By the time she was five, Vanis had heard the same joke so many times she was sick of it: Had her mother Terese not been a guest of honor at the event, not even she would have attended Vanis’s birth.

It was probably true. Terese was a busy woman as the elected willow-touched leader of Foresse. She had no time for a husband and even less for motherhood.

As it was, Terese acted like she had an assistant, not a daughter. A day’s worth of conversation could be expected to elapse thus: “A sprig of bluemint, would you?” her mother might say in the late afternoon, hunched over her desk as the shadows stretched long.

If Vanis brought bluemint, her mother would hum and accept it, and Vanis might not hear anything more until the next day.

If she brought the incorrect herb, a red-faced Terese would point her to a stool and list the identifying traits of bluemint until Vanis could repeat them back to her verbatim.

Terese didn’t need to know that Vanis had learned to identify every herb in the garden by sight, smell, and texture before she was three. Sometimes she just wanted her mother’s eyes on her, even if they were not kind.

Vanis was seven when she brought the wrong herb to her mother for the last time. When she delivered five leaves of common hogstail rather than superb hogstail, Terese stood, cold-eyed, and went to fetch the correct leaves herself.

At seven, Vanis could make a good poultice without help, and while she wasn’t as skilled as her mother, she had learned to speak the core names of plants to urge them to grow. Over the course of a few studious, dedicated months, she had even talked the moonleaf basil on her window into shaking off the blight that ailed it.

The first time she successfully used the magic she inherited from her mother, Vanis clutched the potted plant to her chest—its leaves thick and rich green and shaped, in turn, like various phases of the moon—and ran so quickly to show it to Terese that she nearly tripped.

Terese merely sighed and said, “I have work to do, Vanis.”

Vanis was not taught by her mother, but she had the entire royal library at her disposal, so she read it through. She consumed the entire section on plants and asked for more, for loans from allied countries. She took notes—tomes upon tomes of them. She learned to draw so she could draw every plant and animal in the country. She dreamt in script and sketches and woke with the words of textbooks on her lips.

Vanis was not a skilled girl, Terese liked to say, but she was a diligent one.

She was terribly diligent. She couldn’t hear the voices of plants and animals in faint whispers like her mother could. Not once had she heard a peep from the world. But she could use their names well enough, and on a particularly good day, she could discern their wills. Close observation and hard-earned knowledge told her everything else. She took her skills on the road, to the far villages.

The old lady whose withering garden a fifteen-year-old Vanis coaxed to life sat Vanis down and tutted over her—such a young girl, truly you shouldn’t be traveling alone, she’d say, and have some more tea, love, you’re clearly in need of it! Here, I’ll put honey in. Your throat must be aching after all that work—and when the warmth of the woman’s hands made Vanis cry, she had to make up a lie about spring allergies. As if a willow-touched could be allergic to the things she served!

She worked twice as hard, after that. The people paid her, certainly, whenever Vanis couldn’t wriggle her way out of it, but better than that, they loved her.

She couldn’t get enough of the way their eyes lingered on her and their warm hands held hers like she was a treasure. Their praise was more filling than the richest feast, better than the fleeting pleasure of sex.

They called her selfless. They called her skilled. They told her, with tears in their eyes, that she’d saved their lives, their families, their villages. She refused payment as often as they’d allow her to and told them, “It’s my pleasure.”

And it was. She didn’t need a mother when she had the love of the world.

When she was nineteen, Terese Laforesse looked at Vanis long and hard when the yearly vote for willow-touched Queen came in, and Vanis was, for the first time, a true contender.

“Good,” she said.

That one word on Terese’s tongue was better than any drug.

When she was twenty-two, Vanis met a gentle man who made it his life’s goal to say kind things to her. “You bloom when you hear them,” he said, when she asked him why. “And I’d do anything at all to see you bloom.”

She married him. For five happy years, she continued to travel with her husband beside her, and she was always in bloom.

She had a daughter—a studious, quiet girl she tried to love as best as she could. Karis was an easy child to love.

Like Vanis, she was not exceptionally skilled, but she was a diligent worker. She, too, learned quickly and responded well to praise. Vanis was not good with praise, but that was what she had a husband for. She would sit, sometimes, and watch Karis bloom beneath her husband’s kind words, and as dusk fell, she might practice in her room, alone.

She would imagine Karis running to her with a plant she’d coaxed to bloom or an herb she’d identified correctly. Vanis would stare into her own warped reflection and consider, for a long time, what she would have wanted her own mother to say.

In the dark, with the sun sinking low over her new country—she unseated Terese years ago—Vanis would whisper “good,” and sometimes she would imagine Karis blooming for her.

When Karis was seven, Vanis got pregnant again. To her shock and joy, the pregnancy increased her powers a thousandfold. Terese used to say the voices of plants were faint whispers, but Vanis experienced them for those few months not as sounds but as events. Terese never told her that they weren’t actual voices, but sensations—colors and light and noise and emotion like blossoms in her brain.

Each creature, each plant had a different voice, another thing her mother never mentioned. Perhaps she never knew.

Willow-touched magic came to Vanis more quickly than it ever had. A plague swept the country’s border—a bleeding sickness—and Vanis whispered to the crops in a vast field in a village with their true name and begged them, will you help?

The crop wilted, and in exchange, the people recovered.

In this way, Vanis annihilated the plague before it could spread and returned home a hero, profusely blooming.

The change was slow enough, at first, that Vanis didn’t notice.

The voices of the world around her got less vibrant as the sixth month of her pregnancy came to an end. They crept around her mind rather than blossoming inside it, until they were no more than a paltry human whisper, like her mother described.

Then they were gone again.

She didn’t tell anyone, at first. She didn’t tell a single soul until she tried to make the yellowing fern her husband overwatered return to a semblance of health, and it didn’t even twitch, like it couldn’t hear her voice at all.

When she admitted the truth of it to him, shaking in bed with his arms around her, her husband could only offer kindness, not answers, so Vanis consulted the colony of willow-touched wisewomen from which each generation’s queen was chosen. Vanis’s pregnancy had advanced to a full, aching seven months by the time they came to her with an answer:

She would bear a willow-touched son, the most unspeakable, the most cursed—the most powerful of all willow-touched—because they devoured their mothers’ powers while in the womb.

She begged for anything that could return her power to her. She tried to snuff the life within her, but he wouldn’t die. The wisewomen whispered their apologies: Even if he perished now, he’d take her magic with him. Once taken, it could not be returned. Had you come to us earlier with this news…

She gave birth to the cursed creature who stole her bloom, and she understood, on that day, her mother’s old joke. Indeed, if Vanis had not been the guest of honor at the event, she would not have attended.

The child was a gentle boy, and quiet, and he loved his sister something fierce. Vanis’s husband named the boy Sylvan. Sylvan for greenery, for growth.

Vanis wanted only to see him wither.

© 2026 Jules Arbeaux