April 1990

Violet was in the garden when Susan showed up. Which wasn't unusual, she spent a lot of time in the garden in the spring.

Their garden looked very different than it did when Violet and Mum first moved here. The straggly sad-looking bushes were all ripped out, replaced with an apple tree and a bunch of berry bushes. Against the wall across from the house was a raised bed packed full of strawberry vines — that stuff spread around and got everywhere, it was crazy — and new beds had been dug up against the house, under the windows, but you couldn't really see much there yet. Violet's garden patch was about the same size and everything, but it was moved a little bit away from the north wall and closer to the path down the middle, so other stuff could be planted against the wall, and on the open space on the other side of the path were some more mounds dotted around, places Violet had expanded to after their first year here.

That first spring, Mum payed someone to come in and put an apple tree in the northeast corner, and currant bushes all along the wall on the south side of the garden, in a couple places smaller blackberry plants instead. Just a couple weeks ago, Mum got some priests from up on the Hill to take a few cuttings from currant and blackberry bushes and plant them against the north wall too — apparently you could just do that with berry bushes, snip a bit off the end of a branch and stick them in the ground and they'll make a new plant! That was very cool! The priests did do some kind of magic too, but that was just to make sure they took and would grow nice, they would just do it on their own. It didn't actually look that hard, Violet was pretty sure she could do it herself, but they didn't really have more room in their garden to put more berry bushes. Maybe she could plant a bunch of currants in their courtyard, though, there were spots for it, maybe she should ask their neighbours if they wanted her to try some next spring, get berries going crazy all over in there.

And they were going to get berries! When they got them two years ago now (felt like forever ago), the currants were only maybe knee high on Violet, and the blackberries were tiny little babies. But they got big! Their stems got bigger, long things stretching up, Mum had to get supports for some of them so they didn't flop over, and the blackberries made fruit last year! Just a little bit, each of the bushes made one big long stem over that first summer, and then the second summer that one stem made berries, they were good! (Violet didn't like the seeds, but Mum could magic them out for her.) And during that second summer they made a bunch more stems, and now those were making berries too! Because they had flowers, pretty little white ones, and each flower was going to be a berry later, and there were soooo many! And, and the currant bushes were flowering too! Their flowers weren't so pretty, bunches of whitish-greenish things, but they were also going to be berries! and there were lots!

And the apple tree had flowers too! When they got the tree, it was a cutting off of a grown-up tree, like, about Violet's height. She was taller now, and the tree was even taller than her, it was big — not, like, grown-up tree big, but taller than Mum preferred to be (plants grew fast sometimes), with a few big strong branches, and it had flowers! Pretty big white ones, and, like the berries, all the flowers were going to be an apple later! So they were going to have apples come autumn, that was so cool!

Violet was kind of used to the idea of eating things she grew now, since she made vegetables and stuff a couple years in a row. But apples felt different somehow, she didn't know why. Just, bigger? It was neat.

The kinds of things she grew in the garden changed a little over the couple of years she's been doing this. There were a couple little mounds around the garden, some of them were gonna be cucumbers, and some were potatoes. Potatoes came in different colours! When they went to America the potatoes there came in all kinds of different shapes and sizes and colours — the neighbour kids didn't believe her that potatoes could be purple (even though she never lied), so Mum got some purple seed potatoes special from America, Violet was going to surprise Lasairín and everyone with them when they were ready. (Violet thought the funny-coloured American potatoes tasted better than normal, she had no idea why white people only took the boring ones.) Violet still really didn't like the skins on cucumbers, and pickles made her bleh, but actually she found out that cucumbers were good on sandwiches! Or on crackers, to make like tiny sandwiches, for a snack or something. She even sometimes put some in the cheesy oat flatbread pasty-like things people around here had a lot, but Síomha always gave her such a funny look when she did that...

(That was pretty normal, though, Violet knew by now that other people thought her tastes were very strange sometimes. It was an autism thing, she thought.)

Violet still grew peas, mostly because they made pretty flowers! But she wasn't doing them on the fence this time, didn't want them to shade the new berry plants back there, so they got stakes instead, so they'd climb up in more of a cylinder shape. There were also rows of carrots, because she liked carrots well enough and they didn't really get in the way of anything, but she cut out most of the other vegetables she grew over the last couple years — instead she had bit by bit switched to having more herbs. They had lots of parsley, and Violet was also growing chives too, had bunches of it still coming up from where she'd planted it the last couple years, they both just kept coming back after Violet cut bits off. She did grow some basil, but it was killed off in the winter, she had to wait a bit before planting some more again. She also had some mint, and some thyme, and some sage, and some lemon balm! Lemon balm smelled nice. Since she started having tisanes all the time at school (because the cider still tasted bleh to her) she was experimenting more with stuff, and she came up with one made of lemon balm and mint that was pretty good! She grew it herself last year, and it smelled nice and was super tasty, so, she was doing that again, trying to mix it up with some different kinds of mint to get some extra flavours in there, and maybe a couple sage leaves if she was feeling silly, or some rose hips or berries or something...

