“I see.” He glanced over the labels on the gifts. The vial was some kind of perfume, and the jar was a hand cream with healing herbal extracts. “Thank you. I appreciate it, and I’m sure Agna will like this.” He slipped the vial and the jar into his satchel. “I’ll see you soon. Good business.”
“Don’t get yourself fleeced.” Nelle waved as he turned along the path.
The shop stalls and wagons were lined up just as he remembered them, with a few substitutions here and there. Any stall that sold food was mobbed, four or five customers deep. Their prices must have undercut everyone in Wildern. Keifon waited in line at three of the stalls and procured a bottle of cooking oil, two jars of preserved vegetables, and a bag of rice at a better price than he’d seen in months. He stopped by Baran’s stall, welcomed the toymaker’s bear hug, and caught up for a few minutes. He splurged on a carved wooden jump-square board, imagining a leisurely evening game with Agna on their reading-room table. Until then, he’d just have to keep the pieces packed away from the cats.
The purchase had shot much of his discretionary spending for the month, so he stuck to necessities and conversations at the other merchants’ stalls. After one full rotation, his satchel was laden further with goat cheese and a new book. Well, he rationalized, the game board had come from his fund for books and other not-technically-vital spending. He hadn’t touched the mortgage budget or the support-for-Nachi budget, and the food was covered by the food budget.
He tried not to think about what would happen to the markets in Wildern once winter ended the harvest and forced the construction work to a crawl. The construction crew’s supply lines from Ceien, over the mountains, would have to stay open somehow despite the snow. Without the army’s assistance in keeping food and equipment flowing from Ceien, the work camp’s demand would scour the city bare.
In the meantime, Keifon had slowly filled their larder with dry goods and the jars he’d put up in the summer. He’d even put up some of the cats’ meat and fish scraps, though the smell had been less than pleasant. Neat piles of firewood lined the fence in their courtyard, secured under tarps. He was only feeding one human and two cats. He’d take care of the three of them until spring. They’d stay warm and fed, and the winter wouldn’t last forever.
Keifon shook his head and looked up at the pennants and awnings. The caravan. Yes. He’d visited everyone he cared to visit. His new destination was at the other end of town, and there was plenty of time until nightfall.
The caravan market had supplanted the usual markets for the day; most of the farmers and craftsmen took their wares down to the caravan to trade. Only a few stalls stayed open in the central market square. Groups of shoppers still walked through the square to and from the caravan, and young people clustered on corners to swap secrets and gossip. Avoiding them and the decade-old memories they dredged up, Keifon cut through the middle of the square, past the stone stage and one of the notice boards that stood at its edge. The board was papered with the usual advertisements and requests, along with fliers at its corners that read Construction Business On Other Sign, Please!!! in Kaveran and Yanweian. The latter caught Keifon’s eye, and he stopped to read the board that had been erected next to it.
The new board was pure chaos, with hand-lettered signs advertising rooms for rent and requests for lodging next to typeset fliers reading Who Benefits? and True Townies Welcome Progress!. Three white goose feathers had been tacked to the bottom corner of the board, arranged in a careful fan. The opposite corner held only a nail and a scraggly white scrap, as if another such arrangement had been ripped off the board. Some of the fliers repeated the motif, outlines of feathers drawn in ink in the corners, crammed in among the admonishments about power and money.
Shrugging his satchel strap higher on his shoulder, Keifon moved on. Perhaps he should open the gallery rooms for rent after all. They remained unfurnished, and he could not provide firewood or food, but as long as he made that clear, a sound, windproof indoor space with full plumbing would fetch some kind of price. It felt like a betrayal of Agna’s dream, but he reminded himself once again that her gallery would not open until she got back, at the minimum. He could always send a letter to Jaeti and get her take on it. He suspected she would shrug it off, as long as she didn’t have to oversee the process directly.
