The Enchanted Greenhouse(3)

“Will I live?” Terlu asked.

The sorcerer hesitated. “Yes.” And then he began the spell.

As her blood slowed and hardened, as her breath caught in her throat, as her eyes froze in place, as her flesh turned to polished wood, it occurred to her that perhaps that wasn’t the right question to ask. But she couldn’t think of a better one.

If I live, I can hope.

* * *

Darkness.

Silence.

She didn’t know which was worse—the darkness or the silence—but she was suffocating in both. She couldn’t open her eyes. No, she couldn’t close her eyes.

Where am I?

She listened. There was nothing. No breath. No heartbeat.

* * *

A creak, then a sliver of light, and she could see shapes and shadows: shelves, a crate, and a cart. There were voices behind her, muffled, arguing about where to put a stack of chairs.

She was in a storage closet.

She wanted to call out to the unseen voices, ask them to talk to her—no, beg them. She wanted them to move to where she could see them. She needed to see a face, to look into someone else’s eyes, to see a smile. She wanted to tell them she was awake, alive, aware.

I am here!

The door shut.

* * *

She dreamed sometimes, or almost dreamed, since it was never true sleep. Statues can’t sleep. In her favorite dream, she was standing in sunlight, listening to music. Ahh, music! And she was tasting a pastry. Or tasting a kiss. And there were people all around her, voices and laughter that were the most beautiful music. All around her, it smelled like roses.

But the dream never lasted, and then once again there was nothing, nothing, nothing.

* * *

She wasn’t afraid anymore.

Or angry.

Or sad.

But she wished … Oh, she wished. For sunlight. For breath. For a kind voice. And so she dreamed and remembered and drifted through the days, losing her grasp on time and on herself.

* * *

In the silence and the dark, the statue endured.

When, at last, they came to place her on the pedestal they’d installed in the North Reading Room of the Great Library of Alyssium, she wanted to thank them.

At least now, she wouldn’t be alone.

CHAPTER TWO

Snow fell gently on the statue, which was, the statue thought, lovely but unexpected. Flakes dusted her nose and fell onto her unblinkable eyes, and she wondered why she wasn’t in the alcove in the North Reading Room on her usual pedestal.

Clearly, I missed something important, she thought.

She used to have a view of floor-to-vaulted-ceiling bookshelves filled with priceless （and dusty） books and scrolls. Now she was facing a grove of pine trees, wreathed in snow and laden with pine cones.

She knew she’d been drifting ever since her transformation, but this time, she must have drifted for quite a while and slept very deeply to miss being moved from the Great Library to … wherever this was. How long? she wondered. How much did I miss? Where am I? Between two pines, she spotted a glint of reflected sunlight, but she couldn’t identify what—

Suddenly, she shivered, and a ripple spread down her wooden limbs.

Given that she was an inanimate object, she shouldn’t be able to shiver, so why did— It intensified into a shudder, and she heard a creak that sounded like a tree bending. Oh no, was that inside me?

And then: crackle, crackle, crackle. She felt bubbles rising from her toes up to her knees, through her thighs and into her torso, where they swirled faster and faster.

For so very long, she’d felt nothing. And now suddenly, she felt everything.

She burned. She froze. She hurt. She felt as if she were being ripped apart, and then she felt as if she were soaring through the clouds, her head spinning with a thousand colors. She was an exploding star, bursting with indescribable pain and incandescent joy.

And then Terlu Perna, formerly the Fourth Librarian of the Second Floor, East Wing, of the Great Library of Alyssium （jewel of the Crescent Islands Empire）， and much more recently a statue made of wood on display in the North Reading Room, condemned for the breaking of imperial law regarding unauthorized spellwork … collapsed into a heap on the snowy forest floor.

She was flesh again.

Terlu felt the wet snow seep through the thin fabric of her librarian tunic. It prickled her left thigh and her hip at the same time as the breeze chilled her bare arms. She sucked in air and felt the cold burn her throat, and she expelled it in a laugh.

Oh, she could feel! She could breathe! She could move! She could talk! At the top of her lungs, she sang, “La-la-la!” Her voice cracked, her throat dry from disuse. A bird startled from the top of a nearby pine tree. “Sorry!” she called to it as it flew away, red wings bright against the white sky.

She breathed again as deeply as she could and inhaled the scent of pine and the crisp taste of winter, so sharp and clean that it hurt all the way down to her lungs. In fact, now that she noticed it, all of her hurt: every joint and every muscle ached so badly they shook, but she couldn’t stop smiling. She was alive again!

For a moment, it overwhelmed her. She had very nearly given up hope. She’d had, after all, no rational reason to hope, except for the simple fact that she’d remained alive.

Terlu pushed against the ground to stand up.

And promptly fell down.

“Ow.”