On, and they had rose bushes now too, but they were only babies and wouldn't make flowers for a while. The new beds against the wall were for flowers — some people came by to plant a couple tiny little rose bushes (they were adorable), and then Mum and Violet put in a bunch of lavender along the wall, and also put down some lily buds, just, stuck in wherever they had room for them. Lavender was pretty, and smelled nice, and she could put that in her not-tea too! and also bees liked lavender, so they were more likely to stick around and pollinate their things. Not that Violet thought that was something they had to worry about, they never really had trouble with things being pollinated before, and all their berry bushes were making flowers! But other people also had things in their garden, so, planting things bees liked was also just being good neighbours, when you thought about it.

Violet had very mixed feelings about gardening back when she lived with the Dursleys, but she loved their garden here. Partly because she got to decide what she was doing — Mum came up with ideas too, but when she told Violet things it was mostly just telling her to cut down on the list of things she wanted to try so she didn't make too much work for herself. Though, that was less of a problem this year, because she had school and Master Walter and her art stuff to do. She kind of picked a bunch of mostly low-maintenance stuff she could put down and forget about on purpose, so she didn't need to spend too much time on it. She actually might skip the peas next year, she was only doing them this year because the flowers were pretty, but next year all the berries and lavender and lilies would be in, and maybe roses too, so. But anyway, their garden was mostly filled with stuff they actually ate, and eating something you grew yourself was weirdly satisfying, and it wasn't the super serious business Petunia made it? Like, showing off for neighbours and doing it just so, or whatever, Violet and Mum were just playing around and doing what seemed neat at the time, so. It was fun, and pretty, and also tasty, and it smelled nice out here once all the herbs and everything got going.

This time, she was out in the garden but she wasn't actually doing any garden work. She was doing art work instead. Recently, she was babbling at Master Walter about their garden plans while working on a thing, and he said to show it to him. He didn't mean like invite him to their house (though he had come over a few times by now), but draw it for him. And it wasn't just a silly fun thing to do, it was also art homework, because Master Walter could be sneaky like that — she was supposed to play around with the colours and shadows and light and stuff, not trying to make it look realistic, exactly, just something that looked pretty.

They were still working on things, like, getting proportions and perspective right and stuff, and slowly getting into how to layer colours and shade things properly so it didn't look fake (slowly because it was super complicated and was going to take ages before she could do it right), but Master Walter said it was just as important to know how to make stuff that looked pleasant, even if it didn't look real. More important in a lot of ways, really — it didn't matter if something looked realistic if it was just ugly and bad to look at, and if something was super pretty people didn't care so much if it was fake-looking. Though it did depend on what you were trying to make. Of course, if you were hired to, like, do a portrait, or make a painting of a very specific place or something, whoever you were doing that for probably wanted it to look real, but if you were just making pretty things it didn't matter so much, you could kind of just do whatever you felt like.

So Violet was just doing whatever she felt like. She brought her big sketchbook — this was the second one Mum got her, actually, she already filled the whole first one since starting with Master Walter — and some pencils and her pastels, along with a baking pan to put all her stuff on. She picked a currant bush and plopped down onto the ground, her sketchbook laid across her folded legs...but then remembered that sitting in a skirt like this was improper, and probably double improper, since she wasn't wearing knickers at the moment. (Oops.) So she quick went upstairs to pull on a pair of shorts under her skirt, and then went back outside with her stuff. It was a kind of cloudy day, but patchy enough that the sun peeked through now and then, the glare not super bad but bright enough that the colours of everything were really clear, when the sun came out all glowing and throwing shadows and stuff...

