Page 21 of Sugar & Sorcery
The air was thick with a sweet fragrance, somewhere between fresh snow and melting guimauve.
“This orchard was special. Before.”
Before. That word was always ash in a whisper—a wound that bled in the heart. My gaze drifted toward the far end of the orchard, where the trees lay fallen, dead, broken. Where magic no longer lived.
“This is where I grew up, and where my family disappeared,” Yeun said. “I’m the last of my kind. It was a wondrous forest once. Now, this is all Master could save.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, gently holding my palms out toward him.
He nestled into them. His warmth spread through my sugared skin, comforting as a cup of tea in winter. “It was so long ago. But you should know, the orchard is guarded.”
A boy Spirit drifted between the trunks, his step as light as rustling leaves. He didn’t spare us a glance, moving along some invisible path. He looked like something left behind, like a toyabandoned in a room emptied of its laughter. A shiver crawled up my neck.
“Who is he?” I asked.
Yeun didn’t answer at once, watching the spectral child disappear among the trees. “Every night, he walks the orchard and reaches the Lake of Spirits. He watches over the apples and was probably here when it was all destroyed. He never lets anyone near. He’s never liked confectioners. All of them have been too weak for Arawn’s magic.”
Arawn? It was the first time he’d called the sorcerer by name—not with servitude, but with a hidden affection. So the sorcerer was testing my heart. Ironic, for someone who had sacrificed his own.
“I can do this.”
I left Yeun and slipped between the apple trees. In the next row over, the boy walked barefoot, just a few feet away. His blurred outline wavered in the silver light. A faint crackling hung in the air, like the fizz of freshly poured cider.
I followed at a distance until our paths joined. He stopped there, and I knelt to his height.
“Your master sent me to pick apples.”
His red eyes, fixed and unfathomable, locked on me, as cold as a dying flame.
“Where are your parents?” I asked softly.
Spirits had parents too… didn’t they? But the boy slowly shook his head. I swallowed. I didn’t know much about children, less still about Spirits.
“I don’t have parents either. They were passing through my village and left me behind.”
His large red eyes stayed locked on mine. He was listening. For now.
“I cried for days,” I admitted in a breath. “Until my mentor took me to the orchard in the prince’s realm for my first harvest.I was about your age. She told me every apple was like a wish. If we care for them, they bloom into magic… just like us. But if we don’t protect our hearts, rot sets in from within.”
Slowly, the boy lifted a finger toward me in a silent accusation. My heart tightened. He didn’t need to speak for me to understand what he meant. Just like me. My hands clutched the fabric of my skirt. I understood why the Wish Witch had cursed me. I had wished for it once. To shine like those apples, so I’d never be left behind again. So Nyla would love me as much as she loved the orchards.
“What I’m trying to say… is that I want to take care of your orchard and?—”
A crack of leaves startled me. Éclair, his head crowned with a wilted mushroom, was slipping between the apple trees, followed by Chouquette trotting along, tongue lolling.
“You were supposed to stay with Aignan! And where’s Yeun?”
The two Cursed pointed in opposite directions. Then, without hesitation, each marched off the way they’d pointed.
“They’re not bad, just curious, and?—”
I didn’t have time to finish before another crack split the air. Éclair, with all his clumsy enthusiasm and too long arms, had already seized a branch to pull it toward him. With a badly measured force, he tore an apple free.
“No, wait!”
The damage was already done. The Cursed, by their very nature, could not pick the golden apples. The apple shriveled instantly, its golden glow blackening in his hand. In the space of a heartbeat, the flesh crumbled into a violet pulp.
The wind rose. The boy trembled. His limbs stretched, trying to form a protective dome around the orchard, or a cage. I had lost what I had barely brushed against: his trust.
