Work Text:
(if a box is empty anything can be put inside it. if a field is empty anything can grow.)
On the long bus ride to Canaan Valley, Harrowhark Nonagesimus discovers three things: firstly, that there are places in the world so green that you can taste it in the air, even through a thick pane of glass—secondly, that she doesn’t know what to do with her hands when she isn’t holding her prayer bones—and thirdly, that she’s prone to carsickness.
For so much of her life, Harrow had thought she was above the baser bodily reaction of nausea. She never fell ill, never disagreed with the food they served her at Drearburh, even when it tasted terrible and went down the throat like a legion of wounded soldiers stumbling to their deaths. How embarrassing, to be proven wrong—and on public transportation, of all places. The bus driver spares her a kind, if patronizing look when she stumbles up to the front, pointing her to a stack of utilitarian barf bags balanced on top of a first aid kit.
Harrow wrinkles her nose in distaste. She takes three.
Back in her seat, breathing slowly in through her nose, Harrow considers the letter. She hadn’t needed to reread it for the forty-fifth time—in fact, perhaps she’d brought that bout of illness upon herself by doing so. Still, she can’t tear her eyes off of the thin piece of folded paper, perched like a white bird atop the empty seat beside her. The words, by now, are burned into her brain, carved with a fine scalpel into the neocortex:
Dearest Harrowhark,
If you’re reading this, I believe you are ready for a change.
The same thing happened to me, long ago. I’d lost sight of what mattered most in life… real connections, with other people, with nature. Freedom. So I dropped everything, and moved to the place where I could truly re-find myself. I’ve enclosed the deed to that place… my pride and joy, Novenary Farm. It’s located in Canaan Valley, on the southern coast. A perfect spot for a fresh start.
This was my most precious gift of all, and now it’s yours. I know you will take good care of it, as it will take care of you. Fear not the unknown, Harrowhark. Sometimes the thing you need most is the one you least expect.
Yours in service to the Unrolled Rock ;),
Aiglamene
P.S. If Pyrrha Dve is still alive, say hi to her for me, will you?
Harrow has to assume the clearly rendered winking face is a reference to the fact that she is decidedly betraying the will of Drearburh by even holding onto this letter, much less following its instructions. When she first received it, taped snugly across the bottom of a dinner plate, she barely read two lines before shoving it underneath her threadbare mattress, trembling with something she promised herself was rage. Three days later, she crawled out of bed, and read the letter by the thin faucet-streams of moonlight that crept through her window. By the time the next dusk fell upon Drearburh, she was already gone.
The bus rolls along. Harrow folds the corner of the topmost barf bag over itself, unfolds it, and then refolds it backwards. She repeats this process until the thin cuticle of a triangle flakes off from the rest of the bag. Something about the repetitive twist of her fingers soothes her. She chooses not to examine that. Instead, she squeezes lightly at the thin piece of skin between her thumb and forefinger, watches the flesh desaturate.
Time stretches, taffy-like. Harrow only realizes she’s dozed off when the bus thuds over a bump in the road, jostling her nearly off of her seat. She startles, scrambling to a more secure sitting position, arm hooked around the back of her chair. Outside, the sky is increments darker, the lower curve of the sun dipping down to rest behind the treeline. And there are trees, here. What she thought was an excess of greenery pales in comparison to the dense forest surrounding her now. Clouds of dust spray up from the poorly paved road, coating the already dull windows in a thin sheen of gray.
Harrow’s the only passenger left. This would be alarming, if the bus were not crawling to a halt beside a clearly paved bus stop. She blinks the remnants of sleep from her eyes, gathering her meager belongings, hefting her backpack over her shoulder. The weight of it hangs improbably heavier—something about the air here makes her feel paper-thin, where at Drearburh she might have felt like fine porcelain.
“Dominicus,” the bus driver announces, superfluously.
“Thank you,” Harrow says—prim, perfunctory—and begins her graceful descent down the bus steps.
The bus stop is painfully rural—a single payphone stands at the end of a thin line of stepping stones, surrounded by a bundle of thin leafy trees. A dirt road sprawls out in front of her, curving around a halfway-decayed fence to the left, stumbling through a narrow break in the trees to the right. The grass here bends underneath Harrow’s boots, springing back up when she lifts a cautious foot. Even the wildflowers burst with vitality.
“You must be Harrowhark.” A cheerful voice interrupts Harrow’s vague musing. She glances up, greeted by the sight of a broad-shouldered man with warm brown skin and dark curly hair, dressed sensibly in a pair of dark trousers and a flannel shirt. His hand stretches out to her, and after a moment of consideration she shakes it, noting the calluses on his fingers. “The name’s Magnus. I must say, it’s nice to finally meet you.”
“Just Harrow is fine,” Harrow says, automatically. She draws her hand back, clutching warily at the elbow of her opposite arm. “You’re—the carpenter. I spoke to you on the phone.”
“The very same,” Magnus confirms. And then, with a decided twinkle in his dark eyes: “If you wood believe it.” He must see through her pitiful attempt to suppress the raw cringe roiling through her every nerve, because he laughs, a full-bodied and musical thing. Harrow hasn’t heard anyone laugh like that in—a long while, and it nearly startles her. “Oh, forgive me, Harrow,” Magnus says. “I have to try these out on new friends. If Jeanne and Isaac hear another pun from my mouth, I’m afraid they’ll shove my sleeping body into the incinerator.”
New friends. Harrow rolls the words around in her brain, but fails to make any sense of them. By now, the bus has pulled away—Harrow notes this academically, and not because she feels any urge to ride it all the way back to Drearburh and beg for the church’s forgiveness. She has no earthly idea how to begin to respond to the sheer amount of positivity Magnus is emanating, so she does the sensible thing, and says nothing at all.
“Alright,” Magnus says, seemingly taking pity on her. “Let’s get you over to the farmhouse.”
“Thank you,” Harrow says, defaulting to the very comfortable phrase. Courtesy is a mark of all faiths, and let none say she fall short in it, amen.
They walk down the dirt path, and then—dreadfully—turn to the right, towards the weed-eaten walkway. Harrow delicately picks her way between dew-wet dandelions, keeping her arms tight to her sides, so as to brush against the wavering branches of close-cropped trees as little as possible. She ducks beneath a faded wooden signpost, shooting up from the ground at a decidedly acute angle.
“You’re lucky to arrive here second,” Magnus says, holding a low-hanging branch out of the way. “Last week, this place was—pardon my saying so—a right dump. We only fixed the running water up yesterday.”
“Second,” Harrow echoes, stomach filling with the low-drop dread of having stepped directly into a pitfall trap. Aiglamene’s letter hadn’t mentioned anything about being second.
If Magnus responds, she doesn’t hear it, because they round the corner, and Aiglamene’s farmhouse comes into view.
He was right to call it a dump. It’s a two story building, maybe a third as long as Drearburh’s main temple and half as tall. The red cedar plank walls are overgrown with whorls of flowering vines, and the brown brick fireplace jutting out of the slate roof looks halfway crumpled. A large oak tree juts through a split in the porch, curving around the side of the house like the arm of a lover. And there, standing by the deep maroon door, haloed in sickly fizzling lamplight, is Gideon Nav.
“I’ll leave you two to your reunion,” Magnus says, after a pause so pregnant even Crux would have consigned it to bedrest. He makes a strong exit back towards the bus stop.
Harrow’s brain is a wreck of overfed neurons. Even in the moth-bitten light, she can make out Gideon’s silhouette, the lines of her face. Largely unchanged, in three years—stiff-shouldered, strong-armed, stubbornly light on her feet, like she’s a half-second away from taking off. But there’s an unexpected sense of ease in her face that makes Harrow—uncomfortable, like she’s bearing witness to something intensely personal just by meeting Gideon’s gaze. Still, she stands, and looks, and is watched, and wonders what Gideon sees—if she’s noticing the ways Harrow has changed, or hasn’t.
“Long time no see,” Gideon says, eventually. Her voice is guarded, eyes narrowed.
And—well—Harrow swallows. “I can take the first bus back,” she says, stiff-shouldered, showing no weakness.
Gideon makes a scoffing noise that takes Harrow right back to being twelve years old, and refusing to climb the willow tree in the backyard. “Don’t play martyr, Nonagesimus, it doesn’t suit you.” When Harrow glances up, there’s a strange edge to the grin on her face. She shakes her head, bright hair puffing up like licks of flame in the humid air. “Come on. There’s, like, a shit-ton of mosquitos out here.”
At a loss for anything else to do, Harrow hefts her backpack more solidly onto her shoulder, and follows Gideon inside the farmhouse.
The interior is partially bathed in orange light. “Magnus offered to bring a few lamps over,” Gideon explains, waving a hand to the weak ceiling fluorescent casting a hazy glow on the dark-wrought floorboards. “‘Til then, we’re stuck with this creepy relic, though I suppose it’s better than nothing.”
Harrow glances around. The entry room of the farmhouse is bare-bones, even by her standards: a rug that is mostly thread, a couch on the verge of collapse, and a TV set that appears to be older than Harrow and Gideon put together. To the left, carpeted stairs peter off up into the darkness of the second floor. There are some things mounted on the walls—a collection of maritime knots, a painting of what might be a chicken and might be a cloud, an ominously large fish—but it’s too dark to make out much detail.
She notices, after a moment, that Gideon is watching her, with an expression she has no hope of placing. That feeling of paper-thinness surges through her, again, almost violent in its flimsiness. “You knew,” Harrow says, hating instantly how meek her voice sounds. “You knew that Aiglamene meant this for the both of us.”
Gideon barks out a laugh, more impatience than delight. “Well, I didn’t think you’d actually deign to grace me with your presence, my saturnine sire.”
And, it’s just that—Harrow has had what might be the second-longest day of her whole entire life. She feels smaller and more alone than she has ever been before, like a plastic grocery bag drifting down a highway, battered about by the wind. And to add insult to injury, she’s still nauseated from traveling on that God-forsaken bus from Hell. “Fuck you, Nav,” Harrow bites, blood rushing embarrassingly to her cheeks, before turning tail and stalking towards what she prays is a bedroom.
“Go ahead, take the bed, Reverend Daughter,” Gideon calls after her, voice dry as summer concrete. “May the mattress springs unspool and gut you like a fish.”
Harrow slams the door behind her, but the walls of the house are so shittily constructed that the barrier blocks none of Gideon Nav’s hateful, bitter voice. Through measured breaths, she takes in the details of this new space. The ground floor bedroom is similarly sparsely decorated—a queen-sized bed pushed against the wall between two curtained windows and a faux cow’s hide rug tucked underneath its frontmost legs amounts to all of the furniture. Another large window sits on the opposite wall, curtains pulled open to provide a view of the rest of Novenary Farm. Harrow’s gaze skitters over it—the mass of dark shapes outside, the felled logs and boulders and smatterings of trees—and then she yanks the blinds closed. She’ll have time to think about that tomorrow.
Gingerly, she sits herself down on the edge of the bed, backpack slumping off of her shoulder. She starts the process of pulling her boots off, listening for noise from the other room—but Gideon is silent, and the only sounds she hears are the chirp of crickets, the rustle of leaves, the creeks of an old house settling down for the night. Harrow changes quietly into her set of pajamas, and then awkwardly slips underneath the duvet cover, resting her head on the corner of one stiff pillow. It smells like dust, mostly, and nothing else, which Harrow is grateful down to the bone for.
A very small part of her thinks about getting up, going to find Gideon, and apologizing. Offering use of her bed back to her. After all, she reasons, they’re going to have to live alongside one another for the foreseeable future. That’ll be easier if they aren’t already at each other’s throats. But the rest of Harrow treats that small part with the ridicule such a fantasy demands. Gideon would never believe or accept any kind of offering Harrow made to her. The incident with Sister Glaurica when they were fourteen is proof of that. Besides—Gideon had started it.
Instead, she lays very still, in a bed larger than any she can ever remember sleeping in, further away from home than she can ever remember being. If there even is such a place for her, anymore. Harrow closes her eyes, curls an arm around herself, and clears her mind of every stray thought, until the only thing she can hear is the sound of her own breath. She falls asleep like that.
Harrow wakes with the sun, as is her customary. It only takes a moment for her to remember where she is—so strange is every aspect of her new situation, from the sunlight streaming directly through the gaps in the curtains, to the new smells of wood and grass and dust and lively things, to the coldness of the air as it travels through her nose. Something about it aches when she breathes, like poking at a ripe bruise.
The farmhouse is easier to traverse in the daylight, so Harrow spends a few minutes poking around. There are more rooms on the first floor than the main entrance and the room she’d slept in—off to the right, there’s a bathroom, and behind the front hallway is a decrepit little kitchen that looks to be cultivating at least three kinds of fungi. Gideon and Magnus obviously hadn’t gotten to this room, yet, though a small icebox in the corner reveals some fresh packaged sandwiches and one half-eaten salad. Harrow wonders if the rest of the house looked like this when Gideon arrived, and feels a horrid moment of begrudging respect that she did not immediately turn tail and run, if that was indeed the case.
