Her name, Kiela learned, was Halio, and she spoke in a near whisper. She liked the shop, she liked the shelves of jam, and she liked Kiela’s blue hair. She splurged on three jars of raspberry jam, offering a carton of eggs and a wedge of sharp cheese in exchange.
She was in every way the opposite of Fenerer. Taking a risk, Kiela said, “If you’re interested, we also offer home remedies. We have one prepared now that strengthens trees.”
“Don’t have any sick trees,” Halio whispered. “But . . .”
Kiela leaned closer.
“No reason to think you would . . . Never mind.”
“It doesn’t hurt to ask,” Kiela said. “Questions are the heart of a functioning society.” She wondered if she’d read that somewhere or had just invented it. She rather liked it. The empire had squelched questions about magic—restricting access to answers to the elite—and look what had happened. Imagine how glorious the empire could have been if everyone with a question had been welcomed into the stacks of the Great Library of Alyssium.
“I have a spring . . .Hada spring . . . It used to flow so beautifully, the freshest water, but it doesn’t run anymore . . . But you said you help sick trees, not failed springs. Forgive me.”
“Have you checked upstream?” Kiela asked.
Halio shook her head. “There’s no upstream. My mother’s mother conjured our spring from the bare rock, back when she settled on Caltrey.”
“Your grandmother was a sorcerer?”
“Oh, no,” Halio said. “But back then . . . Well, things were different. All this was before your time. It used to be we weren’t so dependent on those imperial sorcerers. We took care of our own. Minor magics, yes. Nothing as flashy as sorcerer spells, but they did the job. Kept everything healthy and balanced.”
“What happened to all that knowledge?” Kiela asked. “Why didn’t your grandmother pass the spell down?” She thought of the recipe book she’d found in the cottage kitchen. What a shame that those homegrown spells hadn’t been recorded and preserved and treasured like her parents’ recipes. Someone should have done that work. If she’d been here . . . Would she have thought to gather it, like a scholar recording oral history? Or would she not have guessed it was necessary? How much knowledge had been lost because no one wrote it down?
“We didn’t think we’d need it,” Halio said. “The emperor’s sorcerers always came, with spells so much grander than our homespun ones. The older generation was happy to leave the spellcraft for the experts, and the experts were eager to insist their way was best. And then some fluffed-up bureaucrats in the capital with no knowledge of the outer islands or how the world’s interconnected codified that into law, and well, where does that leave us now?”
Kiela had to lean in close to catch all the words, and she didn’t realize that Halio had asked a question, not just a rhetorical one, until the older woman was staring at her expectantly. “It leaves us with finding our own way again, and taking care of one another.”
Halio smiled. “And it leaves us with jam.”
Bidding her farewell, Halio hobbled out of the cottage and away through the greenery. Kiela watched for a moment and then scurried into the back room to search for books about fixing formerly magical springs.
At sundown, Caz finally came in from the garden and flopped down on the hole in the kitchen floor. He sank his roots into the soil and sighed. “It’s still running amok.”
“Is it hurting anything?” Kiela asked.
“It tore a few leaves with its needles at first and impaled a tomato—that was funny, juice everywhere—but it’s gotten the hang of steering around now,” Caz said.
“Is it upset?”
“Not at all.”
“How can you tell?”
“It’s started shouting‘Wheeee!’as it rolls.”
Oh. Oh, wow. “Are you saying it talks? Is it like you?” Had she and Caz accidentally made a sentient being? If so . . . was that okay? What kind of responsibility did they have toward the cactus? Should they offer to educate it? What did it need, and what did it want?
“It just says‘Wheeee.’I’m exhausted. What did I miss here?”
Kiela told him about the two customers and how radically different they were, and she told him how she’d been researching the creation of wells and springs by magical means. “It’s really fascinating.” She fetched the book she’d been reading. “According to the sorcerer Lunia Wheelan, the water is either coaxed from beneath the bedrock or it’s collected from—”
A knock sounded at the door. “Kiela? Caz?”
Caz let out an “Eep! It’s Larran.”
Quickly, Kiela scooped all the books into the back bedroom, tossed a quilt over them, and shut the door. She hurried back to the front of the cottage, slightly out of breath, as he ducked through the doorway. “Larran! Hi. Um, welcome to our shop.”
“Did I catch you at a bad time?” he asked.
