She laid the last board in place and then walked back into the cottage and breathed in the scent of freshly cooked fish. “Smells delicious,” she said—a peace offering.
“Hope it tastes the way it smells,” Larran said, with a tentative smile.
Kiela smiled back, and suddenly they were both smiling at each other. Just a whole lot of smiling all around—she wasn’t quite sure what to do or say next, or at what point she should stop smiling. She wondered if her smile looked nice or awkward. She’d meant to be nice. Since he was smiling back, that probably meant she’d done it right.
Sighing, Caz scooted past her, muttering under his breath, “You are both ridiculous.” But at least the atmosphere in the cottage had changed from uncomfortably awkward to companionably awkward.
While Larran finished with the fish, Kiela poured the melted wax onto the jam in each jar, a half inch thick. Caz held the jars steady for her. When the wax cooled, it would solidify, making an airtight seal that would preserve the jam for at least a year.
She took out plates from the cabinet, and Larran served the fish.
They ate in silence for a moment—it was just as wonderful as it smelled. Light, flaky, and buttery. He’d sprinkled some other herb on it. “Rosemary?” Kiela guessed.
“I’ve an herb border up a ways from my house. If you’d like any clippings, let me know. They transplant well. Don’t need much care either, though it looks like you have a green thumb.” He nodded toward the back door that led to the garden. “Your berries have done well.”
“A decade or so of neglect suited them.” She hoped he didn’t ask more questions than that. She wondered if he’d noticed how much they’d grown since he’d been on her roof. She changed the subject. “How did you learn how to cook fish and build shelves and all of that?”
“Mostly taught myself how to build and fix stuff,” he said with a shrug. “Hit my thumb a bunch of times while I was working on my own house.” He showed her his thumbnail. It was warped on one side. “It never fully recovered. As to cooking . . . that was thanks to the herder who took me on as an apprentice when I was thirteen. He could fillet a fish in thirty seconds flat and make it into a feast fit for an emperor. He never measured anything, just tossed in herbs and spices by instinct.”
Kiela heard a familiar note in his voice. “You miss him.”
“He was lost in a storm three years ago, one of the first of the real bad magic storms to hit Caltrey after the sorcerers stopped their regular circuits,” Larran said. “When it hit, we hadn’t had one like that in . . . I’d never seen one like that. No one had. He underestimated how bad it would be when he went out with the herd. Thought he’d be able to handle it . . .” He cleared his throat as if the memories had lodged there.
She looked down at her fish. “I’m sorry.” He’d had loss in his life too. From the tone of his voice, she guessed the herder was like a father figure to him. She wondered what other thoughts and feelings lived behind Larran’s friendly smile.
“It’s his herd that I inherited. Amarin—she’s the one with teal scales—was the last foal he helped birth. Nowthatwas a wild night.” He went on to spin a tale of a mare in the moonlight, the magic of a traveling sorcerer, and a breech birth that ended in a miracle: a healthy foal and mother.
She finished her fish and cleaned the dishes, while he brought in the wood she’d chosen for the back of the shelves. Together, they assembled her new jam-shelf wall—she held the wood steady, Caz supplied the nails, and Larran hammered.
“If it were possible to find some sort of homemade remedy that would help with merhorse births . . .” Kiela began. “A natural one, not spellcraft.”
Larran stopped hammering. “That would change everything. But there isn’t an herb or medicine that can help. Only magic works—they’re magical creatures, created by some forgotten spell. No one knows how or why they came to be, but they can’t reproduce with the ease of other creatures.”
She resolved to look for solutions anyway. There had to be some way to disguise it as not-magic. Maybe if she whispered the syllables? Except Larran would know it had to be magic . . . And when the other islanders heard about a new foal . . . It wasn’t the same as overenthusiastic raspberry brambles that could have grown naturally.
“What kinds of things did the sorcerers used to do?” Caz asked. “You know, back when they used to come to the outer islands?”
Larran continued with assembling the wall as he answered. “It varied. Sometimes they’d calm the seas. Or they’d strengthen the soil. Coax the rain to fall or not fall. One used to shift currents—we miss that one sorely. Another specialized in orchards—a lot of our island trees aren’t native to the area, and they require specially magicked soil to thrive. He knew spells that would heal storm-damaged trees, eliminate disease, and double production. Used to result in the most incredible golden apples . . .”
He waxed on about the miracles of the sorcerers, while Kiela made mental notes of all that the island had lost. Beside her, she knew Caz was doing the same.
After measuring the next board, Larran took it out to saw a chunk off the end. Kiela and Caz followed. Each of them held an end steady across two rocks while Larran sawed. He carried it back inside and fit it next to the prior board. “I haven’t shared this plan with anyone yet, but as soon as the next trade ship arrives, I intend to travel to Alyssium and make an appeal directly to the emperor at his court.”
Caz yelped, “You can’t!”
“Really, you can’t,” Kiela echoed. He didn’t know what he’d be walking into! She heard the screams echoing in her head, she smelled the smoke, and she pictured the flames encasing the library.
“I have to,” Larran said. “I can’t sit by and do nothing. Someone has to tell the emperor what’s happening in the outer islands and plead our case.”
Kiela shook her head vehemently. “It’snota good time to visit Alyssium. There’s unrest.” That was a mild way to put it. She didn’t know if the city still stood or not. It could have all fallen to ashes by now. “It’s not safe.”
“It isn’t safe here,” Larran said grimly. “Any day another magic storm could hit and wipe us out. And if it doesn’t, then it will be the slow decay of the sea and land. I’ve heard that there’s a general audience where anyone can present an appeal to the magistrates—I’ll make my case there, and I’ll repeat it day after day until I’m heard, if I have to.”
“But right now . . .” She didn’t know how to warn him without risking revealing the secret of the spellbooks. In addition to that, she didn’t want to say the words that would make all of what happened real. She didn’t want to explain that she and Caz had fled—that they were fugitives. And thieves. The words stuck in her throat. They’d burned the North Reading Room. They’d thrown the emperor out a window, to his death. Countless others had died. “You don’t want to go there now.”
“I don’t want to watch my herd, my home, my island slowly die.”
Neither do I.Kiela laid her hand on top of Larran’s as he steadied the next nail. “Just don’t leave without talking to me first, okay? Will you promise me that much?” She’d find the words to explain by then. He looked at her hand, touching his.
