The Diary of Miss Aidyn Hall,
traitor and thief
July 23
Forgiven,
but Not Pardoned
For
the past two days, I stayed clear of the Greenwood . Keeping
my mind off of it—and especially off of Apple Blossom—was no easy task, but I
managed it. When my work wasn’t keeping me busy, I cleaned up the garden pond
and went frog hunting, and at night there were plenty of fireflies just begging
to be caught. I took an opportunity to see my friend Hannah for burgers,
lemonades, and a dip in the pool. Desperately, I tried not to think about the
jade stones, but they would inevitably show up in my mind and I would have to
hold back tears. At night, I didn’t bother holding back.
This
morning, I finally went back to the magnolia archway. The Grand Elder Guardian’s
web still barred my way, and on the other side was a dejected looking Apple
Blossom.
“Hey
there,” I said, trying to sound cheerful in spite of the situation.
She
managed a small, pitiful wave. For a few moments, neither of us said or did
anything. We just stood there with our eyes darting from place to place until I
figured it was up to me to extend the olive branch. I knelt down and held out
my hands for her below the Grand Elder Guardian’s massive web. She approached
me and took them. She was willing to look at me, and I figured that was a good
sign. “Atta girl, there’s my friend,” I said, trying to smile for her. I’m
still not sure whether or not I managed to.
“Do
you know what I’m about to ask you?” Apple Blossom asked darkly.
“You’re
about to ask me why I stole those jades.”
“Exactly,”
she said. “Oh, Aidyn, why would you ever do such a thing? I didn’t think you
were the kind to steal. In fact, I thought you were the complete opposite of
that! Oh, Aidyn…”
“I
didn’t think so either, honey,” I said. “It was…it was an act of impulse, I
suppose. Don’t you ever act on impulse?”
“I can’t think of any time I did,” replied Apple Blossom.
“I can’t think of any time I did,” replied Apple Blossom.
“I
can. Don’t you remember when you snuck a peek at your mother’s book?” I
reminded her.
“Oh.”
She let out a sigh. “I do, but this is different.”
“You’re
right, it is.”
We
were silent.
“Do
you really want to know why I took them?” I finally asked.
“Of
course I do!” said Apple Blossom.
“Are
you going to be mad at me?”
“I’m
already mad at you.”
“Well, I took
them because I thought I could use them to harness the jade essences,” I
admitted. “You said that you couldn’t teach me, so I thought that I might learn
for myself.” Apple Blossom let go of my hands and took a step back. Fire was
growing in her eyes. “I told you I couldn’t do that because it was against
age-old tradition!” she cried. “I thought that you would respect that! You were
going to try to break it anyway!” I’d never seen her get angry, and I was
amazed by how fierce such a little girl could look. “I was never actually able
to,” I said, as if it made a difference. “I felt too guilty to even try.”
“It’s
the principle, Aidyn,” she told me. “Even if you didn’t go through with it, you
intended to. To me, that shows a complete lack of respect! What did you plan to
do with the jade essences? What makes you so worthy of them? We Jadeites use
them to form deep, special connections to the forest. What do you need them for?”
I need them to write about them and make
money. I felt as if I’d been punched in the stomach. What a greedy,
selfish, traitorous, all-around horrible person I was! Of course, I couldn’t
tell her that. Truth is important, of course, but you don’t break someone’s
heart while you’re trying to redeem yourself. So instead, I told her, “It was
so I could form a special connection to the Jadeites, and so I could form a
special connection to you.” It wasn’t a lie. To write about the Jadeites—to
write about anything—I needed to form those special connections. But ugh, look
at me. I’m talking about the Jadeites as if they’re merely writing material.
That can’t be the only reason I want to draw closer to them! I want to draw
closer to them for Apple Blossom, of course. I want to strengthen (and now
repair) our friendship. And I still want to show them that humans are not all
bad, that I am not all bad. I want to
befriend all of Apple Blossom’s little friends—especially Wildflower—and show
them that we humans are not the bogeymen that they had been taught to fear. It
wasn’t all about the writing. It couldn’t be all about the writing.
