Seraphina Nighthollow. Headmistress's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Seraphina climbed the stairs to her office as the sky went grey. The night in the conservatory had proven nothing. She had touched a hundred vines and none had moved. Now she carried a single question up to her quarters. If the ivy answered her hand nine years ago, could she make it answer again? Vesper waited on his perch. Below him sat the moody end table, its teapot wrapped in a wooly cozy, dark ivy trailing down the gothic legs. She had grown that ivy from a cutting she took nine years back. It had never done anything strange. That was the point of keeping it here. It watched her the way she watched herself. She knelt beside the table. She placed her palm above the ivy and thought about the owl, the nest, the vines sliding back. She pictured the stems reaching toward her fingers. Nothing happened. The leaves hung still. She tried again, harder, then softer. She whispered to it. She felt foolish and cold. "It won't come," she said. "I can't make it real if I can't make it move." Vesper dropped from his perch to the arm of the lilac reading chair. He gripped the fuzzy cushion and stared at her. "You are trying," he said. "That is why nothing comes." She sat back. "Then how did it happen before?" "You were not thinking of yourself. You asked if I was hurt." Seraphina looked at the ivy. That first night she had not wanted power. She had wanted the owl free. She closed her eyes and stopped reaching. She thought only of the trapped thing struggling in the dark, and how she had needed to loosen the hold that pinned him. The cold in her chest turned. She felt the wish move outward, not from her mind but from her hands. A soft rustle broke the quiet. She opened her eyes. The ivy had grown. Not a leaf, not an inch. A full arm's length of new green vine spilled from the table and wrapped once around her wrist. The stem was warm. It held her, then loosened on its own and settled across her lap. Seraphina did not move. She stared at the living thing curled over her knees. It had answered. She had felt it leave her, real and warm and hers. "It's real," she said. Her voice shook. "Yes," Vesper said, quiet now. "It always was." She touched the new vine. It was strong, alive, grown in a breath from nothing. This was not chance. This was not a memory she could bury again. She had made a plant grow with a want and a hand. And she understood, with a drop in her stomach, that she had no idea what else her hands could do. No teacher. No book. Only an owl who smelled something wrong in the greenhouse, and a power she could no longer deny. She had to learn what she was before it grew past her control.