She finds Gideon herself on the second floor, in one of the three extra rooms there, curled up on top of a bundle of clothes in a dark and slightly damp corner. In the light of morning, Harrow can better articulate the shape of her—sun-browned, hearty, with the same scarred notch across her eyebrow. Her orange hair flops messily over her forehead, and her mouth hangs slightly open as she breathes. Harrow watches her with narrowed eyes for a few moments, determining with some disappointment that she is, in fact, still alive, before turning and making her way back downstairs.
The first step, she thinks, dressing in her heartiest clothes, must be to clear out some of the farmland outside. Then, she can… buy seeds, surely, and plant them, and, at some point, ostensibly harvest them. Perhaps there’s a book she can read about it, to glean more detail on the subject beyond the common-sense overview. Harrow isn’t sure what Gideon Nav’s plans in Canaan Valley are, but she, at least, refuses to remain in someone else’s charity. The faster she can use the farm for its intended purpose, the sooner she can become self-sufficient.
And then—well, she can figure out and then when and then arrives, and not a moment sooner.
After she finishes pulling a pair of thick pants over her knees, Harrow steps back out onto the porch, and very nearly trips over a package left there on the stoop. It’s a small brown box, wrapped in green ribbon—unlabelled for anyone specifically, so Harrow feels no compunction for pulling the ribbon bow free, and unfolding the thick paper. Inside, there is a package of seeds, striped like small, flat seashells. The lettering on the bag labels them as parsnips. There’s also a small note, handwritten:
Here’s a little something to get you started.
-Mayor John Gaius
Harrow had also spoken to Mayor John Gaius on the phone. He seemed a reasonable man, if a little scatterbrained. Now, she wonders at his sleep schedule, to have this delivered after she arrived but before she woke up. Or—maybe he had someone else deliver it. The mayor of a town most likely has more important duties to attend to than walking around as a one-man mail service.
She returns her gaze to the seeds, all of which are smaller than her littlest fingernail, like brown specks of confetti. Harrow shakes them back into the packaging, and then looks out, surveying Novenary Farm in daylight for the first time.
Once again, Magnus’s assertion that the place was a right dump serves some level of accuracy. The land is absolutely littered with weeds, growing so thickly around and among the grass that she can barely see through to the dirt below. Full-headed oak, maple, and pine trees scatter around the property, casting shadows onto the burgeoning plantlife, interrupted by huge chunks of stone. Harrow spares a moment to wonder how boulders that big even got there, but she can’t come to any meaningful conclusions. There are two ponds that she can see from the porch, each covered in a thick layer of algae and dead bugs.
Looking out upon the mess that she now co-owns should, in theory, fill Harrow with a sense of desolation, or at the least disappointment. Instead, all she feels is a quiet and peaceful emptiness. Like all of the things that have weighed her down are nothing more than cobwebs, ready to be swept aside, whenever she’s ready. Like there’s work to be done.
The weeds have grown stubborn over many years of growth, and Harrow is, admittedly, not the most physically capable she could be. After a little over an hour—it feels like forever, but her father’s watch hasn’t been wrong in the nine years she’s worn it—she’s cleared a medium-sized patch of dirt, piling the long stalks of thick greenery off to the side, by the edge of the pond. Harrow slumps down to her knees, panting from the exertion. With one absentminded hand, she swipes at the layer of algae over the pond, trailing her fingers through the transparent water revealed beneath. A tiny minnow of a fish darts curiously around the new patch of sunlight. It’s—a relief, strangely, to find life remaining beneath the sludge of time.
“Is that you, Harrowhark?” A new voice calls out.
Harrow shoots upright and immediately regrets it, vertigo pulling at her from spine to brain stem. By the time her vision has stopped swaying like an overburdened tree branch, the owner of the voice has crouched in front of her, casting a helpful shadow over her sun-hot head. She blinks up at a middle-aged man, simply dressed, with dark, short-cropped hair and even darker eyes—impossibly dark eyes, lined with faint wrinkles at the corners. “I’m fine,” she says, and then, reflexively, “thank you.”
“Forgive me,” the man says, standing—and now she recognizes that low rasp, different though it sounds in real life. “I stopped by to see how you were settling in, and of course, to formally introduce myself.” He holds out a hand, and after a half-second spared for feeling the depths of humiliation, she accepts it, allowing herself to be pulled to her feet. “It is good to meet you in person, Harrowhark.”
“Harrow, please, Mayor Gaius,” Harrow corrects, dusting dirt off her dark pants. She surprised herself, initially, by her own repeated insistence upon it, but something about her full name makes her feel a little cold, in a way the diminutive doesn’t.
“Then you must call me John,” the mayor replies with a genial smile, the crinkles around his eyes blooming like night lilies.
Harrow blanches. “Alright,” she says, resolving to never do that, even under pain of torture or death. “I appreciated your gift—the seeds, if they were meant for me.”
Mayor John Gaius nods. “They were. I’ve spent some time with Gideon, and she didn’t strike me as much of a farmer.” Less than I do? Harrow thinks, and also: What on Earth is she doing living on a farm, then? “I see you’ve been preparing to put them to use. Would you care to take a break, and walk with me?”
After a moment of trying and failing to find a polite way to decline his offer, Harrow gives an aborted nod. “Let me put these away, then,” she says.
Mayor Gaius waits outside while she finds a desk in the bedroom to carefully fold the seed packet on, and changes into looser fitting clothes. Barely an hour spent outside, and she’d already sweat through the long shirt and thicker pants she’d chosen to wear. Perhaps the darkness of the fabric hadn’t helped, but the idea of wearing the type of clothes Magnus had—saturated, soft flannels—or even what Gideon had on the night before, a gray tank top with long holes in the arms—makes her skin feel uneasy, and over-raw. She’ll just have to acclimate to the new heat her own way.
They pick their way through the overgrown path back to the bus stop in a semi-companionable quiet that Mayor Gaius seems more comfortable in than Harrow feels. Then, they continue down the wider dirt road, small pockets of dust flying up in the wake of their footsteps. “How was your first night in Canaan Valley?” Mayor Gaius asks, as they pass onto ground shaded by a small cliffside.
A part of Harrow wants to say, Fine, considering Gideon Nav is just as stubbornly obstinate and rude as she was when I last knew her. Or, perhaps, Alright, except I think I might have already ruined any chance I have at successful cohabitation with the person I didn’t know I’d be living with. Maybe even, The bed was cold and creaky and the walls were thin enough to hear the wind through. I barely slept. It was better than any night I’ve spent anywhere else, and I could die of guilt just thinking it.
“Restful,” she says, after too long of a moment.
“Good,” Mayor Gaius says, in his warm and kind voice, as though she hadn’t faltered at all.
Harrow realizes he’s taking her towards the town proper when the dirt road beneath them turns into squares of paved stone. The solid material clacks pleasantly under her boots as she walks, and she focuses on the sound, instead of anything her heart of breath might be doing at the prospect of interacting with new people.
The center of town unfolds around the fallen-away cliffside and lines of wooden fencing like the petals of a flower. Harrow takes in the large expanse of the stone path square, the quaint buildings that crop up around patches of grass and well-tended flowerbeds, the green trees and bushes bursting with coral pink, marble-sized berries. There’s less canopy to cut shadows here, and the sun glimmers brightly over the saturated whole of the town, casting glinting reflections on the tiled ground. The smell of warm pastries wafts through the air, as do the ambient chirps of birds, the rustle of wind, the sound of some far-off string instrument.
“Welcome to Dominicus,” Mayor Gaius espouses, only half in her direction. “I’ll walk you around, and, well—point out the important stuff, I suppose.” It’s strange, to hear someone in such a position of authority and import use the word stuff. But Harrow only nods, and then sets her shoulders, steeling herself for the long period of human interaction that lies ahead.
As it turns out, she has very little to be steeled for. It’s still early for people to be out and about, and the few residents they do run into appear to have destinations of their own, so Harrow doesn’t have to do much except introduce herself and listen to some pleasantries. She files the names, appearances, and extraneous details away for later. Abigail Pent—the wildlife biologist, Magnus’s wife, off to the town library—has a focused, wildly intelligent gaze, paired with a sweet and oddly maternal energy that comforts and unnerves Harrow in equal turns. Coronabeth Tridentarius—waitress at the Stardrop Saloon, amateur photographer—walks with the confidence of the impossibly beautiful, cascades of spun-gold hair and a smile full of pearly-white teeth. Silas Octakiseron—well, Harrow hopes to never have to converse with the nephew-or-uncle of the Dominicus blacksmith (it was unclear. She hopes the former, for the sake of future patronage) ever again, as she finds him unbearably creepy. The feeling is mutual, judging by the withering look he sends as she and Mayor Gaius continue their haphazard tour.
He takes her around the main square, pointing out the general store, where she can buy seeds as well as all manner of groceries, and the hospital, attached to its left side. “We keep a small calendar posted on the wall here,” Mayor Gaius says, pointing to the general store’s front window. “Plus, this nifty little notice board, where people can put requests.”
Harrow peers at the cork board. Aside from the lettering labeling it “Help Wanted,” there’s only one notice pinned up. It reads, FOR GIRLS ONLY: psst… I need a Sea Cucumber—you know what it’s for. Keep it secret, okay? -Ianthe
“Well,” Mayor Gaius says, seemingly at a loss, which Harrow can relate to on a molecular level. They move on.
Past the general store lies a thinner dirt path, sandwiched between a simple blue-paneled house and a towering maple tree, cut like a hollow into another cliffside. Harrow and Mayor Gaius pause at the bank of a river that winds around south and east of the town, as though cradling it like an infant. A stone bridge stretches across the stream, leading right into a dirt path on the other side.
Harrow steps out onto the bridge, grasping the stone-brick railing with a tight grip. She turns when she realizes that Mayor Gaius hasn’t followed her. “EdenMore,” he announces, voice quietly grave.
At his accompanying gesture, Harrow looks back out across the river, eyes settling on the modern, square, blue-walled building hunched like a gargoyle over patches of dying grass. A shiny plastic billboard proclaims the store “EdenMore Market: For Eden More Value!” A long chrome truck idles to its side—Harrow can see the faint shape of someone dressed in blue, carrying armfuls of boxes from the truck’s cargo hold to the back of the building.
“Isn’t EdenMore a grocery chain?” Harrow asks, turning back to Mayor Gaius. And then, feeling compelled to elaborate at his faraway expression: “I suppose I didn’t expect a town like this to, well, catch the attention of that kind of—conglomerate.”
Mayor Gaius sighs. When he shakes his head, dark curls of hair float around his temples. “I’m not sure what drew them to Canaan Valley,” he says. “Augustine has been loud in his displeasure, at least. When the higher-ups purchased the property, they insisted that EdenMore would bring a new vitality to Dominicus.” He frowns. “I want to do right by this town, Harrow. I am… still not quite sure what the right thing is, here.”
Harrow has no idea what to say to that, given her lack of knowledge about the geopolitical economic status of this small town in a valley in the middle of nowhere. She nods, placidly, and he seems to appreciate that.
They walk along the riverbed, towards where the salt blows on the breeze. Mayor Gaius points out the blacksmithery, seemingly amused by Harrow’s instinctive shudder at the mention of its inhabitants. Tucked behind the blacksmith’s house is a paneled cabin, painted a deep forest green, with a dark, polished wooden awning. Smoke drifts from the chimney in lazy gray wafts. Through a window halfway shrouded in maroon curtain, Harrow glimpses a room full of bookshelves, cheerfully lit, bursting with calm color. “Ah, the library,” Mayor Gaius says. “I figured you might be the type to enjoy a library. Camilla and Palamedes have been trying to fill out the display cases in the attached museum—without much luck, I’m afraid. Would you like to stop inside?”
Harrow thinks about it—meeting more people, re-plastering her most self-assured and commanding expression over a face she knows is thin and young and amateurish, trailing after Mayor Gaius like a newborn puppy—her skin prickles all over. “Maybe another time,” she says.
They make their way back to the center of the town square. Looking off towards the side of the general store, Harrow notices a stone ramp leading up the side of the cliff face. In the distance, past herds of pink cherry blossom trees, she can see the outline of the roof of another building. “What’s up there, Mayor?” she asks.
Mayor Gaius shakes his head, rueful. “Nothing worth looking at,” he says, which is fantastically cryptic. The only reason Harrow decides not to push is because she simply lacks the energy. Wandering around and meeting people has taken approximately the amount of effort she predicted, but that doesn’t make it any less embarrassing to be exhausted, already, down to the bone and brain stem. “Well,” Mayor Gaius continues, reaching up as though to pat Harrow on the shoulder, and then seemingly thinking better of it, which she is grateful for. “I appreciate you taking the time, Harrow. I’ll let you enjoy the rest of this beautiful day.”
It’s strange—Harrow doesn’t think she’s ever thought of a day as beautiful, before. She looks around, taking in the warmth of the sunlight, the clean air, the lightness of the clothes around her shoulders. There are a few clouds in the sapphire blue sky, drifting along like wisps of cotton fluff. A faint breeze rustles through the trees, whistling soft notes, tracing gentle fingers around the contours of her face. Harrow doesn’t think she wouldn’t go as far as to call it beautiful, but there is certainly something pleasant about the day unfolding around her. Even taking into consideration her short conversation with Silas Octakiseron.