The hills flattened out into a plateau as the elevation of the town mounted toward the foothills. At a street corner he turned to see the sweep of the city behind him, the dark ribbon of the canal, and the cluster of activity that was the caravan camp. Beyond the edges of town the forest reclaimed its territory, undulating into the distance over the hills. It was as unlike his open, grassy hometown as anywhere he’d ever been, and yet here he was — laden with food and books, planning to take on tenants through the winter and figuring out what he could serve his friends for dinner. It was not the life he’d been born to lead. But it was his own.
Agna: The Empire of Herbs
Navigating the maze of streets felt like walking through a deep forest. Every so often her memory would break through with an image of a tavern sign or a fountain, leading her from point to point between the unfamiliar houses and shops. Finally she recognized the herbalist’s shop, though it had been repainted, with brilliant blue sashes around its spotless windows.
A peppery wave of scents washed through her sinuses as the bell rang over her head. Something wooden clattered to the floor just before Lina came running. Agna returned her nearly-strangling hug. Lina’s breath was ragged, but she didn’t cry; Agna smiled to herself over Lina’s shoulder. From the glimpse she’d gotten, Lina seemed well. As usual, she dressed indifferently under her work apron. Agna thought she’d seen that greenish dress years ago, but at least she looked decently rested and fed. Lina persisted in disproving their parents’ paranoia about her fate as an independent young woman.
Agna fought a lump in her throat that rose in response to Lina’s show of emotion. That was one of the unsolvable problems: as long as she lived in Kavera, she wouldn’t be able to see her sister. Lina would want to visit, but it had always been difficult for her to even walk to an unfamiliar shop in Murio, and she’d never been further from home than their grandmother’s cottage in the mountains. Boarding a ship to the other side of the ocean, just for a visit, was beyond her entirely. They had their letters. It would have to be enough.
An older woman wearing heavy gloves emerged from the back room. “What’s all—ah.” Under her scrutiny, Agna waved.
Lina finally detached and turned. “Marzia, this is my sister Agna, the one who’s been sending me herb lore from Kavera.”
“Sorry to interrupt,” Agna said, more for the shop owner’s benefit than Lina’s. “When are you off today, Li?”
“Take the day.” The shopkeeper stooped to retrieve the broom that Lina had dropped. “Not every day you get family coming back from the middle of nowhere. Just be on time tomorrow.”
“Yes, ma’am, thank you!” Whirling toward the door, Lina seized Agna’s hand and towed her out of the shop. “I was hoping you’d get in soon. Have you seen Mama and Papa already?”
The sisters climbed the steep, open staircase next to the herbalist’s shop, dodging the planters and pots lined up along the stairs. “Yeah, this morning. Too early. I had to get some sleep first.”
“That’s good.” As they climbed, Lina plucked off withered leaves and overreaching vines without breaking her stride. “I’ve got most of the good stuff from home coming along in pots, at least what I couldn’t get Mama and Papa to take. This one here and the thyme there are from the kitchen garden.”
At the top landing, where the two of them barely had room to stand next to a fig tree, Lina unlocked a door and darted inside. Agna followed, letting her eyes adjust to the indoor light. Lina had occupied the apartment over the shop for a year and a half, and she had unfolded her obsessions in every corner. Packed bookshelves shouldered in among boxes of notes and preserved specimens in every dim foot of space; every spot that su
nlight reached held potted plants. Lined up on the windowsills, hanging from ceiling hooks, and spilling out of windowboxes, they completed the impression of a library that had been abandoned for centuries and overtaken by a forest. But for all the living and unliving things crammed into the space, every object seemed to have its place, with intricate pathways outlined with rag rugs between the pots. Apart from a closed door on one side, it seemed to be laid out in one room, with a bed in one corner and a sink and a small stove in another corner.
Agna remembered to look for the pitcher and bowl by the door, and rinsed her hands briefly. Lina had laid out a fluffy towel next to it, scented with essential oils. Having completed her entry properly, Agna picked her way past stacks of labeled specimen boxes, following Lina into the apartment.
