The Enchanted Greenhouse(117)
Lotti burst in with the news. “We did it!” she caroled. “All the glass is fixed!”
“That’s wonderful!” Terlu said, celebrating with her. The little rose danced around her with her petals shaking in the air, and Terlu spun to watch. It was indeed a tremendous achievement. After thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of cracks, the glass was at last whole. Every greenhouse could host life again.
“We need a new spell to do.”
Terlu laughed.
“I’m serious.” The little rose widened her petals, as if she was trying to look more earnest. “It’s spectacular that the glass is fixed, but there’s much more to be done.”
“I don’t have a new spell yet.” Terlu waved at the pages she was struggling with. She’d written out reams of notes and tried countless variations, but no success so far.
Lotti hopped closer to the pages. “What’s this one do?”
“Ideally, if it’s working right, it forms a protective shield just within the glass—it’s what makes it possible for some rooms to be hot and humid enough for tropical plants and others to grow vegetables so close to the winter solstice.”
“But it’s not working yet?”
So far, she’d managed a bubble that was permeable enough to allow people to walk through and sturdy enough not to burst—she’d cast it each time from outside the ring of ingredients, to be safe. However, it also didn’t hold in heat, which was the point. She was confident that if she tweaked the spell enough, she’d get it eventually. She was closer to understanding how the phrases interacted. But the key word was “eventually.” “Not yet. How about you get Birch and the others to teach you how to plant seedlings?”
Lotti let out a gasp. “Ooh, do you think I could do that?”
“Absolutely. I think you could do anything you want to do.” Or at least anything that was physically feasible for a very small flower with a base of feathery leaves, though really Terlu wouldn’t have put any limitations on the rose. “I see no reason why you and the other plants can’t be gardeners, now that you’ve finished proving you can be sorcerers.”
“No offense, but I’d rather be a gardener. It’s more important.”
Terlu grinned. “No offense taken. It is more important.”
Pleased, Lotti hopped out of the greenhouse.
Terlu jotted a note in her journal about the results of her latest experiment and then collected the ingredients to be set aside for her next attempt. It was a shame that she didn’t have anyone she could ask to study the texts with her, because even after she decoded the sorcerer’s notes, First Language was notoriously tricky to parse. Ah well, it just meant it would take her more time—which she had, now that Laiken’s malfunctioning spell had been disabled.
Not a single greenhouse had died since they destroyed the ingredients, and she was allowing herself to hope that it was over. Additionally, Laiken’s ghost had dissipated after Lotti told him the news, which was further proof that they’d done the right thing.
Her theory was that a piece of Laiken had known he’d condemned his beloved plants, which was why his ghost hadn’t been able to let go. Now that his mistake was undone, he was at peace, which was nice. At the very least the upstairs bedroom was less windy, even if no one besides Lotti （who slept in a pot on the bedside table） was willing to claim it as their own—there were simply too many memories bound up in it for any of Yarrow’s family to move into the tower permanently, and the neighbor with the toddler didn’t want a home with either stairs or spells.
After everything was tucked away, Terlu headed out of the practice greenhouse. Reaching the rose room, she strolled through. One of the tiny dragons was busily flitting from rosebush to rosebush—ever since she’d left the door open, they’d chosen to help with pollinating, though they always returned to their sunflower maze by the end of the day.
The dragon, a golden one with sapphire-blue eyes, trilled at her.
“Come by the cottage later,” Terlu told her, “and you can have some honey.”
Satisfied, the dragon flew to another rose, balancing on the stem as the bloom bobbed beneath her weight. She stuck her snout into the center of the flower.
Continuing on, Terlu found Yarrow outside by the cottage that was formerly home to the feral gryphons—the gryphons, she’d been told, had been relocated to an unused shed on the other side of the island. Luckily, she hadn’t been involved at all in that maneuver. Yarrow was working with his father on the roof, fixing the shingles. She noticed that Yarrow was working below Birch, in position to catch him were he to ever lose his grip—she wondered if that was a conscious choice or instinct. He doesn’t even know what a great heart he has.
“Did you hear?” Terlu called up to him. “All the cracks are fixed!”
“That’s fantastic!” Yarrow said.
It would be a while before she’d have enough of a grasp on the magic for the old failed greenhouses to be properly enchanted greenhouses again, but they’d function just fine as they were, subject to the ordinary laws of how greenhouses worked. Some of the destroyed rooms had already been reclaimed, designated for plants that didn’t require unnatural heat or for plants that the gardeners wanted to keep in a normal seasonal cycle. Other reclaimed greenhouses wouldn’t be used until spring. Yarrow had his eye on one as a future home for herbs from the southern isles—he had seeds squirreled away and had been just waiting for the right space to plant them.