Angie looked around her friend and echoed the cussing. Overnight, their garden patch had wilted and turned brown.
Mud started breathing hard. Her fists clenched. Leaves pushed out of her scalp and out of her fingernails and, Angie knew, out of her toenails to bunch up in her boots. Mud bent and put her fingers into the ground, digging into the dirt. She was reading the land, and Angie wondered what that might feel like, to be so intimately attuned to the land.
Mud cussed again and when she spoke it was nearly a growl, her accent different, her words slow and vicious. She stood upright and slammed her walking stick tip into the ground as if she was claiming the earth beneath her feet. Or casting a working that Mud wasn’t supposed to be able to do. Or making a pronouncement like a queen or something.
“Theys murdered my plants,” she snarled. “They used the herbicide in the Earth Magic Shed.” Her gaze met Angie’s and it almost seemed as if there were vines snaking inside of Mud’s greenish eyes. “You’un know that revenge we’ns been talking ’bout?” Her voice was so soft it was like a whisper, talking in the “hillbilly” accent she saved for friends and family. “They’s gon’ pay and pay big. And I don’t care if I get thrown outta magic camp forever.”
That sounded a lot like vengeance, and revenge was dangerous if it was magical. But Mud wasn’t magical in the way Angie was so . . . “Okay,” Angie said, not knowing what Mud might do, but knowing that she was in.
Angie broke the visual contact and walked to the near corner of their garden and stooped. “They even killed your basils. You loved your basils.” Angie saw a strange pattern beneath a dead tomato plant, green and yellow coiled together like . . . “Oh, no. Mud,” she whispered. Pushing aside the wilted leaves, she revealed a green snake with yellow-green stripes along its length. Its head had been neatly severed from its body.
“What are you girls doing?” a voice called.
It was Mirilis, of the Richardson witch clan, an eighteen-year-old witch counselor in charge of the gardens. When she reached them she said, “What the heee-ck happened here?”
“Herbicide,” Mud spat.
“No. How could that happen? Who would put herbicides onto a garden plot?”
Angie picked up Mud’s murdered snake, its body limp in her hands. “Same people who killed a peaceful garter snake.”
“Awww. Thamnophis sirtalis,” Mirilis said. “An Eastern green garter snake. Someone must have accidently hit it with a hoe.”
“Must have,” Mud said, her voice cold as a winter ice storm. Green leaves poked through her brown hair and rustled as if with a hard wind. “Huge mishap. Just like the accident of the herbicide on our garden patch.”
Mirilis avoided the dangerous glint in Mud’s eyes, turning away from the weirdness of the leaves moving on Mud’s head and fingers, and shoved her hands into her pockets. “I’m sure it was.” Her shoulders went up high, as if she knew she was telling a lie but didn’t know how to deal with the truth. “You two can start a new garden patch over there.” She nodded to the back of the garden. “Just requisition some seeds from the Earth Magic Shed.”
“Sure.” Mud took a slow breath and the rustling of her leaves calmed. “We’ll do that. Thank you, Mirilis.”
Mirilis gave a quick nod and walked away, fast.
“She knows. But she’s scared of the girls in Cabin A too,” Mud said.
“We can’t prove it was them,” Angie said, placing the dead snake and its head into Mud’s leafy hands.
“We’uns gon’ find outexactlywho done this,” Mud murmured. “Exactly. Who. Did. It. And then I’ll get back myown.” She lifted her eyes to Angie’s again. “I’m gonna get in bad trouble.”
“I guess that’ll mean we both get expelled,” Angie said, thinking that wasn’t really a bad thing, in her opinion.
“You’un still in?”
“I’m in. If no one’s touched the pesticide container since the person who did this, I might be able to pick up a hint of who used it last. They taught us how to calculate atouchworking in geometry class. I just need some string and a stick.” The last part was a lie, if a necessary one.
“Imma bury Sir Thamnos first.”
“Okay. I . . . need to go by the cabin and get my stick and string out of my locker.” Angie needed nothing from her cabin except an opportunity to cast anobfuscationworking over herself, though she would grab the stick and string anyway. It was hard to keep secrets. There was no reason to burden her new friend with any of hers.
Mud blew what might have been agreement though her nose, or might have been a sniff. Angie was pretty sure the older girl was crying.
Acting casual—she hoped—Angie walked to Cabin L, which was empty this time of day. She opened anobfuscationover herself—not actually disappearing from sight, but simply making people not notice her—and made the short trip to the cabin where Carm, Jessa, and the mean girls slept. Once inside, Angie touched each bunk, tying a slender thread of amarkingworking to the residual magic on each mattress.
Residual magic was another of the secrets Angie had to keep because her family was planning to patent aresidual magic seeingworking, mostly because of her. Three years ago, Angie had pointed out that her Basset Hound, George, always came away coated with EJ’s magic cooties when they played together, magic cooties later being explained to her as, possibly, residualmagic. She would never be credited on the patent, because of those stupid secrets, but her family knew who had led them to a money-making working and her parents planned to put her share of the proceeds into a college fund. Angie would rather have had a horse, but no one asked her.
Carrying the filaments of her magic in a closed fist, like strings, Angie slipped out of Cabin A and back to Cabin L, where she dropped theobfuscationworking and took the path back to Mud, nodding her puke green head at some of the other girls here and there. Most stared at her hair; a few giggled. All were heading to activities for free time—at the barn or in hammocks, reading, or whatever. Angie was using her free time to help Mud find out who had killed her plants, her snake, and, maybe, find out who had given her puke green hair. Because it could be the same person.
???
Mud gave her a tiny nod, indicating the path was clear, and Angie untied the latch of the Earth Magic Shed, slipping inside.
