The Field of Flowers

Elias Sahl · Chapter One

The first spell I remember had nothing dark about it.

There was no blood, no black circles, no dead obeying my will. There was only dry earth, morning light, and a little girl convinced that her mother deserved something beautiful.

I was six years old.

Six is a dangerous age.

Old enough to believe you understand the pain of grown-ups. Young enough to think a kind gesture is all it takes to heal it.

My mother’s name was Mara Valmor.

I do not know whether the world ever truly knew her. The world tends to remember the names of those who burn cities, slaughter people, found schools, win wars, sign edicts, or die spectacularly enough to become useful to storytellers. Women like my mother, on the other hand, pass through life bending their backs, counting coins, tending cracked hands, and smiling when they have nothing to smile about.

And yet, before every one of my crimes, before every mistake, before every choice that would carry me far from that house, she was the center of my world.

Mara had slender, strong hands. Not delicate hands. Delicate hands belonged to nobles, or so I imagined then: white, useless, perfumed hands, made for pointing and receiving. My mother’s hands knew how to sew, knead dough, scrub clothes, tell good cloth from a swindle by touch, and make a coin last longer than any merchant would have considered possible.

Her light-brown hair was always tied back, because loose hair got in the way of work. Her eyes were pale, a duller green than mine, like grass after too many rainless days. As a child I thought they looked that way because my mother was always tired.

Only later did I understand that it was not tiredness.

It was what happens to the eyes of someone who stopped asking for anything for herself a long time ago.

My father, by contrast, seemed to have been made from the same substance as the earth he worked.

His name was Tomas Valmor. He stood nearly six and a half feet tall, broad-shouldered, with a woodcutter’s arms and enormous hands—callused, cracked, forever marked by small, stubborn cuts. When he laughed, the house seemed larger. When he went quiet, it seemed smaller.

He was not an educated man, at least not by the standards of people who use learning to measure everyone else.

He could read and write. He did sums better than many merchants who mistook him for an easy man to cheat, and he did not look down on study. Quite the opposite. He respected it. Perhaps precisely because he knew its price.

He did not speak in elegant phrases, could not quote ancient treatises, and could not have given you the full names of every branch of magic. But he could read the sky better than a court astronomer. He knew rain was coming from the ache in his knees. He knew which seeds would survive a bad spring and which would not. He could look a man in the eye and know he was lying before the man opened his mouth.

He was no expert in magic.

But he had lived close enough to Mara’s pain to know that magic was not simple, or innocent, or right simply because someone had written that it was in a book.

I did not understand that then.

I thought my father was simply a big, strong, good farmer, with a voice capable of frightening dishonest merchants and hands wide enough to lift me as though I weighed no more than a bundle of straw.

I thought my mother was simply my mother.

The first lie of childhood is believing that our parents came into being the moment we began to look at them.

They did not.

My mother had dreams before me.

My father had fears before me.

Both of them had met magic before me.

Our house stood on the edge of Valdara, a small farming village so far from the capital that, to my childish mind, Asteria seemed more like a story than a real place.

Valdara was not an unhappy place.

Poor, yes.

Hard, often.

In winter the mud reached your ankles, the wind slipped through cracks in the doors, and the adults’ hands split from cold and work. But in spring the fields filled with green, the communal oven smelled of bread, women stopped to talk by the well, men argued about weather, seeds, and taxes, and children ran between chicken coops, stables, and woodpiles as though the entire world ended there.

For me, then, it truly did.

I knew the name Asteria, of course.

Everyone knew the name of the empire’s capital.

I heard adults say it when they spoke of taxes, laws, harvests promised to someone else, or decisions made by people so far away they seemed invisible.

In my head, Asteria had no precise towers yet, no real streets. It had officials in clean cloaks, well-dressed men and women stepping from polished carriages without looking at the mud, and mages wearing their grimoires openly at their hips, as though a book hanging from a belt were enough to prove the worth of the person carrying it.

Sometimes it is enough.

Not worth, of course.

Only power.

I knew a little more about the Heroine.

Not because I truly knew the history. At six, history is usually a badly learned song, a phrase repeated by adults, a bright picture on a banner.

I knew her because of the festival.

Every year Valdara celebrated Heroine’s Day. It was not a rich festival. Festivals in poor villages rarely are. But ribbons hung between the houses, lanterns burned around the square, a small wooden stage was built beside the well, and someone always played music well enough to make people forget the weight of their days for a few hours.