Since she was just trying to do colours and light and not make it look real, she didn't even bother trying. She lightly brushed over the page in blocks, red for the bricks here and green for the grass here and blue for the sky over the wall, and the ground she went over with brown, hatching at it with orange and yellow and whatever to get the feeling of the different colours and shapes of the mulch, using pencils to make little nudges here and there, force straighter lines. (The pastels kind of smooshed if she wasn't careful, not great for hard lines.) The plant itself was a bit harder, making bunches of green for the leaves, putting down blobs of pigment and smearing it with her thumb to try to get the shapes to look right — now and then cleaning her hand with a charm when the powdery stuff started bothering her. (Cleaning charms had become her new favourite thing very quick.) Tracing over the stems with long back and forth lines with both pencils and pastels, trying to get the shape and the colour to look right, carefully scraping stuff off with a knife when it didn't. And then when she got the basic stuff, she had to make the light look the way it was supposed to, the sun coming from this way, shadows down and back here, so she needed to trace over this stuff with darker colours, and up on these parts with lighter colours, smoosh, smoosh, smoosh, mixing the colours together a little, but careful not to ruin the shape of things, which was hard to do, she had to try to fix things with her knife and go over them again multiple times. It didn't quite look the way she wanted, so she shaded over things again...which was better, but still not great. She did some shading on the wall too, smoosh, smoosh, smoosh, being very careful with the bits of brick red peeking through the brown and black and blue and green and white and yellow of the plant, and then added some clouds in the sky, lighter on one side than the other, little touches of yellow right here on the light side.

When it was about as done as it was going to get (you could only layer pastels so many times before things started getting messy), Violet frowned down at the drawing. That was...okay, she guessed. The flowers looked weird, and the colours weren't quite right, and the shadows looked a bit blotchier than the real ones. But it wasn't supposed to look real. So. Maybe she could... She'd seen a few pastel drawings before, where the shapes didn't look quite right, smeared a little, like could happen when your eyes were partly closed — if she did it, like, following the direction the sunlight was coming from, just, gently set her hand on top of the plant and drag down a little...

Ah! That looked kind of neat! She carefully smeared some more stuff around, the blobs of colour stretching out a little, making a couple fixes with her knife and adding a little more colours here and there, and smearing some more, and there! That wasn't so bad. Didn't look like a real currant bush at all, blobby and vague and almost dream-like, but it was kind of cool! She'd show it to Master Walter, and see what he thought. She gave the baking pan a yank, the bottle of special resin stuff sliding toward her, she lightly brushed over the entire page — the pastels she used was pretty loose and powdery stuff, it would keep smearing and fall off if she left it, covering it with some clear stuff that hardened in the air would save the drawing for longer. She tore the page out of her notebook and set it down on the ground where it'd get some sun to make it dry quicker, held down with a sticking charm. There!

That was one drawing done, but it wasn't so late, she thought she had time for another. After poking around the garden for a bit, Violet moved her stuff under the apple tree, and then laid down on the ground, the trunk just above the top of her head, the branches spreading out straight in front of her. It was kind of neat-looking from this angle! And the way the sun made chinks of brighter colour slanting through, and this wasn't a normal angle to be looking at things from, so it was good drawing practice, she thought. This time Violet actually started with making an outline of the branches in pencil first, her heels pulled way up under her bum to prop up her sketchbook at a convenient angle. But needing to partly sit up see the sketchbook got annoying pretty quick, so she tugged off her skirt — good thing she went in to get shorts, because this would definitely be improper — wadded it up into a ball and tucked it under her head. There! Okay, she was going to need blues and browns and whites to start off with, she dragged the tray of pastels closer to her head, let's see...

She was still laying on her back filling in the colours when she heard the front door open and shut. "Violet?" came a voice she was mostly sure was Susan's. "Aunt Cassie said you were out here, I— Oh, there you are."

"Hi, Susan," she said, waving in the direction the voice was coming from. Violet couldn't actually see, her legs and the sketchbook in the way, but she was very sure that it was Susan now — she was the only one of her friends who called Mum "Aunt Cassie" in English. (Some of the neighbour kids did call her that, because it was just normal for kids to call the other adults in the square aunt or uncle or whatever, but only in Gaelic.) "Is something rr-wrong? I didn't think you were coming over today."

"I wasn't, but I was at home alone, and I got bored." Lonely, she meant, but she didn't like saying that. "Is that okay?"

"Yeah, I was only asking."

"What are you doing under there?"

"Drawing. I have art homework from Master Walter. I ah, I ah, I already did one, it's on the g-gah-grr– over there," pointing with her foot. "You, you can pick it up if you want, but check if it's dry first, please." That stuff did dry really fast, by how much drawing she'd done it must have been almost half an hour already, it should be fine.

There was a pause, Violet nudging the edge of some flower buds with her knife — the leaves were just coming in, kind of poofing out in a cone with jagged edges, hard to get it to look right. After a little bit Susan said, "This is really good, Violet."

"Thanks! I'm supposed to be working with l-l-leh-light and shadows and c-colour and stuff, bleh. Mmmaking stuff look nice, even if it looks fake."

"Well, I guess it doesn't look super real, like a photograph, but it's pretty, so who cares?" That was basically what Master Walter said, but in many fewer words. "How'd you get the colours to do that?"