“Thank you, Mayor,” she says, moving to bow respectfully—remembering that people don’t do that—halting at a thirty-degree angle, before taking off at a dead sprint down the dirt path towards Novenary Farm. She has to skid to a halt after about twenty seconds, to bend over a dull fencepost and gasp for air. Still, she thinks—it was probably worth it.
Upon her return, Harrow begins the task of planting and watering the parsnip seeds. First, she takes a pitstop in what she supposes is her new room—her things are unmoved, and there’s no sign of Gideon having stepped foot inside. She pulls a cellophane-wrapped square of packed protein from the middle pocket of her backpack, and chews it slowly, washing the dusty taste and sticky texture down with long sips of water from her steel bottle (filled at the bathroom sink, which appears only slightly more trustworthy than the decaying kitchen). Then, she takes the packet of seeds, and her refilled water bottle, and returns to the now-cleared patch of land.
The dirt here is soft, and mulchy, lighter-colored and more saturated than any rare spot of nature back at Drearburh. Harrow kneels down, feels the textured grit against her knees through the fabric of her pants. She reaches out with finger and nail, digging fist-sized holes in the ground, and sprinkling a few seeds into each, according to the small-print instructions on the seed packet. Each hole is then marked with a decisive splash of water. Frequent trips are made back to the house to refill the bottle—the pond is closer, but Harrow isn’t sure whether the algae will stunt or aid in plant growth. Something to research at the library later, perhaps.
In its crawl across the sky, the sun lays down a thick, humid blanket over Novenary Farm. Harrow wipes beads of sweat from her forehead, the back of her neck. The more she works, the fainter she feels—not dizzy, necessarily, but scrubbed away, like a pencil drawing rolled over with a rubber eraser. Her hands grow redder, smudged with dirt and heat.
The sun is far past the midpoint of its arc when Harrow is brought back to herself by the noise of movement behind her. She turns, slightly, just enough to see the shape of Gideon Nav in her periphery, walking with purpose towards the farmhouse. She’s coming from the direction of town, moving at a light jog. Pattering lightly up the porch stairs, she swings the door to the farmhouse open and walks inside, not even sparing Harrow a glance, which is—fine. Preferable, honestly. Harrow huffs, dumping the last of this bottle of water onto her latest mound of dirt. Mud splatters lightly outwards, like a squashed grape.
After a few more minutes of digging, the farmhouse door reopens. Harrow remains with her eyes fixed studiously on the dirt, back unmoved. Then—something solid lands with a dull crunch-thud at her side. She jumps, limbs scrabbling over the dirt.
Lying on the ground next to her is one of the plastic bag sandwiches she’d found in the kitchen icebox. White bread, turkey, and cheddar, at first glance. Harrow thinks about reaching for it—decides not to, until she finds out what sort of game Gideon is playing. When she looks up, the girl in question is hovering by the base of the porch, trying to stifle her giggles. She doesn’t appear to be trying very hard.
“Do not laugh,” Harrow demands, feeling very small and ridiculous, kneeling on the ground, covered in wet dirt.
Gideon bends over at the waist, takes a sweeping breath, and then straightens. “Apologies, my dark duchess,” she says. She’s changed clothes, Harrow notices, into a blue tank top and short pants. The tank top has a graphic of a cartoon amphibian plastered across the center, along with the word MILF, and then, in slightly smaller print: Man I Love Frogs. Harrow realizes with a small twinge that these are clothes Gideon is actually comfortable in—it's in the way she holds herself, the looseness in her shoulders. The Drearburh penitent robes had never produced that kind of relaxed silhouette. “That is for you, though,” Gideon continues, “and you can stop looking at it like it’s going to bite you. Don’t think I haven’t noticed you haven’t eaten anything today.”
Harrow glares. “My consumption is, frankly, none of your business,” she says. And then: “I did eat. I’m not a fool, Nav. I took some of the protein squares with me when I left.”
At the mention of the protein squares, Gideon’s face screws up something comical. She gags, dramatically. “Oh, you can’t be serious. Nonagesimus, those things are foul.”
“They are perfectly adequate sustenance,” Harrow says, folding her hands over her lap.
“Yeah, if your taste buds have been burned off in a ritual fire,” Gideon argues. Then, she sighs, shoulders slumping, and runs a hand through her shock of orange hair. “Listen, you don’t have to eat it, alright? But all the ones with white bread Magnus made without mayonnaise, in case you were still a total baby about condiments. So if that’s your primary concern, you don’t have to worry about it.” There’s a pause, and then she adds, “You little weirdo,” almost like an afterthought.
Harrow blinks. She looks down at the bagged sandwich, and then up at Gideon, who is studying the treeline like there’s something very interesting over there. If this were anyone else, Harrow would have thanked her, but Gideon would never let her hear the end of it if she did. “Where are you going?” she asks, instead—because Gideon is clearly going somewhere, hair freshly washed and wearing the dark, thick-heeled boots she used to break out only when she was feeling rebellious.
Gideon perks up at this line of questioning. “There’s a saloon in town,” she says, and—yes, Harrow remembers the building Mayor Gaius had pointed out to her, right in the center of the town square. “I’d suggest you go and make friends, if you weren’t allergic to human being.”
And just like that, all of Harrow’s gratitude evaporates. “Sure,” she says, blithely. “Oh, how I envy you, pining for attention from every pitiable angle.”
Gideon’s scoff is bitter and overwrought. She mumbles something that sounds like “fuck me for making a fucking effort,” which Harrow resents on principle, as all Gideon’s effort amounted to was slinging insults about her ability to socialize, alongside sandwiches she didn’t even make.
Gideon stalks off down the path towards town, a thick line of shadow against the glaring sun and endless greenery. Harrow allows herself to glare at her for two more long seconds before turning back to her seeds. She waits until the sound of her steady footsteps crunching against the dirt has faded completely before reaching for the seed packet, and shaking the remaining few confetti sprinkles within.
She digs the last couple of holes carefully, despite the new red-scorched vitality burning along her nerves. Midway through patting down one patch of soil, she pauses to run her open hand over a cropping of gravel. The sharp pin pricks on the soft skin there settle something inside her. Staring down at dirt-cracked palms, Harrow wonders, not for the first time, what the fuck Aiglamene had been thinking. Maybe she’d known they would make each other miserable. But she wouldn’t have done that to Gideon—she always loved Gideon.
At least, Harrow reasons, Gideon’s lack of interest in the farm means they might successfully avoid each other most of the time. The thought would be comforting if it was at all convincing.
Rather than make the trek back to the farmhouse, Harrow fills up her bottle with water from the pond, and pours it over the last few seeds. She marks these out with a line of pebbles to separate them from the rest of the crop. It’ll be an experiment. Standing, scraping the mud from her hands with the points of her nails, Harrow surveys her work. Fifteen mounds of wet dirt, not quite evenly spaced—they were more uniform towards the beginning of the day, but eventually she got tired of measuring the same distance out. Regardless, it’s something there that wasn’t there before, something that will grow and bear fruit, literally. Harrow imagines herself picking those parsnips, holding in her hands the simple goldfinch-yellow proof of her own solidity. She feels—real, like the breath heaving through her overexerted lungs has finally penetrated past the meat of her body and into Harrow-proper. For a long moment, she just stands there, watching and feeling and thinking of absolutely nothing except for the sweet ache in her limbs.
Then she does have to return to the farmhouse, to wash the grit from beneath her fingernails, and then to climb inside their small shower and scrub at the waxy layer of dried sweat all over her body. The water is cold, but not as cold as they’d kept the showers at Drearburh. Harrow dresses, gaze skittering away from the mirror on the bathroom wall, and then goes back outside, to retrieve the sandwich. She sits cross-legged on the creaky old porch, settles against the wall below the crusted-over window, and cracks open the plastic bag.
It’s a fine sandwich. The time it spent outside has warmed it somewhat, which Harrow prefers—cold food makes her teeth ache. She takes small bites, chews methodically, watching as the sun dips below the treeline, painting the sky in a splatter of saturated tangerine. Streaks of gold reach up towards the darkening swirls of blue clouds like long fingers, grasping desperately for a hold. Everything is so clear here, rendered in sharp, defined lines—nothing at all like the muffled gray blanket the sky had been back at home. There’s something unreal about the pink-shadowed clouds, the pinpricks of stars blooming to visibility like celestial raindrops, the gentle wind weaving through the spread of foliage. Harrow rests her head back against the splintered wood of the farmhouse, and lets her thoughts drift.
Without her consent, or really any desire, she thinks about Gideon.
They were children when they met—five and six, respectively, when Gideon was dropped on the front steps of the Drearburh Church. For as long as she drew breath in those hallowed halls, Gideon hated Drearburh—she mocked and derided its rituals, antagonized its Sisters at every turn, and, of course, attempted escape with a regular determination that even Sister Lachrimorta found impressive. That hate burned more passionately than much of the other parishioners’ love did. In fact, the only thing that Gideon Nav hated more than the House of the Ninth was its Reverend Daughter.
Harrow doesn’t remember when their mutual antagonism started. Certainly, those memories belong to the nebulous and sepia-toned period, before—before everything. Now, when she thinks of Gideon, she thinks of the later years. Kicking at legs beneath the dining tables, scrabbling viciously in the dead-grass courtyard, goading each other into trouble, of which Harrowhark’s punishments were always more lenient. Gideon attempting to smother her in her sleep, with admirable regularity, in those intervening years before the Sisters deemed Harrowhark worthy of the bedchambers of the Reverends. Watching from the shadows as Gideon tried to flee, time and time again—and thwarting these efforts, as was her sacred duty to her shadowed flock, and to the secrets of the Locked Tomb and the Rock Unrolled.
There was a small part of that sacred duty that had the sickly yellow pallor of pity. Harrowhark did not know much of the outside world, but she knew that Gideon, with her bright amber eyes and affable disposition, would not survive a minute of it. There was an even smaller part of that sacred duty that glowed a bright and brilliant red, like fresh blood. Harrowhark chose not to dwell on that part.
Then, of course, she thinks of that morning, when they were fourteen and fifteen, and Harrowhark awoke to find no trace of Gideon Nav in all of Drearburh. Well, not precisely no trace—she was in the rusted locks over the food cupboards, in the streaks of red hair still tangled in the shower drains, in the knife-scratched lines on her seat in the pews, a tally for every aging parishioner who had collapsed during morning services. Gideon was everywhere and nowhere, all at once. She had become one of the ghosts that haunted Drearburh’s halls.
Until yesterday, when she had burst to new life in the moth-bitten porch light. A resurrection, Harrow would say, except that would be perfectly deranged. Gideon hadn’t died. She’d left. There was, counter to intuition, a difference.
Harrow finishes the sandwich under the fading warmth of the spring evening. She crumples the empty plastic bag into a small, compact shape, squeezing her fingers around its slight give. Above, a bruise-blue wave has washed over the warmer colors of sunset, speckled with glowing stars. She’d been too distracted on her first night to notice, but away from the light pollution of the city, the stars here are breathtaking, innumerable and vividly clear. Harrow flicks the porch light off, and scoots forward enough to hang her feet off of the edge, so the soles of her shoes brush against the damp grass below. She curls her arms across her chest, where a small star of her own is forming, vast as the forest.
The general store opens at 9:00AM, and so Harrow arrives at 8:55, punctuality having been instilled into her long before she could even walk places by herself. She ducks around a corner so as not to be seen loitering, and busies herself by examining a tenacious weed growing through a crack in the stone pathing. She’s so lost in thought she almost doesn’t notice when a woman approaches the shop, and one of the glass double doors is swung open to allow her entry. Harrow darts inside after her, attempting to instill some confidence in her stance, despite the fact that she feels like a small, pitiful creature, sneaking somewhere she doesn’t belong.
Inside, the general store is a wash of bright colors—warm-brown wooden floors, pastel blue walls, shelves stacked high with fresh produce, cooking implements, glass bottles of oil and juice and milk tucked between pickled vegetables and boxes of sugar. Harrow watches as the woman who’d entered before her—whom she now recognizes as Abigail Pent, wearing a thin turtleneck sweater and a green skirt that swishes around her ankles—converses with the man who presumably opened the door for her—tall, pale, slicked-back, somehow managing to make a plain gray shirt and thin collared jacket look aristocratic. “Oh, distribution’s been an absolute nightmare, but we should have more in by the end of the week,” the man says, hand sweeping towards something Harrow can’t see. Augustine, her brain supplies—Mayor Gaius said he ran the general store.
“That’s good to hear,” Abigail notes. For a moment, she pauses, distracted for a moment by a shelf of bagged flour—then, she clears her throat, and they continue towards the back of the store. “Magnus will be over the moon. He’s been talking about re-doing Jeanne’s wallpaper for ages.”
It’s at this point that Harrow realizes she’s been hovering aimlessly in the doorway, blatantly eavesdropping, for at least a half-minute. With a small jolt, she stalks off to the right, towards a corner shelf below a sign proclaiming the presence of “SEEDS”.
