The Tiny Witch from the Deep Woods: Volume 2, page 14
Her escort today was a single knight. At first there had been quite a few on these trips, but Misha’s complaints that such a large group was too stifling had helped reduce her guards to one. Between her escort’s short ash-blond hair and his crisp black uniform, along with his muscled frame and sharp gaze, he was the picture-perfect example of a knight. He had a serious personality and wasn’t much for small talk. Geord had recommended him for the position, saying he was a man that would quietly and efficiently carry out any mission assigned to him, even if he was on the boring side.
And Misha knew that even though he came off as hard and unapproachable, he was actually quite fond of children, and he was responsible when it came to taking care of them. As one of the knights in their entourage traveling here from Bluheitz, he’d shown as much on ample occasions. He rarely spoke of his own accord but always replied politely to anything she asked. He was definitely one of the knights Misha trusted.
“Mr. Tenz, do you mind if I check out this shop? I’ll be quick,” Misha said, reminded of something when they neared a shop displaying a colorful array of candies and baked sweets. The shopkeeper, a strongly built woman standing out front, was smiling warmly at them.
After glancing around quickly, Tenz murmured a soft “okay.” Misha quickly visited the shop, exiting with a bag filled with candies of all colors.
“I wonder if we’ll see them today,” Misha murmured, staring at the bag of candy in her hand.
“They seem to play around that area quite frequently, so I imagine so,” her escort replied quietly, bringing a smile to Misha’s face.
On their way home from the royal library after Misha’s first visit, they had found a young girl crying just outside the entrance and two boys a few years older trying to console her. Their efforts hadn’t seemed to be bearing much fruit, so Misha had asked them what was wrong and found out the girl had fallen and skinned her knee.
“That must hurt. I’ll put some medicine on it for you back inside the library,” Misha had said gently.
The sobbing girl had clung to her. After patting her gently on the back, Misha had lifted the younger girl into her arms. “We’ll clean the dirt off it and put some medicine on it. Once we do that, it’ll stop hurting,” Misha had said. Then she turned to the boys. “You two come too.”
“No, umm, it’s okay...” Because the boys had started to panic and tried to take the girl back, Misha reassured them with a smile, inviting them along. They acquiesced, and the whole group set off for the library.
Once there, she asked one of the staff to use their water. Informed there was a well out back, she immediately headed there.
Tenz, worrying that the girl might be too heavy for Misha, offered to carry her, only for the girl to furiously shake her head at the thought of a man she didn’t know carrying her. After that, Misha had to turn down Tenz’s offer. Though his expression was unchanged, a soft “Am I that scary?” from under his breath got a giggle out of Misha. The girl had also refused to be carried by the two boys, so it was probably more her personality than anything to do with him.
“This is going to be a bit cold, okay?” Sitting the girl down on a box beside the well, Misha pulled some water and began to wash the injury. “If we leave sand in your knee, it’ll keep hurting forever and leave a scar, so I have to clean it. It’ll hurt a little. Ready?”
The girl squeezed her eyes shut tight, biting her lip as Misha worked on her knee.
“There, good girl. You’re okay now.” Confirming the wound was clean, Misha spread some ointment on it before wrapping it up in a handkerchief to stand in for a bandage. “There, all done. Here’s a reward for being so good.” She then stuck a candy from her pocket directly in the girl’s mouth.
Still teary-eyed, the girl was quite surprised by the sudden gesture, but that gave way to delight a moment later. “Yum! It’s orangey!”
Seeing the girl finally stop crying, the boys were awash with exhausted relief. “Thanks, miss,” they both said, bowing.
“Oh, you both are so polite as well. Here, you can have some too.” She then handed over more candy to the boys. They hesitated for a moment, but after sharing a glance, they timidly accepted the gift.
“Thank you for the medicine! It doesn’t hurt anymore!” the girl said.
One of the boys sighed as the girl started practically bouncing around. “How come you’re so happy all of a sudden?”
Misha later learned they were kids who lived in a poor part of the city. They regularly went to the library for organized tutoring. The library offered lessons in basic literacy and math to children who couldn’t afford proper schooling, part of efforts to raise the literacy rate in the kingdom. Most of the kids came because of the food that was handed out after the lessons, but kids could also earn candy when they did well on the tests, so they all tried their best.
Misha was pretty impressed with how well-thought-out the program was. Children of poor families were valuable workers once they reached a certain age. Many families thought that if they had free time to go study, they should spend it helping out with work instead, and few children wanted to spend their precious free time studying. However, if they could get food just by sitting still for an hour, that changed everything. There were more than a few families that struggled just to put food on the table.
If the children put forth the effort, they could even get sweets, something children of their status would rarely ever get their hands on, so the kids were motivated to study. As a result, they worked hard to improve academically, and the reading, writing, and math skills they acquired as a result broadened their opportunities for future work. That meant increased wages, which reduced crime coming from those desperate to feed themselves and their families. Elevating the poorest in society helped everyone in the end.
The children Misha met weren’t so impoverished that they needed to worry about food, but their family still didn’t have the money to afford anything like formal education. If it hadn’t been for the royal library’s study program, they wouldn’t have even been able to write their own names.
