“Yes, well.” I shrugged. “I’m a doctor’s daughter. I was taught to be thorough.”
“It was magic sweet clover, though, wasn’t it? Would that have any side effects?”
“Anyway, it’s magic sweet clover,” the woman reassured her husband. “It probably doesn’t have any side effects. Don’t worry so much.”
“But even so, if we persist in our theft for that long, we shall surely be smited! Or smitten! Or smote! I am unsure of the correct participle.”
“And if we do not,” she uttered darkly, “I shall die.”
And so it was that the man found himself climbing over the garden fence night after night. Each time, he would snatch a bit of clover, bring it home, and make a tincture of the fresh leaves. After many weeks passed without incident, he decided the queen either had not noticed or did not care.
Each day, his wife waxed healthier and healthier. And finally, several months later, they decided a single additional dose of the tincture would be enough to pronounce her cured. The clouds gathered ominously on that fateful night, and as the man set forth, the heavens unleashed a torrent, accompanied by flashes of lightning and crashes of thunder. Nonetheless, he once again sneaked into the garden, drenched to the skin but relieved to know he soon would need to thieve no more.
Of course, anyone who has ever heard a story before willbe unsurprised to learn what happened next. As he snipped off that final clump of sweet clover, rainwater cascading off the leaves, there was a blinding light and a deafening boom, and a hand thumped onto his shoulder. He turned his head, blinking away the glowing spots the light had left in his vision,to see the queen standing behind him. The rain touched neither her clothes nor her hair, as if her very presence was repellent to nature itself.
“So you are the thief who has been making off with my clover,” she mused. “I believe it is time for some serious smitening.”
“Oh, great queen, please let your justice be tempered by mercy!” he begged her, dropping to his knees with a splash as he landed in a puddle. “My wife is ill, and without your sweet clover, she would surely perish.”
The queen hesitated and peered at his face. “Wait. Aren’t you my next-door neighbor? The cute one?”
“Uh…yes? That is, our little cottage is indeed inexplicably adjacent to the forbidden magical garden of your grand palace.”
We cannot know what passed through the queen’s mind at this time. Perhaps his pleas moved her and softened her heart. Perhaps she reflected that he had been a good neighbor for many years until desperation forced him into theft. Or perhaps she was thinking not with her head but with a different body part altogether. Whatever the reason, she refrained from smiting him.
Do not, however, mistake her restraint for gentleness, for the next thing she told him shook him to his core.
“You shall not be smitterated this night,” she decided, “and your wife may have however much of my clover she requires. But it is not in me to let a debtor escape without payment or allow an insult to go unanswered. In exchange for your lives, a life must be given to me. Someday, I will take your child asmy own. I will care for it like a mother and train it in sorcery, for any child born under the influence of a magic herb will bear magic in its blood.”
Having no alternative, the man conceded to her demand, and with a heavy heart he went home with the last handful of clover. While his wife might survive, he feared his child was lost to him.
Survive the woman did, and some time later, she gave birth to a healthy girl. Because of the unusual circumstances of the pregnancy, they decided to name the child Melilot.
“I’m not following,” Sam said.
“Not following what?”
“Why Melilot?”
“It’s another word for sweet clover. Like how some people say garbanzo bean, but other people call it a chickpea.”
“You were named after the medicine your mother took when she was pregnant?”
“Listen, I was lucky. If she’d had a cold, I might have been named Sneezewort.”
“Or Bastard Toadflax,” Sam suggested. “Or Wormwood. Or Rapunzel.”
“Bastard toadflax is badass. But rapunzel is basically an anemic parsnip. Awful.”
“Agreed.”
When the child was born, the queen came to visit the cottage, an event the new parents viewed with much trepidation. They felt certain the queen would take the baby as she had threatened to do that terrible night.
Much to their surprise, she did no such thing. Instead, she brought gifts—a bottle of fine wine for the parents and a pretty doll for the child. Accompanying the queen was her owndaughter, the two-year-old princess Jonquil, who was named after the lovely rush daffodils that bloomed in the garden. Princess Jonquil’s father had perished not long earlier in a tragic self-bifurcation incident—
“In a what?”
“Someone guessed his name, and he got so mad that he tore himself in two. It happens.”