The food at Drearburh, she knows, was largely unpleasant, and not at all culinarily complex. Protein squares played a large part in daily meals, and for the other nutrients they were provided with a thick yellow paste that was then dissolved into bowls of salted water to form a rudimentary porridge. To prevent loss of jaw strength and teeth, each parishioner was given a side of dried winter leeks to crunch their way through. Harrow was certainly aware of the existence of other food—when they were much younger, Sister Glaurica would sometimes sneak Ortus packages of mixed nuts and fruit, which he deigned to share with Harrowhark and Gideon. But these tasted sharp and, more condemnably, made Harrowhark’s tongue swell. So, after the first time she generally refused him, and chose to stick with food that did not make it difficult to breathe. On rare days of exuberance, usually after breaking a fast, the denizens of Drearburh would feast on thin meat sandwiched between pieces of chewy bread, slathered with sour-tasting emulsive sauce. It was during these feasts that Harrowhark discovered her distaste for condiments.
To summarize, Harrow expects to find some unfamiliar names among the collection of seeds. Still, nothing could have prepared her for the sheer heterogeneity available to her. The seed shelf is sorted into fruits, vegetables, and flowers, each of which contains multiple differently labeled packets. Harrow leans in, tracing her fingers over glossy images of cauliflowers, strawberries, coffee beans, tulips. There are more parsnip seeds, here, which is the only thing Harrow feels she can safely rule out of wanting, at least in an effort to diversify.
In the end, entirely overwhelmed, Harrow makes her way towards the counter at the back of the store with a small armful of various seeds. Fruits and vegetables, because Harrow figures she can graduate to frivolities once she’s able to feed herself.
She approaches Augustine, leaning against the counter, frowning down at some sheet of paper beneath him. There’s a vague trepidation in her stomach that she smothers under a strong-shouldered, unaffected stance. Harrow steps beyond the last shelf, preparing to clear her throat and catch his attention, when she’s interrupted.
“Augustine,” a shrill voice calls, from behind a door standing on the far wall. That door swings open to reveal a peach-colored celery stick of a woman, hovering just outside of the store proper. Behind her, Harrow sees a set of blue-carpeted stairs, and further back, some vague shapes suggestive of a kitchen. The woman’s face is pinched in displeasure. “Did you finish the last of the oat milk?”
Augustine manages to sigh explosively without moving a single muscle. “Joy, dear,” he says, dry as Drearburh’s winter leeks, “I have customers.”
“And I have coffee,” the woman—Joy, which feels inappropriate—crosses her arms over her chest. “Coffee, which I refuse to drink black, because you make it so horribly acidic—”
“And here I was thinking it suited you,” Augustine interrupts.
Joy gives him a glare that could melt steel. Harrow’s gaze ping-pongs between the two of them. After one tense moment, she says, primly, “I hope you know I despise you utterly.”
“Perhaps,” Augustine says, in what might be considered a drawl, “you finished the oat milk yourself, and forgot.”
“Hm!!” Stiff with a rage she doesn’t remotely bother to tamper, Joy stalks over to the counter, smacking both of her hands down atop it. Augustine leans in, and they begin a furious, lightning-fast conversation, conducted partially in words and partially in tilts of the head, quirks of the brow, and rude gestures. What English they do speak is too low and quick for Harrow to comprehend.
So, she stands there, arms full of seed packets, and seriously considers committing the second crime of her whole life: simply turning and walking out the front door. Somehow, she doubts the bickering pair would even notice.
“Oh, don’t look so tense,” Abigail Pent says, appearing over Harrow’s shoulder like a flash flood. “This is actually quite tame for Augustine and Mercymorn.”
Harrow blinks. “They’re often like this?” she asks, faintly.
“Near constantly,” Abigail confirms. Harrow shuffles slightly, rotating to face her. She’s holding a cloth tote bag, filled with vegetables that look bright and fresh, if slightly droopy. When she spots the cache of seeds cradled in Harrow’s arms, she lights up with interest. “What sort of things are you planning to grow, then? I’ve always wanted to try my hand at farming, but we simply don’t have the space for it up in the mountains.”
“Oh.” Harrow glances down at her armful, as though she might find some wisdom there. “A bit of everything, I suppose,” she says, voice stilted—she prays it comes off cool or disinterested, rather than stiffly awkward.
Abigail hums, nodding. She doesn’t appear slighted, but her expression isn’t pitying, either, which must count for something. “Well, which are you most excited for?” she asks. “Do you have any recipes you’re looking forward to making with home-grown food?”
Harrow is saved from answering these impossible questions when an equally impossibly high-pitched noise pierces through the air. Mercymorn—only slightly more fitting than Joy, which, it occurs to Harrow, might be some horrible sort of pet name—throws her hands into the air with one knife-sharp movement. “Fine,” she espouses, thinly. “Service the veritable hoards of people slavering for your attention. It’s not as though I have anything of import to do, being the town’s only doctor—”
“I’ll ring you up here, farmer,” Augustine says, waving Harrow over. She approaches. Though there’s no graceful way to dump an armful of seed packets onto a counter, she certainly makes an honorable attempt. With careful flicks of his hand, Augustine sorts the packets into four inscrutably categorized piles, walking his spindly fingers over each pile as he counts under his breath.
Harrow waits, watches as he scribbles something on a pad by the cash register. He tells her the amount she’s due, and she gets halfway to withdrawing the amount from her backpack when Abigail clears her throat. “Absolutely not, you charlatan,” she announces.
Augustine smiles crookedly, properly chagrined. “Sorry, chick,” he says, which confirms Harrow’s assumption about his tendency towards detestable pet names. He adjusts the price down about ten percent, clacking away at the old-timey keys on the register. “A man must make a living, somehow. I have a wife to feed.”
Mercymorn, still hovering to the side, hums another high-pitched sound of disgust. “I’ll feed on the flesh of your bloated corpse before I take a single cent of your money, Augustine,” she interjects, smoothly.
“Darling,” Augustine replies, slick as an oil spill, “if you want to feed on my flesh, you need only ask—”
“Ick!!”
Harrow drops her money on the counter, and as casually as she can manage, runs for the door.
Outside, Dominicus is beginning to show more signs of life. Birds chirp from the eaves of trees, squirrels dart between rustling bushes, and one man with perfectly coiffed hair and a blue uniform pulled tight around his shoulders speedwalks across the bridge toward the EdenMore. Harrow’s gaze flows around the scenery like a lazy breeze. It catches on the dappled light across the stone plaza, the spindly grass curling over the edges of dirt pathing, and—two teenagers, it seems, walking along the river. They appear to be more piercing than human, which Harrow can appreciate, but still—teenagers, which may as well be a foreign species. And they’ve certainly spotted her—the one with the braids elbows the one with the stovetop-flame spike of hair so hard he stumbles fully into the river.
Harrow takes advantage of the ensuing moment of panic to make her daring escape. She disappears up the stone ramp to the side of the general store, onto the upper cliff face. There is a path, here, worn down and overgrown though it might be, and Harrow follows it up, cringing away from the brush of damp wildgrass against the tops of her socks. As she walks, the building she’d spotted on her tour with Mayor Gaius comes into clearer focus.
If Novenary Farm was a dump, this place is a graveyard. Before her stands a towering, crumbling mess of wood and stone and slate. The shutters hang by rusted screws, and what of the windows she can see through them look to be caked over with grime. Once upon a time, vines must have tried to make a home up the wooden siding, but something’s killed them. Their dried, gnarled corpses look like gashes against the chipping paint. The whole building sags forward, like a puppet with the strings cut, like Atlas underneath the weight of the sky.
Harrow loves it immediately and desperately.
A rusted clock face peeks out beneath a swath of decaying vine, its hands lying limply towards the faded 6 marked at the bottom. The arm of a tree juts through a splintered hole in the roof, blanketed in drooping leaves, and as she watches, a brown bird takes flight from the nested mass, fluttering towards the treeline. Harrow runs a finger along the top edge of a wooden stake. A rope must have been tied here, blocking the path, but it’s long since unspooled into loose, mud-damp thread.
“Ah, the Community Center,” Mayor Gaius says.
Harrow barely manages not to startle out of her skin. She stiffens, grasping for the straps of her backpack. “Forgive me, Mayor,” she says, tightly.
“John, please,” Mayor Gaius says. He’s not looking at her—his dark eyes are focused entirely on the decrepit building, and the crease of his frown is more sorrowful than angry. “And you’ve done no wrong to forgive, Harrow.”
For a moment, they simply stand there. Harrow looks at Mayor Gaius, and then at the Community Center, and then back at Mayor Gaius. “Mayor, if I may ask—what happened?”
Mayor Gaius takes what appears to be a fortifying breath. “The Community Center used to be the pride and joy of this town,” he reminisces. “Always bustling with activity. Nothing happened, Harrow, it simply… fell into disrepair. And the further it fell, the less time we spent here, and the less compelled we felt to fix up the little things. And those little things become big things, when left to their own devices. Eventually, Mercy and Augustine and G1deon convinced me to lock it up.”
“How did you make that sound with your mouth,” Harrow wonders.
“In any case,” Mayor Gaius continues, blithely, “EdenMore Corporation has been hounding me to sell the land, so they can turn it into a warehouse. Dominicus could use the money, but there’s something stopping me from selling it… I guess old-timers like me get attached to relics of the past. Ah, well.” He sighs. “Here, let’s go inside—for old time’s sake.”
This is a situation in which Harrow feels she would be well within her rights to decline—the building looks like one wrong breath could topple it. But there’s something about this dead place—this haunted place—that draws her in. It’s the first hint of familiarity she’s felt since leaving Drearburh.
“Alright,” Harrow says, nodding.
They pick their way over the sprawl of rope and weeds, up two crumbling stone steps to the creaky wooden door. When Mayor Gaius turns the grimy bronze doorknob and pushes, a cloud of dirt coughs from the hinges. Harrow fans the dust from her eyes, and follows him in.
The interior of the Community Center is just as wretched as the outside. Wide patches of the wooden floor have rotted away into dark soil, spindling fingers of wood and leaf reaching out from the dirt to scratch along the remaining planks. Off to the side of the expansive main room, a cracked and dusty glass box sits, water-stained concrete, seaweed crusted across the bottom. A sturdy brick chimney is set into the far wall, and looks to be the most intact construct in the room, save for—
“Hmm,” Mayor Gaius notes, as taken aback by the small, mud-crusted hut as Harrow is. He turns to face her. “I guess Jeannemary and Isaac have been messing about in here.” His voice tilts up towards the end, like he’s asking a question, though Harrow has no idea how she’s meant to answer it—the only thing she knows about Jeannemary and Isaac is that they dislike puns. “This place is even more dilapidated than I recall…”
What Harrow sees next is this:
A small flash of light, low to the floor behind Mayor Gaius. And then, when it fades, there’s a creature in its place—round, about eight inches in diameter, colored a brilliant green. Little antennae waver like cattails atop its head. It bounces lightly, its form jiggling.
Harrow doesn’t scream, but a noise of some indeterminable pitch escapes her pursed lips, as she stiffens down to the molecule. She tries to play it off, casting her gaze wide, but the damage has already been done. Mayor Gaius spins around. As he does, the creature vanishes. No pop, no light, no puff of smoke—one second it’s there, and the next second it’s gone.
That—the disappearing—is enough to actually give Harrow pause. Historically, her hallucinations haven’t particularly cared whether or not other people are looking at them. Historically, they’ve been made of less gelatin and more bloodied bone. Something to worry about later, though—Mayor Gaius has turned back to her, concern lined in the furrow of his brow. “Are you feeling well, Harrow?”
“Fine,” Harrow answers, faint. She’s suddenly and viscerally aware of how much eye contact they are or are not making, and busies herself by working through the Fibonacci series, eyes fixed on the floor below.
Mayor Gaius does that stutter-stopped shoulder-reaching-thing with his hand. It rankles Harrow more the second time. He stuffs his fists in the pockets of his dark jeans. “I wouldn’t be surprised if this place was full of rats,” he says, after an awkward pause—awkward for Harrow, at least, who is trying very hard to replicate the strange creature’s disappearing act.
Just then, there’s another flash, behind Mayor Gaius’ other shoulder. The creature pops up on the other side of the room, bouncing lightly on a patch of weedy dirt. This time, it squeaks—an Ah, ah, ah noise. Something about the rhythm and pitch grates inexplicably at her ears.
Harrow stays very, very still. She ought to be skilled at it. She’s had years of practice. Something must give her away, though, because Mayor Gaius snaps his head up to look over his shoulder. As it had before, the creature vanishes the moment it comes under someone else’s scrutiny. When Mayor Gaius faces her once more, his concern has turned contemplative. “It might be time for me to head home,” he says. And then, with a wry smile: “I need some lunch. You’re welcome to join me, if you’d like?”
“I’ve already eaten,” Harrow excuses, which is a lie.
Mayor Gaius doesn’t call her on it. He nods, a bit stilted, and moves towards the door. Before he leaves, he says, almost as an afterthought, “I suppose I’ll keep the place unlocked, for now. Maybe you can help catch that rat, if you have some extra time.”