"Blur together? That's easy, look." Violet pushed herself upright (her head spinning just a little, she'd been laying down a while), waved Susan over under the tree. While she came over, Violet dabbed a little extra yellow on the sun-side of one of the branches, traced over a few of the leaf buds, glancing up at Susan every couple strokes. She was in plain trousers and long-sleeve shirt, made of her special Seer-friendly linen. She'd gotten a haircut again recently, funny red-auburn-pink hair in a fluttery halo around her head.

She was moving a little slow, subtle dark blotches under her eyes — Susan must not be sleeping again.

When she was close enough, bending almost double to avoid running into any branches, Violet said, "It's easy, see?" She smooshed the yellow into the branch, smearing it along to mix into the brown, and then dragged her fingers along the leaf buds to tug the blobs of colour against the sunlight just a little bit, like she'd done with the currant drawing. "The pastels are this pow-p-powdery stuff, you can mess around with them. It looks funny and blurry and fake, but I think it's neat. Ah, um, almost Impressionist-like, I think."

"I don't know what that means, Violet," Susan said, smiling a little.

...Um, obviously, that was something Violet picked up from the books Master Walter was making her read. "Art thing, n-n-nnnever mind." She'd tried to say not important, but fairy magic wouldn't let her say it, because she thought Impressionism was important, actually. "Ah-Ah-I think it looks neat, is the point."

"Yeah, it's definitely better than I could ever do. You're really getting good at this stuff."

Violet shrugged. "I practise."

"Mhmm." Susan seemed to think something was funny, for some reason, but whatever it was she kept the thought to herself. Plopping down to the grass next to Violet, "That's neat, getting the tree from underneath?"

"That's the idea. Not coming out the way I wanted, I think. It's ah– It's ah– It's– Art stuff is hard sometimes."

"If it weren't, I guess everyone would do it."

...Probably not, though. Violet knew from neighbour kids and grown-ups asking her about it that a lot of people thought it was a silly waste of time. She thought it was fun though! so they could just go bother someone else about it. "So. If you w-wah, wanted to do something else..."

"No, that's fine, finish your drawing."

Okay then, Violet would just do that. She flopped back down onto her back, wiggling a little so she was sitting right with her skirt under her head and everything. Glancing between her sketchbook and the branches overhead, right, she was shading the lighting differences, how one side of the branches were brighter and more yellowish/orangish than the other, where the light hit them. And also fix the edges of the branches where they kind of ran into the sky, or the sky ran into the branches, but, she thought if they blurred into each other that was actually okay, just not too much. Anyway, she was about here, she wanted to trace over with some yellow here, and here...

Already closing in on her drawing, she wasn't paying that much attention to Susan. She sat down on the ground, 'above' Violet and on her right, leaning against the tree. For a bit she just sat there, as Violet traced over things and dabbed on colour and smooshed, not really paying attention to time passing by, as happened when she was focussing on a thing. She did wonder for a second if she was doing bad friend stuff, not really paying attention to Susan, but Susan wasn't trying to talk to her either — Violet glanced up, and Susan was just sitting there, leaning her head against the trunk of the tree. Probably fine, she thought, if Susan was bored or whatever she'd say something.

The drawing was starting to almost look what she wanted — not quite the same as it looked in her head, but getting there — when she heard a noise from Susan. She let out a little...uncomfortable moan kind of sound, didn't know what that was supposed to be. The best thing to compare it to she could think of was that time Lasairín had way way way too much candy one Samhain, and got really sick. She looked up, Susan was moving, shuffling across the ground a little bit from the tree...and then laid down in the grass, letting out a shaky sigh.

...Um.

"Susan? Are you okay?"

Her voice a bit thin and shaky, Susan said, "Fine, just dizzy."

"Dizzy?"

"Yeah." Susan let out a noise that wasn't quite a hum and not quite a groan, kind of both at the same time. "It's... You know the dose of my grounding potion has to match up with my weight, and I can also just get used to it, so it needed to be fixed."

"I know." It had to be adjusted a few times already, and Susan was sick for a bit after when they did. Her potions broke down into stuff in her body, and some of those were, like, kind of poisonous? It made the side effects worse for a little bit, until she got used to them, and sometimes they had to try other stuff to make it better, it was very complicated.

"Well, this time, after fixing the dose, there was too much crap in my blood. It was poisoning me, slowly. So," she said, her voice turning tense and hot, "I have to switch to a different potion, but we have to figure out the dose of this one, but before we can do that I have to go off it, and wait for all the stuff left in my blood to filter out right, or it'll screw up the new potion, so right now I'm on no grounding potion at all, and it sucks!"

