Page 1 of Growing Memories (Valley of Sylveren #2)

Chapter One

A tiny flare in the back of her mind set Eunny Song’s eye twitching. She flinched, nearly burning herself upon the heated end of the fire iron on her workbench. The thin sheet of wood she’d been attempting—badly—to burn with a decorative design ended up with a smoldering hole instead.

“Gods all break,” Eunny muttered, tossing the ruined piece onto the bench.

She’d never been much of a woodworker in any form, much less a hand at pyrography.

Either she’d have to pass the repair job on to one of the regulars who came by Song’s Scrap or see if the customer for the wood panels would accept a simpler job.

The name of her shop should’ve said it all: scrap.

Practical repairs that gave extra life to used objects and materials.

Not art. She wasn’t running a gallery. Wasn’t running much of a repair café, either, if she were being honest with herself. Not a successful one, at any rate.

Eunny’s eye twitched again. She bit her lip, fingers grazing the outer edge of the jittery skin.

The small spasms had become a recurring theme over the last couple of weeks, or had it been a month already?

Maybe even longer. They’d been so sporadic at first it was hard to remember the true start.

The twitches coupled with a sense of restlessness that had been building in her chest. An intangible feeling of…

certainty. Certainty without substance. All she knew was that whatever it was, it was coming, but it was still too nebulous for her to grasp.

She pushed back from her bench. Trudged past the stacks of items in need of repair, which had steadily been growing all summer, taking up more and more of her already limited space: tools that were more rust than metal, furniture missing arms or legs, fabric that even the moths and the rats found below their standards.

Junk. She would publicly deny it, but her repair café had descended to the depths of a glorified junk shop.

Half of it wasn’t even for pending jobs but “donations.” The rest was work demanding more skill than she possessed to fulfill the owner’s request. Demands for “pretty” rather than “functional”.

“Shit.” The curse hissed through her teeth as she tripped over a fallen handle of—something.

Could’ve been a broom or a rake once. Hard to tell with its head missing.

It was just a stick now, waiting to be repurposed, once the edges were re-sanded and polished so it wasn’t just a length of splinters.

It had fallen from the crate of Sylveren University’s incomplete greenhouse order crammed into a corner as she dealt with it piecemeal.

Eunny started to jam the handle back into the crate, then took it back to the workbench instead.

She could seal the crack near the end quick enough, give it a kiss with her sanding block and slap some wax on it.

Done and done. Not up to her old standards, but the university was sending someone for pick-up later anyway, and they were already getting a partial order back.

She could chuck it in with the few refurbished tool heads she’d managed to fix and the repaired seed trays, and that was one less thing cluttering up her place and her to-do list. Although, gods, if Gransen broke his temporary banishment and came to get the university’s order—and saw how Eunny had made negligible progress on it…

She could practically hear the café’s self-professed “manager’s” disapproval already.

Dodging the array of containers scavenged to collect drips from too many worn spots in the café’s roof, Eunny made her way toward the back door.

Rain in the somewhat notorious Valley of Sylveren was the normal order of things.

Most days, Eunny loved it. The wind and the rain, the cloudy gray skies, the massive storm-colored lake and the verdant hills that surrounded the small town of Sylvan.

It was home, far more than Graelynd, the neighboring country along the Valley’s southern border, had ever been growing up.

Even the towers and stone of Sylveren University set into the mountainside, its halls little more than a memory.

Everything fit. She belonged to the Valley.

Had felt its claim when she was still just a child coming up for visits at her auntie’s tea shop.

Had felt the subtle shift in her head, her heart, of being welcomed beneath its oft-gray skies.

The Valley of Sylveren didn’t take to everyone.

Most were merely tolerated, some outright rejected, plagued by a subtle—or not-so-subtle—feeling of unease.

Of being repelled. But those the Valley found agreeable, it claimed.

For so long, the knowledge that Eunny was amongst the latter had been a comfort.

