The Enchanted Greenhouse(19)
Terlu followed the road to where it ended, on the western edge of—what had Yarrow called this place? The island of Belde. Stopping, she wrapped her coat tighter and looked out at the sea. On Alyssium, you rarely had an uninterrupted view of water—there were other islands and tons of ships, both sailing and cargo ships, going to and fro. On her home island of Eano, you’d see fisherfolk out in their canoes, sometimes a dolphin or two frolicking in the waves. But here, there was only the blue sea. There was no sandy beach, only rocks, and the waves crashed against them, white froth billowing up with each crash. In the distance, she saw the shadows of what could be other islands, smudges of a grayer blue, but they could also have been clouds.
A dock led out into the water, but no boats were tied to it. Just a dock with an empty flagpole at the end, with a box beside it, secured to the deck. She thought of Yarrow’s offer to summon a ship to take her away. I could do it right now. Walk out to the end of the dock, raise a flag, and summon a stranger to come and take her wherever she wanted to go, but where would that be?
Home? In disgrace? She couldn’t do that to her family. It wasn’t just that they’d be disappointed in her or that she’d be embarrassed to admit she’d failed to thrive, though that was all true—it was the fact that reaching out to them could endanger them. She was still a convicted criminal. Her parents, her sister … She wished she could tell them she was alive, but without knowing whether or not she’d been pardoned, how could she risk it?
She still had no clear idea why she was here. Why had someone sent her here in response to Yarrow’s request for a sorcerer? The plaque on her pedestal had been very clear she’d been a librarian. Sending her had to have been a mistake. And if so, the second that soon-to-be-in-trouble official discovered the truth, she’d be shipped back to the Great Library and reinstalled in the North Reading Room. No, she couldn’t ask her family to harbor a convicted criminal.
It was better if no one knew she was here, and it was smarter to stay until she knew who had made this mistake and why—and what she wanted to do about it.
She’d never had any real vision for what she wanted to do with her life. Becoming a librarian had been a suggestion of one of her professors, and it fit her skills, but it had never been her passion, the way sailing was for her cousin Mer or carving for her aunt Siva or fixing things for her sister Cerri. She’d wanted, when she left her family and her home, to find some kind of life goal. That’s what she’d be missing on Eano: a passion and a purpose. That’s why she’d felt she had to leave. She knew she had no future there, and she was tired of being the one in the family who hadn’t yet found her path.
She just wasn’t sure where she did have a future or what her destiny was supposed to be.
Staying here for a bit might be good for me. Terlu could think about what she wanted and what her life should be, now that she had a second chance.
Yes, that’s what this is: a second chance. And maybe the solitude will be nice for figuring all of it out. It could even be essential.
Or she’d miss the sound of voices so much that she’d start talking to the trees.
She turned back from the sea and noticed one more building that she hadn’t explored. Set back from the shoreline, it was more of a squat tower than a cottage. Made of stone, it was two stories tall with a conical roof that was blanketed in snow. A lighthouse? Except it didn’t have a light on top. A grain silo? She trudged across the snow toward the tower.
A key was dangling from a hook beside the door. She plucked it off and tried it in the lock. It opened easily, and she poked her head inside. “Hello?”
She was getting a bit tired of saying that, especially given how infrequently her greeting was returned, but still, she wasn’t going to barge into a previously locked whatever-this-was.
What was this place?
Sunlight filtered in through murky windows and lit dust that floated in the air. It sparkled like flecks of gold above the sturdy worktable that stretched the length of the room. She walked inside. Every wall was filled with shelves that were overloaded by books, journals, and papers in haphazard stacks, to the dismay of her librarian heart. Gardening gloves and pots of various sizes were heaped in one corner. A desk piled precariously high with papers sat beside one of the filthy windows, facing the dock and the sea beyond.
It was very much the opposite of Yarrow’s warm and tidy cottage. It looked more like a laboratory. Or a workroom of some kind? Not a living space. In one corner, she spotted a narrow set of stairs—perhaps they led to the owner’s living quarters? She doubted that anyone lived here now. It was draped in the kind of undisturbed dust that only can accumulate in the absence of anyone. A cold stove sat in one corner of the room. Cobwebs clung to it, and Terlu shivered. It was clear that this place hadn’t been used in years.
She touched one of the papers on the nearest shelf. It was stiff but not brittle to the point of dissolving into dust. Definitely a workroom, she decided. All the notes, the random garden supplies that looked more like unfinished experiments, and the overflowing desk … Terlu examined the desk. In the center of all the papers was a pot with a dried-up ball of leaves. The leaves had curled in on themselves as if hugging their core of desiccated soil.
She picked up the pot. “Oh, you poor thing.”
Tucking it under her arm, Terlu prowled through the rest of the workroom, examining everything like a detective searching for clues. A pile of mostly burnt papers lay next to the stove. She knelt to look at them.