Eva couldn’t create life out of nothing. Her gift merely coaxed existing seeds and bulbs in the soil out of dormancy. She’d limited her garden to local flora so as not to introduce any invasive species to the area, but in here?
She could grow anything she wanted.
Past the bags of fertilizer and a clothesline strung with drying sage lay a pile of books Eva had long neglected. She rifled through the stack. A homesteader’s field guide. A historical romance novel she’d read a dozen times. A book on local songbirds. When she opened that one, the pages made a loud, unsticking sound. Something old and tarry had been thumbed across an image of an oriole. Eva touched the bird.Probably sap.They used to take this book into the woods on birdwatching days.
But when she took a whiff, she realized she was wrong.
Honey.
With a hard swallow, Eva recalled her father’s painful gasp as he begged her for honey.Lottie’s honey.Eva had never seen him so desperate, and it scared her not to understand.
She was missing something.
At the bottom of the stack, Eva found a folder full of pressed flower heads, and her heart skipped. Dad had built her a flower press for her eleventh birthday. He had made a big show of it, and the two of them had spent the afternoon collecting and preserving blooms while Dad told her stories.
Eva frowned, rubbing her thumb over a pink petal. The smooth and delicate silk wrinkled under the pressure.
Dad had a whole trove of heartbreaking folktales. Eva still remembered her favorite, about a honeyman who found magic in the wildflower fields on their mountains. He tried to take the magic home in sachets full of seeds, but by then the forest had already wriggled into his veins, and the seeds bloomed instead, spilling flowers out his pockets.
Eva sniffed, then immediately wrinkled her nose, forgetting the tale as the smell of rot hit her. She tracked it to a pot of heirloom tomatoes. Just this morning, they’d been heavy with bulbous fruit, but the weight of her emotions had over-ripened them. Now a sour flavor stained the air, and a rime of mold coated the tomato skin in fuzzy white-blue patches.
Eva pushed out a breath. “You are in control.”
When she sat back on her haunches, a steel box shoved far into the shadows under the counter caught her eye. Cobwebs silked the backs of her fingers as she dragged it forward. Eva shook them off, goose bumps stippling up her arms. A bit of dust sprayed out when she popped the lid, making her cough. Eva waved it away and lifted one of the thin green notebooks from the stack inside.
Dad’s journals.
Eva ran her thumb over the smooth laminated cover. In his giant hands, they had always seemed so small and trivial. Now this one weighed heavily in her grasp.
Something gnawed at the back of her mind.
Her father kept a detailed record of his life and business. He’d shown Eva some of the charts he made, tracking the patterns and preferences of their bees so they could better serve their needs as keepers. He kept logs of their apiaries, too, and made sketches of the trails he took up the mountain, noting the herbs he found along the way.
Eva lifted the cover page, then stopped herself. She’d never intruded on his privacy before, and even the thought of doing so now made her itch. But something nagged at her.
Her father’s stories weren’t always children’s tales. They could be wicked, thorny things. In some, the honeyman was punished for trying to steal away the magic he’d found. Dad’s imagination made every new retelling more fantastical and jarring. Perhaps the honeyman’s lungs filled with waterweeds or he sprouted honeysuckle from his ears!
A shudder moved through her.
They were just stories.
And yet while Eva had studied cures to common ailments, nothing she’d tried had ever worked on the aspen tree rooted inside her father’s body. Her father’s condition wasn’t exactly one you would expect to find in an anatomy book or a tome on ancient herbal wisdom. It was strange, and wrong, and horrifying.
What are you hiding, Dad?
Eva skated her thumb across the cover again. She knew there were things he’d never told her.
Or maybe he had.
Eva let out a breath. “This is crazy,” she said aloud, needing to physicalize the turn of her thoughts, to ground herself in reality. Those were just stories!
But what if she was wrong? What if there was something more, hidden in his half-truths?
She didn’t want to break his trust, but… Eva flashed to the strain of his lungs as he had succumbed to sleep. She pictured the withered tree in his chest, its heartwood barely pulsing.
Chest tight, she flipped the journal open.
At first, Eva found nothing of significance between the pages. There were detailed annotations and instructions for new hikers and seasoned veterans of the woods alike. Dad had a way of spotting treasures others would pass by. Troves of hidden ginseng untouched by sang hunters. Fields of bloodroot, which blossomed only a few weeks a year. Goldenseal, which had become so popular now that people often forgot you could overharvest a good thing.
