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A week to the day after she and Luz decided not to try it long distance, after her human went home to mundane Earth and left her behind, Amity found herself coughing up flowers. They were soft, fragile petals, the blooms five-pointed like small pinkish-purple stars in her hand, and they crumpled easily enough under her fingers when she crushed them to a fist. The thin blossoms clung to and caught wetly in the back of her throat, leaving a lump there she couldn’t swallow around.
Amity knew about curses, and knew of several people who might like to curse her, but this didn’t feel malicious at first. Just inconvenient, and a little bit worrying, and a lot like something her mother shouldn’t be made aware of-- and then as days passed the other symptoms set in, stomach sickened, heart stuttered and hammered unevenly under her breast. Her lungs went tight and heavy and full with sorrow, and always there was the cough, dry and wheezing, that ended with a mouth full of bitter flowers.
She didn’t recognize them, the blossoms that fed from her magic, and she wondered how long their taproots had been twisting down through the spongy branches of her lungs, just waiting for the right season to flower. A handful of petals disgorged a few times a day became regular consumptive coughing fits that she struggled to hide, the faint fragrance of it always stinging at her sinuses, and when a week had passed and the condition only continued to worsen, she pressed an exemplary bouquet of the blooms between the pages of a particularly hefty textbook and made the trek into Bonesborough to find an expert she could trust.
The Parks’ family home was on a shady, twisting street, and Amity had only been there once, many years ago. It wouldn’t do for a Blight to be seen hobnobbing with the inhabitants of such a hovel, and so whenever they’d met it was mostly Willow being led up the hill to the Manor, hand in hand with one of her fathers. Still, Amity remembered the way. She could have walked it in her sleep.
And Willow answered the door when she rapped at the big brass bold-voiced knocker, which was a small mercy, guarded surprise evident in her soft, gentle face. “What do you need?” she asked, not unkindly, and Amity flinched a little at the truth that neither of them ever sought each other out without reason these days. They’d barely said two words to the other since Luz left, but then again, Amity hadn’t been saying much to anybody at all.
The rasp of a dry, rustling cough tickled at the back of her throat. Amity opened her Advanced Abominations text to page 238 and showed her the fragile, tissue-thin flowers, already faded and antique, a blossom out of season. “Do you know what’s wrong with me?” she asked.
Willow looked hard at her, and Amity felt that if she answered the question honestly, she might be able to go on for a very long time. “Maybe you’d better come in,” Willow said instead.
---
Edric had come down with a case of the Wilting Cough when he was fourteen and Amity was just turning twelve, and just slightly too young to care. She wished in retrospect that she’d paid more attention, but this was the sort of thing that was always happening to Edric, a boy prone to dramatic fits of melancholy whenever his latest crush didn’t pan out. It hadn’t seemed serious at the time; Emira had taken the flowers and wound them through his sea-green hair and made him laugh again, and after a house call from a respected member of the Healers Coven and a week of bedrest, he’d been fine. Mother had been fairly severe about it, but Mother was severe about everything, including the embarrassments her oldest children had made of themselves. They burned the blossoms, and scattered the ashes in the garden, and no one said anything more about it.
So Amity knew what the diagnosis was likely to be, if not the accompanying prognosis, and she tried to keep her heart calm while Willow led her through a house that was more cramped and cluttered and homey than her own house, and sat her down on her bed to be examined. Willow’s room got a lot of light, warm streaks of the end of summer pouring in through tall windows to feed the rows of sprawling potted plants that balanced on the sill and every exposed inch of desk and table. Creeping ivy spilled in waves to the floor. Brighter, healthier flowers turned their heads hungrily towards the sun. Amity perched stiff-backed on the edge of the sagging mattress and gripped the spine of her book so hard her already pale knuckles went bloodless and bone-white.
“How long has it been happening?” Willow asked softly, too quiet, too serious for comfort.
“Two weeks,” Amity rasped, trying to sound normal. “And a day.” She didn’t want to see the way Willow’s eyes went full with pitiful understanding, so she went back to looking at the plants instead. On her desk, a broad-leafed fern draped its arm over a framed picture of Willow together at the carnival with Gus, and King, and Luz. Amity coughed again, and choked it down.
“You shouldn’t do that,” Willow told her, matter-of-factly, with the certainty of the long-suffering. “It’ll make it worse. For one thing, you’ll tear up your throat that way. That’s how people start coughing up blood.”
