The Enchanted Greenhouse(86)
He shook his head. “My mom was years gone by then, and my dad … I’m told my grandmother fought with my father and Uncle Rorick to send a search party, but they refused. Up until the very end, I thought they’d come for me. It was supposed to be a game. An afternoon.”
She wanted to cross to him and hug him. Or march over to Birch and Rorick and yell at them loudly with very pointed vocabulary.
“When I got back, I asked my father why he didn’t come for me.” Yarrow poured the rose tea steadily and calmly but still without looking at Terlu. “He said he had work to do.”
“I’m so sorry, Yarrow.” I’d come for you, she wanted to say. She took her cup, the tea warming her hands. She breathed in the sweet steam. “That wasn’t right, what he did. You were a child. Even if you hadn’t been … I’m sorry.”
He nodded abruptly. He looked so tense that she thought he’d shatter if he stepped out into the wind. He didn’t touch his tea. “If they ask why I didn’t bring the cakes myself…”
“I’ll tell them you have work to do.”
He almost smiled.
* * *
Alone, Terlu carried the honey cakes and the kettle of tea down the snowy road to the sorcerer’s workroom. She listened to the soft whoosh of wind over the snow. Overhead, the sky was a cloudless blue, and the air smelled of pine and sea. In the distance, she heard cheerful voices and the echoing ring of a hammer.
Yarrow’s relatives were swarming over the blue cottage.
Terlu called to them, “So you know, that one”—she pointed up the road at the first cottage she’d visited—“has feral gryphons. Also, I brought breakfast.”
Grinning, a woman with gold-and-black hair hurried over—Yarrow’s sister, Rowan. Terlu recognized her instantly from the prior day. She had the same cheekbones as Yarrow but a wider smile. She was wearing a heavy brown coat over sturdy work clothes. She’d tied back her braids today with a purple ribbon. “You are a gift. And yes, we know about the gryphons. That was our late Aunt Misla’s house, and she confessed before she passed that she’d left cake in the cabinets, which was a crime against cake and an invitation for a feral flock—wild gryphons have a sweet tooth. You’re Terlu Perna, yes?”
“Yes, and you’re Rowan? Welcome home.” She remembered Yarrow had said the blue cottage, the one she’d set her sights on before she knew Yarrow would welcome her into his own cottage, was his sister’s. It was also the one that would be easiest to make livable, perhaps because it hadn’t sat abandoned for as many years. She noted the relatives seemed to have helped themselves to Yarrow’s tools and supplies and wondered what he’d thought of that. Probably fine with it, so long as he didn’t have to talk with them. “Hope you slept all right.”
“Oh, yeah, slept like a hibernating bear. The upstairs folk had a restless night, due to the ghost, but we’ll get the cottages back into shipshape in no time.” Rowan relieved Terlu of the kettle. “Come, let’s bring it back to the workroom. Most of the others are there, getting themselves up and ready. Hey, Ambrel! Terlu brought breakfast!”
Ambrel trotted toward them. She was shorter than Rowan and had sky-blue skin and an apple-round face. She wore a puffy blouse with embroidered flowers underneath a blue coat. She’d already collected sawdust all over the coat.
“My wife, Ambrel,” Rowan introduced her.
Terlu greeted her. “We met yesterday, but I— Ghost, did you say?”
“The old sorcerer, Laiken,” Rowan said. “Not a surprise. He was both magical and unhappy, exactly the type to leave a ghost behind.”
“I was surprised,” Ambrel said.
Rowan shrugged—a move so identical to her brother Yarrow that Terlu felt her eyes bulge as she stared at her. “He’s harmless. Mostly just moans.”
“He could be singing arias, and I still wouldn’t want to live there,” Ambrel said.
Laiken’s ghost was upstairs from his workroom? She’d thought it felt haunted, but she hadn’t made the leap to realize it was actually haunted. She remembered how shadowy and creepy it had felt and how she hadn’t wanted to go upstairs since the first time she climbed the stairs—she’d even thought to herself that she wouldn’t be surprised if his despair had lingered, but she hadn’t made the leap to thinking that he himself had. It might have been useful to know his ghost was still in residence. “Can he communicate?” If he could tell her what spells to use and which were purely experimental or, worse, dangerously flawed …
“You’ve never met a ghost before, have you?” Rowan said, with just enough of an air of tiredness that Terlu was certain she had met at least one. As far as Terlu knew, they weren’t very common. She wondered what stories lay behind that tone of voice. “They’re bundles of leftover emotions. Whatever was strongest while they were alive. No real awareness or thought process.”
“Just a whole lot of sad leaking all over the place,” Ambrel said.
Rowan wrapped her arm around her wife’s waist. “Which is why I convinced everyone to fix up my cottage first,” she said to Ambrel. “So it can be our cottage.”
“It’s a lovely cottage,” Ambrel said. “Ghost-free and gryphon-free.”