The women made simple sweets, hard around the edges and too precious to be eaten quickly. Children ran about with honey-sticky fingers, men drank more than they needed, old women corrected the story every time someone told it badly, and at the end everyone danced.

That was what I remembered most.

The sweets.

The lights.

The way my mother looked younger, for one evening at least, when my father managed to pull her into a dance.

I knew that the Heroine had been good.

That she had saved the empire.

That long ago, in a great forest near the capital, she had defeated the Dark Lord.

That was enough for a child.

I did not yet know that the world loves to divide stories in two: the Heroine on one side, the monster on the other; light on one side, shadow on the other; those remembered with flowers and songs on one side, those whose names are used to frighten children on the other.

I did not know that one day they would put me there.

On the wrong side of the song.

My family and I lived just beyond the last row of houses, where the road lost its interest in people and began to interest the insects instead. Behind our house stood the vegetable garden, a toolshed, a small hay barn, and the stable for the earth dragons.

Earth dragons are not what rich children imagine them to be.

They do not breathe fire. They do not fly. They do not guard princesses or priceless treasure, mostly because no princess with a shred of sense would agree to be guarded by a creature that spends half the day chewing roots and the other half asleep in the mud.

Ours were two old males, Bruma and Zolla.

They were broad and low to the ground, covered in placid brown scales, with slow, patient eyes. They had powerful legs, short claws, horns worn down by age, and heavy tails that knocked over buckets, inattentive children, and my father’s pride whenever they decided they had no intention of moving.

They plowed better than any other animal.

They ate more than any other animal.

And they stank with a determination no other animal could have hoped to match.

I adored them.

Bruma was the gentler of the two. If you spoke softly to him, he would turn his head as though he were truly listening. Zolla, on the other hand, pretended to be stupid in exchange for apples and sweet roots. My father said that, of the two, Zolla was the clever one.

“Real fools work harder,” he used to say. “The clever ones find a way to make you think they don’t understand.”

I am not sure he was talking only about dragons.

The field where everything happened was not what my father called the good field.

The good field lay south of the house, near the well. It was the one he worked most carefully, because it gave us our best vegetables and part of the grain we took to market. The bad field, by contrast, lay beyond the stone wall, toward the old road.

That was what the neighbors called it too.

The bad field.

Almost nothing grew there. The earth was hard, yellowish, cracked. Stones everywhere. Thin weeds. Every attempt to make it useful had ended in swearing, sweat, and wasted seed. My father said he would put it right one day. My mother replied that the day in question had apparently lost its way.

I liked it precisely because no one else did.

Children have this foolish, wonderful tendency to love broken things because they believe affection is enough to mend them.

A few days earlier, I had heard my mother talking about that field.

She was not talking to me.

Adults often believe children do not listen unless they are being addressed. It is one of their more convenient mistakes.

Mara was behind the house, a basket of laundry resting against her hip. My father was repairing a wagon wheel, kneeling in the mud with grease on his hands and the usual scowl of a man convinced that objects broke specifically to offend him.

My mother was looking at the bad field with a sad expression.

“It would be beautiful,” she said softly.

My father barely lifted his head.

“What would?”

“To see it flower. Just once.”

He followed her gaze toward that barren, yellowish stretch of dirt, littered with stones and starved weeds.

“That field?”

“Yes, that one.”

“Mara, that field wouldn’t grow flowers if you begged the goddess of fertility on your knees.”

She smiled.

Not a happy smile.

One of the smiles she used when she wanted something she already knew she would never have.

“I know.”

My father returned to the wheel.

“I can try fixing it after the harvest.”

“You say that every year.”

“And every year the field keeps playing dead.”

My mother stood there a moment longer, looking at it.

“Pity,” she said.

Then she went back inside.

I was sitting by the door with a piece of hard bread in my hands and dirt on my knees. I said nothing.

But that word stayed with me.

Pity.

At six, I did not understand the weight of impossible wishes. I thought they were simply wishes waiting for someone clever enough to grant them.

That morning my mother returned from the market earlier than usual.

I was sitting on the back step trying to make a crown out of grass and dry twigs. I did not have many flowers, because few grew around our yard. Or rather, they grew whenever they forgot that nobody had invited them, and then my father pulled them up because he said they stole nourishment from useful plants.

I had decided this was a terrible injustice.

A house without flowers seemed to me like a person without a smile.

My mother arrived with her basket almost empty and her shoulders lower than usual.

That I remember clearly.

Almost every other detail of that day has blurred.

