The Enchanted Greenhouse(68)

Yarrow spoke into the silence. “When I was six or seven, I was given a plant to care for. After a few weeks, its leaves turned yellow, it developed spots on the stem, and the roots began to rot. I thought it had developed some kind of disease.” He paused. “Wait, you said a favorite memory. I don’t know if this one qualifies.”

He was talking. That was all she wanted. “It’s fine. Go on.”

“It was a nice memory, I guess, in the end. I went to my father, and he told me I’d overwatered it. I hadn’t known that was possible. All I knew was that plants needed water, so I thought I was doing the right thing.” He paused and took the rolls out of the brick oven. The cottage filled with the scent of fresh bread.

Terlu ladled soup into the bowls, and she scooped some grouse into a bowl for Emeral. Hearing the sound of the food plopping into the bowl, Emeral perked up. He launched himself into the air and flew across the cottage, while Terlu and Yarrow sat at the table.

She’d missed this, at the library: having a meal with someone. I’m not going to jeopardize it by throwing myself at him. She didn’t need love. She just needed soup and fresh bread and someone to talk with. And he was, miraculously, talking.

“I was crying, and it was my tears that convinced my father I was ready, that I cared enough to want to learn. He started lessons that day on how to care for plants.” He continued the story while they ate. “We went through an entire greenhouse, and he identified each plant and told me how to prune it, re-pot it, and water it. The next day, he asked me to lead him through and parrot back what he taught me. When I failed, he started over.”

Hot, the rolls tasted like honey-drenched clouds, and the soup was even richer than it had been the day before, now that the herbs had seeped into the broth. She split her attention between his words and the broth.

“Once I mastered one greenhouse, we moved on to the next.”

“You learned plant by plant,” Terlu said. “All of them?”

He shrugged. “Eventually. Took a bunch of years. But it only took a month until that plant—the one I’d overwatered—was healthy enough to bloom.”

“Your father must have been proud of you,” Terlu said.

“It was a good day. I wish…” He trailed off.

“What?” she prodded.

“I just hope he’s all right. That all of them are okay.”

“You said they’re florists, right?”

He nodded.

“Then there’s no reason to worry. A florist shop wouldn’t be anywhere near the palace or any place revolutionaries would strike.” She said it with as much conviction as she could. “I’m sure your family is fine, and we’ll get a reply from them any day now.”

Yarrow exhaled and a rare smile crossed his lips. “Thank you.”

She felt herself blush.

After they finished the soup and the bread, they cleaned up together, and Terlu, for once, didn’t feel the need to fill the silence with words. It was a nice silence, side by side. It would be nicer if we were kissing. But no, she wasn’t going to allow those thoughts to ruin a lovely moment. He opened up about an emotion. And he told me about himself. That was a huge victory.

It wasn’t a trivial detail either. This was formative. Plant by plant, he’d learned to care for this place … Maybe that’s the way to fix it. She’d been trying to recreate Laiken’s spells, but he’d been a master sorcerer. “Maybe … I need to think smaller.”

Yarrow raised his eyebrows, listening, waiting for her to say more.

Pulling out the spells, Terlu spread them over the bed and studied them. She could identify a few of the disparate parts. What if she extracted a few lines of spell at a time and focused on fixing just a small facet of the greenhouse, instead of trying to tackle the entire structure? If it were a smaller bit of magic she was attempting to work, then maybe the results wouldn’t be so … wet. “The spell’s too large, at least for me. It’s like you trying to care for a plant without knowing how. I just don’t know enough to understand how much of what to do when, at least not in the way a sorcerer with massive amounts of training would, and there’s too much that can go wrong. If I break it down into pieces … Like here.” She pointed to a section of the text. “This line is for fortifying an individual pane of glass. In the context of the full spell, Laiken did it all at once, to seal the full greenhouse in one spectacular effort, but … I think I could adapt it to focus on healing a crack in a single windowpane, which might be a much more reasonable goal, at least at first.” She shook her head. “But what if another greenhouse fails while I’m taking it slow?”

He shrugged. “Slow is better than not at all.”

Terlu frowned at the spells, trying to rearrange the lines in her head. “Do you have any writing charcoal here?” She’d left the set she’d been using in Laiken’s workroom.

Opening a drawer at his desk, he withdrew a writing set. She sat cross-legged on her bed and began to work. Outside, the moon rose higher, spilling pale blue light across the snowy forest. Inside, the winged cat curled up by the hearth.

“You should sleep,” Terlu told Yarrow.

“You should sleep,” he replied. “Especially if you’re going to work magic.”

She waved that off. She was close to an idea. “As soon as I finish this…”