And that was something they were proud of.
“Mom was really happy when she saw I could write my own name.”
“Yeah, she was happy when I did it too!”
“Granny was so happy she started crying!”
“Oh! She’s here!”
As they neared the library, a small girl dashed toward them. Her hair, a rich honey color that reflected the sunlight well, bounced as she ran. At the same time, Ren dashed forward, leaving his post walking calmly alongside Misha.
“Anna! Be careful, you’re going to trip again!”
Anna, having just turned four, was prone to tumbling when she got excited. Once again stumbling across nothing in particular, she did indeed dip unsteadily in one direction. Ren reached her just in time to push her back to regain her balance.
“Thanks, Ren!” Anna laughed, elated.
She dropped to the ground to pet the little wolf, who gave her an admonishing lick. Ren seemed to have taken a liking to the little girl. Misha witnessed something of a protective instinct in him toward her. She couldn’t help but find that adorable, and she grinned as she followed after him.
“Don’t run off on your own, Anna!” shouted a boy as he jumped out of the grass, soon followed by another.
“Hi, Yuu. Hi, Teto.”
Once she called out to them, the boys’ faces instantly lit up. “Oh! Hi, Misha!”
Yuu was Anna’s older brother, and had the same poofy, honey-blond hair. Teto was their neighbor and friend. He stood out with his black hair and much darker skin tone. His grandfather was from the south, and Teto had inherited that blood quite strongly. The two boys were seven years old, and spent a great deal of their time taking care of Anna.
“You’ve all got grass in your hair. What were you doing?” Misha asked, pulling bits of dry grass out of Anna’s hair.
The kids happily displayed the bags they were carrying. “We were collecting plants by the water, since the rain just stopped.”
“It’s gonna be dinner!”
Their bags were packed with numerous kinds of edible plants. The waterfront provided well for those that lived nearby. Misha thought they had just been playing around, but they had actually been working to help their families. She couldn’t help but praise them.
“Looks like you found lots. You guys are good at this.” They had wormed their way into the dense thickets where adults couldn’t easily go, hence the mess now decorating their heads.
Misha led the children by the hand to a grassy spot near the lake and sat down as they shared shy smiles at her compliments.
“I found some really cute candy in a shop earlier. I got enough to share.”
The children shouted for joy as Misha produced a bag of candy. They excitedly held out their hands, but Misha shook her head, popping the candies directly into their mouths. Considering the work they had been doing, the children’s hands were filthy with dirt and juices from the plants.
As the kids enjoyed their candy, Misha asked them all sorts of questions. About their studies, about their home lives, about the games they usually played. They happily answered everything she asked. Their innocent and excited replies quickly dispelled the gloom hanging over Misha from the problem of the herb garden.
“Actually, here. I have something for you too,” Teto suddenly remembered, pulling a bright red tomato out of his bag. “Grampa grows them. He said the rain made them too big and ruined them, so he can’t sell them anymore, so he gave them to us for a snack.”
As he said, the big tomato in his hand had burst through its own skin. Though it still looked perfectly tasty, it wasn’t really suitable for sale anymore.
“It doesn’t taste like much, but it’s really juicy! We carry them around instead of water,” Yuu added, pulling another one from his bag and taking a bite.
After giving the tomato a serious inspection, Misha followed suit. Tomato juice gushed out into her mouth. As Yuu’d reported, it was really watery but still quite good.
“Too bad. It still tastes good, so it feels like a waste. Do they not do well with too much rain?”
Teto nodded as he wiped the mess from around Anna’s mouth. “If they suck up too much water, the insides grow faster than the skins, so they burst. Once that happens, the bugs can get inside really easily, and they rot right away, so you can’t sell them. That’s what their grampa says. That means we get to eat as much as we want, but I’m getting a bit tired of them,” he said, shoulders slumping.
Yuu nodded. “Yeah. Dinner is always tomato soup, or boiled tomatoes, or something else—tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes! I know we don’t want to waste them, but I’m so tired of them.”
Misha giggled at how the two of them understood the reality of the tomato situation, but at the same time something flickered to life in the back of her mind.
“You wouldn’t want to get tired of it, would you?” she asked.
“Nope. And grampa says as they get too big, they taste worse. He says you need moderation in everything.”
“And then he takes our pie from us. He’s so mean. We’re still growing, so we need the food!”
“Yeah, he always complains we’re eating too much!”
As the children continued to complain about their grandfather, Misha sank into her own head, tuning them out entirely.
“Moderation...”
Information tumbled around inside her skull. An orderly, beautifully perfect herb garden. Plants growing much larger than usual.
“I should be able to figure it out...?” That’s what Miranda had said with a somewhat admonishing gaze.
And the herbs that had survived from her mother’s garden, surrounded as they had been by weeds.
“Misha?” The kids realized Misha had frozen in place. They were now looking at her with concern.