Amity couldn’t taste iron and copper on the back of her tongue yet, just useless regret. “It’s fine,” she said.
“No,” Willow said firmly, “really. Do you know anything about the Wilting Cough?”
“I don’t even know what these are,” Amity said, and she opened the book again to demonstrate. “Are they even real?” She flushed as hot and tender as a sunburn; of course they were real. They were killing her. “I mean, are they a real kind of flower, or just made of magic?”
Willow tenderly took one of the pressed flowers between thumb and forefinger, peeling it from the page, and held it cupped in the palm of her hand. “They’re oleander,” she said. “Some people have belladonna, or hemlock. That thing they say, about the kind of flower that grows in you having some kind of significance-- that’s just romanticism. They all mean the same thing.”
“Which is?”
“Regret,” Willow told her, and she closed her fingers carefully over the flower, as though it were something precious. “Oleander is for something unresolved.”
She got up and went to her bookcase, which unlike Amity’s private library back home lacked rigorous study materials and the latest Azura volume but was full of gardening primers, and floral encyclopedias, and farmers’ almanacs. The book she came back with was old and hardbound, and she flipped to a dogeared page in the middle. “It’s got lots of names,” she said. “The Flowering Corpse, Hanahaki Disease… a bunch of names, no real cure.”
Amity accepted the book in silence and glanced first at the diagrams, pen and ink drawings of lungs infested with the roots and stems, vines extending through the bloodstream to wrap around the heart, constricting it, searching for the source of love. The source of magic. Her own heart shuddered in a way that wasn’t painful, just unsettling, the valves flapping without rhythm or purpose. “A disease that feeds on magic,” she said.
“And magic feeds on emotion.” Willow brushed off the front of her dress. “You can read up on that, I’m going to get a cup of tea.”
Her heart clenched again, wondering when Willow had become the sort of person who casually drank afternoon tea. It was on brand, Amity supposed, and one of the potted shrubs did look like it might have been a jasmine bush, but the last time she’d been here they’d gulped thick, murky hot chocolate from mugs the size of their heads and called it good, and it made her think that she didn’t really know this Willow at all, just the image she’d had of her in her head since they’d been small, a polaroid slice of a single moment in time.
“Okay,” Amity said.
Wilting Cough, she read, was a fatal disease that rarely killed. Its most tragic victims were its most romantic; widows left behind by the sudden departure of their spouse, young lovers left bereft who sickened for want of someone they could never have again. This phenomenon had become rarer since the widespread proliferation of oracular magic and necromancy, with those left behind able to dial up the deceased for one last confession or argument or apology, and most other cases were mild. Either the urgency of the feelings faded, leading to remission, or the sufferer was able to approach the object of their emotions and clear up the issue.
If you couldn’t do any of those things-- if, for example, your beloved had decided to choose her past over you and return forever to another world, and if you were sure she’d been the love of your life and you were so angry with her for not even really talking about it, just slamming the door behind her on your life and love and the future you could have had together-- then you were in deep trouble.
Willow returned with a tarnished silver tray piled high with a kettle, two thermoses, and two cups patterned with little dancing bears. “Sorry,” Willow said, filling one to the chipped brim with dark amber liquid that steamed like any witch’s brew and passing it to her. “I thought the floral pattern would be a little rude right now.”
The tea was hot enough to burn her tongue, but there was apparently honey in it because it soothed Amity’s throat going down. “It’s okay. The bears are very… you.”
Willow looked at her again, witheringly, looked right through her. “I don’t know if that’s a compliment or not,” she said, and then broke out into a snort of laughter that Amity echoed. It felt so good to relax again.
“Honestly? Me neither.”
They sipped for a moment and then Willow set her cup aside, picked up the thermoses. “These are for you,” she said, and passed them to Amity, who startled. The metal was smooth and charmed warm and sloshed musically with heavy liquid. “This one’s willow bark tea,” she explained, “it’ll help with the pain. Sip it whenever your throat feels raw, but not too much. Too much will make your liver inflamed.”
“Ah. Also not ideal.”
“Not at all. This one,” she pointed to the second thermos, “is my own blend. It can’t really stop the growth, but it slows it. Keep things feeling manageable. One cup a day, in the mornings. You can skim a little off the top for acute flare-ups, but don’t do that too often. There’s a week’s worth in there, I don’t have enough of it to be giving it out more than that.”
