Free Wings of Renewal: A Solarpunk Dragon Anthology by Claudie Arseneault

open to reveal Anabel, dressed in wrinkled tan farming clothes.  
    “Good, you're here.” She grinned. “Come on through, and please ignore the mess. Leave your bag by the door.” Elena dropped her duffel bag and followed Anabel through the living room and out the back door. She was used to people claiming their houses were a mess when they weren't, but Anabel hadn't been kidding. There were knick-knacks and blankets scattered around the room, stacks of dishes on the coffee table, and what looked like clean laundry on the couch. The house was brightly lit and airy, though, which made the mess not seem so bad.
    The back garden was populated entirely with vegetables, as far as Elena could tell. Corn stalks stretched high towards the summer sun. Onions and peppers lined the next rows, and after that, she lost track of what was what. The witch led her to a shed and handed her a wooden-handled shovel.
    “I need to plant some more seeds here,” she said, gesturing. “Turn the soil over, a few rows wide.” She walked off towards the house without another word.
    Elena stared. Helpful. She'd done very little work with the earth, focusing her studies and now her apprenticeship on pottery and metalwork, anything she could do with her hands, so long as it was inside. She hadn't so much as tended an herb garden before.
    Hesitantly, she stuck the shovel in the ground, bending halfway over to push it into the hard, dry earth. When she lifted the shovelful of dirt to turn it, half of it flew off the shovel from the force of movement. She groaned. Her second attempt didn't bring more than a handful of dirt out of the ground at all, and as she was gritting her teeth for a third try, she heard laughter from behind her. She turned.
    “I'm sorry,” Anabel said, covering her mouth. “I didn't realize.”
    “Didn't realize what?” Elena asked, her tone more prideful than she'd intended. “I'm fine here.” She sighed. Smooth move, El ,she thought.
    The witch grinned openly now. “Are you?”
    “I—” Elena looked down at the shovel. “No.”
    “That's what I thought. I didn't realize you hadn't done this kind of work before. Here, let me show you.” She took the shovel from Elena's hands and expertly drove it into the soil, using her foot as leverage. When Elena had finished turning the first row of soil under Anabel's watchful eye, the witch nodded.  
    “Better. Much better. Now come over here, let me show you how to plant the seeds.” They spent the morning kneeling in the dirt beside one another, crawling along the rows of plants. Anabel pointed out the difference between intentional plants and harmful weeds and showed Elena how to pull the dead leaves from a plant to help it thrive.  
    Planting new seeds was the most exciting part, Elena found. The entirety of life was contained within the handful of seeds she carefully pressed into the soil, mirroring the movements of Anabel's hands beside hers.  
    “These are going to be flowers,” the witch had said.
    “I thought this garden was for vegetables.”
    “Not always. These aren't edible for us, but they're good for the bees. We can't plant just for ourselves. Our lives would never flourish.”  
    Elena nodded. This was the kind of rhetoric she'd heard her whole life: the importance of loving the Earth that she might return that love. It made more sense here, on her knees and up to her elbows in dirt, than it ever had in a classroom or at her parents' kitchen table.  
    When they'd patted down the last seeds into their new soil, the sun had risen high and hot, sending the women inside for lunch and a break from the pounding heat. The afternoon was spent on housework, tidying and making dinner under the welcome coolness of a clay roof.  
    After dinner, Anabel led Elena outside to the patio and gestured to a pair of chairs. “I know the sun sets just the same every night,” she said, “but still I watch it. It never fails to mesmerize me.”
    Elena often found