The Enchanted Greenhouse(47)
Circling through the greenhouse, Terlu reassured each of them that they were wanted, they were safe, and everything would be okay. Lotti kept silent, only piping up to echo what Terlu said, while Yarrow checked the health of their roots and stems, also echoing her. No one was going to make them sleep again, and no one was going to harm them or take them away.
By the time she’d talked with each of them, the sun had set, and the plants were beginning to curl into their pots—some of them calmer and some merely exhausted.
As near as Terlu could tell from what the plants said of their last day, Laiken had been afraid for them—he’d kept repeating this was for their own good, to keep them safe from anyone who would want to take them and use them. He’d never specified who might want to take them or why, but he was insistent that this was his only choice.
“He’s gone. You’re safe,” she told them over and over, until they calmed, one by one.
She returned again to the philodendron on the walkway. Of all of them, he was the only one who had kept calm throughout the whole ordeal. “Dendy, will you all be okay for the night, or should we stay here?” Terlu asked. She could bring Lotti back to Laiken’s tower and then return to spend the night with the other awakened plants.
“Yooou twooo won’t fit in a pot,” Dendy observed.
“We could bring in bedding,” Yarrow said.
“I’ll stay with them,” Lotti volunteered. “I … think I owe them. Even if I don’t remember. I’ll stay, in case any of them needs anything—and if they do, I’ll come get you. And maybe they can help me remember.”
Terlu asked Lotti, “Are you sure?” The other plants hadn’t been kind to her. “You could come back to the cottage with us for the night. We’ll be back in the morning.”
Yarrow knelt beside the philodendron and spoke softly to him.
“I’ll be fine,” Lotti said. She climbed down Terlu’s pants and hopped onto the ground near the ivy. “These are my friends.” She added with more of her old spirit, “Or they will be.”
* * *
With reluctance, Terlu and Yarrow left Lotti and the other sentient plants. Caught up in their own thoughts, they didn’t speak much as they walked through the other greenhouses and then outside to the cottage. The temperature had plummeted further, and Terlu’s breath misted in front of her as they hurried between the pine trees.
Inside, she continued to shiver while Yarrow built up the banked fire.
“Do you think they’ll be okay?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Yarrow said.
When she was a little warmer, she hung up her coat and crossed to the kitchen cabinets to set bowls on the table while Yarrow heated up the soup. “Do you think Lotti will be okay?”
“She’s a survivor.”
“Are you okay? I know … that is, I’d gotten the impression that Laiken was important to you. Finding out that he cast that spell against their will…”
“He took their lives from them,” Yarrow said. “Because he was afraid.”
Filling their glasses with strawberry-mint water, she waited, giving him space and hoping he’d say more. He had to be feeling a lot. This sorcerer … While he didn’t sound loving, he’d been a father figure, in a way. He’d created everything on this island, including everything that Yarrow cared about. It had to hurt to know he’d intentionally harmed his own creations, that it hadn’t been an accident or something that had gone wrong. He’d deliberately taken the plants’ ability to think, feel, move, and experience life, with no plan to ever wake them again. It wasn’t a punishment for anything they’d done, like it had been with Terlu. They were innocent.
“He was supposed to protect them,” Yarrow said. “All my life … Everyone on this island was dedicated to protecting every plant, and he … He was the one who started it all, who taught us.” He shook his head. “He shouldn’t have done it.”
“It’s okay to be angry at him.”
“It’s pointless,” Yarrow said. “He’s dead. It doesn’t matter how I feel about it.”
She set the glasses on the table. “It matters to me.”
He looked at her startled and then nodded, but he didn’t say anything more about it. Instead he said, “I’ll need to secure a few flies for the Venus flytrap. There are spells on the greenhouses to control which insects are allowed in which area, and I don’t know if any are allowed in the sentient plant room. In fact, I should talk to each of them tomorrow to determine what kind of environment they’ll thrive in. The myrtle seems to miss the sea? I don’t know what to do with that. Maybe move his pot to the dock so he at least has a view? One of the greenhouses used to have a spectacular view of the ocean, but it failed early on.”
That gave Terlu an idea.
A terrible idea, but still an idea.
“Do you think…” She paused. Maybe it was better to not give voice to the idea? No, she couldn’t do that. “Do you think any of the plants know about the greenhouse spells? If they do … it’s possible they could help me identify which spells Laiken used to create the greenhouses…” She shouldn’t even be considering this. After all, today’s spell hadn’t performed the way she’d expected. She’d failed to realize how widespread a spell’s effects could be.