The Enchanted Greenhouse(113)

They turned with the cave, and then the third dragon flew into the shadows.

Terlu missed the weight of them on her shoulders. She knew this was what she’d asked, but still … She squeezed Yarrow’s hand tighter. “You okay?”

“It’s different this time. Yes.”

“Good. I’ve never been in a cave before. And it seems that I’m not a fan of the dark, which isn’t something I realized until, well, now. After I was turned into a statue…” She stopped, swallowed, and then continued. “They put me in a closet for a while. Just left me there, while they made the pedestal in the North Reading Room. I was in with other storage items. Just a thing to be stored and forgotten. I thought I’d been forgotten. I think … I think I forgot myself for a while.” She hadn’t thought the cave would dredge up those memories. She’d prefer they stayed relegated to the back of her mind.

“I’m sorry you went through that.” His voice felt like an embrace.

She kept going. “When they brought me back out into the light, I woke up a little. I remember when they installed me in the North Reading Room. I remember…” Her voice shook. “I thanked them. Thanked them. In my head. I couldn’t talk, of course. But I was grateful because of that little bit of kindness, because of the sunlight, because I wasn’t alone. I could watch people as they came to stare at me. I could listen as they told my story. Mangled it of course. Until I stopped listening. And eventually, they lost interest in me. I became a familiar decoration. They stopped seeing me as someone who had once been someone. I think … I think I can’t blame them, because I was a familiar decoration. For years.” Six years.

“Can I at least hate them for you? The ones who did it to you.”

“I did it to myself. I broke the law and was caught.”

“Your punishment exceeded the crime.”

“The judge didn’t think so.”

“I won’t let that happen to you again,” Yarrow said. The cave twisted, and they followed it, unspooling the thread behind them. She wondered where the dragons had flown. She couldn’t hear the flap of their wings or anything but the crunch of pebbles beneath her and Yarrow’s shoes.

“You might not be able to stop them.”

“If my family is right, ‘they’ might not exist anymore. While you and I were … distracted, things changed in the outside world. But you aren’t in the outside world anymore. You’re on Belde. Everything’s different here.”

Maybe he was right. She wasn’t in Alyssium, and the empire had fallen. Maybe that meant she was safe. Still, though, she couldn’t ask anyone to put themselves at risk for her. She’d been the one to learn the spells; she’d take the blame if an imperial investigator came. If she had to, she’d claim she forced the plants to cooperate.

“Besides, the plants won’t allow you to be taken away from them,” Yarrow said, as if he could hear what she was thinking. He squeezed her hand. “You aren’t alone anymore either.”

The words felt like a jolt. She’d been saying them over and over to Yarrow—he wasn’t alone, he didn’t need to be alone, it was better that he wasn’t alone—but she had stopped thinking about how they applied to herself, even though he’d said it before too. This time, she allowed the words to sink in. He’d been trying to show her that with every honey cake he’d baked, every greenhouse he’d shared with her, every afternoon he’d spent with her experimenting with spells.

I’m not alone.

She’d found a place for herself. She’d found companionship. Not just with Yarrow, but with Emeral and the plants and the dragons, and now with his family.

Somehow this deserted island had become so very full.

Yarrow halted as the tunnel opened into a cave as massive as a concert hall. “I remember this.” He held the lantern before them, but there was already light, a sliver of sun from high above, piercing the darkness, illuminating the vastness with a whisper of day. Stalactites and stalagmites reached toward one another in pillars of dripped stone. The rare hint of daylight danced off the watery sheen, catching the delicate colors of the stone.

She gawked beside him. “It’s beautiful.”

On one side, water dripped down a wall of ivory stone. It stained the rock green and copper. She hadn’t guessed so much beauty lay under the island.

“Come,” he said.

He led her between domes of limestone. She looked up at a ceiling of stone icicles, arrested mid-drip, and wondered if anyone else knew what magnificence was hidden beneath the greenhouses. Had Laiken been here? What had he thought and felt when he saw this? Had he been awed by its beauty or was he too consumed by his misguided purpose?

Ducking through an opening, Terlu followed Yarrow into an alcove, untouched by the sole beam of sun from the crack above the cavern. He lifted his lantern. Here, the stone had formed delicate lacelike curtains. “I did come back here,” Yarrow said. “Once, years later. I wanted to prove to myself … Well, it doesn’t matter because it didn’t work. I lasted an hour and then I ran out, but I remember this room.”

“I love it.”

He smiled.

She didn’t know that stone could form like this. It looked as if it were made by magic, not by water and time. Or maybe water and time was its own kind of magic.