The Enchanted Greenhouse(27)
It said nothing of who Terlu was or why she was a statue or why she was sent here, nor did it mention any pardon or any official end of her sentence.
But there was a signature at the bottom, in clear swooping letters:
Rijes Velk, the head librarian of the Great Library of Alyssium.
She’d sworn in court that Terlu wouldn’t work magic again, staked her reputation on it. Yet she’d sent Terlu here, with a spell to be cast illegally—why?
A solution to multiple problems, she’d written.
Terlu’s heart beat faster as she turned those words over in her head.
In front of her, Lotti was screaming at the philodendron to wake and crying for Laiken to come back, to not be dead, to not leave them like this. Yarrow was trying （and failing） to console her. He had a panicked look on his face, as if he were seconds from fleeing.
I know why I was sent here.
“I’m supposed to wake them,” Terlu said out loud.
CHAPTER NINE
It was the only explanation that made sense.
Yarrow stared at her. “What do you mean?”
Using her leaves, Lotti shook a pot as she shouted, “Wake up, wake up, wake up!”
Terlu wrapped her arms around herself, but it didn’t make her feel any safer or less exposed. She didn’t know how Rijes Velk had gotten her statue out of the Great Library and all the way to the island of Belde, but she very much doubted it was with anyone’s permission. If she were here, Terlu would’ve asked her how she’d done it. You didn’t just remove a full-size human statue from the library without anyone noticing, especially from as prominent and well-guarded a site as the North Reading Room. She couldn’t imagine how the head librarian had managed it. She hoped Rijes hadn’t endangered herself in the process. But regardless of how …
It seemed clear to her that regardless of how, these plants were why. It was far too much of a coincidence otherwise. She was guilty of plant magic; suddenly, here she was in an enchanted greenhouse that needed magical help.
“Rijes Velk thinks I can help,” Terlu said.
“Can you?” Yarrow asked.
Her throat felt closed. Unable to form the words, she shook her head. She couldn’t use magic again. I don’t want to go back. If Yarrow knew what she’d done, if he knew she was a convicted criminal, he’d …
He was looking at her, his green eyes wide, unreadable.
He wouldn’t do anything, she realized with a start. Because they’d arrest him too.
He wasn’t a sorcerer, yet he’d cast a spell to restore her. If he turned her in, he’d have to admit where she came from and what he’d done—he’d be in as much danger as her. He wasn’t going to turn her in.
I can trust him.
She trusted the head librarian, and Rijes Velk had sent her to him.
“Then why did you say…” Yarrow began.
“Because I did it before. Or I did something closely related. I … cast a spell.” Terlu had to look away, afraid of what she’d see in his eyes: disapproval, disappointment, pity. “I hadn’t planned to. I discovered the spell while I was cataloging journals from the collection of a late sorcerer…” It was only when she stumbled on one of the rare ingredients in a shop that sold gently used accessories, she started to daydream about it. “It was like a game at first, seeing if I could find the ingredients. No, not a game. An intellectual exercise. I told myself that perhaps I’d write a paper about the difficulty in casting a complex spell. Not that anyone would publish it. I’m not a sorcerer or a professor. But it was a fascinating challenge—the spell itself is linguistically convoluted, with unfamiliar words that you do not want to mispronounce.” She’d heard plenty of cautionary tales of sorcery gone wrong—they were presented as proof of why the stricter laws against spellcasting were necessary. Once, a sorcerer was trying to start a fire and instead he set himself aflame. Another time, a young sorcerer tried to summon a water horse to carry her across the waves, but instead she drew a herd and destroyed her village. And another time, a young girl had experimented with a spell and lost ten years before she was discovered—she’d transformed herself into a rock. Moss had grown on her by the time her family finally found her. “But I became more convinced that I could do it. I researched the history of the words in the spell, studying their etymology, until I was certain of each one. Over the course of multiple months, I located every ingredient.”
Lotti had stopped shaking the pots and was now listening to Terlu. She hopped closer to Yarrow, who hadn’t said a word. Terlu felt the weight of their silence, thick and heavy as a blanket of snow. She hugged her arms over her chest, the letter from Rijes Velk clutched tight.
This wasn’t a story she’d wanted to tell to an audience. She’d done it once already, and she was never going to forget the condemnation in the judge’s eyes or the vicious victory in the imperial investigator’s. But she’d started, and now she had to finish. “His name was Caz, and he was a spider plant. He was kind, he was smart, and he was funny, and they took him from me as soon as they found him.” She risked a glance at Yarrow.
He was holding himself very still, watching her as if she were a bird that might startle and fly away. She couldn’t read what he was thinking, but she didn’t see disapproval or pity. If anything, she would name the look in his eyes hope.