“You have an entire patch of them outside,” Eunny said, a reluctant, resigned feeling settling into her bones. “Why are you making more?”
“There’s something about them,” Ollas said, excitement in his face. “The delegation had them for a reason. I want to run some tests to see if I can figure out why.”
“Fine, I’m game,” Eunny sighed. “Can I wear your gloves? I forgot mine.”
He slapped his pair into her hand. “I just want to amend the current transplant mix.”
She picked up a small scoop. “Okay, if you handle the plants, I’ll shovel.”
They set to work. Eunny spooned different amendments into the tray at Ollas’s prompting, mixing it with a hand rake as he fluffed the dirt around the fresh divisions of the delegation plants.
“Do you, uh…” Ollas began in a hesitant voice. When Eunny gestured for him to continue, he said, “Do you remember plants like these at the delegation?”
“No, they only had me check dried herbs and some seeds the Eyllics were offering,” Eunny said, pausing as she closed her eyes in thought. “Remedies for aid workers and trade merchants to use while making deliveries in Rhell. Supposed to be a goodwill gesture, but…”
Eunny opened her eyes so she could deposit the mixture into the pots. “Nothing we hadn’t already seen, from what I could tell. I think most of them were just for show?—”
A puff of dust swirled up. As she reached for the watering can, Eunny started to sneeze, accidentally taking a step toward Ollas and brushing against the plant’s closest leaf. A blur of hot and cold emanated from the dirt mix, the churn of magic unmistakable as it filtered straight through her clothing like the barrier wasn’t there. It caught her by surprise, the increasingly familiar pulling at her mind. At her center. A swirl of magic flowed through her fingers, a sympathetic vibration humming beneath her skin. The reaction was subconscious. Second nature, even after all this time.
Even if she’d abandoned it. Called her magic lost. Called—believed—it dead to her. But her spark caught in the arcane reaction happening in the seed tray and swept her along. The flow of magic was so reminiscent, just for a second, of how it had felt on that awful day. Wild, rushing, draining away from her.
No. Eunny fought panic. She was here, in the greenhouse. Not in the delegation’s camp. But the magic was swirling through her fingers, frissons of cold energy pricking her skin. She remembered slipping. Falling. Feeling like some vital part of her was being sucked out. She was losing control, again. A scream built in the back of her throat.
“Keep stirring.”
Eunny blinked. She knew that voice.
“Sorry, should’ve mentioned the reaction. Stir, stir, stir,” Ollas said, making an encouraging motion with his hands. “The enchantment in the amendment weakens if it gets hot or cold spots.”
Automatically, she moved her rake through the dirt, sloshing water onto the dusty mix. The motion dispersed some of the tingling sensation. She focused on the sound of Ollas’s calm voice, willing her hands not to shake.
“It’ll even out as it sets, and the spell in the granules helps ward against rot. Not perfectly, but they help with the water retention worked into the mix and the cold spells.” Ollas added more dirt to the tray and gently tamped it around the base of the plantlets. “Lets us push it with how wet we can let the trays get in this climate. Especially these days.”
Eunny kept dragging the hand tool through the dirt until the roar of blood no longer rushed through her ears. Her hand only shook a little as she set the rake aside. She stared at the plants. The pulling sensation was dissipating, the arcane flow sinking into the dirt. Fading. No, absorbing. With her panic easing, Eunny realized that the magic reaction wasn’t the same as when she’d lost control. That had been a terrifying, frictionless drain as her magic streamed away. But these plants, or the dirt, or some combination thereof, they didn’t pull her magic away so much as absorb what was at hand.
That pulling sensation. Its familiarity went beyond her fall into the patch outside the greenhouse. These seemingly benign plants, leftovers from the delegation… She was certain she’d never seen them, at least not in this fully grown form. But the absorptive properties…
A vague memory flitted in the foggy recesses of her mind, of times she’d tried so hard to never think of again.
“Eunji, come look at these. They say they’re healing plants.”
“What do you expect me to do with these?” Eunny held the seeds up in front of her face. “Goddess break, Mother! For the last time, if you wanted plant knowledge, you should’ve brought a grovetender. Or a mender who gardened. Anyone but me!”
She’d probed the seeds with her magic, for all the good it would do. Unless they were meant to be eaten, Eunny wasn’t the kind of apothecary who grew her own wares, and thus didn’t know what to do when given plants before they even started to become plants. The seeds hadn’t reacted at all, just sucked up her magic. No resonance, no spark, no indication that they were anything useful. They were just there, taking up space. Which was rather how Eunny had felt at the delegation.
Maybe Ollas was right—something was going on. With the plants, and with her mother. It was too coincidental. Eunny could accept that the Coalition would want to keep an eye on the elective given its obsession with being in everyone’s business when it came to trade. But the strange magnetism of the plants, and how that magnetism seemed to be affecting not just her but Ollas, too? Bioon repeatedly asking Eunny about new developments in the elective, wanting Eunny to spy on Ollas? It didn’t make sense. She didn’t understand it.
But…she didn’t have to. If Ollas’s plant nerdery was going to put him in the path of the Coalition, of her mother, Eunny knew whose side she would take every time.
“You said you were looking into the records for these things?” Eunny asked, waving a hand at the tray as Ollas resettled it on the lower shelf. “Let me know if I can do anything. I need plausible reasons to be helping you with your work.”
After they’d cleaned up from their adventures in the greenhouse, Ollas grabbed his exam paperwork and motioned toward the door. “Home?”
A heady warmth filled him when she nodded. It was a simple affirmation, and likely one he was taking too literally, but having Eunny consider the apartment her home…it was a feeling he never wanted to lose.
Eunny fell into step beside him.
“Did you feel anything?” she asked as they locked up. “Anything weird? When I was adding the new dirt.”