The door shuts with a dull, creaky click, and then Harrow is alone in the old Community Center.
Without the presence of another living soul, time slows, taffy-like, moments between heartbeats stretching into full stomached breaths. Harrow waits, shivering slightly in the damp air. After an indeterminate amount of time, she clears her throat. “I’m alone,” she says. “You can show yourself.”
Nothing happens. Of course nothing happens. Nothing happens because there was nothing there to begin with, just as there never is anything, no matter how sure she is that this time, it’s different. She breathes in moisture, feels it crystallize into shards of ice in her lungs. Digging her thumbnail into the palm of her opposite hand, Harrow makes her way back out into the sun.
On the morning of Harrow’s sixth day in Canaan Valley, the parsnips break through the soil.
Monotony has started to blend her days into one clear-toned olive green. Time passes in a blur of clearing weeds, planting seeds, and afternoon breaks exploring the forest south of Novenary Farm. A few times, she’s spotted more of her neighbors—a pale woman with short-cropped curls in a frilled blue sundress, feeding bundles of hay to a crowd of clucking hens, and a dark-skinned man reminiscent of a collection of rectangular prisms, fishing in the branch of the river that runs through the forest. Luckily, she manages to skirt around their fields of view, or at least present recalcitrantly enough such that they choose not to bother her. Around once a day, she and Gideon have a stilted conversation, and Harrow more often than not leaves the interaction feeling raw and unbalanced and, frankly, pissed off. She burns through about three percent of her protein square stash, supplementing with sandwiches when they are so thrown at her, mostly in irritation after a poorly-gone Gideon interaction.
All of which is to say that Harrow’s first harvest represents a pleasant break in routine. When she spots the first inch of golden root pressing for sunlight, she drops to her knees. She fits her hand around the leafy green stems, giving an experimental tug. The parsnips come free from the soil with light, round, suction-pop sounds, dustings of dirt falling away with the brush of her hand. Once she’s started, it’s easy to fall into the rhythm of it, gathering the roots in the cradle of her arms. She shuffles down her crookedly rendered line, not caring about the dew-wet mud she’s smearing all over this pair of pants, until—
Harrow pauses. She clambors ungracefully to her feet, sways for a moment—her water bottle is still inside, she hadn’t remembered to fill it—and then takes off striding towards the farmhouse. Her arms are still full of parsnips, so she can’t twist the doorknob, but it hangs loosely enough on its hinges to give way with a good kick. “Griddle,” she snaps into the empty front room, the volume scraping along the line of her throat, “what the fuck?”
After at least a half-minute, during which Harrow’s rage alternates between a high simmer and a low boil, Gideon appears at the top of the stairs. She’s scrubbing a thin gray towel over her shock of hair, one visible curl dark and drooping across her forehead. Her tank top of the day, a stretch of red cotton proclaiming “World’s Okayest Muscles,” is dappled along the shoulder seams with water stains. “What’s up?” she asks, trotting down the stairs.
Maybe it’s the fact that Harrow barely managed four hours of sleep the night previous. Maybe it’s that these absurd parsnips are the first good things Harrow has ever made, and Gideon is already trying to sabotage her effort. Maybe it’s that Gideon looks so comfortable, so herself, in this stupid house in her stupid shirt, and Harrow still feels gossamer-thin, like a strong wind could blow away everything human about her, leaving nothing but the bones behind. But something stokes the fury inside her—lights it up, like grease on an open flame.
Trying to explain would sound ridiculous, so she doesn’t try. “Follow me,” Harrow says. Her voice is short and sharp as Sister Aisamorta’s filed-down canines.
Gideon slowly folds the towel, and tucks it under her arm. “O-kay,” she says. She’s immediately wary, which would normally make Harrow feel better, but, well.
Harrow turns and stalks out the door, not bothering to check if Gideon is following her. She steps over the tied bundle of weeds at the bottom of the steps—need to find something to do with those, put it back on the list—and tries not to stomp—it only makes her look like a tantruming child—as they approach the half-harvested parsnip patch. Her arms are still full, so she can’t point. But she can tilt her head purposefully. “Explain,” she demands.
Gideon stares blankly at the dirt. “I don’t—Harrow, what am I even looking at.”
“This is juvenile, and embarrassingly petty,” Harrow steamrolls, lifting her chin in the way that makes her face look cold. “Even for you, Griddle.”
With an expression of slowly dawning defensiveness, Gideon looks between the holes on the ground and the parsnips in Harrow’s hands—counts—notices the four patches of roots that look carelessly and messily ripped from the dirt. “Harrow,” she says, a little unsteadily, “I didn’t, I swear—”
“Well,” Harrow bites, “unless it was the invisible specter of your mother, finally returned for you—” That had been Gideon’s favorite excuse, when they were younger.
Gideon’s eyes go flinty-frigid. She huffs a short and bitter laugh. “You’re a hideous witch, Nonagesimus,” she notes, tone companionable, “and I only wish I’d had the forethought to fuck up your stupid vegetables—”
Caw!
They both stop short, turning towards the source of the sound. A dark-feathered, fluttering shape takes off from its perch atop a dense evergreen shrub, a distinctly leafy stem peeking out from its beak. Harrow watches it, dread sinking low in her stomach. Normally, she likes crows, but this one might have just made her look a total and complete asshole.
Slowly, she and Gideon walk over to the bush. There, between spindly green needles, lies a chunk of smushed, golden pulp.
“Now,” Gideon says, sounding a half-second away from bursting into laughter, “I’m not saying anything for sure. But it looks like—”
“Shut up,” Harrow snaps, bunching her hands into fists. “I will—I am going to take care of this.”
Gideon doesn’t ask the obvious question—how? She says nothing at all, which is far more irritatingly smug than anything she could say. Harrow sets her shoulders back, and strides off towards the farmhouse, dropping her armful of parsnips in the shipping bin. She can harvest the rest later, when Gideon isn’t—there, staring at her, with those horrible, inscrutable eyes.
It’s still early—a weekday of some sort, though Harrow has mostly lost track—and Dominicus proper sits quietly and patiently for the rest of its denizens to wake. Harrow dips south to walk alongside the river, takes a moment to sink her hand down in the steady current, past the knuckles, past the wrist, letting the shock of cold clear her head. She’s been wrong before, certainly, but the occasion is rare, and the proving has never been so humiliating. Usually with the two of them it was the other way around. Harrow hasn’t felt pride in that for years, now—pride being a childish and unworthy taint on the soul of the Revered Daughter—though if she had it would certainly be soured.
She approaches the library with caution, unsure if it’s been opened yet. The lights are on, and the faint noise of heated discussion sounds from inside, so she tests the door. It creaks open, loosing a breath of vanilla-scented air.
Admittedly, the only other library Harrow has to compare to is Drearburh’s, but this place is so immediately different it feels wrong to even put them in the same category. It’s warm, in temperature and shade, red wood floors and tall dark bookshelves stacked high with colorfully-bound books, some shiny and new, some creased with wear and age. An empty checkout counter stands before her, similarly littered with books, papers, and post-it notes. Harrow makes her way over, curiously peers at these notes: “Order 3rd copy of The Old Drift,” “Pasta for dinner?”, alongside a whole slew of entirely illegible scribbles.
She’s brought out of her distraction by a voice from the other side of the room. “Are you just going to stand there and snoop, then?”
“Jeannemary,” another voice chides.
“She’s right, though?” from a third.
Harrow realizes, with a start, that they’re talking about her. Through a gap between bookshelves, she can see through to an open area in the center of the library. There’s a low table upon which a stack of paper lies, surrounded on four sides by beanbag chairs and deep aqua cushions. Three of the seats are occupied—two of them by the teenagers Harrow had spotted a few days previous, and one by a man she hasn’t seen before. He looks like a mineral formation whose wish to become a real boy was only mostly granted—all brown and gray and sharp angles, wrapped in a wool sweater that pulls tight over his shoulders and hangs loose around his waist. Behind him, shifting restlessly between her feet, is a woman with sharp-cropped dark hair. She’s dressed similarly, but she’s pushed her sleeves up past her elbows to reveal lean, toned forearms.
Clearing her throat, Harrow says, “I haven’t been snooping. I’ve only just walked in.”
The teenagers share a pointed, raised-eyebrow look. Mouth twitching at the corners, the man says, “Don’t mind these two. They’re only looking for a way to get out of the quiz they have today.” As if connected by some unseen Bluetooth device, the teens drop their heads and groan in unison. The man turns back to look at the woman, now leaning against a bookshelf. “Cam, would you—”
“Yup,” the woman responds, pushing off the bookshelf to stand. “And about the—”
“Of course,” the man says. “Though it might take a few hours.”
This is the second unintelligible conversation Harrow has witnessed in about as many days, and she is no more enamored with it this time than she had been last time. She turns back to the notes on the desk out of protest, deciphering one of the scribbles: “CALL THE ARCHIVIST.” After a moment, the woman rounds the line of bookshelves. “Hello, new farmer,” she says, bouncing once on her toes.
“Harrow,” Harrow introduces. She considers sticking a hand out, remembers the dirt still caked beneath her fingernails and in the lines of her palm, and decides not to.
“Camilla,” the woman replies, then tilts her head towards the group on the opposite side of the bookshelves. “The one fancying himself a professor is Palamedes. Anything in particular you’re looking for?”
Harrow nods. “Information on the construction and efficacy of scarecrows,” she says.
Apparently, the library has a whole section devoted to the intricacies of the farming life. Camilla produces a hardcover book on the crafting of wood and fiber objects, and Harrow takes it to one of the desks pushed up against the wall. She sits down, leafs through the book, taking notes on the crafting recipes that seem the most useful. There’s a few pages on a tapper she can make, if she gets her hands on some copper, though it’s left unclear where one finds loose conductive metals.
Across the room, Jeannemary and Isaac lean over their respective paper packets, scribbling furiously. Palamedes watches them with a serene, contemplative expression. After giving Harrow a few more books, Camilla walks back over to him, leaning her elbows against the back of his chair, leaning in to whisper something to him that Harrow has no hope of catching. Whatever it is makes him smile, an incongruously soft thing, eyes lighting up like tungsten filaments behind the frames of his glasses.
Watching this show of comfortable domesticity makes Harrow feel uneasy. Underbaked in the center but still burnt around the edges. She props one of the extra books up to form an amateurish barrier between the scene and her periphery.
After about a half-hour, Palamedes declares that their time is up, and the teenagers hand him their packets, bumping into each other as they rush out the door. Palamedes and Camilla have another quiet conversation, helpfully muffled by Harrow’s open book. Then, before she realizes what’s happening, Palamedes is there, hovering over her desk and clearing his throat politely. When she glances up, he says, “Apologies if Jeanne and Isaac were any kind of distraction. I hope you’ve been able to find what you were looking for?”
“Oh—yes,” Harrow says, holding out a thin-lined journal (stolen from Ortus’ ridiculous stash), upon which she has written her notes: Once you start growing a lot of crops on your farm, you can expect to be visited by crows. In the morning, you might discover that a crow has made breakfast out of your hard work! One way to prevent those bothersome crows from eating your crops is to set up scarecrows near your crops. Be aware that scarecrows have limited range, so you'll need multiple if your farm is large. There are also a number of helpful diagrams she has painstakingly copied onto the thick off-white paper.
“Good!” Palamedes says, appearing genuinely pleased. “And if you’re having trouble, you can always ask Magnus for help. He’d be delighted, honestly.”
Harrow nods, despite the fact that she would genuinely rather eat gravel.
“Actually,” Palamedes adds, “there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you—well, you and Gideon, really—”
“What is it?” Harrow interrupts, before he says anything else about Gideon, whom she had almost managed to put entirely out of her mind.
Palamedes reaches a hand up to adjust his glasses, though they’d been sitting perfectly fine on the bridge of his strong nose. “A few months ago,” he says, “a small meteorite fell on the southern end of Novenary Farm. Cam and I wanted to do some mineralogical analysis on a sample—there’s a mass spectrometer over in New Rho City where we could perform some radiometric dating. I think Abigail was also curious about its geochemical properties. There’s actually a relatively famous pomologist who’s done some studies on the genetics of Stardrops in connection to—” He seems to realize he’s been rambling, and cuts himself off with a slight shake of the head. “In any case, Mayor Gaius was wary about us trouncing all over private property, and he hadn’t heard from Aiglamane in years, so there was really nothing to be done—until now.”
“I see,” Harrow says. “So, you’re just—looking for permission to access the farm?”
“Yes and no,” Palamedes says. By now, Camilla has finished cleaning up the low table—she walks over, strides smooth as flowing water, and Palamedes makes room for her to perch on the arm of his chair. “The most chemically interesting samples will be taken from the center of the meteorite,” he continues, “but we don’t have the kind of tools necessary to break open something that high on the Mohs scale. Octakiseron’s really only interested in the geodes from the mines, and a pain in the ass besides, so—”
“We were told Aiglamane might have left a pickaxe at the farm,” Camilla finishes.
