“I’m sure. You could barely keep my window boxes alive, let alone study like an earth mage.” Yerina chortled to herself as she got to her feet. “Oh, before I forget, you’ve got a letter from Dae. I was just about to have it sent up to the school.”
She dug around in an apron pocket and pulled out a small envelope with Dae’s clean handwriting on the front.
“I’ll tell your mother about your school adventures in my next letter,” Yerina said, her tone becoming too casual. Eunny suppressed the urge to roll her eyes. “Unless you’d rather tell her yourself?”
“Only you enjoy one-way correspondence, Auntie,” Eunny said dryly. “Tell her. Don’t tell her. She’s not going to care either way.”
In typical Yerina fashion, she managed to both ignore Eunny’s negativity and insist she was wrong at the same time. She hugged her again before going back to checking on patrons, and Eunny made her way back to Sylveren.
Her aunt’s joy in Eunny’s activities reminded her of Ollas—happy that she seemed happy. And Eunny was. More than she could remember being in a long while. Unburdened enough that she’d actually touched her magic, even if by accident. Only a touch, but even that would’ve been unthinkable at the start of term. She’d drawn up a few drops of magic and it had been… fine.
Eunny read Dae’s letter as she made her way back to the Grove. Considering they’d just seen each other in the last fortnight, Dae must have written it shortly after arriving back in Rhell. Eunny knew they liked to correspond a lot, but this was excessive.
Dae’s letter was indeed short. Not even a proper letter-letter, but more like a hastily penned note. The secret delegation plant had transplanted well into the containment zone’s blighted soil, and preliminary tests from the camp’s mender suggested it would apply well to preventative tonics. Not enough to cure those badly sickened by long exposure to the poison, but effective in slowing the concentrated toxicity’s ability to infect the healthy.
The menders think this might eliminate the need to leave the containment zones for long periods to recuperate, Dae wrote. Make more if you can!
Eunny reread Dae’s final plea, the words burning into memory long after she’d stowed the note back in her cloak pocket.
Maybe Ollas was right. The secret plants’ rate of change seemed to support his theory. The strange pull. The restlessness that had been building all summer, that had taken off once Eunny and Ollas were in close proximity again, once the plants had gotten a taste of her magic. Could the medley of sensations all have been part of the imprinting spell he spoke of, imparting a subconscious urge to fulfill it? To make the plants bloom? But they fed on magic—her magic—and they needed more of it to make it past the current stall they had at just leaves. Ollas could propagate every single clump outside of the greenhouse, but they wouldn’t achieve their new state, the healing variety Dae wrote of, without magic.
Back in her new apartment, Eunny immediately went to the counter where her trio of stems were suspended in glass vials filled with plain water. They’d exploded with new roots overnight. When she brought her face up next to one, a faint pulse of warmth emanated from the leaves.
Hesitantly, she touched one of the leaves and called up just a speck of her inner light. Only a scrap of it, enough to search for a hint of resonance and no more.
A single sparkle of golden light slipped from her finger to the satiny green leaf. It flared bright like an ember, then winked out. Yet in that brief moment, Eunny felt a hum of magic, as if the plant had been imbued. The hum held familiar notes of her own magic…and something else. Someone else.
Not body magic, but she’d remember the signature of Ollas and his thready light forever. Would always remember how her magic had ensnared him, tangled with his feeble light and traced through his body, wreaking havoc.
I think it’s us.
The memory of their electric lovemaking dimmed a bit in Eunny’s mind. He was right; they were affecting the plants. The imprinting spell, or whatever caused the instinctive pull in them, it took advantage when passions were running high. Any time self-control waned.
Eunny sank into a chair, eyes never leaving the plants in their glass vials on the counter. They were still so small. Now that she looked at them and knew their inner hum, it was impossible not to feel it: a gentle presence but persistent, always tugging for more. She hadn’t been able to put a name to the feeling before, but now…
The idea of giving the plants more of herself was disquieting. Had needles of fear and denial and no clamoring in her head. She balled her hands into fists, fingernails biting into her palms enough to make the rising panic subside. The pain didn’t vanish fully, but it gave her enough room for clarity.
She wasn’t in this alone.
Chapter Seventeen
Nevin—Sorry this took so long, but I had to hunt just for this much. Noc Lowe is liaising with the Coalition for waterway access, might know someone who knows more. Let me know if you want to get in touch.
Ollas’s friend who clerked for the Sentinels had finally written back. If one could call this brief letter such; it was attached to a hasty copy of the Sentinel inventory logs. Many items were scratched or blacked out, with a scribble at the bottom indicating transfer to an unintelligible name. A jaggedness to the magicked pigment used for the copying work implied that parts of the logs had been torn away. At the end of the last page was a weak impression of the Coalition’s seal of a wheel enclosing a coin.
He didn’t have a lot of hope that Ranger Noc Lowe could get any more news if the Coalition was involved, but anything was better than the pages of heavily redacted records.
Frowning at the sorry state of the “logs,” Ollas went into the storage greenhouse to check on the new tray of cuttings started from the delegation plants. He knelt to observe them where they were stowed on the lower shelf. All but one had fully converted from resembling grass to bearing blade-shaped leaves. Further inspection revealed that the lone outlier wasn’t simply slower to change than its brethren—it had died.
Removing the dead plant from the tray, Ollas carried the pot back into the greenhouse’s main room. He left the pot in the washbasin to be cleaned later and carried what remained of the plant over to the counter, stopping short of the compost collection bucket. A physical inspection didn’t reveal any signs of rot or disease, no pest infestation or anything else that would indicate a need for the burn pile. But there was also nothing that would easily explain why the plant had turned a deadish brown and gone crispy, as if it had dried out. The soil around the brittle roots remained moderately wet. A quick test with one of the soil probes reported good parameters, which were echoed when he checked the surviving starts, too.
A frown creased his brow. Ollas never expected a perfect success rate, and sometimes an individual simply didn’t thrive. But seedling death didn’t usually appear so at odds with the growing conditions. His failed plantlet looked as if it had been dehydrated.
Ollas summoned a touch of his magic and gently pushed it into a browned leaf. The plant didn’t absorb his magic so much as the drop of golden light shattered, breaking apart into the tiniest wisp of smoke and fading away.
“What happened to you?” Ollas murmured.
“Nev!”