Amity uncorked it and sniffed the tea. The steam curling invitingly up from the spigot was the only thing in her life that didn’t smell of flowers. “You mean, you’ll keep making it for me?” she asked, humbled. That was something she wouldn’t have dared ask for, not after everything.
Willow shrugged. “Sure,” she said. “Why not? You’re… my friend.”
“I can pay you, if you want. Not very much, I actually don’t get a lot of allowance, but--”
“Don’t worry about it,” Willow told her. “It’s really not a big deal. You don’t need magic to make it, just patience. And time.”
The idea that Amity might be requiring a lot of her time, for an unknown duration, sat silent and heavy as a cloud of carbon monoxide between them. “Thank you,” Amity said, and meant it. She didn’t know what else to say.
It didn’t seem to have been what Willow wanted. “It’s okay,” she said. Now it was her turn to examine the plants, the beckoning curl of the fern, the small bunch of bright pink blossoms right on the edge of the window sill. Amity didn’t know how she could have missed them before; there it was, right in front of her, the thriving cultivation of living oleander. “I’d be brewing it anyway. All this is just extra.”
---
Every night for a week, Amity had been writing letters-- and long before that, it had been how she expressed herself when she had something trapped inside that was too embarrassing or uncouth or vulnerable to say. All the things that caught in her throat like flower petals, stifling and smothering her, came out on paper: in her diary, which was addressed to herself, and in letters she would never send but that at least expunged the poisonous feeling out of her, putting the ugly emotions somewhere she could safely dispose of them. She’d written a lot of letters to Ed and Em when she’d been young, and to their mother and father. She’d written more than one to Willow.
Now they all started: Dear Luz.
In some of them, she was pleading. In some of them she was sorry. In some she wished she could have been brave enough to take Luz’s hand and walk over the threshold of the new world together, leave everything she’d known, all her friends and family and borrowed ambitions behind. In some she was furious, beyond angry, like a hurt animal lashing out to hide its own leaking wounds. Sometimes it helped keep down the cough even as hot tears stung the corners of her eyes and threatened to spill over, staining the paper with salt and making it all that much more real; sometimes her usually neat and tidy hand trailed off into an illegible squiggle as she coughed, and coughed, and brought up a garden of beautiful, toxic flowers.
It wasn’t the suffocation that would kill you, Willow had explained, when the tea had been slurped down to dregs and Amity was left contemplating the inscrutable patterns of sludgy leaf pulp in the bottom of her cup, wondering what a fortune teller might read there in obvious allegory. It was that oleander (and belladonna, and hemlock) were all poisonous, and after a while, they got into your bloodstream. Let enough of the toxin build up, and that was that. In the meantime you would suffer, pining for something that was lost to you, slowly withering away as the roots wound in deeper, threading through your flesh, until it was impossible to tell what was the plant and what was your own heart.
Dear Luz, Amity started, and immediately put her quill down to hack and cough and sip tea, the thermos juddering in her unsteady fingers. Willow bark, for the pain-- astringent and bitter, an old remedy. A terrible metaphor.
Dear Luz, I hope you are well
Dear Luz, how is your mother? Mine is
Dear Luz, come home.
The cough scraped its way up her throat like something many-legged and living, desperate to get out. A shower of petals and bright red droplets obscured the rest of the page.
Grief sat like incense smoke in her lungs, perfumed with flowers, the signal fire for a funeral. She burned the blossoms and the crumpled notes with their stilted, half-formed sentiments all together.
---
“How long?” Amity asked her one afternoon, sitting on the Parks’ back terrace. Willow had a little garden too, nothing half so grand and elaborate as the trellises and topiary maintained around the Manor but charming in its own way: a small patch of the family house that was only her own, crammed with vegetables and herbs and things grown not only for show but for good taste. White sage was in season. They sat in peeling wicker chairs with the kettle set up on an equally wicker end table between them and watched Ghost stalk between the darkly tilled rows of fresh-planted pumpkins, a proper tea party, Willow whistling to the cat whenever he got too close to something that might not agree with his magical, but still feline, stomach.
This inquiry came out of nowhere, they’d been sitting in slightly awkward, slightly companionable, extremely stilted silence enjoying the peace of the late afternoon and the distant sounds of the Bonesborough market filtering between the houses, but Willow understood immediately. “Since we were little,” she said.
Amity put down her cup excitedly. “Wait, do you think-- it feeds on your magic, what if that’s why you never developed control over your power?”