I remember only my mother’s shoulders.

The curve.

The weight.

The way she set the basket on the table without a sound, as though even noise were something we could not afford.

I followed her inside.

“The bread?” I asked.

“I bought it.”

“And the honey?”

She looked at me.

I was six. Honey was serious business.

“Not today.”

“Why?”

“Because the bees were stingy today.”

It seemed a perfectly reasonable explanation.

Only much later did I understand that the bees had not been stingy. The buyers had. Some of our vegetables had gone unsold. The miller had raised the price of flour. A woman from the village had paid less than she owed because “they’ll be rotten tomorrow anyway.” And Mara, as always, had chosen to buy what we actually needed.

Honey was not high on the list.

I wanted it, though.

And wanting is a savage thing when you are a child.

Not because children are more selfish than adults.

Adults simply lie better.

My mother ran a hand through my blond hair.

“Maybe next time.”

That hurt more than a no.

Next time was a place impossibly far away, where adults sent the things they did not want—or could not afford—to give you.

I looked at her hands.

There were fresh scratches across her knuckles. A thin cut on her thumb. Dirt beneath her nails. And yet, when she stroked my hair, she was gentle.

“Are you sad?” I asked.

She stopped arranging the basket.

For a moment the smile vanished from her face.

Then it came back.

“I’m only tired, little one.”

Adults believe children cannot tell a lie spoken gently from the truth.

Children can tell perfectly well.

They simply choose, very often, to forgive it.

I left the house soon after, my heart heavy with a pain I could not name.

I wanted to do something for her.

Something big.

Something that would make her forget the market, the honey, the counted coins, the flour that cost too much, and the way she had set the basket down on the table.

And I remembered the field.

Her gaze.

Her voice.

It would be beautiful to see it flower. Just once.

At six, I took that sentence literally.

Not as melancholy.

Not as a sigh.

Not as surrender.

As a request.

My mother wanted to see that field in bloom.

And I wanted to give her what she wanted.

At six, I did not know many forms of salvation.

I knew hugs.

I knew promises.

I knew crowns made of grass.

And I knew flowers.

I went to the bad field.

The sun was high but not cruel. The air smelled of dry earth, stable, and dust. Bruma dozed beneath the shed roof. Zolla watched me with one eye open and the other closed, perhaps deciding whether I had hidden any sweet roots beneath my dress.

I had not.

I knelt in the middle of the field.

The ground was hard beneath my knees. Dry. Cracked. Full of little stones that bit into my skin. I ran my fingers through the fissures and felt sorry for the earth too.

It seemed lonely.

It sounds foolish written down like that.

Perhaps it is.

But truth, when memory brings it back, does not always possess the dignity of literature.

I felt that field was lonely.

And I felt that my mother was sad.

And in my childish mind the two things joined with perfect simplicity.

If the field became beautiful, my mother would smile and be happy.

I placed both hands on the ground.

I did not know what I was doing.

I knew no formulas, gestures, circles, invocations. I had never seen a real spell cast up close. I had seen the village mage perform little wonders during festivals: lighting a flame without tinder, lifting a bucket without hands, suspending a white light above the well on winter evenings.

Useful things.

Small things.

Permitted things.

No one had taught me that magic could flow through desire and imagination as well.

Or perhaps someone had, a very long time ago, and then decided it was too dangerous a truth to leave lying around.

I closed my eyes.

I thought of my mother.

Not her whole face. One detail.

The way her smile had died for an instant when I asked whether she was sad.

I wanted to give it back to her.

I did not pray.

I did not ask.

I did not command.

I wished.

I imagined that barren, neglected field filled with every kind of flower.

Not because I knew how to do it.

Not because I wanted to prove anything.

Because my mother had wished for it.

And I, a foolish little girl who loved her the way only children know how to love, thought the world ought to obey that one small wish.

The earth beneath my hands received my desire and my imagination.

And changed.

At first there was only warmth.

A faint warmth, like holding a cup of freshly poured milk. I thought the sun had heated the ground. Then the warmth moved.

Not over my skin.

Under it.

Under my palms.

Under my fingers.

Under the cracks.

Something answered.

Or perhaps I answered something that had always been there, waiting for a small creature insolent enough to wake it.

I opened my eyes.

A green line had appeared between my hands.

Thin.

Fragile.

Impossible.

I jerked backward, more surprised than frightened.

The green line trembled.

Then split in two.

Then four.

Then too many to count.

The earth opened with a sigh.

