The Enchanted Greenhouse(65)
After we perfect the spells? Could she say “we”？
After the tomatoes, they crossed into dead room after dead room, until at last he stopped. He didn’t say anything at first. He just turned in a slow circle. She looked too: at the cracks in the glass, the brittle dead plants, the cobwebs in the cupola, and the heavy layer of dust that lay over it all like a gauzy shroud.
“This was the first room we lost,” Yarrow said as he set down the two baskets of ingredients. “My father and I. We only found it after it was too late. We thought if we’d been faster…” He trailed off. “There was never enough time.”
Standing beside him, Terlu took his hand. She felt the calluses on his palm from years of gardening, but his hand was still warm and soft.
He didn’t pull away.
A minute later, he took a deep breath. “Where do we start?”
Reluctantly, she removed her hand from his so she could spread her notes on the ground. She wanted to ask more about his father and the rest of his family, if he was worried about them, if she could help, but she’d promised to work on the spells. This is how I can help. “Near as I can tell from the notes, this is the primary spell Laiken cast on each greenhouse. It’s highly advanced and very convoluted, but as far as I can understand, it simultaneously strengthens the windows and fortifies the perimeter so that the structure can maintain whatever conditions are established inside.”
Yarrow grunted.
“It seals the glass.”
“Ahh.”
“Maybe,” she amended.
He raised both his eyebrows.
Terlu showed him the spell. “See, the word terilis has multiple meanings, depending on context, and I don’t exactly know the effect of pairing it with rwyr, which is essentially an activation word, with connotations that the spell will influence the natural world—an important word when dealing with plants because the suffix -yr is often linked with chlorophyll, except in cases where it’s paired with vi, which this is not, which is why I believe—”
He took her hand back in his, and she cut off, staring at her lavender hand engulfed in his golden one. He’s never touched me before. She’d touched him plenty of times—point of fact: she’d taken his hand just a few minutes ago—but he’d never reached out to her. A tiny difference that felt immense.
“I trust you,” he said.
Still staring at their hands, she gave a little laugh. “I’m not a trained sorcerer.”
“I know.”
“If it goes wrong—”
“It will be fine.”
It might not be fine. All of a sudden, the seriousness of what she was doing hit her. There was a valid reason that the judge had wanted to make an example of her. She couldn’t guarantee that the spell wouldn’t do more harm than good. Maybe this is a mistake.
“I’ll be here, whatever happens,” Yarrow said. “You aren’t doing this alone.”
Terlu felt her insides melt.
Yes, the spell might fail, but that was why she’d asked for a greenhouse that was already dead. How much more harm could she do? “All right. We try it. For this one, we need the sand, the elderberries, the seeds from an iffinal bush, a fern frond, the bud of a primrose, and the fruit of a sweetbriar tree.”
Kneeling by the baskets, he extracted each item.
“Close the lids when you’re done,” Terlu said. She’d learned from when she’d accidentally woken all the sentient plants at once—don’t leave extra ingredients out in the open air.
He obeyed.
“Pile those together so they’re touching, please. And then … I don’t know … hope really hard that this works?” Taking a deep breath, Terlu began, pronouncing each word that she’d translated painstakingly into First Language from the sorcerer’s code. She was careful to speak clearly, emphasizing the correct syllables, breathing only at the ends of phrases.
When she finished, she fell silent. Yarrow waited beside her, patient, trusting.
Above them, the glass darkened to a smoky gray. It blocked the sun, and the greenhouse plunged into shadows. One by one, stars began to appear on the glass. They spread, thickening into clouds of stars that swept across the false sky.
“Beautiful,” Yarrow said.
It was, but … “Not at all what I thought it would do.” She craned her neck, trying to see all the stars. It was a replica of the summer night sky: she recognized a few of the constellations. She’d had an aunt who loved to take all the children onto the roof and point out every constellation she could name and tell stories about them, old myths from Eano and the nearby islands: the dolphin who greeted the dawn, the mermaid who was searching for the ocean, the cat who flew twice around the sun and became a part of the sky. She pointed toward a collection of eastern stars. “That one is the Sun Cat.”
“Why are there stars?”
She frowned at the spell. It wasn’t the words; there were no words that hinted at night or stars. “Are there any ingredients that have a connection to the night?”
“Primrose,” he said promptly. “We used an evening primrose, blossoms after sundown.” He knelt by the baskets. “There are several hundred varieties of primrose. I brought six of the most common.” Opening the first basket, he held up a cluster of yellow flowers. “Cowslip primrose.” Another, purple flowers on long stems. “Candelabra primrose. Common primrose. Rose primrose. Oxlip…”