15

Really, it was quite amazing how much you could do to procrastinate visiting somebody.

For instance, household chores were usually unappealing, but when you have an unpleasant conversation stretching ahead of you, volunteering to scrub the soot from the kitchen fireplace could take several delightful hours to delay it.

Weeding my garden seemed an urgent task, too. I mean, I had a bare patch sitting right in the middle right now. Even after I siphoned off my magic for the day, there were barely even shoots of groverweed, and very little could be done about the filias my sister had almost entirely stripped out of it. I sighed. After the awkwardness yesterday, I really didn’t want to ask Jontan for some of his, but I probably was going to have to anyway.

No, no. I put that out of my mind. Only one unpleasant conversation per day. Besides, there was a hint of slipgrass in my thayflowers, and one of my adly vines needed trimming. That was plenty to do for now, right?

Except . . . those didn’t take long, and I soon stared around in exasperation. Why had I kept up with my weeding all season? Hadn’t I realized I would need to use it for an excuse later?

I looked around for something else to do, and my eyes fell on a spiky silverbush somewhat in the distance. Aha! Yaika’s garden!

Armed with a spade and clippers, I headed out of my gate, squeaked it back into place, and skipped towards Yaika’s fence. She spent far more time painting intricate designs on the inside and outside of that polished wood than she ever spent pulling up weeds. Her gate didn’t squeak, either. I wonder what she’d used to make the hinges work so smoothly.

Standing in the center, in the bare-dirt part she used for dyeing, I felt a thrill of trespassing. Yaika would kill me if she saw me here. But then again, she was the one who’d gone into my garden and cut practically all of my filias yesterday, so she really had no leg to stand on.

Her silverbush held out its green limbs far into the spindly ulla tree beside it, so I trimmed back the offending branches. Her burra patch was way too crammed, so I pulled out the weakest stems. I was just starting on removing slipgrass from her tonna berry shoots when I heard someone yelp.

I turned around to find my sister standing at her gate, wearing her oldest, most frayed shift, a bundle of grey fabric and dyeing equipment tucked under her arm.

“What are you doing?!” Yaika asked in horror.

“Removing slipgrass from your tonna berry shoots,” I said unapologetically.

“I want the slipgrass! The tonna berry shoots are the weeds!”

I looked down, my brow furrowed. “Why would you want slipgrass when you could have tonna berries?”

“Because they’re full of thorns, and slipgrass is useful for yellow, and I don’t need berries,” Yaika said hotly. “Mother already grows plenty of them! That’s why her plants are always sneaking shoots onto my side of the fence!”

Oh. I looked down. Okay, maybe I had gone a little overboard there.

“And you cut my silverbush?!” Yaika yelped. “The sap’s only glittery when it’s fresh! Otherwise, it just turns things grey! Now I’m going to have to dye things silver all day!”

I straightened, trying to maintain my dignity. “Well, you’re the one who got into my garden yesterday —”

Out!” Yaika cried.

I trudged back down the dirt path towards the house, and nearly bumped into Grandmother on my way past Mother’s garden. She was pushing a heavy wheelbarrow, loaded down with plants with straggly roots. The wheel hit a small bump, and one fell out.

“Here you go,” I said helpfully, picking it up and putting it back.

“Thank you, Raneh,” Grandmother said, still trundling along.

“Do you need help?” I asked hopefully, trailing after her. “What are you doing?”

“Filling Hurik’s garden with something useful,” Grandmother said. “I’ve been telling that son of mine for years that I should have an herb garden of my own, and he keeps insisting Hurik needs to learn to work outside by having his own space. Now the boy’s gone for a few weeks, and we have company coming, and I’m going to take advantage of it.”

“Do any of those plants send runners under fences?” Yaika asked warily as we passed her gate. Hurik’s gardening space was between hers and mine.

“No,” Grandmother said.

“Do you need help?” I asked again, eagerly. “I could help you plant them, or — oh! — do you have a watering can? I could water the roots —”

“Thank you, but I’m fine.” Grandmother stopped outside of Hurik’s falling-down fence, and propped the metal bars of the gate open with the wheelbarrow.

“Are you sure?” I said desperately. “I mean, the whole space is full of weeds. I could help you pull them . . .”

Grandmother reached down and pulled a sharpened shovel from the compartment beside the barrow. “No, thanks. I’ll just be turning the earth over, weeds and all. It won’t take long.”

“But . . . but . . .” I protested.

Grandmother smiled. “Why don’t you just do whatever you’re procrastinating?” she asked shrewdly.

Busted.

“O-okay,” I said, swallowing. “I’ll just . . . do that.”

I headed back to the house, wishing desperately that I could think of something else to do first. Nobody else came up the dirt path to distract me.

Inside the house, I peeked into Grandfather and Grandmother’s room in case Grandfather needed me, but he was scratching away with a pen, referring to several papers in front of him, so he didn’t look interruptible.

As I headed up the stairs, slowly, I heard Lala’s door open. I perked up, spinning around, to see her emerge in a crimson and pink shift that I rather thought had been made from two of my old underskirts.

“Lala!” I cried hopefully. “Do you need my help with anything?”

Lala squinted up the stairs at me. “No,” she said. “You don’t have magic. You can’t help with my chores.”

I bit my tongue, because it was almost, sort of tempting to correct her. But I wasn’t stupid enough to just spill the beans to anyone in reach. Especially somebody as untrustworthy as Lala. She gossiped with her friends about us all the time.

“R-right,” I said, my heart pounding so loudly, I could hear it. “I’m just . . . uh . . . I’m going to visit Genn.”

I waited for her to ask me to stay.

“Okay,” Lala said. “Have fun.”

Gaaahhhhhh . . .

I turned around and headed slowly back up the stairs. As I reached the landing, I heard the front door slam behind me. When I turned around, she was gone.

Why won’t anyone stop me? I moaned silently. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to do this. Now’s the perfect time to stop me. I’ll do anything else at all!

But nobody came to stop me as I slowly changed into a dark orange bodice and matching outer skirts, a combination that normally cheered me up, but today did nothing to lift my gloom.

Nobody stopped me as I brushed my hair and pulled it into the usual tight bun at the back of my neck, or when I dithered over placement for our family signature. I considered going out to pluck new plants, but reluctantly decided that the signature I’d worn yesterday was still too fresh for that to make a valid excuse.

Nobody stopped me as I headed down the dirt path towards our road.

Nobody stopped me as I kept on going, past the carriage tracks my parents had left in the mud from the dew at dawn, beyond the edge of our land, and onto the main road.

Nobody stopped me as I turned the opposite direction, away from the market my parents were at far down the road, and toward the Weedless land. Sweat collected at the back of my neck, and I wished my parents hadn’t taken the carriage. Genn lived just far enough away to be really inconvenient to visit on foot. It took nearly an hour to walk it. Surely that could have been a good enough excuse to wait until tomorrow instead?

And yet, nobody stopped me.