“This is a terrible idea.”
Kiela held up a clean jar. Streaming between the vines over the window, the sun hit the glass and sparkled all over the kitchen. “This will work,” she promised. All she had to do was coax the brambles into producing ripened berries, teach herself how to make jam, and package it all up. Also, turn part of her cottage into a shop. And learn more usable spells. Okay, it was a lot.
Maybe she was fooling herself. She didn’t really know anything about running a shop or magic or jam . . .But I do know books—and that meant there was nothing she couldn’t know, eventually. That was a magic in and of itself. Drying her hands so she wouldn’t drip on anything, she searched the kitchen shelves.
Joining her, Caz climbed up onto the third shelf. “Now what are you looking for?”
“A cookbook.”
“Oh!” He very much approved of that, she could hear in his voice. If there was a book involved, that automatically made any course of action much more sensible. Without complaint, he pulled himself up onto a shelf within the closet. He squeezed his leaves between jars, searching for a cookbook, and then hopped root-ball-first to the next shelf. She looked through the cabinets beneath the sink.
After a few minutes of searching . . . “Aha!” Caz cried.
And then: “Oops.”
She turned around to see one of the glass jars tumbling from the top shelf. Caz stretched out his leaves—the jar landed in a net of leaves with a plop. Kiela rescued it and set it beside the sink. “What did you find?” she asked.
He pulled out a dusty and battered book with his tendrils.
She took it and gently brushed the dust off with the dry towel. Sitting on the floor cross-legged, she flipped through it. It was exactly what she hoped it would be: her parents’ recipe book. Look, there was the potato soup that her father had loved. Oh my, it had a lot of butter. And here was the muffin recipe. She twisted the book to see her mother’s handwritten notes in the margin, doubling the cinnamon in her father’s recipe. Two pages later, she found a peach pie recipe in her mother’s handwriting with a note from her father that read,Delicious.And a wet drop landed on the ingredient list.
Quickly, Caz swiped it away with a leaf.
Kiela leaned backward and wiped her eyes. She hadn’t even realized she’d started crying. Awkwardly, Caz patted her back with a tendril.
“It’s the dust,” Kiela explained.
“Of course.”
She kept going until she found it: a recipe for raspberry jam. Like the pie, this one was in her mother’s handwriting with notes from her father in the margins. Hers eyes blurred again as they filled with more tears.
“Your parents left this for you,” Caz said. “They would’ve wanted you to do this.”
Kiela let out a hiccup-laugh that was half a sob. “No, they really wouldn’t have.” They’d left this island with dreams of a better life for all three of them, and their plans for her future had never included her coming back, especially without them. She touched the berry-stained recipe and traced the loops of the letters. “But they did like jam.”
The recipe called for two ingredients: berries and sugar.
Kiela had bought some sugar from the bakery and had enough for a trial batch at least, but the berries . . . She put her hands on her hips as she contemplated the brambles in the backyard. Untidy, the branches had knotted themselves into a leafy morass of prickles. She’d trimmed them yesterday but hadn’t truly tamed them yet. They sprawled across the far corner of the garden so thickly intertwined that she couldn’t tell where one plant began and one ended. A few pale raspberries were growing tucked here and there beneath the leaves, but she didn’t see any ripe ones.
“More magic?” Caz asked.
“Did we save the extra duckweed?”
He sighed heavily. “Yes, and we have a few rosebuds left too.”
She considered the brambles while Caz trotted back into the house to retrieve the spell ingredients. Maybe if she did just a small poultice this time . . . They didn’t need the bush to grow from a seed, the way they did with the tomatoes; they just needed it to hurry its cycle and produce ripe berries. So, a touch of magic?
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Caz said as he returned.
“I absolutely do not know what I’m doing. I thought that was clear?”
Plopping on the ground between what looked like a celery stalk and a squash vine, Kiela combined the ingredients into a paste. She consulted the spellbook to refresh her memory of the words—she didnotwant to accidentally drop a syllable or two. She’d heard stories of what happened to sorcerers who slurred or stumbled over their spells. There were sorcerers who’d transformed themselves into trees, their houses into solid stone, their meals into poison . . . The storm that destroyed the island of Virand was said to be caused by a weather spell gone awry. A few years ago, one of the emperor’s sorcerers had tried to enchant a songbird and instead had sprouted feathers herself. She was said to molt every spring, and her feathers were worth a fortune. Kiela had seen one once, in the hat of a library patron—brighter than peacock blue, with a shaft that looked to be made of gold. At any rate, Kiela didn’t want to sprout feathers or bark, so she took great care as she dropped a dollop of paste at the base of a raspberry bush and chanted the words.
“That should do it,” she said.
“It took a bit of time with the—whoa!”
Caz scrambled back as the brambles exploded into a burst of growth. Kiela grabbed the spellbook, clutched it to her chest, and retreated across the garden. The raspberry bushes slammed into the fence and flowed over it into the forest. Green burst from the branches as new leaves unfurled from the slender brown stalks, and flowers popped into bloom up and down the stalks. The white petals opened and then broke apart before raining down on the lawn, while the hearts of the tiny blossoms swelled and hardened into pale berries. A few seconds later, the berries darkened into red.
