The Enchanted Greenhouse(6)
The only sound was the crunch of her shoes on the gravel and the squish of the melted snow between her toes. She was still shivering where her wet tunic touched her skin, but it was vastly warmer inside. She expected her clothes would dry quick enough.
As she drew closer to the heart of the greenhouse, it became even hotter, and she soon saw why: a white porcelain stove in the shape of a spiral shell. It radiated heat, causing the air to waver near it. A bench with blue tile encircled it, and she dusted off a few stray leaves that had fallen on it and sat. Sighing in joy, Terlu cozied up to the stove.
She couldn’t see any hatch for inserting wood, and she didn’t smell smoke. A magical stove. Unusual, but not impossible. Well, clearly not impossible, since here it was.
Oh, wow, she could curl up and sleep here. Granted, the bench could use a few pillows, and it needed to be cleaned. She doubted anyone had sat here in ages, given the thickness of the dust and the number of stray leaves on and around it. As she looked at the plants that filled the vast room, she wondered if anyone had been in this greenhouse in years.
She began to feel a bit uneasy.
She couldn’t be alone in this vast place, could she?
Terlu was no expert, but even she could see that the plants had been allowed to grow wild. They wound around each other in tight braids and tangles, filling every bit of available space. What if there’s no one here? What if I’m alone?
She felt panic bubble in her throat. Her heart began to race, and she gulped in air. After so much time unable to speak, unable to have a simple conversation, unable to touch anyone or be touched … I can’t be alone here. Maybe this greenhouse was abandoned, but someone nearby had cast—
“Rrr-eow?”
A winged cat walked around the stove on the blue-tile bench. He had gray fur, amber eyes, and brilliant emerald wings that lay crossed on his back. When he reached Terlu, he paused and looked at her.
“Hello!” Terlu said. “Aren’t you a beauty.”
Almost certainly agreeing with her, the winged cat proceeded toward her and climbed onto her lap. He kneaded her thighs through her tunic with his claws, turned around once, and then settled onto her. His emerald-green feathers ruffled as he shrugged his shoulders into a more comfortable position.
“Um, okay, welcome,” Terlu said, enchanted by such unexpected feline friendliness. Gently, she stroked between his ears. The fluttery fear in her throat receded as she petted the winged cat. Slowly, her heart calmed, and she could breathe without feeling like she was about to shatter. His fur was as soft as velvet. She smiled as he tilted his head so she’d pet his cheeks and neck. “So happy to meet you. I was beginning to think I was all alone here.”
He purred.
CHAPTER THREE
“Do you have a name?” Terlu asked the winged cat.
He didn’t answer, of course. She wasn’t surprised. She’d never heard of a talking winged cat. She’d read a travelogue once about a distant island that was rumored to have a breed of talking lizards. The explorer had claimed they were prophetic, but he’d also devoted an entire chapter to the glories of a type of hallucinogenic mushroom so his other claims were considered suspect.
“Is there someone around here who feeds you?” she asked. “You don’t seem feral.”
The cat was contorting himself so that she could pet beneath his wings. In her experience, strays were never this friendly … unless he’d been raised with humans and then abandoned? If so, that would explain why he was so desperate for cuddles.
“I know how you feel,” she told him. “That’s me too.”
That was the whole reason she’d cast the spell that destroyed her life in the first place: she’d been lonely. It was that simple. And that pathetic, she thought. She had believed that a position at the library would mean helping researchers find obscure bits of knowledge, educating curious patrons, and sharing her favorite books with like-minded colleagues. She’d specifically requested and interviewed for a public-facing position only. By the time she’d finished her training, though, the imperial laws regarding magic had tightened even more, restricting the vast majority of the volumes in the Great Library. Only the most elite sorcerers were to be granted access to the spellbooks and related materials, and Terlu wasn’t senior enough to be assigned to those luminaries. With apologies from the beleaguered librarian in charge of the second floor, Terlu had been reassigned to the stacks, where she was lucky if she saw another soul once a week, and then only briefly. The library, as a rule, did not attract social beings.
Terlu was good at many things: she’d excelled at all her classes and proven herself to be a very organized and efficient researcher—her professors had universally recommended her for the librarian position when she’d asked for references. She spoke nine living languages and could read six extinct ones, including the complex and highly nuanced First Language, plus she was fluent in several dialects used by the exclusively seafaring clans of the outer sea. She could also bake an excellent blueberry pie （thanks to a cookbook she’d found in the library）， play an eight-string guitar （at least a few primary chords）， and sketch a reasonable facsimile of whatever she was looking at.
But she was not good at being alone.
She liked to talk, she liked to listen, and she wasn’t interested in listening to herself talk. She was the kind of person who could walk into a shop and know everyone’s stories, from the customers to the stockers to their cousins twice-removed, by the time she walked out with a tub of butter and a half-dozen eggs. This was not a useful skill, however, in the empty and quiet library stacks, and it wasn’t useful inside an abandoned greenhouse either.