That’s good intel, though Harrow has no idea who gave it to them. Just yesterday, she’d found a bundle of old tools by the woodshed. They were rusted to hell and back, but still identifiable as an ax, a hoe, a pickaxe, a water bucket, and a curved blade, which seemed to serve no purpose except for looking dangerous. Gideon had immediately appeared and stolen that one away, leaving Harrow with the rest. “I’m not sure it’s in any working shape, but I did find it,” she says.
Palamedes and Camilla share a look, a head-tilt, a quirk of the mouth. It hardly takes a moment, but it’s long enough for that gelatin feeling to sweep through Harrow’s stomach again. Finally, Camilla says, “If you bring it to me, I might be able to clean it up a bit.”
“Or Octakiseron,” Palamedes adds, reluctant. “He’s got a real forge, but he’ll probably charge you.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” Harrow says, fiddling with the top right corner of the open journal page. And then, in a moment of pure, instinctual madness (she cannot name any other reason for why she would do such a thing), she asks, “Are there any unusual creatures native to this part of the valley?”
Palamedes frowns. “Unusual, like non-indigenous squirrels and birds—” her heart drops further, if such a thing was possible— “or unusual, like monsters?”
Harrow blinks. “Pardon?” she asks.
“Not technically accurate, but the most accessible classification I’ve come up with,” Palamedes admits, running a hand through his hair. He fluffs up an awkward-looking cowlick, which Camilla combs down, moving her thumb with the easy grace of someone who has done so many, many times. “Giant flies, or beetles? Little yam-looking things that pop up from the dirt and bite at your ankles? Slime balls?”
She thinks slime ball might be the closest classification for the creature she saw in the Community Center, but it’s not really accurate, as the thing didn’t seem wet. Besides, there’s always the chance that Palamedes is pulling a very strange practical joke on her, though he doesn’t seem the type. “...Not exactly,” she settles on.
“They don’t leave the caves, usually,” Palamedes continues, frowning, “but EdenMore’s been drilling at the cliffside there, so that might have caused some disturbances. You could speak to the Mayor about it.”
So, probably not a joke. Perhaps this is just—normal, for the world outside of Drearburh. Monsters and magic and dead, haunted buildings. Harrow closes her journal, just for something to do with her hands—drums her fingers along the edge of the cover. “He was there,” she says, digging a nail into the soft leather, tracing her finger pad over the crescent-moon mark. “He thought it might have been a rat.”
The two librarians share another horrible glance. “Well,” Palamedes says, “there’s always Commander Wake.”
“Wake?” Harrow asks.
“She runs the Adventurer’s Guild, up in the mountains,” Palamedes explains. “Sort of by the entrance to the old mines, but to the right. She’s just a bit… well, she’s sort of…”
“Not okay,” Camilla pipes in.
“But not like not-okay like there’s something wrong with her,” Palamedes stresses. “She’s totally fine. She’s just—mean.”
“Maybe evil,” Camilla adds.
Harrow stills. “Maybe evil?”
Camilla shrugs. “Her broadsword gives me the creeps,” she says, as though that’s a regular thing to say.
“Oh, stop scaring the farmer,” Palamedes says, to which Camilla refluffs his cowlick out of protest.
In the end, they let her take the book of crafting recipes back to the farmhouse, after writing her information down in an old ledger and providing her with a minimalistic library card. Harrow puts the book down on her desk, and goes back outside to finish harvesting the parsnips. She lugs them over to the shipping container, and lines them up carefully inside, and when Gideon comes out to throw a bagged sandwich at her head, they don’t talk about any of it.
Over the next few days, Harrow receives two letters in the creaky mailbox beside the farmhouse. The first is wrinkled and clunky, and when she slides her finger beneath the sealed fold, it comes away dusty with sand-colored crumbs. Inside, there’s a note from Ortus, letting her know that the House has fallen into less chaos than expected, and not to worry about it. The note also mentions that the accompanying cookies are nut-free, and that he remembers her allergy, which Harrow will have to take his word on, as she is not quite sure what an allergy is.
She pokes a finger at the crumbled brown chunks at the bottom of the envelope, and after determining that they don’t smell rotten, hesitantly places one in her mouth. The texture of it is nothing like the protein squares—nothing like the sandwiches, either, or even the trail mix Ortus used to sneak her. It’s chewy, and a bit crunchy—overwhelmingly sweet, especially once the darker chips begin to melt on her tongue, but not in a way that stings. It warms her, even though it’s been chilling in the mailbox all night.
Before she realizes it, she’s eaten all the larger pieces, and moved on to pinching bits of crumb together, sucking the sugar off of her fingers. For a moment, shame bites viciously at the heels of her throat, but—there’s no one around to tell her off for being improper, and besides, she saw Gideon eat a pastry off of the ground once—she would have no place to judge. So, Harrow stands by the mailbox, and shakes the last of the crumbs into her mouth.
The second letter arrives in a smooth black envelope. Harrow pulls the stationery out with careful fingers, breath leaving her lungs in a low whoosh as the navy blue cardstock glimmers in the caught sunlight. She reads over the inked writing once—twice—blinks, folds it back inside the envelope, and rushes up the stairs back into the farmhouse.
Gideon is in the kitchen, prodding at a small metal machine that Harrow has never seen before. She glances over her shoulder when Harrow walks in. “Coffee?” she asks, with an air of nonchalance Harrow knows is practiced.
Rather than ask what coffee is—presumably, it has something to do with the contraption, which looks as though it might have been recently discovered at the bottom of a lake—Harrow holds out the envelope.
Gideon’s face crinkles in confusion. For a moment, Harrow thinks she might have forgotten entirely about their old arrangement, which would be a nightmare on at least five different levels. But then, her expression clears, fades into something like understanding. Without another word, she takes the envelope, slides the letter out, and reads. “Thou art the explorer of the old Community Center,” she says, “and thee whom those of its corse have chosen. Should you pay a visit to me, mine chambers lie west of the forest lake, in the stone tower. I shall provide guidance towards thy ‘rat problem.’ From A.L., Wizard.” Gideon looks up, and her face has crinkled again. Now that Harrow is more certain of herself, the effect is quite nearly funny. “Harrow, what the fuck?”
Harrow clasps her hands together, unable to contain the relief that rushes like warm air down the length of her spine. “There’s magic in Canaan Valley, of course.” And then, because Gideon is still all scrunched at the brows: “Oh, do keep up, Griddle.”
Gideon splutters. Harrow snatches the letter back, and turns, hurrying outside. She takes the porch stairs two at a time, starting south towards the forest. After a moment, she hears another set of steps thud down the stairs, scuff across the dirt, crunch over a weed patch. Harrow glances up to see Gideon skid to a halt beside her, and then look down, expectant. “To the forest, then, my gloom-and-doom-mate?”
Utterly disgusted, Harrow narrows her eyes. “Firstly, that is—nonsense. Absolute garbage.”
“It’s like roommate,” Gideon explains, as though that helps. “But goth, and weird.”
“Secondly,” Harrow barrels onward, “you are not invited to this meeting. You are not invited to any meeting I attend. Don’t you have coffee to eat?”
Gideon quirks her head, and then shrugs, shaking the curious expression loose. “Listen,” she says, “if you’re going off to learn the secrets of the universe, I’m not just going to sit around, waiting for you to smite me whenever you get pissy.”
“Smite you.”
“Oh, you know what I mean.”
For a long moment, they stare each other down. Gideon crosses her arms, probably in order to create a more threatening silhouette. It doesn’t not work, but Harrow hasn’t been afraid of Gideon Nav since they were six and seven. What breaks her, in the end, is the look of absolute patience in those water-gold eyes—she really is extremely curious about this A.L., Wizard, and doesn’t feel like waiting Gideon out.
“Fine,” Harrow huffs, and pretends for her own sanity that she doesn’t see the shadow of Gideon pumping her fist, stretched out against the dirt path ahead of them.
They walk through the forest in relative silence, save for the ambient noise of squirrels chittering, birds chirping, and dirt shifting beneath their feet. According to the news channel Gideon’s been blasting from their newly-functional television, salmonberry season is rapidly approaching. Harrow can see the buds begin to sprout on the bushes—light green, scaled, ovular, cradled by damp leaves.
Past the lake, past the cherry blossom tree, a cone of stone-thatched roofing peeks through the canopy of leaves high on a nearby cliff. Harrow and Gideon wade through patches of knee-high grass before rounding the corner of a cliff, landing at the bottom of a set of uneven wooden steps. Looming at the edge of the path is the tower—and it is a tower, thin and long, stacked circles of mossy stone bricks cut through by a curved oak door, windows placed haphazardly, as though by dartboard throw.
The state of the cliffside stairs inspires neither confidence nor trust, but Harrow would suffer through a thousand packets of trail mix before allowing herself to look discomforted in front of Gideon Nav. She conquers them in the greatest, most sweeping strides she can manage, heedless of the way they creak and groan. Gideon follows behind her, and together approach the door, passing between a set of partially-grown mystery stalks and a cauliflower large enough to swallow one or both of them whole.
There’s a scattered nature to the exterior, more obvious now that they’re close. Potted flowers and succulents litter the space on either side of the door, some propped up by wooden stools, some nestled into patches of grass. Thin vines crawl like spider-silk between the cracks in the stone, leaf-tongues trembling in the light breeze. The knob on the dark-wood door is a bright, burnished gold.
Harrow knocks.
They wait. Nothing happens. Gideon sighs, reaches an arm over her shoulder, and bangs her fist more forcefully against the door. There’s the low thud of flesh on wood, and then—a whistling creak, as the door inches open a scant few radians.
“Well,” Gideon says, dusting her hand off on the fabric of her jeans. “After you, my tenebrous queen.”
“Do you have these written somewhere?” Harrow asks.
Gideon shrugs. Harrow rolls her eyes so forcefully she thinks they might disconnect from her optic nerve, and pushes past the door to enter the tower of A.L., Wizard.
The smell hits her first—fresh, and sharp, and violently green, like she’s pressed her face to the center of a blooming flower. Sound, then, the high protest of old wood, the crackle of bonfire flame, the rolling bubble of boiling water. After a moment, her eyes adjust to the dim light, and she can take true stock of the tower’s interior. It’s about as thin and cramped as you’d expect from looking at the outside—a desk shoved in next to a sprawling, intricate chalk circle, behind which a bookshelf is squished against the wall. Most of the room’s light comes from a blackened stone fireplace, beset on both sides by stacks of books and rope-tied piles of firewood. To Harrow’s left, a massive cauldron sits atop a ring of smoking, red-hot embers. It expels verdant gas like breath from a gaping black mouth.
Behind the cauldron stands a woman. She’s tall—taller than Gideon, even, long-limbed, the exact shape of her hidden beneath flowing layers of purple and black fabric. Blonde hair cascades in smooth waves down her shoulders, the length of her back, puddles in the midnight train of her robes. Her yellow eyes glow like those of a nocturnal, carnivorous animal. She’s beautiful in the way the light of an oncoming train is beautiful. Harrow feels her breath up and leave her entirely.
“Come in,” the woman says. Her voice lilts like cheerful gold, though her expression remains blank.
Harrow takes a cautious step forward. A half-step behind her, Gideon does the same. The woman continues, in her strong and evenly modulated voice, “I am Alecto, seeker of the arcane truths. Mediary between physical and ethereal. Master of the seven elementals. Keeper of the sacred cha—” She pauses, blinks. Rotates her head. “Who is this one.”
“A nuisance,” Harrow announces, “but harmless.”
“Hey,” Gideon protests, voice barely clawing above a whisper.
Alecto makes a high humming noise. “Thou, whom I foresaw,” she says. “Allow me to show thee something.”
She moves over to the chalk circle, and Harrow follows. It’s an intricate design, spiraling circles folded around a twelve-pointed star, a shape like interlocked molecular p-orbitals in the very center. “Behold!” Alecto says. And then—a flash of brilliant silvery light—a low, chiming rumble in the air—one of the creatures appears, hovering in the center of the chalk circle. It squeaks its Ah, ah, ah noise, juddering against some unseen force.
“What the fucking fuck, Harrowhark,” Gideon hisses out, high as a dying man’s wheeze.
“Shut—up—” Harrow intones through staccato breaths, gaze locked on the creature, and on Alecto.
“Thou hast seen one ere, have thee not?” Alecto asks. “They call themselves the Junimos… Mysterious spirits.” She waves a hand, and the Junimo screeches, vanishing in on itself with a bubble-pop sound. Her eyes are just as luminous as they were over the cauldron when she turns back to Harrow. “They refuse to cooperate with me. Still, thou hast reason not to fear them. Shouldst thou like to speak their language, the language of the forest, I may be of use.”
At this, Gideon’s hand lands heavy on Harrow’s shoulder. “This is—Harrow, this is—”
She’s trembling, breathing a bit unevenly, and doing that thing where she tries very hard not to say a certain word, which firstly serves to call into question Harrow’s earlier assumption that the world outside Drearburh was overflowing with oddities like this, and secondly serves to completely piss her off. “It’s different, this time,” Harrow says, crisply. “Very real. Have you changed your opinion on being smited?”
