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After arithmetic, history, and an unscheduled stop at a sweet-seller’s cart, the wizard Farengar takes two pupils on a field trip. Through a field.
“The dandelion,” he says, wading through an ankle-deep sea of the buttery blooms, “is a flowering plant of the family Asteraceae, genus Taraxacum. Repeat after me. The family As-ter-a-ce-ae.”
Two voices, high and small, drone the answer in dutiful unison. “Asteraceae.”
“Good. And the genus Tar-ax-a-cum.”
“Taraxacum.”
With an approving nod, the wizard takes his nose out of his field guide and turns to survey his students: the steward’s daughter Adrianne and the Jarl’s fosterling Lydia, stumping along behind him like ducklings behind the duck. They’re perspicacious, Farengar thinks, for eight-year-olds. They’d rather be beating each other with sticks than memorizing the Cyrod names of wildflowers, of course, but they haven’t run off to play shield-maids just yet—and Lydia, the little ankle-biter, is following his lecture with a fiercely furrowed brow.
“Very good, girls,” he says, flattered by the attention; it speaks, he supposes, to his prowess as a teacher. He claps the field guide shut. “And the word Asteraceae—well, let’s see who’s been studying their noun charts, shall we? The Cyrod word aster, from which we derive the family name of the dandelion, is in which declension?”
Lydia, sensing a trick, eyes him with wolfish suspicion. “What’s the genitive?”
Farengar smiles. “Asteris—”
“Third!”
Adrianne, not to be outdone, tugs the wizard’s cloak. “It means star.”
“So it does,” Farengar agrees, subtly twitching his cloak away from the little hand. On the way through the market, as a treat for surviving arithmetic, he’d bought both girls a bag of sticky-sweet comfits—and watched with polite horror as they crunched through the lot, chewing with open mouths, then licked their fingers clean like cats. He tries not to think about it. “Now, why might we compare a flower to a star?”
“Dandelions aren’t flowers,” says Adrianne, scrunching her sticky nose. “My fa says they’re weeds.”
“Far be it from me to argue with your fa,” says Farengar, who’d argued with the eminent Proventus Avenicci not fifteen minutes before buying the comfits. “But let’s interrogate—none of that eye-rolling, now—let’s interrogate that assumption, shall we?” He smiles and tucks his book under one arm. “What’s a weed?”
The girls look at him as though he’s the stupidest creature alive.
“A weed,” says Adrianne patiently, “grows where it shouldn’t. Like in Gerda’s onion patch.”
Lydia nods along, eyes wide. “So Gerda makes you pull them out.”
“And why,” says Farengar, raising his eyebrows, “does Gerda make you pull them out?”
“‘Cause she’s got creaky knees,” says Adrianne.
Lydia, more quietly, says, “‘Cause they’re bad.”
“Just so. Er, Gerda’s knees aside,” says Farengar, his eyebrows climbing higher, “we agree that we pull weeds because—because they have no useful properties, let’s say?”
His pupils nod.
“And because they have no useful properties, they don’t belong in our gardens, where they might harm the plants we grow to eat.”
More nodding.
“Ah, but the dandelion,” says Farengar, his smile scholarly and smug, “is entirely edible. To say nothing of its medicinal capacity”—he kneels to pick one of the plants, grinning as the girls lean over his shoulders—“and, of course, the fact that it’s an essential ingredient of dandelion wine. A very useful flower indeed.” He twirls the dandelion between finger and thumb, then glances from little face to little face. “And—see? The blossom looks a bit like a star, doesn’t it?”
The girls look at the dandelion. Then each other.
“No,” they chorus.
Farengar sighs.
“Go and gather some,” he says with martyred patience. “We’ll bring them to Arcadia. She’ll tell you all about their uses in alchemy.”
Adrianne, recognizing the recess for what it is, brightens and takes off. She’s halfway across the field, her black curls bouncing, before Lydia takes a single hesitant step. Then stops. Then stares at nothing, pale and still, ankle-deep in dandelions and drifting bumblebees.
“Lydia,” says Farengar, affecting a stern frown, “didn’t I give you a task—”
He falters, aghast. The child is knuckling her eyes.
“I’m a weed,” she says, her voice terrible and small.
Farengar is perspicacious for a twenty-eight-year-old.
“Let’s—let’s interrogate that assumption,” he says, very gently. “Look at me. Who braided your hair this morning, Lydia?”
The Jarl’s fosterling sniffs. She takes her braid tenderly in two hands, holding it as another child might hold a favorite toy. “Irileth.”
“And do you suppose Irileth would have bothered to braid your hair,” says Farengar, “if she didn’t love you very much?”
Lydia stares at him. Then she blinks a few times, hard, and toes a dandelion with her shoe. “No.”
“Do you suppose the Jarl would let you swing from his balconies, and bite his thanes, and wrestle hounds under his table—and climb trellises, and loose cats in the kitchens, and otherwise disturb the peace—if he wasn’t very proud of you?”
“No.”
“And do you suppose Adrianne would let you drag her into mischief,” says Farengar, glancing briefly over his shoulder to check on her, “if you weren’t her dearest friend?”
“No,” mumbles Lydia, staring at her shoes. Then she looks up, her face flushed and furious and horribly, horribly ashamed. “But her fa says—”
The smile drops from Farengar’s face.
“Never mind,” he says, his voice soft and sharp as spellfire, “what Avenicci says. He’s decorative.”
Lydia laughs, startled, then smiles a little tearily. Farengar, still solemn, beckons her over.
“You are very welcome in our garden,” he says, and tucks the dandelion behind her ear.