“Oh,
Aidyn…” Apple Blossom stepped forward and took my hands again. “There are other
ways to do that. You don’t have to harness the jade essences to do that!”
“Will
you teach me the other ways?” I asked her.
“Of
course I will.” And so we were friends again, but I’m not off the hook yet. She
hadn’t said that I wasn’t going to be punished, and either way I have to make
amends.
The
Grand Elder Guardian still blocked my way, but he was willing to move aside
when Apple Blossom politely requested that I be let in. The other guardians
parted the way for us, though I’m sure it was very begrudgingly. “Who was it
that I stole the jades from?” I asked Apple Blossom.
“Her
name is Chicory of Willowmead,” Apple Blossom told me. “She’s a gardener and a
flower gatherer. In fact, she was gathering some flowers along the Bell ’s Rush
that day when you…” She did not finish that sentence.
“Take
me to her,” I said. “I’ll apologize and do whatever she asks of me to make amends.
Maybe she needs some work done around the house, or an extra set of hands to
help in the garden.” It wasn’t until I said it that I realized it wouldn’t hold
any water. Why in the world would she trust a thief with her house and garden?
I had delusions of grandeur, thinking that I was going to just blaze through
her front door with an apology and offers of menial labor and then everything
would be okay again. The truth of the matter was that she may not accept any
form of apology from me.
Apple
Blossom said, “We’ll just have to wait and see, Aidyn.”
When
we crossed the bridge, we were greeted by several men and women in emerald
green uniforms fashioned from maple leaves and reinforced by armor plates.
Apple Blossom had told me about them once; they were a sort of public militia
that dealt with street and civil matters in the Greenwood . Though
they worked on the streets, they were dispatched by only one person: the king. Just
because I had been forgiven enough to be let in doesn’t mean that all was well.
Who would have known that petty theft was a reason to call upon the street
militia? Oh wait, it wasn’t, unless you were a human among Jadeites, and
therefore universally distrusted in the first place.
“Good
afternoon,” Apple Blossom said to the soldiers, and I nodded to them. The
soldiers, whose stony eyes had been fixated on me, bowed to their princess.
Then one of them, a gruff-looking man holding what appeared to be an old mace,
began speaking quickly to her in a language I couldn’t make out. I figured it
was the tree elf language that they used for their writing. Apple Blossom spoke
back to him in the same language, and that got me irked. It was all well and
good if these soldiers didn’t trust me to hear what they were saying that was very obviously about me, but Apple
Blossom had trusted me enough to remain friends with me even after what I did,
so she should trust me enough to hear at least her end of the conversation about me! Now that I think about it, if
the Jadeites think humans are so terrible, why did they—or at least, this
particular branch of them—adopt our English language? Isn’t it just a little
presumptuous of them to go around speaking the language of the creatures they
so hate and distrust? And if human contact is discouraged at best and forbidden
at worst, how were the Jadeites able to get close enough to humans to adopt an
entire language from them? Was it always like this? It’s something for my Need
to Know list, and something to stay up late into the night pondering.
The
only words in the conversation that I could make out were my name and Chicory’s
name, both said by Apple Blossom. The soldiers’ words were lost on me, and
because they were doing such a good job of remaining stone-faced, there were no
expressions for me to speculate from. Finally, Apple Blossom took my hand and
the soldiers moved aside to let us pass. They fixed their eyes on me again, and
I tried to smile for them but I don’t think I quite managed it. As we headed
past the village where I had been gawked at so many times (amazingly, nobody
was gawking now), I understood that the soldiers were following
us—specifically, following me. So this was how it was going to be.
Chicory
of Willowmead, it turned out, lived in a small, boxy tree-bark shack out of the
way of everything else. Everything about her was simple, from her unremarkable
grass-green hair cut short to her faded blue pants and worn-out grey tunic. She
had a plain but pleasant face, slate-blue eyes, and a little spot of dirt on
the tip of her nose. It seemed like the only thing about her that wasn’t plain
in every way was her garden, which was just like a picture out of Burnett’s The Secret Garden . Roses of all colors—red, pink,
purple, yellow, white, and even blue—grew in arches and trailed like
waterfalls. Snapdragons grew several feet tall against the garden gates.