Violet had sat up a little as Susan talked, setting her drawing aside, leaned around the tree to look at her. She was laying there on her back, glaring up at the sky. Her eyes were red and shimmering a little, not quite crying, but pretty close to it — angry tears, Violet was pretty sure. Trying not to feel guilty — Mum and Susan said it wasn't her fault, and Susan actually liked that she was a Seer, for family reasons, but sometimes she still felt bad — she asked, "Have you slept at all?"

"A little. Nightmares. Saw the Dark Lord attacking the Manor this morning — again." Susan's house was attacked by the Dark Lord and a bunch of Death Eaters on New Year's, when her mum was still pregnant with her; they kind of won, chasing the bad people away, but Susan's dad and grandfather both died. Violet knew she saw the battle before, even felt her dad die, which sounded awful. "I was hoping I could stay here tonight, or go up to the Hill somewhere."

"Sure. We're not d-doing anything, I think. Um. Do you wanna tr-ch-trry sleeping with me? I know you said my magic feels nice."

Susan frowned, her lips quirking in a funny lopsided look, didn't know what that was. "I don't know, maybe..."

"I'll wear a nn-nightdress."

"Oh, okay, we can try that, then," Susan said, sounding a little relieved. It came up at some point that Violet slept naked a lot of the time — she'd guessed that that might be why Susan didn't like the sound of the idea, and it looked like she was right. "Thank you, Violet."

"Sure." There was another thing Violet was thinking about, but she didn't know if there was really a nice way to ask. But she felt like it was more important to ask than to do it nicely. "Um... Susan, are you eating?"

Susan scowled up at the sky — Violet got the feeling she didn't want to answer that question, which probably meant the answer was no. But, after a few seconds, she did answer, and the answer was, "No."

"Susan! How long?"

"...Two days? I'm not sure, it— I'm not sleeping either, and time feels funny if you're not sleeping right. That's what's making the dizziness happen, not eating."

But that was bad! That was very bad! Susan couldn't just not eat things, she needed to...

Violet stopped herself before saying anything, actually biting her lip to make sure she didn't blurt out something stupid. Obviously Susan knew she couldn't just not eat things — she'd just explained that a minute ago, there was funny stuff with her potions going on, it was only supposed to be for a little while until they could get their potions fixed. Two days was a long time, but...Susan's healers must know what they were doing? They knew way more about health stuff than Violet did, and if they weren't freaking out — enough that they let Susan leave, come here, instead of staying in hospital or whatever — then they must think it was fine. Or, maybe not fine, but not an emergency that they had to deal with right away.

Going on about how not eating for two days was very bad, and Susan really should eat something, would not be helping. Violet making it a big thing wouldn't be telling Susan anything she didn't already know, and putting pressure on her about it wasn't helping, might just make her feel worse. Like she was doing something bad, like it was her fault that she couldn't eat right now.

Which would be bad, because it was Violet's fault, really. She accidentally turned Susan's Seer stuff on, and now she couldn't even eat because of it, for so long that she was too dizzy to keep sitting up against the tree! Two days, had Violet ever gone that long without eating before?

...Probably at some point, when she was still with the Dursleys, but she didn't remember. (One day was pretty common, when they did something extra freakish, but she couldn't think of a specific time they weren't allowed food two days in a row.) But remembering that, remembering what it was like not being able to eat, and this was her fault, her chest starting to go all hot and sharp and twisted up, but she tried to stop thinking about it, because Susan would probably just feel worse if Violet started crying or something...

Violet couldn't fix this — she was getting magic lessons, but she was just starting, really. Susan's healers were way smarter, and she didn't know anything at all about how Seer stuff worked. The only thing Violet and Mum could do to help was try to make Susan as comfortable as they could while they...waited for...

Hold on a second, Violet was having an idea. She set up the rest of the way, pulled a blade of grass out of the ground, and set it on her leg. She drew her wand, and concentrated very very carefully.

During her second magic lesson with Mum, they found out that Violet's transfigurations were just as permanent as her charms — transfiguration was only supposed to temporarily make a thing into another thing, but Violet's actually made the thing into another thing, for real. Or, sort of? See, proper visualisation was really important for transfiguration: you could only make a thing as well as you could imagine it. And things could actually be way more complicated than they seemed at first, as Violet was learning in the anatomy lessons she also had with Mum, for special metamorph reasons. Getting a transfiguration to look right was really complicated, and took a lot of practice, and concentration.