Not so much these days. These last few… years.

Eunny shook her head, banishing the morose thoughts.

The unseasonably deep, unrelenting gray was getting to her.

She missed her best friend, Dae. Although Dae had only come to the Valley for a year of study at Sylveren University, Eunny had so quickly grown accustomed to having her friend in the flesh after years of long distance and letters.

With Dae off doing her Adept Two research, fighting the poison devastating the northern kingdom of Rhell’s landscape, their friendship had reverted to correspondence once again.

Eunny glanced up at the dark sky. Rain might be the norm here, but this was just excessive.

It had been nearly two months since the summer solstice, and they hadn’t seen consecutive days of dry moments, let alone blue sky.

The Valley felt like a haven of mud more than anything else.

Song’s Scrap wasn’t the only building in town struggling, but hers was a problem that required more than a recast of some waterproofing charms or quick patches to the shingles.

She paused on the outer stairwell that led to the loft above her aunt’s beloved tearoom, the Mighty Leaf.

Grimaced at the glaring, visible sags in her repair café’s roof.

Couldn’t find any humor in the irony of a repair café in a state of disrepair itself.

She turned away rather than keep looking at the temporary joins where the café had been tacked on to the tearoom’s more permanent structure, proper construction that was not falling apart because it had been built with the promise of a better job later.

Eunny had made it work, keeping Song’s Scrap operational with patch jobs and pique, but even sheer stubbornness only lasted so long.

Stubbornness and apathy.

“We could help you with the repairs,” her Auntie Yerina had said. More than once. “Turn it into a proper shop. The town loves it.”

And wasn’t that just the problem. The community had embraced her ramshackle café far more than Eunny could’ve ever hoped.

She loved it, too, sort of. The idea of it.

Of having a place where she would only have to fix things, never people, and with her own two, mundane hands.

While she took paying work, she also opened the shop a few days a week for communal mending gatherings, and they had taken on a life of their own.

Not that Eunny had been able to hold any open craft hours lately.

She couldn’t make the space or provide accommodation that was halfway decent, and she balked at fixing the café, making it “proper.” Real.

Like a place where she could belong, doing something she loved. As if she deserved either.

Shouldering open the loft’s door, Eunny snagged a towel on the way to her desk, blotting the moisture from her dark hair.

Thunder rumbled in the distance, the noise competing with the pounding rain on the roof.

Eunny dropped into her chair, elbows going to the desktop as she sighed, rubbing her temples.

Her gaze drifted along the scuffed wood, traveling down until it came to rest on the bottom drawer.

With slow, reluctant movements, she dragged it open.

Tucked away at the back was her old apothecarist toolkit.

She pulled it out and hefted the familiar weight of it in her palm, fingers caressing the well-worn leather all creased and scuffed from what had once been frequent use.

The material wasn’t as flexible anymore, dried out after years of being stored away, no longer regularly handled and conditioned.

Eunny set it on the desktop, undoing the one-hand tie and unrolling it with a flick of her wrist. Muscle memory carried the motion where her conscious mind forgot.

She ignored the tools that remained in the pockets of the wrap.

Her variety of tweezers and any useful ingredients had long since been pressed into service at the café; she didn’t need the array of scoops or cutting implements or specimen jars.

She had no need to come up and look at this relic from her past with any regularity.

It had been so easy once, to feel the soft current of her magic coursing through her hands.

Had hardly taken any thought to call light into her fingers, drawing from the tiny well at her center that was the source of her magic.

Given the current downpour, with the rain so prevalent that even the air inside the loft felt vaguely damp, the circumstances were eerily familiar.

It made the memory of magic itch along her palms.

Eunny shook her head, scattering raindrops everywhere. Not that it did much good, as more rain fell in her eyes. The tents were in ruins, the scent of smoke battling against the elements as it filtered through the air. At least the rain kept the delegation’s camp from going up in flames.

