The Enchanted Greenhouse(40)

“They didn’t hurt me,” Lotti explained. “They just scooped me up and brought me here.”

“Every time Laiken came to access the heart of the maze, he must have brought them a treasure,” Yarrow said. “They must have thought you were one too.”

“I am a prize,” Lotti agreed.

Kneeling by the stack, Terlu tossed aside a diamond. Yarrow picked it up and whistled. “I don’t know much about gems, but this must be worth the entire island.”

Lotti unfurled her leaves. “Ooh, let me see.”

He handed it to her, and she placed it in the center of her blossom. “It suits you,” he told her. “But I wouldn’t get too attached. It’s part of the dragons’ hoard.”

Sighing, Lotti set the diamond aside.

Terlu continued to sift through the tiny mountain of junk and jewels. If I were a sorcerer who wanted to protect my secrets, this is precisely what I’d do. Or maybe not precisely. She wasn’t sure she’d think of an ever-changing maze of sunflowers guarded by miniature dragons—that was rather specific.

A little golden dragon with obsidian-black wings broke away from the others and trotted toward them. He picked up the diamond with his talons and set it back into the center of the rose. He chirped wordlessly at her, nodded his head, and then waddled back to the honeycomb.

“I like that dragon,” Lotti said, closing her petals around the diamond.

At the base of the hoard, Terlu found it: a slim book, bound in green leather, with no markings on the cover or the spine. She extracted it from the pile and opened it.

“Yes!” she cheered.

“What is it?” Yarrow asked. “Is it the spell?”

“Better!” Terlu crowed, holding it up for him to see. “It’s Laiken’s codebook.” She plopped onto the ground, cross-legged, and began to read through it. “He was writing in First Language, but he mixed it with … ooh, that’s interesting. I haven’t seen that dialect in a while. Knew it had to be connected to Ginian. But it’s an older variant.”

“Can you break the code?” Yarrow squatted beside her and peered at the book.

She beamed at him. “Oh, yes. Very much yes.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a chunk of chocolate. He held it out toward the dragons and then pointed toward the codebook. After miming it a couple of times, the dragons seemed to understand: the chocolate for the codebook.

A few minutes later, the three of them and their prizes exited the maze—straight through, with sunflowers opening a path to the door. Above, the aurora danced with the dragons as they cavorted in the sky, shooting tiny flames like they were stray fireworks.

Emeral was pawing at the greenhouse door. He’d clearly had enough of chasing and being chased by tiny dragons. Terlu picked him up, and he snuggled against her, tucking his head beneath his wings, as if he wanted to pretend the dragons didn’t exist.

“Thank you,” Yarrow said solemnly to the little dragons.

“We’ll bring more honeycomb and chocolate next time,” Terlu told them.

Yarrow glanced at her, his eyebrows raised.

“They liked it,” Terlu said in answer to his eyebrows.

“Yes, they did.”

She couldn’t tell what he was thinking, and he turned away before she could ask.

They hurried through the greenhouses and outside, down the snowy road, to the sorcerer’s tower. While Emeral flew to curl up on the hearth, Terlu shed her coat and immediately headed for the stack of encoded notes that Lotti had separated out from the rest.

“What do you need?” Yarrow asked.

“Paper,” she said immediately. She liberated a charcoal pencil from the array of beakers, jars, pots, and gardening gloves, while Yarrow located blank papers in a drawer in Laiken’s desk.

“How else can I help?”

She shook her head. She just needed to concentrate. “I don’t know how long this will take me…” She’d work as fast as she could, but it would take a bit of time to understand how Laiken constructed his code and then learn to use it with ease.

“I’ll bake you honey cake.”

Terlu grinned. He was a man of few words but an excellent understanding of what was required for a proper research project. “Thank you.” She kept reading.

“Thank you,” he said. “You … don’t have to do this. You could have raised the flag on the dock and left on the next boat. Not everyone would have stayed.”

Placing her finger on her spot in the text, she looked up at him and studied the sadness mixed with hope in his deep green eyes. A lock of black hair with a streak of gold had fallen across his forehead, and she fought the urge to push it away from his eyes. How could she look into those eyes and then walk away? The way he’d gazed at her when she first met him, like she was the answer … The way he was looking at her now … It’s worth the risk. He is worth it, whether he knows it or not. And so’s Lotti. Softly, she said, “I’m sure your family would have come back if they’d known what it was like here.”

He shrugged and then looked away. “I’ll return with honey cake,” he mumbled. With that, he bolted out of the tower, and she watched him leave, wondering how many thoughts and feelings went unvoiced behind those deep-as-the-sea eyes.