She wondered if she’d stepped too far, but she didn’t remove her hand. He was staring at his hand as if he hadn’t heard her words. “Larran?”
“I’ll talk to you first,” he promised.
Good,she thought.
“But Iamgoing.”
Not if I can stop you.
Chapter Twelve
“First, we need to catalog what we have,” Kiela said to Caz after Larran left. That was step one to identifying spells that would make appropriate “remedies.”
Caz rustled his leaves in excitement. “Ooh, I missed this!”
She’d missed it too. Granted, it hadn’t been that long in sheer number of days since she’d processed any books, but Caltrey felt like a world and several lifetimes away from the Great Library of Alyssium. When they’d docked in the overgrown cove, she hadn’t known that she’d ever feel like a librarian again.
“Do we have paper?” Caz asked. “Please tell me you packed paper. Or pencils? Do we have any pencils? I read once about a scholar who’d been imprisoned and had to write on his walls in his own blood.”
On her parents’ bed, Kiela opened her bag of personal items. She unpacked a set of pencils, the finest graphite in Alyssium, each sharpened carefully by her with a slim whittling knife that she kept exclusively for that purpose. Untying the ribbon around the set, she laid it out open on the bed. Caz danced above the pencils, so excited that he shed bits of soil on the quilt. She then took out one of her precious blank notebooks. “No need to use blood.”
“You’re a hero,” Caz told her solemnly.
She never traveled anywhere without a notebook, so it wasn’t a surprise she’d packed a few. She wished she’d packed a crate of them. She doubted that paper was readily accessible on Caltrey—there was the bakery, the mill, the fish market, the yarn and fiber store, and perhaps a shop for furniture? But she hadn’t seen a stationery store. Opening the notebook, she stroked the smooth, crisp, blank page. There was something so very beautiful about a notebook without a single note in it. It felt like touching pure potential.
“You write, or I write?” Caz asked. He was petting one of the pencils with a leaf.
It was obvious how much he wanted to do it himself. “You can write,” she offered.
Shivering in delight, Caz said, “I love you. You know that, don’t you? You are the best friend anyone could ever ask for.”
It wasn’t clear whether he was talking to Kiela or the pencil, but she grinned. “Same to you, Caz. Also, you have exceptional penmanship.” She wondered if that had been part of the original spell that created him or if that talent was inherent in who the spider plant was. It felt rude to ask.
“I’m blushing. You just can’t tell because of the chlorophyll.”
She laughed.
And then they got down to work.
Starting with the first crate, Kiela unloaded the books one by one. For each, she read aloud the title, author, publisher, island of origin, and year of publication, and Caz noted the information down in tiny, precise letters and numbers. They also awarded each volume a designation for topic: weather, vegetation, animals, stars, sea, etc., and a sub-designation for whether it was a practical spellbook, a scholarly study, or a historical record, as well as the secret librarian-only designation for “mostly bullshit.” Caz switched leaves often, and they paused only for Kiela to resharpen the pencil, careful to preserve as much of the graphite as possible—these too were a limited resource that she wasn’t certain she’d be able to renew. She wondered if you could use berries to make an ink that would last.
The pencils should last for a while, but if she was going to think long term . . .First things first,she reminded herself. She couldn’t afford the kind of tangents she loved to indulge in while she was at the library—here, whether or not she could afford to eat was dependent on how efficient they were at their research. She’d tackle the ink problem if and only if it became necessary. When they finished the first crate, they moved on to the second.
She was pleased to see that they had saved a great number of books on a healthy array of subjects, including a few she’d forgotten she’d chosen, and she was grateful for each one. So much knowledge, preserved. Even better: so much knowledge, at her fingertips.
After every book was recorded and categorized by topic (and piled throughout the room and on every inch of both her parents’ bed and her daybed, first by topic and then alphabetically by author), Kiela and Caz surveyed their treasure trove.
“Where do we begin?” he asked, wonder in his voice.
This wasn’t her usual indexing project, where she prepared a list based on a researcher’s specifications. Normally, a scholar or a sorcerer would come into the library, request all information on one specific line of inquiry, and she’d search her volumes and present them with a complete index of where to locate each mention. Normally, the deadline was “by the next symposium,” and the only stakes were the patron’s academic reputation. Normally, her research wasn’t directly tied to whether or not she’d have food.
That added a flavor of urgency to the whole endeavor.
For their shop, she wanted practical spells with obtainable ingredients that could be dismissed as remedies by the casual eye, and she wanted them for an array of uses from plants to weather to (if it was possible) the merhorses.Start small,she cautioned herself. She didn’t even know if she could find a single appropriate spell. Right now, it was all just a wild idea.
A wild idea that has to succeed.She didn’t have a Plan B.
“I’d like to know everything about everything,” Kiela said, “but I suppose that isn’t a reasonable research parameter.” She chewed on her lip as she contemplated how to narrow it down. Choose wrong, and they could waste hours and hours in the fruitless pursuit of minutiae. She didn’t have that kind of time to waste.Fruitless,she thought, turning the word over in her head. She thought of their success with the tomato plant. “Let’s start with fruit.”