Not a real sound. Not like wood splitting or stone giving way. More like a breath held too long and finally released.

Shoots emerged from the cracks.

Dozens.

Hundreds.

Green, glossy, alive. They stretched toward the sun with cheerful, shameless haste. I sat in the middle of the field, hands dirty and mouth open, while the world around me decided to change.

Then came the flowers.

First the little white ones that grew along the ditches in spring.

Then the yellow ones common in the meadows behind the church.

Then purple bellflowers, red poppies, tiny blue stars, daisies, wildflowers I had seen a thousand times, and others I did not know I knew. Some were so small they looked like colored snow. Others opened wider than my father’s palm.

And then, among them all, one appeared alone.

A lily.

Black.

It was not truly black like the night: there were deep, almost violet reflections hidden in petals so dark they seemed made from shadow gathered beneath the earth. But at six, the distinctions of botanists do not exist.

Only wonders do.

And that lily was black.

It grew a short distance from me, taller than the others, slender, upright, impossible to ignore. All the other flowers filled the field with their unruly cheerfulness.

It did not.

It simply stood there.

Alone.

Elegant.

And because of that, it seemed more beautiful than all the rest.

I stared at it the way one stares at something one has never called by name and which has answered anyway.

I could not have said it then, but in the middle of a field born to make my mother smile, that single black lily seemed to be looking at me.

The place everyone called the bad field bloomed.

Not slowly.

Not according to the patient rules of seasons.

It bloomed all at once.

As though the earth had spent years waiting for someone so foolish as to wake it with a request both audacious and beautiful.

I laughed.

The way children laugh, clear and bright.

That is the part that hurts most to remember.

Not because I understood that I had power.

Not because I thought myself special.

Not because I imagined towers, grimoires, envy, ravens, blood, or fire.

I laughed because the field was beautiful.

And because I was certain my mother would be happy when she saw it.

I ran toward the house shouting her name.

“Mama! Mama! Come here!”

Mara came out with her hands still wet. She must have had them in the washbasin. She wiped them quickly on her apron and watched me run toward her.

“Ingrid? What is it?”

“Come! You have to see!”

She followed me.

Not alarmed at first.

Not yet.

Perhaps she thought I had found a nest. Or a strangely shaped stone. Or that Zolla had finally decided to obey an order.

When we reached the wall, my mother stopped.

I did not.

I jumped down into the field and turned toward her with both arms spread wide, proudly presenting my marvel.

“Look!”

Mara said nothing.

The wind moved the flowers.

All together.

A wave of red, white, violet, yellow, blue.

And in the middle of all that color, the black lily.

Upright.

Silent.

Like a low note inside a song that was too happy.

My mother raised a hand to her mouth.

I thought she was about to cry with joy.

“Do you like it?” I asked.

She did not answer.

“I did it for you,” I said, with the particular innocence of children.

That was when I saw her face change.

Not much.

My mother had always been good at closing doors before anyone could look through them.

But I was her daughter.

And children, when they are small, see things that adults later pretend to forget.

I saw joy.

Yes, it was there.

For one heartbeat, my mother looked at that field and found it beautiful.

I know that.

Even now, I know it.

Brief as it was, swallowed immediately by everything that came after, the joy was real.

Then came fear.

Not simple fear.

Not the ignorant terror of someone who sees magic and mistakes it for a curse.

My mother was not afraid of magic.

She never had been.

She had wanted it too much to fear it that way.

Her fear was older.

Deeper.

Crueler.

Mara did not look at the flowers like a superstitious farmer confronted by a marvel.

She looked at them like a woman who recognized a door.

And knew where it led.

“Ingrid,” she said softly.

My name, spoken that way, no longer sounded like mine.

It sounded like something that needed to be hidden.

I lowered my arms.

“You don’t like it?”

The question struck her.

I could tell because she stepped forward quickly, almost painfully, and came to me among the flowers. She knelt and took my face between her hands.

Her fingers were trembling.

My mother almost never trembled.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

I smiled at once.

Children forgive quickly when they are given the word they were waiting for.

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Then why are you sad?”

My mother closed her eyes.

When she opened them again, the mother had returned to her place.

The wounded woman had hidden behind her.

“I’m not sad.”

A lie.

Gentle.

Useless.

“I did it,” I said. “Just for you. So you’d be happy.”

She swallowed.

“I know, little one.”

My mother looked across the field.

The flowers brushed her apron. Some bent toward her as though they recognized her.

That pleased me then.

Now it breaks me.

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