on that way for years, me and my garden, all wrapped up in each other. My sisters were older, already entangled in the deeply personal process of unraveling their own gifts. We had each other, but we were each, for a little while, consumed with ourselves; Rhi with her recipes and her ingredients, Persi with her potions and charms. It’s inherently selfish, this exploratory stage of magic.” She hesitated, biting her lip. “Maybe not selfish, that’s not quite it… self-involved? Self-centering? In any case, though we loved each other, and loved Asteria, our magic was the most important thing as we discovered it. The most important thing… until you came along.”
She smiled at me, a softer smile than the mischievous grin of a moment before. I returned it, eager for the smile to carry us into the next part of this story she was telling me.
“It was a gravitational shift, Wren. I can’t say that I had planned for you. You were a surprise, as you know… the best surprise. But when you arrived and the midwife laid you in my arms, the center of my universe moved outside of myself. My world no longer revolved around the magic in my veins. Itrevolved around you. The shift was instant and irreversible. You became the most important thing to me. I hadn’t expected it. Or at least, I hadn’t expected the force of it.” She smirked. “This is the part where you get to scoff and say I’m being dramatic and mushy.”
My eyes had filled with tears. The fact that I had to wipe them away made the exaggerated roll of my eyes slightly less effective. “Seriously pathetic, Mom,” I said, in the most sarcastic teenage tone I could muster under the circumstances. She smiled, appreciating my efforts.
“In any case, you became the new focus, Wren. My magic became… well, not unimportant, but secondary. My sisters underestimated that, but Asteria never did. I think she knew that you were more important to me than anything else, even more than my ties to this place. It’s why she tried to protect you herself that night. It’s why she didn’t tell me what had happened until I confronted her.”
My heart sped up. She was telling me so many things that I’d always wanted to know, but had been too afraid to ask.
“The night the Darkness came for you, I wasn’t with you at the house.” She said it like each individual word was being painfully ripped from inside her. “I was here, in this garden, trying to find a small portion of peace for myself. I’m not sure if anyone’s ever told you this, but being a mom is kind of hard, and no toddler is a picnic. I was tired and feeling a bit burnt out. I came here to… to be a little selfish again, I guess. To reconnect with myself. And in that couple of hours…” She shook her head, unable to continue.
I took a step toward her, wanting to comfort her. “It’s not your fault, Mom. The Darkness was waiting. If it hadn’t come that night, it would have come another night. And another after that. Even the most attentive parent can’t be watching 24/7.”
She sighed. “I think enough time has passed that I know that. Logically. But then? When it happened? Wren, you can’t begin to imagine the guilt, the horror I felt when I walked back in the house to find Asteria had you in that protective circle. I… think I lost my mind for a short time there, I really do. I held you all night in that circle. And only at dawn, when Rhi and Persi came to relieve me, to insist I eat something and get some sleep, only when they had you guarded between them did I leave that circle. But I didn’t go to the kitchen to eat, or to my bed to sleep. I came here. I came here, to the place I built entirely with my own magic, and I destroyed it.”