Camellias and peonies, lilies and dahlias, azaleas and petunias, and flowers I
didn’t even know the names of formed a carpet of color intertwined with jade
stones of varying shapes and sizes. When we arrived, Chicory had been
harvesting from bushes of bright bleeding hearts. When we entered—me and Apple
Blossom in front, soldiers spread out in a fan behind us—she paused and looked
at us. The sight of the soldiers visibly intimidated her, but she softened when
Apple Blossom approached her with her characteristic smile. “Good afternoon,
Miss Chicory,” she said. Chicory bowed her head so that her nose touched the
spade she was holding.
“You
have the loveliest garden,” said Apple Blossom. “I see that you take the best
possible care of it. I like to see nice flowers and the nice people who tend to
them.” I understood that she was trying to make the poor girl less anxious.
Sure enough, that got a smile out of Chicory.
“This
is my good friend, Aidyn Hall,” said Apple Blossom, putting her arm around me.
“She’s human, but she is most definitely one of the sweetest ladies you could
ever hope to meet.” When she said this, I smiled a real smile, because I knew
once and for all that she had forgiven me. “But,” Apple Blossom went on, “as
you must know, even the sweetest are capable of doing the wrong thing
sometimes. Why, the list of the wrong things I’ve done could fill a book from
beginning to end! And so I am afraid that Aidyn has done the wrong thing, and it
is you she has wronged. She…”
“She’s the one who took my jades!”
Chicory exclaimed.
“I’m
afraid so,” I told her. “But I am genuinely remorseful for doing so, and I will
do anything you ask of me to make up for my crime—anything at all! I am your
loyal servant from now until you decide that I have sufficiently apologized for
the stealing.”
“Right
now I just want to know why you took them,” said Chicory.
“I
wanted to study them,” I told her.
“Study
them for what? You humans don’t have them where you’re from?”
“The
ones we have are nothing like the ones you have,” I said truthfully.
“Well,”
said Chicory, dusting off her pants, “if you wanted to ‘study’ them you could
have waited for me to come back and asked me. You’re a grown-up lady. You
should have known that there was no need for stealing! Do you still want to
look at them?”
“Thank
you, but I’m no longer interested,” I told her. I didn’t feel that I deserved
it.
“Well,
that’s all, then,” Chicory said. “You don’t have to work for me. You really
don’t seem so bad, and I’m sure that the princess knows what she’s talking
about, but there is nothing that I would feel right in trusting a human
with—certainly not my prized garden! So I will accept your apology and leave it
at that.” So I was forgiven, and it didn’t even take any work. I was slightly
disappointed, as I’m sure that working as a maid or a garden-hand in a Jadeite
household would have given me quite a bit of excellent material. But Apple
Blossom said, “I am glad that you found it in your heart to forgive Aidyn. You
are so kind, Chicory, and the perfect example of what a citizen of my Greenwood should
be.”
Chicory
reached up into one of the arches and picked off an exquisite white rose, so
well-formed and detailed that it almost looked like it was made rather than
found in nature. She handed the rose to Apple Blossom, who received it with her
usual enthusiasm: “Oh! It is beautiful, beautiful! What a perfect rose! Oh,
thank you, Chicory! Thank you, thank you! But,” she turned to me, “can you give
one to Aidyn too?” When Chicory looked doubtful, Apple Blossom said, “Oh,
please? She’s my very, very best friend!” My heart swelled.
Chicory
picked an identical white rose—I wondered how many perfectly-formed roses she
had on those arches—and handed it to me. “Thanks very much, Chicory,” I said
with a smile. Apple Blossom put her arms around Chicory, stood on tiptoe, and
kissed her cheek, and Chicory blushed as she returned the embrace. “Thank you
very, very much, Chicory,” Apple Blossom said. “Thank you for being so kind and
for forgiving Aidyn and for having such a wonderful garden.” She took my hand
then, and we took our leave.
I
am forgiven. I am still Apple Blossom’s friend—her very, very best friend, her only human friend. I really want to
keep it that way.
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