The Enchanted Greenhouse(29)

Or maybe I shouldn’t be doing this at all. What if this is all a truly terrible idea? “Just … once more, before we really begin … you don’t think this is a mistake?”

Lotti flapped her petals. “Ugh! How can it be a mistake to save lives?”

“You won’t be…” Yarrow stopped. “… statued? Statue-ified?”

I was right, there’s no word for it. “I didn’t think I would be before. I wasn’t harming anyone. I didn’t think anyone would mind. What makes it different this time?”

“This time,” he said simply, “you aren’t doing it alone.”

There were no more perfect words he could have said.

Still … “I’m going to look upstairs first. He might have kept his most important notes closest to him.” She managed to walk across the workroom without looking as if she wanted to flee.

Lotti hopped across the table toward the cold fireplace. “How’s the chimney? Can we light a fire? And by ‘we,’ I mean ‘you,’ garden boy, because that’s obviously not my thing.” She waved her leaves. “I don’t want to be tinder.”

Yarrow stuck his head beneath the chimney. “A few abandoned nests. Some cobwebs. But it’ll be fine for handling the exhaust from the stove.” Opening up the wood-burning stove, he added, “Might smell a bit.”

Leaving them to figure it out themselves, Terlu climbed the stairs. She held on to the walls as the steps creaked and groaned. Halfway up, she halted—the drums were loud again in her memory, or maybe that was just her heartbeat.

This time, she told herself, it’ll be different.

This time, she wasn’t doing it for herself—Lotti needed this, so did Yarrow. And the sleeping plants. Firmly, she took all of her doubts and fears, wadded them into a ball, and shoved them down. She climbed the rest of the way up. I have to help them.

Resolved, she took a deep breath of the dusty air … and coughed.

Upstairs was sad, drab, and mostly bare. A bed with dusty sheets and blankets was in the center of the room. A grimy mirror hung on one wall. Curtains were pulled over the windows, keeping it all dark and shadowed. No desk. No bookshelves. Only a bedside table with a solitary notebook on it.

Terlu picked up the notebook—her fingers felt instantly grimy—and blew the dust off its green leather cover. Flipping through, she saw it was handwritten, and the notes quit halfway through. The rest was blank. Perhaps it was his most recent notebook? If so, it wasn’t going to be of much use. She needed spells from his early work, from when he established the Greenhouse of Belde and first created the sentient plants. Closing it, she wondered what this sorcerer would think of her searching for his spell. Would he support her or condemn her? These were his plants, after all. Perhaps he’d approve.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a dusty mirror with a hint of herself: brown untamed curls, round lavender face, slightly frightened purple eyes. And then a shadow flitted across the mirror.

Terlu glanced behind her—no one was there.

Still, she shivered. There was something unsettling about the abandoned bedroom. Even though the sorcerer was long gone, she couldn’t help feeling as if the shadows were watching her. It felt like the kind of place that held ghosts.

“Sorry for intruding,” she said out loud.

No one answered.

There’s no one here. Just my imagination.

She’d never encountered a ghost herself, but she’d heard plenty of stories. On the sixth floor of the Great Library, it was said that the ghost of a librarian lingered in the stacks, unwilling to rest until she’d read every book in her section. The current librarian would leave a new book open each week, flipping the pages every so often.

Terlu wouldn’t have minded the company of such a ghost, but she hadn’t had the seniority to be allowed up on the sixth floor.

Regardless, there was nothing useful in the late sorcerer’s bedroom.

Taking the green-leather-bound notebook with her, she returned downstairs. “Looks like he kept all his work downstairs.” She dropped the notebook onto the table and then shed her coat and scarf. The workroom was already warmer now that the fire was lit. “This was the only item up there, and it’s too recent to be useful.”

“Not surprised to hear it,” Lotti said. “He worked here. Slept there. But it was still a good idea to check.”

“Only thing upstairs is the remnant of his memory,” Yarrow said. “Unless the bats came back. I had to clear out an infestation of bats the first winter after Laiken died. Relocated them to the island caves. You didn’t see bats, did you?”

“No bats. Just dust and a lot of creepy shadows.”

Defensively, Yarrow said, “Cleaning abandoned buildings hasn’t been my priority.”

“It wasn’t a criticism,” she said quickly. “You’ve done amazing, especially on your own, with all the greenhouses and your own cottage and no one else to—”

Lotti slapped the table with her leaves impatiently. “Yes, yes, he’s great, but my friends are comatose. Can we get back to that? You know, before you lose your nerve and I have to face the fact that the man who was like a father to me is gone—long gone—and my siblings and friends are, like, one step up from inanimate objects.”