Ren shrugged. “It’s called Cold Flower, isn’t it? No matter how long or hot you boil it for, the resulting tea will always go cold the second you take it off the flame.”
“Huh. What an interesting plant. You know, Blossom would probably love to see it.” No sooner had the words left Pansy’s mouth than she snapped it shut, shame tinged with the dulled remnants of her earlier anger flaring hot across the bridge of her nose.
For a moment, Ren watched her, their eyes seemingly tracking everything from the slight thinning of her lips to the tight set of her jaw. Then, they said, “I take it something happened with Blossom?”
Pansy sighed. “That obvious, huh? Yeah. Remember those cookies I gave her? Well, she decided to share them with my parents. Normally, this would be fine except the cookies had sugarfern in them, which I guess prompted my parents to get Councilor Millwood involved – or maybe she just happened to see them. I’m not exactly sure. But, either way, someone figured out why those cookies were greener than usual. And you know what happened after that.”
A beat. “I take it you blamed Blossom for this?”
Hearing it now, her logic sounded so obviously flawed – and, truthfully, it had been. Maybe she’d even known it at the time, but anger and hurt had always blinded her the worst of all. She swallowed, regret a hard lump in her throat, and nodded. It was a quick jerk of her head, all shame and remorse, and finished with her gaze pointed towards her feet.
“I just felt so betrayed,” Pansy said, her voice strained,whisper-thin. “All I could think about was the fact that if she hadn’t given my parents those cookies, none of this would have happened. I would be have been able to have dinner with my parents like normal, and come back here and live my life how I wanted. So, I told myself that she owed me, and that’s why it was okay for me to go to her shop and take some of her seeds.”
“Ah. So that’s where all those packets came from.”
“Yeah.” Pansy sighed, her lips twisting into a mirthless smile. “Maybe Councilor Millwood was right about me. I’m a terrible halfling.”
“Because you stole from your friend?”
She nodded. “Among other things.”
“You know,” Ren said after a brief moment of silence, “a goblin only takes something if they feel it’s being wasted or misused. Like this house, for example, or even my gardening tools.”
“Youtookthose?” Pansy asked, mouth agape.
Ren shrugged. “Only because their previous owner preferred swinging them at any animal who made the mistake of stepping into his garden. Nature forbid anything so much asbreatheon that man’s prized tulips, which, for the record, I also took.”
“Was he misusing them too?”
“On a more conceptual level, yes. But I admit I was mostly being petty with that one. In any case,” Ren continued, with a haphazard flick of their wrist, “the point I’m trying to make is that taking something that would otherwise languish in someone else’s hands isn’t necessarily wrong – at least, from a goblin’s perspective.”
“So, I’m turning into a goblin, then, am I?” Pansy asked with a soft huff of a laugh. “Great. Councilor Millwood willlovethat.”
“Well, I do. So, who cares what that busybody thinks? Her opinions are shit, anyway.”
Pansy’s heart didn’t so much as skip a beat as fly right off therails. It zigged then zagged, soared then plummeted, the pattern it stamped into her breastbone about as coherent as the jumble of words careening across her consciousness. Ren loved that? Abouther? Even just repeating the words sent a fresh surge of lightning arcing through her already frenzied pulse.
Calm, Pansy. Calm, she told herself, muscles tightening against her own tittering nerves, the rush of heat across her skin. Saying that they loved something about her wasn’t the same as saying they loved her; the gap between those two sentences was wide enough to accommodate even a behemoth’s impressive girth.Don’t get ahead of yourself.
Except, she already had. Now all she could do was damage-control.
A few deep breaths later and her pulse had settled into something far more manageable, the buzz beneath her skin no longer a few bolts shy of launching her into the stratosphere. “I didn’t know you could swear,” she mumbled finally.
Ren rolled their eyes. “Of course I can swear. In fact, if you’d like, I can do it right to Councilor Millwood’s face.”
“Oh, gods.” Pansy choked and quickly shook her head. “No. Don’t do that. That would be aterribleidea. Hilarious. But also terrible.”
“Suit yourself,” they said with a shrug. “But the offer remains open if you should change your mind.”
“Thank you, Ren. I – I appreciate you trying to make me feel better about this whole mess, my own shortcomings as a friend included.”
“You know, when a goblin hurts a friend, a gift usually goes a long way to making amends.”
Pansy made a thoughtful sound, her mind turning yet again to the Cold Flower Ren had shown her earlier. “That’s actuallya very good idea.”
“Yes, I know,” Ren said, their lips peeling back into self-satisfied smirk. “I’m full of them.”
Pansy scoffed. “No one likes a person with a big head.” The fact that she’d said this with a smile had undoubtedly lessened the impact of her words, as evidenced by the nonchalance with which Ren received them – namely, another shrug.