After a moment’s pause, Gideon says, in the lowest grumble of her register: “Feels like it should be smote.” Out of the corner of her eye, Harrow can see her shake her arms out, hopping up on her toes, like she’s preparing for a fistfight. “Alright,” Gideon announces. “Teach us the tree-speak.”
Alecto has moved back to the cauldron. “Come hither,” she instructs. They do. The closer Harrow gets, the stronger the smell is, and the more individual notes she can identify within it—wet soil, pine, something spiced and sweet. Alecto continues, “Mine cauldron bubbles with the ingredients of the forest. Baby fern, moss grub, caramel-top toadstool…” She produces a comically large ladle, dips it into the swirl of smoke, pouring a few ounces into two copper mugs. These, she holds out to them, like offerings.
“If we die in this creepy tower,” Gideon says, gravely accepting her mug, “I will haunt you for all eternity. Your spirit will not have a moment’s rest. I’ll sing you Coldplay’s greatest hits until your ghostly ears bleed, and you weep for mercy, and then—only then—will I move on to OneRepublic.”
Harrow does not dignify this with a response.
Alecto hands her the second mug. “Drink,” she says. “Allow the essence of the forest to permeate thy corse.”
Before she can talk herself out of it, Harrow tilts her head back, and pours the liquid into her mouth.
It is possibly the most vile thing she has ever tasted, and that is a high bar to vault so effortlessly over. The liquid is scalding, presumably because it was just spooned from a bubbling cauldron. What flavor she can make out is jaw-pinchingly sour, worse than the time she and Gideon sneaked a bar of cheese from the back of the fridge that turned out to be nine months expired. Harrow bends at the waist, coughing violently. She holds onto her stomach only out of pure stubborn refusal to let Gideon see her vomit.
“Fuck me,” Gideon mutters, near-hysterical. With one smooth motion, she tosses her drink back.
Harrow lifts her head up, needing desperately to see Gideon look as miserable as she feels, but before Gideon can even lower the mug, her vision vignettes, fading from the outside into a flat forest green. Low in her chest, a swirling tornado picks up speed. She tumbles to the floor. Retches, somewhere.
Incomprehensible shapes swim in front of her vision, sharp-edged and feathery. She can hear her pulse. It thumps irregularly, pulsing wet in her ears. Harrow squeezes her eyes shut—she thinks she makes a low, pained noise—sour tears stream down her face, pooling coppery in the hollows of her cheeks—
And then, as soon as it began, the feeling fades. Harrow gasps a shuddering breath, blinking harshly until the scene in front of her clears, focuses. Gideon is lying flat on the floor, face pressed to the wood, shivering. Alecto stands by the cauldron, looking placidly out at them. When she catches Harrow’s gaze, she says, “There art many mysteries around us. Thou must be patient if't be thy wish to discover them.” Then, with a flash of golden firework sparklers and a sound like the tearing of paper, she’s gone.
For a moment, there is nothing but silence.
With a thump, Gideon flops onto her back, spreading her arms and legs out like she’s trying to make a snow angel out of the thin layer of grime over the floorboards. “On the bright side,” she says, voice cracked and grumbling, “the Sisters would actually shit themselves to death if they found out about this.”
Harrow throws the empty copper mug at her head.
On the true bright side, the forest potion works. The next time Harrow sets foot in the Community Center, there’s a note left on the floor of the deserted crafts room, written in an odd, unfamiliar script that she is, miraculously, able to read. The note details a request for various forageable goods—the others like it, scattered around the rest of the building, ask for other crops, crafted goods, and found objects.
As Harrow wanders through the empty, decaying rooms, Junimos of different colors appear behind bookshelves, or peek out from corners. If she had to hazard a guess, they seem curious. This does make her wonder what, exactly, these creatures plan to do with five pumpkins, a gold bar, and a piece of cloth. They aren’t exactly forthcoming. Still, Harrow is patient (and has absolutely nothing better to do besides), so she copies all of the requisitions down into her notebook.
Gideon has patently refused to engage with anything relating to “that nasty slug juice,” which is obviously a positive development from her earlier insistence on interfering. However, it means that Harrow is on her own to complete the Junimos’ requests. She takes a day to scour the forest, gathering stalks of wild horseradish, leek, dandelion, and daffodil. When she returns to the Community Center, bounty in arms, a sky-blue Junimo greets her, bouncing higher and more frequently than any she’s seen before. Somehow, it leads her through a completely nonverbal transaction—the bundle of forage for a packet of mysterious-looking seeds.
Such is life, in Canaan Valley. Sometimes, Harrow worries she’s taking the whole thing a little too well—despite the townspeople’s general nonchalance, Gideon’s been avoiding both the forest and the Community Center like the plague. Then, she chastises herself. If Drearburh taught her anything of value, it was how to adapt—rapidly, and quietly.
The packet of mystery seeds keeps her occupied for a while. She marks time through small irregularities. A morning is spent in the library, learning how to make fertilizer from tree sap, aided by Palamedes’s knowledge of the valley’s natural mineral composition. Mayor Gaius catches her on the way back to the farmhouse, and invites her in for tea, a beverage only slightly less repulsive than the forest potion.
Potatoes come up from the ground in bunches of two and three. The cauliflower sprouts leafy green and eggshell-white. Gideon and Magnus finally fix up the kitchen—he and Abigail insist on loading them up with food for their pantry, which is admittedly very helpful. Harrow’s still got her stash of protein packets, and she’s learned how to make field snacks from the acorns and seeds that drop from the trees around the farm, but there’s something deeply soothing about sinking her teeth into a roll of bread, feeling it split beneath her incisors. They refuse to accept payment, so Harrow sneaks a few bundles of kale and garlic into their fridge, and calls it even.
Strangely enough, though she planted the crops herself, the volume of the harvest still manages to surprise her. It’s a relief, at first—she makes back the money she’d spent on seeds by selling two sacks of produce back to Augustine, and that’s only a quarter of her stash. Augustine can’t buy it all from her, and the shipping bin only empties once a week, so Harrow is stuck with the unenviable task of ridding herself of approximately a metric ton of fruits and vegetables. Hence, the kale and garlic sneaking. She can’t claim total selflessness.
Not much else of note happens in the time that passes. Gideon’s day-to-day activities remain a mystery, and their interactions sparse, but the constantly varying supply of fresh fish in the icebox gives Harrow an inkling of what she’s been up to. Harrow’s not sure where, exactly, Gideon learned to fish—honestly, everything she knows about fishing seems relatively antithetical to everything she knows about Gideon Nav—but if Gideon is happy (and, crucially, away from the farm), she has no complaints.
And then, on the day after the first of the mystery seeds sprout into rows of wild forage, Harrow exits the farmhouse to find Dulcinea Septimus waiting by the porch.
It’s the first time they’ve interacted up close—Harrow only knows her by name because Abigail mentioned buying eggs from her, and she’s the only person in town Harrow’s seen with chickens. Today, she’s fitted a straw hat over her silky brown curls, and an earth-toned plaid shirt drapes over her shoulders, tucked in at the sides so as not to get caught in the spokes of her electric wheelchair. Her thin mouth quirks into a wry, cheerful smile when she sees Harrow halt at the top of the stairs. Perched on her lap, gently kneading at the dark fabric of her skirt, is—a cat.
The cat is average-sized, if she had to hazard a guess, fur striped black and mud-brown. Harrow stares at it. The cat stares back, with placid, unblinking yellow eyes.
“Good day, Harrow,” Dulcinea greets, without hesitation or any hint of self-consciousness, as if they’ve known each other their whole lives. “How are you this morning?”
“Well,” Harrow says, after a moment. She glances down at the cat—turns back to the woman. “And you, Dulcinea?”
“Oh, please, call me Dulcie,” she insists, stroking a hand over the cat’s back. It arches its back into her touch, making a dreadful little mrrp sound. “Dul-ci-ne-a is such a mouthful, really.” She looks up to meet Harrow’s gaze, then, soft eyes and a sliver of white teeth peeking through her smile. “I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve come to pester you this morning.”
Harrow isn’t quite sure what to say to that. “You haven’t pestered me yet,” she settles on.
Dulcinea—Dulcie—laughs, a short thing, more breath than sound. She reaches up to adjust the thin cannula running from her right nostril, retucking the plastic tube behind her ear. “Too kind, Harrow. Well, I found this little fellow running around the area between Novenary Farm and our place. I would keep him myself—he seems to be a bit of a bastard, and I appreciate that trait in a companion—but one of my godsons is horribly allergic, and that house is simply not big enough for two asthmatics.” Here, she tilts her head, and furrows her soft, feathered brows, as though she’s just noticed something important. Then she straightens, and the furrow melts away. “Do you think you could use a cat on the farm? I won’t take offense, either way.”
The cat looks at Harrow. Harrow looks at the cat. His face, wreathed in early morning sunlight, appears almost sorrowful. It’s a familiar expression. She half-expects him to begin spewing melancholic, detestably-metered poetry. “What does he eat?” she asks.
“Oh, I bet he’ll fend for himself,” Dulcie says. “They’re carnivores, and there’s plenty of squirrels and birds about. All he really needs is somewhere safe to rest his little head at night—perhaps a bowl kept full of fresh water.”
Harrow purses her lips. She walks down the porch stairs, coming to a rest directly before Dulcie’s chair, and crouches before the cat. For a moment, she simply examines him—the slanted line of sparse fur above his eyes, the glint of sunlight off his wet nose. Quick as a flash, he leans forward, poking over the bridge of her nose with a sharp stroke of his sandpaper tongue. Harrow flinches backward, wiping her sleeve over her forehead.
Dulcie muffles a giggle, either at the cat or at the face Harrow made in response, which she’s sure is comically scrunched. “Oh, he likes you,” Dulcie coos, scratching delicate fingers behind the cat’s ears. Her nails, like Harrow’s, are short-cropped, and lined with dirt beneath the distal edge.
They didn’t keep animals at Drearburh. There were the rats, of course, but they were feral, and had a habit of dropping dead in the corner of the chapel, where the Sisters often left poisoned cheese wedges. Harrow knows as much about cats as she knows about the polio virus—that is to say, she’s read about them, and they’ve featured in at least one of the documentaries her parents put on to occupy her when she was too young to understand the permanence of death, but she’s never encountered the phenomenon in the flesh.
As far as she recalls, feline saliva is not poisonous. Though she can’t be perfectly sure.
Still, if cats are carnivorous, he’s unlikely to chew up any of her crops. In fact, he might take out any vermin who’d seek to disturb the plants, and aid in scaring away the crows. If all he needs is a water bowl—the farmhouse is big enough, surely—
“Alright,” Harrow says, unfolding to her feet. Her joints ache, but in a distant, far-away sense, like perhaps she’s experiencing the ghost of long-dead pain. “I’ll take him.”
“Wonderful,” Dulcie says. She pokes a finger at the hump of the cat’s back, and he leaps off of her lap, immediately scampering to nudge against Harrow’s calf, winding his tail around her ankle. “Any idea what you’ll name him?”
Harrow narrows her eyes until the creature at her feet fades into a brown blur. “Not sure,” she says. Which is, for the most part, true. It’ll be a hot day in Drearburh before she considers cursing any living creature with the namesake of Ortus Nigenad.
Dulcie leaves with a box of fresh strawberries tucked under her elbow—one hand on the throttle of her chair, the other waving a cheerful goodbye. Harrow watches from the bottom porch step, feeling decidedly unbalanced. She thinks she might never be used to it—the instinctual, unearned warmth the people here keep displaying.
The cat bumps its small head against the side of Harrow’s shin. When she doesn’t respond, he opens his mouth and bites at the leg of her pants.
“Ah,” Harrow says. “She did say you were a bit of a bastard.”
“Mrraw,” the cat replies, eyes perfectly innocent, and a bit droopy.
“Hm.” Harrow folds herself down to sit on the front stoop. After a moment of nervous hovering, she places her hand on the cat’s head, scratching gently behind the ears, as she saw Dulcie do. The cat stills, and then pushes up into her fingers. He twists his head, so her nails move along the whisker-lines of his cheeks, and makes a soft rumbling noise.
It doesn’t feel so different from having her hands buried in the dirt. Softer, sure, and jumpier than soil tends to be. Nerve wracking. But it doesn’t make her skin crawl.
The farmhouse door creaks open—Harrow jerks her hand away from the cat—and Gideon stumbles out, running a hand through her hair. “Did I miss Dulcie?” she asks.
Harrow folds her arms across her chest. “How do you know her?” she asks, resolutely not looking at Gideon’s newest muscle tank, even out of her periphery.
“Met her at the Stardrop, a few weeks back,” Gideon says. Her tone is unusually conversational—no hint of an edge. Harrow decides not to acknowledge it. “Drank me absolutely under the table,” Gideon continues. She pauses. “Might be in love with her.” Another pause. “We’re to be wed in the fall, and you aren’t invited.”
“Hm,” Harrow responds, tapping one booted toe against the dirt. She stares out at the flowering expanse of Novenary Farm, noting the way the rising sun glimmers off of dew-wet leaves, silvery treetops.
