The Enchanted Greenhouse(101)
Kneeling, she traced the cracks from the floor upward. What caused the failure? She’d thought it was simply the age of the ingredients. If that were the case, though, then the greenhouses should be failing in the order in which they were created, and they weren’t. She knew for a fact that this greenhouse was a later one. According to the dates in the notebooks, Laiken had only experimented with the singing plants well after he’d collected seedlings from around the Crescent Islands. The earlier greenhouses were all straightforward recreations of environments on the other islands. In fact, the very earliest ones held vegetables, and the majority of those had shown no sign of failure yet.
So why this greenhouse? And why now?
Was it just random, or was there a reason? She thought of Laiken’s ghost and wondered if it had any idea as to what was causing this. I have to find a way to ask. This couldn’t be allowed to continue to happen. It didn’t matter how much of his code she cracked or how many spells she puzzled out if it was all going to be destroyed in one catastrophic moment.
Around her, the chaos swirled as the people and plants worked and shouted, but she blocked it all out. Working alone, she followed the cracks, tracing them to their source. All of them started from the foundation and spread upward. Why? What does that mean? Could the failure come from the earth somehow? Had Laiken buried the ingredients? She knew from his notebooks that he hadn’t. He’d kept them open to the air, for a wider area of influence—he’d specifically noted how he’d discovered that was necessary. So why did all the cracks begin at the ground? Why not the cupola, which had to suffer the bombardment of wind, rain, and snow? Why not the seams between the windows, which had to be the weakest points?
One of the sentient plants shrieked for help.
Questions can wait; there are plants to rescue.
Leaving the mystery, Terlu hurried back to the others. Yarrow passed her a trowel, and she began to dig at the roots of a flowering bush, moving the soil away from the soft naked strands beneath the plant. The flowers crooned in a minor key, punctuated by wail-like arpeggios.
Up in the rafters, Lotti began to howl, “Cold coming!”
Terlu looked up to see frost spreading across the cracked glass. It blossomed in flowerlike patterns, as the pillars and rafters became coated in ice. The leaves of the bush in front of her shriveled, and the flowers collapsed into shriveled, brown knots. Its song quieted into a whisper, then fell silent. Oh no, it’s happening. She’d hoped they’d have more time—
“Grab what you can,” Yarrow called, “and get out now!”
The sentient plants, who had been through this before, sprinted for the doorway. The humans were slower, but Yarrow abandoned the roots of the singing tree he was working on and instead herded his relatives out the door.
His father continued to struggle with the roots of his tulip tree.
“Leave it,” Terlu said. “The temperature will fall too fast. You’ll die too.”
“Help me,” Birch cried.
She dug into the roots with her trowel, hacking at them—better a wounded plant than no plant at all. The tree sang louder, a kind of wailing keen, as its petals shriveled into brown husks. The faint floral smell deepened into a medicinal kind of odor, the stench of decay.
Yarrow returned and the three of them unearthed the tree. They dragged it by the branches to the doorway and through. Yarrow slammed the door. He turned on his father who, without his cane, was sagging against a pillar. “What were you thinking?” Yarrow exploded. “I said to get out!”
“I couldn’t leave it,” Birch said. One of the cousins handed him his cane, and he clutched it. “I left before. I’m not going to do it again.”
“Your heart—”
“—is fine.”
One of the others gasped, and they broke off their argument to look to the door. Frost spread over the glass, and then a second later, it melted away. Terlu sank to the ground and panted.
“Nasty spellwork,” Birch said.
“What do you mean?” Terlu asked, looking up.
He waved his hand at the door. “That’s not natural.”
Well, obviously it wasn’t. None of the greenhouses on Belde were natural. “I think it’s a cascading failure,” Terlu said, “stemming from a single weak point in—”
“There’s no evidence of any enemy at work,” Yarrow said to his father, over her. He was scowling at Birch, and his hands were clenched at his sides. “I’ve been here longer than you, and since you left, there hasn’t been a single soul to step foot on Belde in—”
Terlu got to her feet. “Wait, what enemy? What are you talking about?”
“It’s one of the many things we disagreed on,” Birch said. He leaned heavily on his cane, and she noticed that his muscles were shaking. He’d pushed himself too hard, too fast. She glanced around, looking for a chair to shoo him into, but he wasn’t budging. Continuing to shake, he scowled at his son. “I believe that the failures aren’t natural. They’re caused by a spell, cast by a rival sorcerer.”
“And I say there’s no rival sorcerer,” Yarrow snapped. “How could there be? Laiken spoke to no one, and there’s no one but us on the island. It’s simply the old spells decaying. That’s all. Entropy, a natural occurrence. If we can revitalize the spells—”