The Enchanted Greenhouse(72)
They trooped back through the dead greenhouses until they reached the warmth of the rose room. The sweet scent curled around them. While Terlu plopped down onto the edge of a flower bed framed by pink roses, Yarrow filled a bucket of water and carried it back to Lotti.
The resurrection rose lowered herself into the bucket with a sigh, holding on to the edge with her leaves and dunking her roots into the water. “Ah, that’s nice.”
“How much of the ingredients do we have left?” Terlu’s voice broke on the word “ingredients.” She swallowed to ease it.
“Rest your voice,” Yarrow said. He crossed to the enchanted stove in the center of the greenhouse and pulled out a kettle to boil. “Rose tea?”
She nodded but didn’t speak.
She sat in silence while Yarrow bustled around the greenhouse, pruning random rosebushes as he waited for the kettle to boil. Lotti soaked in silence as well, dipped in the bucket. From a nearby greenhouse, Terlu heard the faint sound of off-pitch singing.
When the kettle whistled, Yarrow prepared the tea, using rose hips and petals. He carried a mug over to her, and Terlu opened her mouth to thank him.
He put his fingers to her lips. “Rest.”
She was tempted to kiss his fingers, but he removed them too fast, and she wasn’t sure how he’d react if she did anyway. Holding the mug under her nose, Terlu breathed in the steam. It smelled heavily of roses, and perhaps another spice? She didn’t know what he’d added to it, and it wasn’t worth using her vocal cords to ask. She sipped the tea and then winced as a faraway singer hit a note that was more screech than song.
“Ugh, can’t someone stop them?” Lotti asked.
As another plant shrieked in dubious harmony, Terlu took another sip of tea and felt it scald the back of her throat, soothing it as it stung. A few more sips later, and she began to feel better. She wasn’t sure, though, how many hours she could do this for, if her voice felt so tired after just a quarter of one greenhouse. “We need help,” she said. It came out scratchy. She swallowed and tried again. “We can’t do it with just the three of us.”
“You sent the letter,” Yarrow said. “No one replied. Either they didn’t want to return or they couldn’t. The fact is no one’s coming.”
“You don’t know that. It could just be a long journey.” Or he could be right. Marin could have failed to find Yarrow’s relatives. The chaos could have spread as far as wherever their florist shop was. She didn’t say that out loud. It was equally likely the boat was just slow. She was sticking with that explanation until proven otherwise. “The fact is we don’t know if anyone’s coming or not.”
He snorted.
“I was thinking of asking the plants.”
A grunt, but it was less skeptical. He was thinking about it.
Of course, enlisting all the sentient plants to help with casting illegal spells would absolutely be frowned upon. But then, Terlu had already broken the law spectacularly by waking them, and then she’d compounded that by learning and casting a new spell multiple times. How much worse would it be if she turned a dozen or so beings to a life of crime with her? Yarrow and Lotti were already her accomplices, after all.
If an imperial investigator discovers what I’ve done here …
Hopefully, they were all too busy with the revolution to worry about one lowly ex-librarian on a distant, mostly abandoned island. If she were lucky, they’d been disbanded when the empire fell, though that seemed too much to hope for.
Regardless, she wasn’t going to stop helping now. Perhaps there was a way, though, to keep the other plants innocent. What if they merely gathered the ingredients and didn’t cast the actual spell…？ Of course that still left her repeating the spell a thousand times, which didn’t really solve the problem. I should just ask them. Put the choice in their hands. Or leaves. So long as she was clear about the risks …
“If it’s their choice…” Yarrow said, echoing her thoughts.
“I’ll talk to them,” Terlu decided.
“You might want to bring earplugs,” Lotti said.
Carrying her mug of rose tea, she opened the door between greenhouses and entered the room with the singing plants and trees. She was swamped with a wave of sound—the lovely harmonies of the enchanted flowers, but above it a caterwauling that sounded like raccoons arguing over a tree. As for the sentient plants—
The ivy, Risa, was dangling from one of the rafters. They cradled the daisy in a loop of their vines and was swinging her like a child on the world’s most dangerous playground, while the daisy shrieked, “Higher!”
The fireweed, Nif, was spurting sparks into the air like he was attempting to emulate a fireworks display, while the flytrap, Sut, tried to catch the sparks between the lobes of his trap. The calla lily cheered them on.
In the center of the greenhouse, Dendy had his leaves raised, swaying them from side to side as he sang in his soothing, pleasant voice:
“In the morning, the skyyy is bluuue,
And the birds all caaall, ‘Coo-coo-coo,’
They flyyy so that they get a viewww
Of the ocean that’s alsooo bluuue…”
Sure, it was all a little circus-like, Terlu thought, but it wasn’t so terrible. Dendy had a nice voice, a deep baritone, while the enchanted plants crooned a chorus of—