Horribly, Gideon settles down on the stoop next to her. She strokes a confident hand across the cat’s spine, pats him firmly and repeatedly on the side. The cat mrrps again, stuttering through every pat. “Who’s this little gentleman?” Gideon asks, eventually.
“Dulcinea dropped him off,” Harrow says. “I figured he could keep the rodent population under control.”
“Ah,” Gideon says. “So practical.” And then: “You know who he reminds me of?”
Harrow clambors, marionette-like, to her feet. “No,” she says, shortly, before stalking away.
The end of spring approaches like a rolling ocean wave. Entirely accidentally, and through embarrassing trickery on the part of Mayor Gaius, Harrow finds herself attending the town’s annual Flower Dance.
They’ve cleared the forage from a section of Cindersap Forest, and lined the clean square with wooden barrels full of roses, dahlias, tulips—a group effort from the denizens of Dominicus, to which Harrow was thankfully not invited. Augustine mans a small stand near the entrance, proffering various rare seeds, as well as a selection of dried flower garlands. Across the field, a large table is set up, draped in a coral-pink tablecloth. It’s covered in colorful food dishes—chicken wings, salads, cakes, and a gumdrop-shaped pink gelatin that Harrow can’t seem to tear her eyes away from.
It’s never been quite so apparent how many of the townspeople Harrow has yet to meet—or, rather, successfully avoided. There’s the awkwardly dressed man Harrow has only seen fishing in the forest lake, standing between Mayor Gaius and another unfamiliar face, a woman with strong features and an easygoing grin. To their left, an absolute colossus of a man helps adjust Dulcinea’s portable oxygen concentrator around her waist, while she grabs a painted wooden cane from a woman wearing a light woven shawl. Three young boys chase each other around the field, calming somewhat after the woman lightly admonishes them. Behind the stiff-shouldered form of Silas Octakiseron stands an equally pale-faced man, a good ten inches taller, with the same platinum blonde hair. And in the center of the grass, another stranger with coiffed brown hair pulls Coronabeth Tridentarius into a smooth twirl.
Upon her arrival, Harrow was horrified with the realization that she might have to socialize amongst these strangers. Fortunately, though, she was immediately waved over by Palamedes and Camilla, who had situated themselves by a stretch of fence between the buffet table and the river. Their quiet presence eased her as much as their manner of dress—Mayor Gaius had implied a level of formality to the event, and as such Harrow wore the one prayer dress she’d bothered to take with her, only to stand out completely amongst the crowd of flowing pastels and crisp whites. The librarians, while not clad in a black as dark as hers, at least had the decency to limit their color to a small yellow rose in the pocket of each of their gray suits.
Small mercies, surely.
“Do you know,” Palamedes says, picking absently at his plate of salad, “these springtime dances can be traced back to ancient fertility rituals?”
Harrow blinks. Even the smallest of mercies, it seems, God has not seen fit to grant her.
Camilla snorts. “You’ve spooked her, Warden.”
At her sharp glance, he shovels a few more forkfuls of vegetables into his mouth. Harrow empathizes with his hesitation—whoever made the salad slathered the vegetables in a glaze that is somehow both sweet and sour. “They aren’t fertility rituals anymore,” Palamedes protests. “Clearly.”
“I appreciate the educational opportunity,” Harrow says. Despite her stiffness, neither of them take offense—at least, not that she can tell.
Palamedes smiles, a small, smug thing. He shares a quick look with Camilla, and then turns back to Harrow. “We have some business to discuss with Dr. Pent,” he says. “You can come along, if you’d like.”
It’s a kindness, and one that goes down as sweet and sour as the salad dressing. Harrow shakes her head. “I’m alright, thank you,” she says.
Palamedes scoops the last stray piece of spinach into his mouth before folding his paper plate neatly in half. He and Camilla both nod at Harrow, and then they’re gone, two strands of dark gray wool against the golds and pinks and blues of springtime.
Harrow isn’t hungry, and she definitely doesn’t want to eat anymore of the salad, but she finds herself nibbling on the drier pieces of mixed greens anyways, if only for something to do with her teeth. Her gaze travels from the backs of Palamedes and Camilla, to the tense forms of Mercymorn and Augustine, hunched over something behind the flower stand, to Dulcinea, now playing amongst her godsons.
“I saw you visit the Wizard,” a voice says, from over her shoulder.
Harrow startles. Salad spills off of her tipped plate, tumbling onto the grass. The woman to her side only laughs, a dry wine sort of noise. “My, but you are twitchy.”
For one, hysterical moment, Harrow thinks: Coronabeth Tridentarius has fallen into a pit of acid. But, no—with a sideways glance, Harrow confirms that Coronabeth is still hovering around the center of the field, flanked on either side by the man with the coiffed hair, and—
“If you’re looking for your roomie, she’s talking with my sister,” the girl drawls. They really do look remarkably alike, in face if not in stature. She’s paler and thinner, the dress that pulls tight around Coronabeth’s chest hanging off of her in loose, flowing drapes. Her hand, when held out to shake Harrow’s, is lined with blue veins. “Ianthe,” she says.
“Harrow,” Harrow says, shaking out of politeness rather than any real desire.
Ianthe’s palm is unsurprisingly clammy. “Oh, I know,” she says, eyes flaring. “Everyone’s been buzzing about you, farmer. So dark and mysterious.”
Harrow’s not quite sure how to respond to that, so she defaults to her tried and true blank-stared silence, tucking her hand back inside the long sleeve of her dress.
This appears to delight Ianthe, who grins broadly. “What kind of little shadow vestal are you, Harry?”
“Absolutely not,” Harrow says, shortly—whether to the question or to the nickname or to both, she doesn’t know.
Ianthe goes to say something else, leaning a scant inch closer, but she’s interrupted. “Lay off, Tridentarius,” Gideon says, appearing at Harrow’s side with a stealth that the Junimos would envy.
“I thought you were busy flirting with Corona,” Ianthe says, somehow both sharp and languid.
“And I thought I told you not to try anything,” Gideon bites back, crossing her arms—actually clothed for a change, in the sleeves of a dark blue blazer—over her chest.
This whole conversation has been—alarming, on a number of levels. First and foremost is the implication that people have been discussing Harrow—further that one of those people has been Gideon, who last paid Harrow a compliment when they were eight and nine respectively, and she said that for a shrimpy nerd, Harrow had a somewhat powerful temporalis muscle. Secondly is the stance Gideon has taken, angled towards Ianthe in a way that Harrow might call protective, if she were having a stroke. The thing is—Harrow isn’t having a stroke, and therefore Gideon’s body language remains a complete mystery, which cannot possibly bode anything but disaster.
“We were just having a conversation,” Ianthe protests, though without much force behind it. “Harry and I have a mutual friend, you see—not you, Gonad, though I suppose you’re somewhat familiar—and I was simply curious as to what sort of errands she has you running.” She turns her dead lavender gaze back on Harrow. “And I wanted to offer my services, of course. If you’re in need of any assistance.”
Harrow blinks. “I am not,” she says, and then, in a pitiable effort to reassert the natural order of the universe, “and neither am I in need of a babysitter.”
Gideon sighs deeply, as though drawing strength from some unseen pocket of oxygen. “Fine,” she says, mouth pulling into a thin smile. “Whatever. You’re both total weirdos, you deserve each other. Have fun making poultices from frog sperm.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Griddle,” Harrow snaps. Ianthe’s mouth forms a delighted little ‘o’ shape, and Harrow’s stomach squirms, though she can’t quite tell if she’s pleased or displeased with the development. When Gideon raises an expectant eyebrow, she continues, maintaining her flat, unaffected tone. “Frog mating cycles are seasonal. They won’t begin sperm production for another month, at least.”
Gideon’s nose wrinkles. “Gross,” she says. “Thanks for that.” She stalks away, shaking her head.
Harrow watches her leave only because her head is already positioned in the direction to do so. Gideon melds back into the joyful crowd with ease—the tall blonde butterfly Coronabeth swings an arm around her shoulders, and her friend with the coiffed hair leans in to whisper something to them. After a moment of accidental staring, Ianthe slides neatly into Harrow’s field of vision, just casually enough to be perceived as an accident. “Griddle,” she says, with a light laugh. “That’s fantastic. Do you have any more fun facts to share? I so love a good biology lesson.”
Truthfully, Harrow had originally gleaned the frog fact from one of Palamedes’s ramblings. But to say so would be to invite further conversation, which is the last thing Harrow wants from this woman, who has been altogether extremely upsetting. “No,” she says, shortly.
Ianthe’s smile twists. “Well, then, you’d at least grant me a dance.”
In what can only be an example of divine karmic repayment, Mayor Gaius chooses this moment to clear his throat. Like magic, everyone falls silent, turning towards him in a rippling wave. Mayor Gaius offers a bashful smile, the kind that makes him seem younger than he usually does. “While the afternoon’s still young, I’d just like to say a quick word.” How long is this dance going to last, Harrow thinks, but before she can formulate any conclusions, Mayor Gaius continues: “We’ve been fortunate enough to welcome two new neighbors to Dominicus this season. Novenary Farm has sat empty for many years, and while I miss Aiglamene dearly—” At this, the woman standing next to him tips her head in acknowledgement, and Harrow remembers the letter’s instruction to say hello to a Pyrrha Dve— “I know she’s left the place in very capable hands.”
There’s a slight pause, just beginning to border on awkward, when Magnus raises his glass of cider. “Cheers to that,” he announces warmly.
A chorus of toasts resounds, stuttered only by the low murmurings of the teenagers: “Is Aiglamane dead, then?” “No, she went back to live with her weird cult up north?” Mayor Gaius raises his own glass—presumably filled with water, unless he’s been downing grain alcohol—and makes eye contact with Harrow, who bravely decides not to hide behind the buffet table.
By the time the noise dies back down into layered conversation, Palamedes and Camilla have returned to Harrow’s side. “Tridentarius,” Palamedes acknowledges, with a nod.
“Sextus,” Ianthe replies, pleasantly, though the expression on her face suggests she’s just tasted something sour. “Hect.” And then, to Harrow: “I suppose I’ll see you around, Harry.”
“Do not count on it,” Harrow responds, hiding her hands further up the lengths of her sleeves.
As it turns out, the dance lasts for hours, and then Harrow is roped into helping with cleanup by the woman with the easygoing grin, who does turn out to be named Pyrrha, and who coughs into her cigarette when Harrow brings up Aiglamane’s mention of her in the letter. Pyrrha hands her a lavender-scented trash bag, and Harrow walks around the field, gathering paper plates and stray napkins. By the time everyone has finished collapsing the tables and fences, the sun has long since set. Pyrrha hefts the trash bag over her shoulder with a wink and a word of thanks. The rest of the town begins to say their goodbyes, heading east, and Harrow is left standing next to Gideon.
Their walk back to the farmhouse is silent. Harrow finds her gaze darting over to Gideon again and again, watching the way the slanted moonlight glints off of the stray orange hairs that drift around her temples, wanting to say—something. Not an apology, but maybe—maybe something apology-like. Apology-adjacent. But the further they walk, the more the words dry up in Harrow’s mouth, and by the time they approach the stairs up the front porch—halved in size by a newly installed five-degree slope ramp, courtesy of Magnus and Gideon’s joint effort—Harrow finds that her voice has left her completely.
“Night, Harrow,” Gideon says. She sounds halfway hesitant, if Harrow didn’t know better.
A pause. “Goodnight, Griddle,” Harrow responds.
Gideon gives a halted sort of nod, before stepping forward, ascending the ramp to the front door.
Harrow sits down on the bottommost stair. She folds her arms over her knees, and stares out at the expanse of Novenary Farm, a studying the grounds as she’s taken to doing each night. The changes have been gradual enough not to be remarkable while they were happening, but something—the end of the season, perhaps—makes Harrow think back to the Novenary Farm she’d first come to upon her arrival at Dominicus. The scattered detritus, the weeds that curled around tree roots and clung to the eaves of the farmhouse. There are still remnants of that decay lingering, especially towards the edges of the farm, where the forest grows thicker—fallen trees Harrow isn’t strong enough to move, boulders she hasn’t been able to pick apart. But there’s a stretch of clear, clean land—nine plots of hoed dirt large enough to fit nine piles of seeds each, almost perfectly square, rich and dark with fertilizer. In the mornings, when the sun crests over the hill, the soil gleams, the dew on the foliage glistening, bubbles of rainbow-prism light. It’s—it’s sort of beautiful.
Wrapping her arms around herself, Harrow can’t help but notice the ways that she’s changed, too. Her frame is still thin, and small, but the clothes that used to drape like loose curtains fit over her shoulders more tightly, and her grip on her wrist is steadier and firmer than she can ever recall herself being. Semi-regular, uninterrupted sleep has loosed the bags from beneath her eyes. When she breathes in, long and deep, the fresh air wisps warmly against the inside of her chest.
Inside, a light on the second floor flickers on. Harrow startles out of her reverie, letting the sleeves of her dress fall back down over her hands. She spares one moment to linger on the silhouette shadowed across the windowpane before ducking back into the farmhouse.