Misha jumped back to her feet, not having noticed them. “I think I get it...” she murmured. Abruptly, she grabbed the three younger kids and wrapped them in a big hug. “Thank you! I think you just helped me figure out a problem I was having! I’m going to go check! I’ll definitely repay you someday!” Misha shouted as she bolted off back to the herb garden.
“What was that about...?”
“Who knows?”
Utterly confused, the three kids watched her run off.
“She seemed happy,” Anna commented, holding tight to the bag of candy Misha had left with her. “Should I give some of these to granny?”
The two boys glanced at each other in response to Anna’s total lack of concern. They both shrugged.
“Sure, why not?”
“We’ll probably see Misha again later. She can explain what’s going on then.”
Recently, their grandmother hadn’t been feeling well and as a result hadn’t been eating much, so they figured something sweet might get her to start eating again. Their attention already diverted, the three grabbed their things and scampered home.
Chapter 13: The Problem with the Herb Garden
While working in the garden as usual, Adol was quite surprised to suddenly be called to the reception room by Misha, whom he’d seen leave the garden not that long ago. The desk in the reception room reserved for her was buried in so much paperwork that its surface was no longer visible.
“We’re harming the plants through overnutrition? Meaning rapid growth is our problem?” he asked, having a hard time with the information Misha had rattled off to him.
Sitting on the other side of that desk from him, Misha nodded gravely. Her face was flushed with excitement, and her eyes were sparkling.
“I figured it out thanks to those kids today!” she said, handing him a large tomato. It was bright and fresh, but the skin had burst open to show the fruit’s interior.
“What’s this?”
“Take a bite.”
The sudden instruction confused him, but he was no match for the pressure of Misha’s smile, which would not relent until he did as he was told. The tomato was more watery than usual, but it otherwise tasted ordinary.
“Now try this one.”
While he was still trying to figure out what the point of all this was, she handed him another tomato. This time it was quite a bit smaller, but the skin was completely intact.
“This one is...much better.” It was far sweeter, with a stronger flavor. He stared down at the two of them, taken aback by the stark difference.
“They’re the same kind—grown by the same person and with the same soil and fertilizer too. However, they were grown a bit differently. The first one was the normal way: planted in a field. The second was in a pot situated under a roof. That means there was one difference: the amount of water they got. There’s been a lot of rain this year, so the tomatoes grown outside get too much water, causing their skins to burst.”
Adol listened to Misha’s explanation as he held a tomato in each hand. “Okay, that I understand. Still, how does that pertain to our situation?”
Misha frowned for a moment, seeing realization had yet to dawn on him. “These are the growth records for your cedes. From the time you plant the seeds until the flowers bloom, it seems to take about three months.”
“And?”
“Whenever I’ve harvested cedes, I’ve seen them bloom in four months at the earliest, and they’re strongest when they bloom at six months. Yours are clearly growing far too fast.”
“So...”
“Cedes was originally thought to be a weed. It can grow just about anywhere it finds itself. Maybe the fact that yours are growing in a place too rich in nutrition is causing an effect similar to these tomatoes? That cedes leaf I tasted on my first visit was weak. I barely noticed its characteristic bitterness.”
“So, you’re saying that’s because they grew too quickly?” Adol murmured, pushing through Misha’s avalanche of an explanation. “I understand that the properties of the plant might change when growing at a different speed, but...”
“Mr. Adol,” Misha replied firmly as his gaze started to wander. “Someone told me that ‘plants live by putting roots down into the ground.’ Now I understand what she meant.”
Misha imagined Miranda staring back at her, weighing her, testing her, together with images of the herbs grown in her mother’s herb garden at her father’s mansion, drowning in weeds for over ten years.
“There are some herbs that grow only in harsh, rocky environments. Some prefer humidity or grow in water. They all have preferred environments. My mother’s herb garden was small, but it had a very natural feeling to it. The plants weren’t divided from each other. They were left to grow among one another, and they thrived.”
Misha’s eyes closed for a moment. The bright passion in her gaze had flickered with something dark for a moment. Was it nostalgia? Longing? Unaware of Misha’s situation, Adol had no way of knowing, but he felt it spoke of a deep, sharp pain. Nonetheless, when her eyes opened a moment later, that negativity was gone. The emotional whiplash had left Adol confused. It was at once both a relief and a disappointment. He wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about it.
Too wrapped up in her thoughts, Misha failed to notice Adol’s reaction. “The place you’ve made here is very beautiful. It’s a perfectly arranged flower garden. That would be fine if it was for decoration in the castle, but that’s not what you’re after, is it? This garden isn’t for being pretty; it’s for treating people with what we grow here.”
Misha’s emotional speech wasn’t particularly well reasoned, but it nevertheless squirmed its way into Adol’s heart.
“This garden’s purpose...” he murmured softly.
He was proud of the herb garden they had managed to create. They had cleared trees, dug out the roots, built walls of brick, and cultivated the soil. Although they had merely been following the instructions of the castle’s gardeners because they had no prior experience in the field, he and his people had struggled through the backbreaking work of getting accustomed to this new profession. In fact, more than a few of Adol’s peers saw him as giving up his profession as an apothecary to become a gardener.