“Not that little,” Willow said, smothering half a smile with another sip of tea. “Anyway, I did develop, didn’t I? Just a late bloomer.”
They subsided into silence again, something else choking off the air in Amity’s lungs now. “That’s a long time to leave something unresolved,” she said.
“Sometimes you can’t fix it,” Willow told her, with a tone that had passed out of resignation and into calm acceptance. “So you just have to learn to live with yourself. It probably would have been easier if I could have stopped caring, but that’s the problem, you know? When you love someone that much, it kills a part of you to not care anymore.”
“I’m sorry,” Amity said automatically, trying for My condolences and meaning, I’m sorry.
“It’s not your fault,” Willow said, and maybe she even meant it. “Anyway, I’m almost over it now, I think.”
Amity coughed discreetly into her cloth napkin, and thankfully only stained it with flowers. “Yeah? That’s great, Willow.”
Ghost came up from behind a patch of begonias and wound around her legs, then Willow’s, then hopped elegantly up into Willow’s lap where he curled up as still as any other hunk of wood, save for the twitching tip of his tail. Willow stroked the arch of his back, holding him on her soft thighs. “I used to think it would never get better,” she said, absently. “Like-- I was so humiliated and angry and the worst part was that I still wanted the person who had hurt me, so much, it was like I couldn’t breathe. And then I couldn’t. And it just hurt and hurt and hurt, and she didn’t care at all, and I couldn’t just decide to love her less. She was my friend.”
“Pretty bad friend,” Amity said, feeling hollow.
“Oh the worst.” Willow giggled at her expense, and it was vaguely delightful. “But you know, I got older, and I realized she was hurt too, and that kind of helped. Everybody’s hurt, and everybody hurts each other.”
“Mm. Even roses have thorns, right?”
That comment seemed vapid and empty the second after she said it, the most obvious kind of pedestrian observation to make, but Willow played along anyway. “Right. And-- yeah, like roses, sometimes things are beautiful to look at from a distance, but they’ll hurt you up close.”
Amity lay her hand upon the table, palm up and open, vulnerable, inviting the prick of the thorns. “Maybe sometimes it’s good to be hurt,” she said. She’d spent so long doing the hurting, making herself cold and dead inside as indifferent stone, an internal landscape where nothing, good or bad or nurturing or poisonous, could ever hope to grow.
“No,” Willow said, and Amity got the sense she’d just regurgitated the same well-meaning, useless platitude that Willow had been hearing about her condition for a decade, “it really isn’t.” But she put her hand in Amity’s hand regardless, and they stayed that way until the sun went down on the garden.
---
The week after that, Willow marched up the steep and foreboding hill to Blight Manor with a bushy potted shrub clutched proudly in both hands, and thankfully it was Edric and Emira who answered the door, because they ushered her right up to Amity’s room with a few winks and nudges but a minimum of anything that would have alerted the family matriarch. “This is for you,” Willow said, brandishing the pot. There was a bright red bow wrapped around it.
“What is it?” Amity asked, politely baffled.
“A special tea plant,” Willow told her. “Very rare, my own cultivar. So you can brew your own tea.”
Amity’s chest constricted up tight, which was a familiar feeling now, at the thought that she might no longer have a reason to fly down into the town and spend an afternoon with Willow. That they might go back to only passing each other now and then in the halls at Hexside, everything between them now behind them, all and only memories. “Thank you,” she said, and accepted it. She held the pot on her lap. “What about you, though? Don’t you need this?”
Willow shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Not anymore. I think I’m going to be alright now.” Amity wondered how long it had been since Willow had coughed up a handful of flowers over her.
“You’re really strong, you know?” Amity said, stroking one of the fuzzy, velvet-soft leaves of the plant between thumb and forefinger. “To have gone on this long. Your affinity for plant magic--”
“I know,” Willow said, cutting her off. “And it helped! But the more I used my magic on it, the more it grew down into me. Trying to fight it wasn’t the answer.” She put her hand on Amity’s shoulder and squeezed, and Amity took a deep, clear breath. “You have to find your own answer, for yourself. And in the meantime, drink lots of this tea.”
Amity tried to pretend she wasn’t leaning into the touch, like a sapling leaning against wood. “I’ll think of you when I do.”
Willow smiled, full and for real, and just then Amity could really believe that everything was going to be okay. “I’d like that,” she said.
---
Dear Luz,
I forgive you.