The Midsummer Remedy

The remedy will save Tansy. Harvesting it will kill Philippa.

She is going anyway.

A magical sickness is spreading through Saltwhistle, striking down everyone with the gift. Douglas's bees lie motionless in their hives. Roz cannot remember yesterday, or the day before, or the decades of secrets she has kept. And Tansy, brilliant Tansy who has grown into the daughter Philippa never expected, lies unconscious in the apothecary's back room.

Slipping further away with every hour.

Philippa knows the cure. She knows exactly what she needs: nightbloom, bloodthorn, and weeping iris. Ingredients that grow only in the Nightbloom Garden, the most dangerous place in Saltwhistle. A garden where the plants protect themselves. Where the price of harvest is measured in the harvester's own body.

The constraint means she cannot enter with magical protection.

She will go in unshielded. Undefended. And very possibly not return.

Douglas begs her to find another way. His voice breaks when he asks. Roz, in her lucid moments, tells her it is suicide. Quillby has rolled himself into a ball and refuses to look at her.

But Philippa Ashmore spent fifty-two years learning what it means to love someone more than yourself. The apothecary taught her she deserves to receive.

Now she must prove she has also learned when it is right to give everything.

Some gardens only open for those willing to bleed. Some remedies cost more than they cure. And some women discover that the constraint they thought was a punishment was always preparing them for this moment.