The chaos began to settle as the Sentinels quelled the last of the Eyllics’ desperate defense.

The Eyllics who hadn’t died by an arrow or blade ensured their end through other means, for apparently death was preferable to capture.

Eunny’s stomach tried to heave at the memory of what it had felt like trying to save one of them.

Eyllic or not, enemy of the Valley—enemy of all the Empyrean Territories, for that matter—or not, Eunny was a mender first. She’d taken an oath that transcended nationality.

But the empire across the sea was a master of poison, and its work was fast when needed.

The oily, bitter feel of it to her magic still clung to the edges of her mind even as she reached to heal her dozenth patient.

Maybe it was for the best the Eyllics weren’t her problem.

Unethical as the thought was, Eunny was exhausted.

She was an apothecary by trade, not a practitioner of direct mending.

Patching up the various wounded Sentinels and trade delegation members had her inner sphere of magic feeling dangerously low.

“Who’s next?” she mumbled, eyes closing in a long blink. Her brain felt heavy, sluggish.

“I— It’s okay. I’m fine, it’s barely a scratch.”

She looked up to see Ollas Nevin clasping a bloodied bandage around his arm. Rain had flattened his brown curls against his head, hiding a gash near his temple. She’d have missed it if the trail of red against his pale skin didn’t give it away.

“Come on,” she said with a weary wave of her hand. When he hesitated, she glared at him. “Get over here, Nev.” An upside to having known Ollas since they were kids: Eunny didn’t need to find the energy for things like patience and professionalism.

His head wound wasn’t bad, just prone to bleeding with all the rain.

The slice across his arm was worse. Eunny didn’t have the energy to shush Ollas’s babble as she placed trembling fingers on the blood-soaked gauze pad already slapped across the wound.

A dull roar began in her ears, gradually growing louder in time with her heartbeat.

Ollas was the last one. She only needed to glue him back together enough to hold for just a little bit.

Just long enough for her to take a nap. Then she could brew some fortifying tea, keep everyone in good shape for the trek back to…

to wherever they were going. Gods, she was tired.

Ollas was talking again, voice low, hesitant. Annoyed, Eunny shook her head. He sounded so far away, and the roar in her ears wasn’t dull at all anymore but a blare of incoherent noise.

Something brushed against her magic. She blinked, reflexively pushing it away, but her control was slipping, ripples coursing up her arm as sparks emanated from her fingertips.

The pulling sensation intensified, tangling Eunny’s threads of arcane, the pressure building until they yanked free of her.

She tried to claw back control, but she was so tired.

Spent. Couldn’t regain control as magic was dragged from her skin and onto Ollas.

Her golden light moved of its own accord as it spilled over his arm and onto his chest, sinking into him and disappearing.

Ollas screamed. He went rigid beneath her touch as his muscles seized.

As abruptly as the fit had begun, his body relaxed, sagged, and in her mind’s eye, Eunny felt miniscule bubbles of magic bursting beneath her fingers.

His body twitched with each one, as if it stung his flesh the same way each pop seared in her head.

Wisps of golden light rose from Ollas’s body, turned gray like smoke, and drifted back down until he was covered in tiny motes of ash.

Eunny blinked away the memory. The nails of one hand had left dark crescents in her light brown palm.

She forced her shaking hands flat against the desk.

All was quiet now. Silent. She didn’t reach for her magic.

Didn’t listen. Didn’t try. She’d grown used to the absence.

She was relieved by it, for it meant magic was dead to her.

The bell beside her desk rang, signaling the opening of the repair café’s front door. Eunny jerked from her wavering thoughts, stuffing the toolkit back into the desk drawer.

“I’m here, I’m here!” She hurried down the loft’s steps, cursing herself for getting lost in useless memories.

“Sorry, I don’t have the whole?—”

She stopped in the middle of the café’s front room.

Ollas Nevin, the Homegrown Hero, darling of Sylvan, the man Eunny had broken with her wayward magic, stood at her door.