Blueberry Queen

In the run up to the farmer’s festival, Clara begins inviting Marjorie over more often rather than coming up to the Archives and hanging out in her home. 

“I’m frightfully sorry, sweetpea,” she says one day, covered from head to hoof in flour. “I know you hate leaving that old moon of yours. I just need to be ready to sell as much as I can for the festival! It’s such a great opportunity to get new customers in the diner, and that grand prize ain’t nothing to sneeze at neither, if’n I can manage to win. Speaking of…”

She begins to pat herself down, cleaning the flour from her fur and clothes with deft, practiced hands and small, controlled bouts of wind. Clara rarely uses her magic for anything, and Marjorie is fascinated to see it, even if she still feels faintly exposed being in someone else’s kitchen. The scent of delicious baked goods is heady in the air, and that helps things.

“Speaking of?” Marjorie prompts after Clara has been lost tidying for a moment.

“Right! Right,” she replies, and goes to the fridge to grab something to drink. It’s a kind of pale blue beverage that sparkles in the light Marjorie’s never seen Clara drink before, but its contents aren’t a total mystery. 

“Is that a potion of lustrous flora?”

“Is that what they used to call it?” Clara asks, or maybe teases, judging by the tilt of her smile. “The vendor I got it from told me it was a Verdant Smoothie, trademark included. I’ve got to drink two of these a day up till the festival to help guarantee that win!”

Marjorie wrinkles her nose as Clara begins to chug what she recognizes to be a potion. “That’s one way to do it, I suppose. Darling, was that vendor reputable?” If it truly is what she thinks it is, those dosages are about right, but it also sounds a bit like a scam.

“Been goin’ there for a few years now! If it’s a scam, it must be a pretty darn good one!” Clara claps her hands together. “Will you brush my hair for me, Margie? Proper hair care is good for my blueberries.”

Marjorie pauses, opening her mouth as though to say something, and then just exhales through her nose. “Certainly, dearheart. Where’s your brush?”

Clara’s brush lives in the bathroom, and so Marjorie fetches it and the two of them move to the living room to hang out. The weather outside is absolutely abysmal, dreary with autumn rain and chilly besides. Inside, however, Clara has the heat turned up high and they sit close to one another, trading words like warm touches. The kettlecats Marjorie brought from home to soothe her anxieties - Meredith and Tanner - curl up in a pile on Clara’s lap while Marjorie busies herself with the task at hand.

The brush slides through Clara’s hair with a bit of gentle encouragement, all lush white curls and carefully avoided sprouting blueberries. Her goal is to strengthen their roots, after all, not pluck them prematurely.

“Have you ever thought about growing your hair out?” asks Clara, sounding tickled by the prospect. She pets Meredith idly and doesn’t wince when Marjorie hits a snag that she has to carefully pick apart, hidden at the nape of her neck.

“I’ve worn it long before,” she replies, distracted by the work. Without her realizing, she’s closed all her eyes except the bottom set, the ones she uses most for focusing on mundane things. “It’s not my favorite style. It gets caught up in my flora, you see, but that doesn’t work out so well for me. And it tickles.”

“It does?”

“Yes, when it falls in front of my face it tickles my nose something awful. I don’t know how you stand it.”

“Oh! I see,” Clara says. “Suppose I never notice that sort of thing, on account of my hair having always been long. Must tune it right out of my head!”

“Maybe so,” Marjorie agrees. “It’s beautiful, though.”

“Aw, you flatterer!” 

Clara’s tail twitches to bap Marjorie in the side, and Marjorie smiles in response. “I speak only truths, dearheart. Now, tell me how you’re going to set up your stall again?”

“Ah! Well, you see, I’ve got this special charm to keep all the pies warm behind the stall…”

The two of them pass time like that. Marjorie visits a few more times over the course of the week, and every time she watches Clara down a Verdant Smoothie (trademark included) and helps her by brushing her hair. 

By the morning of the festival, the clouds are thick in the sky, but they’re supposed to clear out as the day goes on.

Nonetheless, Marjorie is wrapped up tight in her butterfly wing cloak, and wields a parasol against the wide open sky. They’re items of safety to her, to help keep her grounded in the face of the unfamiliar. 

The streets of Yestershire are, to be fair, not unfamiliar to her, exactly. She has seen them many, many times in her long life. Before she met Clara she was content to see them personally once every few years - perhaps once a decade, in her particularly reclusive moods - but her scrying has left her knowledgeable about the city’s layout. Even if she wasn’t, she also has Agnes walking with her on one side and their dalon mount Fortuna on the other. It’s hard to get lost when surrounded on all angles by friends and family who know where they’re going, and who can block the crowd from her.

“You’d think Clara would want to meet up with you first,” Agnes is saying. She doesn’t seem any more enthused to be in the crowd streaming toward the park than Marjorie, really, but she doesn’t seem bothered by it. She just isn’t fond of most people. Marjorie could almost be envious of that.

“You’d think,” she echoes, but shrugs one shoulder. “Or maybe e didn’t want to wake us so early in the morning to help set up. She got up at 4:30, I believe.”

Agnes’ lip peels up at the concept. It’s 9 a.m., now, and the day lanterns dotting the street gleam with warm morning light, and still her dear sister Aggy had been difficult to rouse from her hoard. “Then I’ll have to thank her for her discretion.”

“Won’t we all?”

The narrow streets eventually open into a wider park, dotted with mossy trees and the occasional bench along a walkable path. Fresh and new along that path are an abundance of stalls set up to hawk their goods. Fortuna swings her great big head this way and that to take in all the sights, and honestly Marjorie feels much the same. Her head could be on a swivel for all that there is to see. 