“Did you see what they’ve done, though?” Lina pulled a book from one of the shelves and laid it on the table, which was packed in between the sink and the stove. “The garden is lovely, fine, and their new cook is talented, fine, but I can’t believe what they’ve done to the house. One of Papa’s subordinates is living there now. Some stranger. In our house.”
“I saw the new place, yeah. It’s nice. If it’s working for them, I can’t begrudge them that. I just wish they’d waited until I got home.”
Lina’s sharp chuckle echoed the slap of another book on the table. “They tried! They’ve been complaining about you dragging your feet since New Year’s.”
Agna froze, seeing her father’s fussy handwriting on his expensive stationery. Come home. We need to talk. Month after month. “They never said anything about this!”
Lina flipped her hands. “They want to pretend it all happened one day accidentally. Oh, no, we aren’t heading for retirement. I think it’s something to do with the agency. Don’t show any weakness, or something.”
So much time had been wasted for what amounted to pride. Would she have come, if they’d told her? There was no use worrying about it now. She was here, and before she left — which she would do, no matter what her parents thought — she’d see this through.
“Come see, though.”
Agna followed Lina’s gesture past a rack of drying herbs toward the table. Lina had laid out two thick binders, their pages held together with metal clamps. She unclipped one of them as Agna watched, and turned over the cardboard cover and a blank sheet of paper. Agna’s own work was mounted to the next page, with paper brackets holding down the edges of her old sketchbook paper. It was a clumsy study of a mulberry branch. On the opposite page, an array of notes in Lina’s handwriting mirrored Agna’s captions.
Trying not to hold her breath, Agna turned a page, then another. One page held a study of the weed that grew in the roadside ditches in southern Kavera, the one the locals said their dogs sought out to ease stomachaches. On another page was the lichen that Nelle had gone out to collect in the mountains, after the Feast of Darano. She turned more pages. Dayweed, the flower that Laris had displayed on his mantelpiece, drawn in a fog the next day from the first wild specimen she saw. She’d drawn one study in the middle of yet another argument with Keifon, and another after they’d had a long discussion about theology.
The collection spilled over into the second book, which Lina unclipped for her. Agna paged through one drawing after another, watching her graphite lines grow clearer, watching her first wobbly incorporation of ink flow into precise lines and hatching. The dates in the corners reached her arrival in Wildern and stopped. When the shifts at the hospital had begun and she’d started to research her potential backers for the gallery, she hadn’t found time. Her supposed studio, which Keifon had insisted upon, was only an empty room.
Lina squeezed her shoulder, watching as Agna closed the second book. “What’s wrong? Was this a bad idea? I’m sorry.”
“No — no. It’s lovely. I just haven’t drawn in a while. I’ve been too busy.”
“I thought as much. I’ve been researching the older specimens in the meantime. Making more notes.”
Agna opened the second book again. Lina’s notes on the facing pages compared the features of each Kaveran plant to those native to Nessiny, and discussed their medicinal qualities. “This is really impressive.”
Lina shrugged. “It’s fun to collaborate.”
“Sorry I haven’t kept up with it.” She’d rather be in that front room now, sitting at a drafting table by the window, than facing another meeting with her father. But even when she went back to Wildern, her money and time had to go toward the gallery. Her own dabbling in art had just been a distraction on the road; she’d never be as talented as her mother or Letta or the Kaveran artists whose sketches filled her file folders. She was an agent, a dealer. She could fight off the role of her father’s replacement all she wanted, but her value still lay in finding other people’s art. She would always be a planner and a deal-maker, not an artist.
She turned to one of the later pages, where her study of bark and leaves faced Lina’s notes about herbalists’ lore and techniques. Lifting the unclipped pages, she held them out at eye level.
Lina beamed. “Hey. You think so?”
“Maybe.” She set them back in their places and squared the pages’ corners. “I didn’t intend for them to be displayed. It’s just sketch paper, most of them.” And yet Lina had pressed out the creases and mounted them with removable brackets. Her notes were an elegant tangle of cross-references written on linen paper, readable at arm’s length and thick with botanical and medicinal information. As something halfway between a scientific exhibit and art… “Hm. Maybe.”
