The Enchanted Greenhouse
Sarah Beth Durst
For my mom,
Mary Lee Bartlett,
who taught me to love stories
and has a much greener thumb than I do.
I love you.
CHAPTER ONE
The plant was innocent.
Everyone agreed on that. Still, when the judge declared it in his reedy voice for the official record, Terlu nearly cried with relief—after she’d been arrested, her primary worry was that they’d blame the plant. He wasn’t to blame. It was all her. She’d tried to make that clear.
She shifted in her chair to watch while the court bailiffs escorted the spider plant away. He raised a tendril toward her, and Terlu lifted her fingers to her lips and then toward the newly sentient plant.
I won’t cry. She refused to cry when she hadn’t done anything wrong. Very illegal, yes, but not wrong. So far, she hadn’t shed a single tear, at least not in public, but right now, all that prevented her from sobbing out loud was the scowl on the prosecutor’s face as he glared at her, as well as the head librarian’s hand on her arm, which was the only touch of kindness in the courtroom, both literally and figuratively.
Leaning closer, the head librarian, Rijes Velk, whispered to her, “I will see that he is safe and cared for. He’ll always have a home with us.”
Terlu swallowed hard.
Not going to cry.
Stiffly, gratefully, she nodded at Rijes Velk and then faced the judge.
The judge was swaddled in embroidered robes that transformed him from a skeletal man with spidery limbs into a wide mushroom of ruffled silks. He reminded Terlu of a hermit crab, the kind that used to swarm the beaches of her home island—his gnarled body tucked inside his ornate outer shell, with only his claws exposed. She had to look up to see him, seated on the dais, raised high above the accused. Above me, she thought miserably.
He was framed by stained glass windows that showed a stylized map of the Crescent Islands Empire, each jeweled bit of land caught within panes of sapphire blue. Instead of warm amber daylight, it cast the whole courtroom in a bluish tinge, which made all the painted faces glaring down at her from the balconies on either side of the dais look even more cold and unfriendly. It was all designed to intimidate and overwhelm, and it was, Terlu thought, rather effective.
If the judge was a hermit crab, then she was an oyster, extracted from her shell, splayed open and exposed to the elements. She fidgeted with the sleeves of the tunic they’d given her. It was a gray cotton, soft from use and vastly oversize, and she wondered how many other （much taller） criminals had worn it before her. She knew how she looked in it: like a child playing dress-up, rather than a woman in her twenties. Or more accurately, I look like a chipmunk. She was short and pleasantly plump, with wide eyes that made her always look slightly surprised, round cheeks, and smile creases around her mouth. She was certain she looked more like a chipmunk than a criminal, if chipmunks were lavender and gray. Her mother had purple skin, while her father was tinted more pink, and Terlu had ended up an agreeable shade of lavender, which matched nicely with the gray cotton. But however nice and innocuous she looked, it didn’t seem to be making a bit of difference in the way the case was going. She’d even tried to tame her curls for the court appearance, as if tamed hair would make her appear any less guilty.
The problem was she was guilty: she’d cast a spell. She’d gathered the ingredients, researched the words, deliberated on whether it was wise, decided it wasn’t at all wise, and did it anyway. She’d created Caz, a sentient spider plant, to keep her company in the empty stacks of the Great Library of Alyssium. She’d made herself a friend because she could not handle one more day of being friendless, of being so far from her family, of living sequestered in her silent and empty corner of the library where the only choice was find a way to bear the isolation or admit that she’d failed to find a place for herself, that she’d made a mistake in leaving home, and that her family and friends were right to say she’d never flourish out in the world on her own.
Terlu honestly hadn’t thought anyone would mind.
She’d harmed no one. She hadn’t even inconvenienced anyone. And Caz himself was delighted to be alive and thrilled to be her companion. The patron who’d noticed Caz, though, had been neither delighted nor thrilled.
Only the most elite sorcerers were allowed to use magic. The spellbooks that filled the Great Library were for their use alone, by imperial decree. The imperial investigator who took the case was not about to let one low-level librarian be the exception to the rule. As the prosecutor, he’d argued eloquently for her guilt.
Frankly, she didn’t think he’d needed to argue so hard. She’d obviously broken the law—a talking, walking spider plant was kind of unignorable proof.
And so, Terlu wasn’t the least bit surprised when the judge pronounced, “Terlu Perna, Fourth Librarian of the Second Floor, East Wing, of the Great Library of Alyssium, you have been found guilty of illegal magic use. Sentencing will commence immediately.”
Beside her, Rijes Velk rose. “I plead for leniency.”
Like the judge, the head librarian was also encased in embroidered silk, but unlike the judge, she looked as if she belonged in such finery. She was an elegant woman with silvery-gray hair, which had been braided to echo the latticework on the great door to Kinney Hall. Her onyx cheeks were painted in gold with symbols that indicated the oaths she’d taken, to honor the history, wisdom, and knowledge of the Crescent Islands. If Terlu hadn’t known that Rijes was old enough to be her grandmother, she would have assumed she was simply ageless.