Though, in a funny way, transfiguration was both harder than you might first guess, but also easier than it should be when you thought about how complicated it was. You had to visualise the thing you were making, yes, but you didn't have to get into the super super fine details — like all the molecules and stuff, you mostly didn't have to worry about that. Mum said some of the gaps were filled in with unconscious stuff — things you knew about a thing without realising that you knew it — but other things the universe filled in for you. Like, there were only so many ways a thing could be? Like a puzzle, everything was made out of pieces clicked together, and there were only so many different kinds of pieces and they only went together in so many different ways, so there was a point where, if you got it close enough, magic and your own brain and reality itself did the rest for you.

Which was very neat! Magic was so cool sometimes.

You could also use charms to cheat at transfiguration more directly. These spells were, kind of, charms that had a transfiguration inside them — the effect of the charm was to make a transfiguration happen, if that made sense. (It didn't take very long for Violet to understand what Cassie meant about the line between them being way fuzzier than people pretended.) Since they could be good practice for transfiguration, Mum had actually taught her a few of those, which were very easy. Making things bigger or smaller, mostly. But it was one of those spells that gave her her idea: the doubling charm.

Conjuration was like transfiguration, with how you had to do the concentrating and visualising, but it was also way harder, because it took a lot of magic to do — you were making a thing that was basically just magic frozen into the thing, but physical things were very very dense compared to, just, magic, so even to make a small thing took a lot more magic than the basic spells Violet was practising with so far. But you could cheat, and do a charm with a conjuration inside of it...which used way less power than conjuring the thing on your own somehow, because reasons and stuff. (Violet didn't know, magic was confusing sometimes.) The doubling charm made a conjured copy of whatever it was cast on, which was the only conjuration Violet knew how to do right now.

Violet concentrated on pushing the magic down her arm and into her wand, and visualised, the nice warm water that made her body change flowing out and through the blade of grass, and then swirling around to freeze into a perfect copy, right next to it. It took a couple seconds for the spell to click — she couldn't use the incantation for this one, bad for stammering, which made it harder — but then there were two blades of grass on her leg instead of only one. Violet brushed away the original one, and picked up the conjured one, letting it sit on the middle of her palm. And, concentrating and visualising, started trying to transfigure it into a carrot.

If Violet understood correctly, how the Seer stuff worked was that Susan picked up echoes of things — especially things related to death, and Susan said there were death echoes pretty much everywhere, which was kind of creepy when she thought about it. But, okay, something death-related happened in a place, and an echo kind of seeped into the land — actually into the magic of a place, but thinking of it as the land was less confusing — and stayed there, attached to the place. Plants growing there later pulled the echo out of the land, and now they carried it too; so when Susan ate something, she got echoes of people who'd died wherever the stuff was grown, even if it was centuries ago.

But this blade of grass didn't grow anywhere — she made it with magic, just now. The doubling charm didn't copy magical stuff that might be attached to things, just the physical part, so, any echo the grass absorbed from the land shouldn't be in it, right? It should just have echoes of Violet's magic, which Susan said were fine. So, if Violet transfigured this blade of grass into a carrot, then it shouldn't have carrot echoes, or any death echoes from anywhere, just Violet-echoes — but it should still count as a real carrot, because Violet's magic was permanent. Which meant Susan should be able to eat it no problem! You weren't supposed to eat conjured stuff, because it was temporary, and things disappearing after you ate them could be very bad for you, but they should stay forever when Violet did them! so this should work!

She thought. Maybe.

Really, she had no idea if this was going to work, but she might as well try. Susan hadn't eaten anything for two days, after all, that sounded like something Violet had to fix right away, if she could.

Even if the idea was kind of mad. Kind of a lot mad, honestly, but magic was mad sometimes — especially when it was weird cheater fairy magic.

(It was her fault, Violet wanted to help.)

Soon, she had a tiny little carrot, as short as the blade of grass she made it out of, so she cast the charm to make it bigger a couple times. And now it was, like, baby-carrot size, like the little ones that were used in stews and stuff sometimes — a couple good bites' worth of carrot, at least. It looked like a carrot, and it smelled like a carrot, so...that was probably good?

Only one way to find out. "Hey, Susan, try this."

"Hmm? What?"

"I have an idea. Sit up, please."

Susan groaned, but after a second she pushed herself up — wavering back and forth, she looked dizzy. It took her a bit to force her eyes to focus, blinking. "Ugh. What is it, Violet?"

"Here," she said, holding out the carrot.

Looking down at Violet's hand, Susan frowned. "Where did you get that?"

"I m-mmade it, with magic. You know, I t-told you about my funny fairy magic?" Susan was one of the people Mum said was allowed to know, so Violet had told her almost right away.

"Oh. Oh!" she said again, leaning closer over Violet's hand. "You conjured it?"

