Like A Mustard Seed | Fiona

This is where the hospital wing grew extra plants. Plants that couldn't grow up in the castle greenhouse. Plants that needed for-real dirt and open air. So it was explained. The older kids, grinning from ear to ear, had explained it patiently as a river. To get the urgent-medical-cleaning-stuff, Gruff would himself need to swim the rain-rivers between the castle and the urgently needed plants. That was just how it was.

At least he got outside.

Why did the special magic clothes he had to wear at special magic school absorb all the water in the world? Gruff put his shoulder against the big door of Greenhouse Four and leaned forward. Then, feeling foolish, he grabbed the big handle in both hands and dug his heels into mud to lean backwards.

Dripdripdripdripdrip. Gruff shook himself dry. Gruff tore at the chest-part of his robe and let the drippy, impractical robe slough off into the dirt of the greenhouse.

"'Scuse me," he stepped toward the blonde kid. She didn't look half so soaked, "I need -"

The blurred inkstrokes on his parchment had not survived the torrent. The soggy mass poked letters at him in incomprehensable scrawl.

"Some mandragon parts. For the wing. Some of the senior kids are cleaning the sheets by boiling them in a big pot. They need to put mandragon parts in it to -" What the hell was mandragon, anyway? Gruff was still unconvinced on the existance of dragons, let alone half-person-half-dragon plants. "-Clean the sheets."

They cleaned sheets all the time at the hospital wing. They were obsessed. Sheet-psychos. He had signed up because people said they learned special healing magic. If he could do healing magic, everyone would know they were wrong about people that didn't have magic parents. They had sensed his plan, though, and recruited Gruff into their crusade against perfectly-fine sheets.

"They said I should find the blonde girl that knows everything."

Fiona had been elbow-deep in a pot of soil when the greenhouse door opened and someone very wet came through it.

She looked up. Slytherin robes, or what remained of them given that he’d apparently taken them off and dropped them on the floor in a heap. In the dirt. She looked back at him and narrowed her eyes. First year, probably.

"I need some mandragon parts. For the wing. Some of the senior kids are cleaning the sheets by boiling them in a big pot. They need to put mandragon parts in it to clean the sheets. They said I should find the blonde girl that knows everything."

She straightened up and pulled off one glove, then the other, with the composure of someone who had been waiting for this kind of moment. ‘The girl who knew everything’? She could play that part.

“It’s mandrake,” she said, pleasantly but firmly. “Not mandragon. Dragons aren’t plants.” She set her gloves down on the potting bench. “And they don’t keep the mandrake in here. This greenhouse is for the medicinal herbs. Mandrake is in that one.” She pointed at the greenhouse just outside, next to the one they were in.

Fiona paused, looking at the dripping boy, his robes on the floor, parchment clearly ruined, and decided to help him.

“I’ll show you where.” She untied her apron and hung it on the hook by the door, then glanced outside at the rain that was coming down in buckets. She looked back at him. “You really owe me for this one.” She looked back down at his robes on the floor. “The soil stains. You might want to pick those up. You can hang them here,” she said, pointing at an empty hook by her apron.

"Dragons aren’t plants.”

No duh.

The girl wanted to give a lecture. She must have a real bossy mum or dad that likes giving lectures. Some people thought this was the way to talk to people because that's what they'd learned when they were little kids. She dripped orders and commands and instructions with the same ease that Gruff dripped rainwater.

Mandrake. Mandragon. Which one was correct? The girl who knew everything assumed she was correct, but she tried to direct him to an entirely different greenhouse.

This couldn't be the right girl. If she were, she'd know that the older kid had been very clear that it was Greenhouse Four - they'd made him repeat it back twice - that he was supposed to go to.

The soil stains. Didn't this girl that knew everything know that fairies cleaned your school clothes when you were asleep? It was basically the best part of magic school.

"Wait, hold up," he did as she bid, and collected the pile of liquid and wool from the earth. He hung the soaked blob on a hook as directed, and saw an messy sleeve direct water to the earth like a spout. Were the girl's eyes always narrow or was she having a bad day? She looked at him like the older kid did when he walked in and asked how he was supposed to help and they sat right next to eachother on the bed. He wasn't an annoyance, and he would prove it.

"I'm not letting a girl get all soaked on account of me." Mum would have killed him. There were right ways and wrong ways to act and Gruff wasn't a lout. "I can go on my own - I can do it. You're all busy. What's a mandrapes look like? I can owe you for that. For telling me what they look like."

Desperately, he studied the scrap of parchment. The streak of ink revealed even less as time crept forward. It had definitely been mandragon. What could he do? Return back with a mandrapes and get roused on by the older kids? He needed to find the blonde girl who actually knew everything. She's know what to do. 'What to do' was part of 'everything'.

"I'm not letting a girl get all soaked on account of me. I can go on my own. What's a mandrapes look like?"

Fiona stared at him, her expression that of disbelief. She had already corrected him once, and now he was wrong again.

“Mandrake,” she said, trying not to sound too rude. “Man. Drake. Not mandrapes.” She picked up her apron from the hook and folded it over her arm. “And you absolutely cannot go on your own.”

She said it with complete certainty, giving him no chance to budge her decision.

“You don’t know what you’re looking for, you can’t say the name properly, and your instructions are on a piece of parchment that is essentially dissolved.” She glanced at the soggy scrap in his hand. Totally unreadable at this point. “If I send you in there alone, you’ll come back with something completely wrong and then someone will blame me for it.”

She pushed the greenhouse door open with her shoulder and looked out at the rain, then back at him.

“Besides,” she said, “you still owe me.”

She looked up, wishing she knew the charm to create an invisible barrier between herself and the rain, but she didn’t. It couldn’t be helped.

She stepped out into the rain without waiting for him to argue.