“Well, you can take them in the meantime, and think about it. I have copies of my notes.” Lina replaced the clips holding the books together and stacked them on the table.
“Thanks. So what else is new with you?”
Lina pressed her fingers into the soil in one of the pots, then poured some water into it from a pitcher. “Working, mostly. Meeting with the other Herbalists’ Guild members. We’re looking into some locations for a new store. Marzia doesn’t know yet. I feel kind of guilty, but…” She flung out her free hand. “There’s a chance we could make a new shop succeed in a neighborhood that doesn’t have anything like it nearby. We have to try. You know.”
Agna smiled. “Yeah. I know.”
“So you are going back, right?” Lina set down the pitcher, untied her apron and crossed the room to hang it by the door. She ran a hand along her braid, pulling it over her shoulder. “I mean… it’s great to have you home. But hearing you talk about all the things you’re planning… I don’t want you to have to give that up.”
Agna sighed. Her fingers traced the cool metal edges of the clips on the binders. “It’s complicated.”
“You don’t want the agency anymore, right?” When Agna didn’t answer, unwilling to voice such a bald denial, Lina went on. “Say you don’t, then. Hypothetically. Papa finds some young up-and-comer like Naire-ceisi did. It’s not the end of the world.”
It wasn’t for Lina, no. Agna pushed back the impulse to snap, It’s not so easy for some of us. Lina hadn’t been born and raised to step into this role. She’d always been free to do whatever she wanted.
But then… Lina had fought for this, for the room crammed with plants and books, for the space that belonged to Nicolina Despana and no one else — not their parents, not Esirel, no one. She’d resisted the marriage offers from their father’s colleagues’ children and the insistence from Esirel that she stay safe at home and wait for their life to begin. Agna’s shy, supposedly cosseted sister knew something about carving out her own place in the world.
“He worked so hard, though.” Agna pulled out a chair at the table and sat next to the binders of illustrations. “I just hate to throw that away.”
“Who’s throwing it away? They can let someone else be the boss, they aren’t shutting it down.”
“But it won’t be in the family anymore.” Her sister should understand this much; she’d carried the same name all her life, even if she ignored its
obligations. “Someone has to carry it on. I don’t see you lining up.”
“No need to be bitter. You’re just as free as I am to walk away. You think I didn’t think about it?” Lina crossed her arms over her stomach, her shoulders hunching, and for a moment she seemed like the old Lina: afraid of everything beyond the garden fence. “I could suffer through business school, it’d be good for me to push myself, I don’t want to leave you with all of the responsibility. You were away at the Academy. I thought I should try to keep up. And I felt sick and I cried coming home from school every day and just being alive started to hurt.”
All while Agna had been cocooned in Academy gossip, convinced that learning Kaveran and copying Rone would be the most important goals of her life. “I… never knew. I’m sorry. Lin, I didn’t know.”
“I put on a brave face.” Lina’s smile was bitter. “For Esi, for Mama and Papa, for you. But finally I had to accept that I wasn’t made for your world. That was when I applied for the job at Marzia’s. And things started to make sense again. I knew what I had to do with my life. And it wasn’t the agency.” She took a few breaths, and her voice steadied. “What I’m saying is, I don’t want you to force yourself into that place, either. Where you don’t want to be yourself anymore and everything hurts. And I don’t want to believe that Papa would make you take over if you really didn’t want to. The two of you can make a plan. And someday… who knows, maybe one of our kids can take over while he’s still around. We don’t know what will happen.”
They didn’t know, true. It was impossible to predict the career paths of children who were years away from being born. Agna rested her head on the tabletop. “…Yeah. We don’t know what will happen. That’s what I hate.”
“You want predictability, go join the agency. Be Papa’s follower and don’t make your own decisions. Which I think is about as likely as you growing a second head.”
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