"Yep. Wanna try?"

"Can't hurt." Susan started tugging at the fingers of one of her gloves, loosening it to pull off. "Not being able to eat sucks. I'll even take a carrot at this point."

"...D-d-don't you like them?"

"Not really, no." Oh, whoops. Before Violet could wonder if she should try to transfigure it into something else — she just went with a carrot because it was the first thing the shape of the blade of grass made her think of — Susan already plucked it out of her hand with gloveless fingers. "Feels okay, at least." Cautiously, like she was worried it was going to blow up in her face, she took a little bite off the end of the conjured carrot — and then she jerked back a little with a sharp rrfff noise, her eyes squeezing closed, the back of her gloved hand coming up against her mouth.

"What? What is it?" She didn't screw it up, did she? Like, food was really complicated, maybe it tasted super bad or something...

"It's fine, just..." Susan wiggled her hand in the air, shaking her head. "Er. Got a really hard hit of your magic, all at once."

"I thought my magic was nice."

"It is, it was a lot, is all. And it was only for a second, this just tastes like carrot now." Susan took another bite, her face twitching a little — maybe got hit with Violet's magic again, but saw it coming this time — and before long the rest of the carrot was gone, Susan chewing with her glove against her mouth, and... Her eyes were wet again, seemed to notice that herself, squeezing them closed and ducking her head a little. "That's, um... Good idea, Violet, that– that actually tasted like food."

...Violet kind of wanted to ask if she was crying, and why, but if she was trying to hide it that was probably a rude thing to do? Maybe? "Um. Does, does, does food not always t-taste like food?"

"No." And that was all Susan said, she didn't explain any past that — which was weird, if food didn't taste like food to Susan then what did it taste like? "Can you, er... I don't know how much conjuration you can do yet, but can— Sorry, I'm so hungry, Violet..."

"No, don't— It's fine! I can do more!" Something about the way Susan said that hurt, but Violet tried to, just, push past it, because she could help! Making food for her actually worked, taking the bad death echoes out of it, which was the important thing! "I can only do l-luh-lll-l— We should ask Mum. Make sure it's healthy to have?"

Susan made a face, but after a second she nodded. "Okay, let's go now." She scrambled to get her feet under her, and then quick stood up. Apparently too quick, because she teetered a step, "Woah," she tried to grab onto a branch of the tree but she missed, falling down onto her knees again.

Okay, if Susan couldn't even stand up right, getting some food in her seemed like a very very good idea. Violet gathered up her art stuff — making sure her drawing of the tree stayed on top, but it might get ruined anyway, oh well — and gave Susan a hand up. Susan kind of leaned on her the whole way into the house, which was fine, if a little awkward while also trying to carry her art stuff. She dropped the tray off in the kitchen, helped Susan get up into one of the stools, and then went to get Mum.

Mum was not happy that Violet had given Susan conjured food without asking first — not in an angry way, just worried that one of them could've have gotten hurt by accident. Over what felt like hours (but probably wasn't nearly that long), Mum had Violet try transfiguring things, transfiguring a carrot out of another piece of grass, using a doubling charm on a real carrot, and using a doubling charm on a conjured carrot Mum made. Mum did some tests on all of them, and Susan tried a little bite of each. Susan said they were all good for Seer reasons, though the one Violet made out of a piece of grass tasted a little different than the other two; Mum said that that one wasn't quite right, missing some of the nutrients and also wasn't quite built correctly? Carrots were like a bunch of roots smooshed together, and had like tiny little tubes and stuff in them — Violet didn't know all that in detail, just, thought of a carrot...

But! After the tests and stuff Mum said Violet could make food for Susan, and if she did it with a doubling charm it'd even be healthy and stuff! But Violet was still little, so the amount of stuff she could make at a time was really small. Luckily for Susan, Mum was the best at clever magic ideas, so she got a good one right away: they were going to make Susan some lamb and potato stew. Right away, Susan started saying they couldn't do that, but then stopped herself, her eyes going wide — she could never have meat, because she felt the animal it came from dying, but if Violet conjured it it would never have been alive at all! so she should be able to have anything, as long as it went through Violet's special fairy magic!

(Mum really was so smart, Violet didn't know how she came up with stuff sometimes.)

It was a little complicated to figure out, especially because Violet had to do everything herself. Mum was worried that if she made the stew it might leave an echo Susan could pick up, so they had to avoid Mum doing anything to help as much as possible. But because Mum was very clever, she found a way around that: she would prepare a little piece of every ingredient, which Violet could just double over and over until they had enough. They had Susan touch the pot quick, just to make sure it was clean — it wasn't great, but Susan said it was weak enough it should be fine — and then they got to work. Mum separated off a little piece of butter, and Violet doubled a copy of it into the pot. Then she unskinned a garlic clove, Violet doubled it twice, smooshing them down and tossing them in the pot with the butter. After thinking for a second, Mum transfigured some salt into a tiny little block, so it was one piece, which Violet could then double easily, Mum said it would dissolve in the soup...