Many of the stalls are selling fresh farming goods, yes, from fruits and veggies to delicious fresh honey - a rare import around these parts, to be sure - but also other kinds of crafts. There’s a stall that appears to be selling nothing but raincoats and shawls, and someone selling hand-crafted jewelry that gleams in the light. 

She sees a pendant that almost looks like an eye amongst those trinkets and nearly stops to buy it on principle, but then she catches a glimpse of Clara’s stall down the way.

Or, more accurately, she catches a whiff of it. The scent of baked goods wafting from her little set-up is immense and mouth-watering. A large crowd is formed around Clara’s stall of baked goods. It’s not surprising--everyone loves a good slice of pie in the morning, and Clara makes simply the best of them all. 

Still, when she spots Marjorie over the heads of her encroaching mob, she waves excitedly. 

“Pardon me, hon, just a sec--sweetpea!” she calls out as Marjorie makes her way over, side-stepping around hungry customers. “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes! Darling, I’m swamped.”

“I can see that,” Marjorie says, mildly, as she watches stargold change hands in exchange for another slice of pie.

Clara is radiant in the fall chill, with flushed cheeks and a bright smile. Something about the work she does lights her up from the inside as though fueled by it. Notably absent from her hair, however, are the blueberries she’s spent the past few weeks tending to so carefully. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it?”

“It’s something, for sure,” Agnes says, sitting up on her hindlegs so that she might be seen more clearly.

“Oh, hi Aggy!” Clara replies, cheerful as anything. “It’s plum fantastic is what it is! I’ll probably be sold out ‘fore the judging starts at this rate, but I just got one little problem…”

“Go on?”

“I’ve been so busy I haven’t been able to take my entry over to the tent they got set up for the competition! Could you take it for me, Margie? Pretty please? I’d go myself, but I don’t want to leave the stall unattended.” Clara bats her long eyelashes, to which Marjorie sighs, even as her old heart flutters. 

“Yes, yes, alright.”

Clara gives a little whoop of excitement, leans over the counter, and kisses Marjorie full on the mouth. “Thanks, sweetpea! I got the blueberries right around here somewhere…” 

She digs around her stall for a frantic second, though Marjorie has to admit to being too distracted for a moment to really see where they’re coming from before there’s a small basket of blueberries sitting in her hand. Clara giggles and directs her toward a tent set up a ways further into the park before returning to her customers. 

“You’re so in love it makes me sick,” Agnes says as they’re walking away from the stall, more teasing than hurtful.

“Oh, be quiet.” Marjorie tilts her chin up a little to mask the burning in her cheeks. “Go find something useful to do.”

“Shan’t.” Her sister’s smug tone is noted and unappreciated. “Besides, we’ve got a request to fulfill.”

That they do, and so the two of them - three, if a distracted dalon is to be counted - go to the tent indicated. It’s full to the brim with supersized fruit, veggies, and fungi, and a good handful of people are wandering around ooh’ing and aaah’ing at the sheer size of them. In comparison, the basket of blueberries in Marjorie’s hand feels quite small indeed. 

As blueberries go, they’re sizable, but certainly not the size of a massive apple or plump pumpkin. Their true strength is in the depth of color and flavor that Clara’s repeated treatments have instilled in them. Hopefully that will be enough for the judges to see what really matters here.

If they don’t… Well, Marjorie knows a few tricks.

It’s not actually difficult to sign up for the competition. She fills out a card with Clara’s pertinent information and finds an empty space for the basket while Agnes stares the judging panel down. For some reason the judges begin to look a little nervous, but that couldn’t possibly be because of them. That would be ridiculous.

She hears one of them murmur something about “the sisters Witherbloom” and turns to look at them with the full weight of her manifold gaze. The panel quiets down immediately. One of them hesitates before offering a wave.

“Tch. Suck-ups.” Agnes doesn’t wave back, though her voice is quiet enough that they probably don’t hear her. Marjorie does wave, offering a small, mysterious smile.

Okay, perhaps their intimidated looks have something to do with the two of them. Oh, well. 

Marjorie turns on hoof to leave them to their murmuring.

“You can’t tell me you’re not curious about what they’re saying,” Agnes says to her, popping up an eyebrow.

Marjorie replies, “Oh, desperately. But Clara will want news...”

“Sickening.”

“...and I believe a touch of subtlety will drive our point home far more quickly than an iron fist. Now that they know we’re here, perhaps they’ll know what’s expected of them.”

Agnes raises both her eyebrows as she reconsiders Marjorie’s perspective. “...Hm. Perhaps so.”

It does seem so, because Clara ends up with a blue ribbon in a few hours’ time, when the day lanterns are waning toward evening. She’s all sold out of cakes and pies by then, and accepts her ribbon with the widest, most beautiful smile Marjorie has ever seen. 

Whether the victory is purely because of Clara’s hard work - a surefire possibility - or because a few judges got spooked by the appearance of the witches of the Witherbloom Archives, they’ve achieved what they set out to do today. For one last festival memory, Clara absolutely insists that Marjorie take a picture with the Fate’s focus of her and everyone else who won a ribbon.

The second place winner has already stormed off out of frustration, but a satyr named Cyrille crowds in close with his spotty pumpkin. He seems a little disgruntled, but after the photo is taken, Clara grabs his hand and shakes it cheerfully. 

“Congratulations, big fella! That’s a mighty fine gourd you got there!”

Marjorie is about ready to lay into this guy if he doesn’t play nice, but Cyrille’s tail gives a little wag and he smiles slowly. “Thank you, ma’am. I like your berry--it matches your ribbon.”

“Aw, shucks! Thank you kindly.”

With that show of good sportsmanship, Marjorie lets herself relax. It’s a fine day for a festival, after all.