Zinnia Chatterwick's Arc

Chapter 2 of 4

The five good candles were gone, and Zinnia had a shop full of ones that smelled like burnt cereal. Cosmo had told her the truth before he left. The seed trader wandered. She never stayed anywhere. Zinnia stood in her lighthouse-shaped shop, surrounded by shelves of jars, and did the one thing she was good at. She started asking people. If she could sell a second potato peeler to a woman who owned one, she could talk a moving cart out of hiding. She left the shop with her burnt-cereal candles boxed and walked the lanes. She stopped everyone. She traded a jar of scorched wax for a rumor. A baker had seen the cart two days past. A child said it smelled like grass and gasoline. Nobody knew where it would be next. By afternoon Zinnia had a fistful of guesses and no cart. Then she remembered the smell. The good candles smelled like soil and honeysuckle. The trader poured them. A trader who made a scent like a whole meadow would follow the meadow. Zinnia asked where the flowers grew thickest. People pointed the same way. She followed the pointing until the buildings thinned and the air turned green. The cart sat at the edge of a field. It was small, painted, and stacked with candles in every shape. The trader was hitching it up to leave. Zinnia ran the last stretch, waving her box of bad candles like a flag. "Wait," she called. "You poured these. The gargoyles. I sold all five in one night." The trader turned. She looked at Zinnia's box, then wrinkled her nose. "Those went bad. Old batch." "The gargoyle ones didn't." Zinnia opened the cart's shelf without asking. She lifted a trio of candles painted with green hills and grass. She smelled them. Grass, bamboo, and something sharp underneath, like fuel. She lifted a star-shaped one, orange edged in pink. Neroli and bubblegum. "These. People will sit in my shop all day for these." The trader crossed her arms. "I don't take orders. I move. I sell what's on the cart and I go." Zinnia had been talking her whole life. She talked now. She told the trader about the honeysuckle spreading through her room. About Cosmo sitting down. About two strangers coming in off the street to stay. "I don't need you to stop moving," Zinnia said. "I need to buy the whole cart. Every candle. Right now." The trader named a price. It was most of what Zinnia had left. She paid it. Zinnia pushed the cart home herself. Her shelves filled with grass, bamboo, neroli, and honeysuckle. She had no more burnt-cereal problem. Her friend helped her build a new shop, where she could pour her own candles and make her own scents.