Then there was the onion. Mum cut one into quarters, a more comfy size for Violet to double, and then had Violet copy one of them twice. Violet chopped the onion quarters into little pieces — carefully, their knives were magic, and sharp — threw them in with the butter and the garlic. The potato went like that, Mum peeling it (in a blink, with a charm) and cutting it into quarters, Violet copying one of the quarters a few times and then chopping them up, into the pot. Getting the liquids was a little annoying — Mum decided it was easiest for her to freeze a little bit of them, Violet would copy the frozen bit however many times they needed, and throw them into the pot to melt, fishing out the crushed garlic cloves in the meantime. Being cold meant the cooking would take longer, but it was the best way to get liquids to work. (Using magic on only part of something was really hard, Violet couldn't do that yet.) Ooh, how about mushrooms, did Susan like mushrooms? Susan did like mushrooms, okay, copy a nice big mushroom a few times, chop it up and into the pot. The lamb was easy — Mum cut a little piece off the stuff they had down in the cold pantry, Violet doubled it straight into the pot, again and again and again and again, until that looked like enough.

While all that was cooking, Mum and Violet worked on copying all the herbs and stuff they wanted. Susan, sleepy and dizzy, just sat quietly in her stool, her head resting on her arms, seemingly asleep. If she did sleep a little while they were cooking, that was fine, actually — she really needed to sleep.

It took a while, all the little things Violet had to copy were annoying to do — each leaf of all the herbs they wanted, one by one — and she was too little to do the warming charm Mum used to speed meals up sometimes, but eventually it was starting to smell great in here, all herby and rich from the potatoes and lamb. They even made some bread, but that was a little bit much — the hunk of bread she copied must be too big, a crackle of painful pins-and-needles shooting down her arm as she cast the spell, ow! Mum insisted on checking Violet over quick, to make sure she didn't break anything, but it was fine, it stopped hurting right away, Mum was just being silly.

Once the lamb was cooked through and the potatoes were all done, that was it, the stew was ready! Violet carefully scooped some up into Susan's bowl — one Mum got special from the Hartrights (the same people who donated the beads and stuff to the Starlighter kids and made Susan's Seer-friendly jewellery), that was good for Seer reasons and only Susan (or Violet) was supposed to touch, just in case — holding it with two hands carefully climbed down off her stepstool, and carefully carried it over to Susan's spot, set it down on the counter. There! Done! It smelled pretty good at least, try it! Oh right, a spoon, oops, be right back...

Susan cried. Kind of a lot.

It might sound a little weird, crying over a bowl of soup. But Susan hadn't eaten for two days, and she'd seemed really frustrated about the trouble with her grounding potion, and, there was probably a lot bottled up at the moment. And she said earlier that food didn't normally taste like food? but stuff Violet made did (once her magic stopped being super strong), and, it'd been a while since Violet had accidentally turned the Seer stuff on, so... It was kind of a big deal, actually, not a big surprise Susan might be having strong feelings about it.

Violet didn't know what you were supposed to do when someone started crying while eating the food you just made for them — especially since Violet wasn't sure if this was bad crying, really. Just a lot, and feelings being too much. But she felt bad — this Seer stuff was her fault, even though people always told her it wasn't, and she could see it was really hard for Susan to just do normal people things sometimes (like sleep, or eat) — and she didn't know what else to do, so she just scooted another of the stools right up next to Susan's and, just, leaned against her, arm going around behind her back, in an awkward sideways hug.

That didn't seem to make Susan cry less — like those times Violet was upset about something or trying not to cry, and Mum (or Síomha now) hugged her, which only made her cry more, but not really in a bad way, just feelings — but the hand she wasn't eating with groped around to find Violet's other hand. She held on tight, enough it almost hurt, so she obviously didn't want Violet to let go. So Violet didn't let go, leaned her head against Susan's shoulder, shaking in little fits and starts as she tried to eat through the tears.

Susan held her hand through the whole thing, tight and shaking, her fingers all soft and smooth from spending so much time hidden safe in her gloves. And she finished the bowl, and the bread, finishing a whole meal for the first time in over a week.

(Violet was pretty sure this was the single best idea she ever had.)

Right, so, that was the food problem solved, let's see if we could do something about the sleep problem, okay? Come on, up you get...