He shrugged. “Suppose so. Yes. He left no heir, unless you can find a record of it. By law, it falls to whoever inhabits and cares for it, which would be me. And the plants.” A hint of a smile crossed his lips. “Laiken would have hated that a gardener inherited. He viewed us the same way he viewed a shovel or a bee, a tool to keep his gardens alive. In one of her letters, my sister asked if I had stayed merely to spite him… Maybe in part I did.”
He’s right.Laiken didn’t want anyone to have this place. The sorcerer had dismissed all but two of the inhabitants of the island, and he’d put the sentient plants to sleep—he’d intended to leave the island fully uninhabited. “I think he wanted to seal his greenhouse away from the world.” She showed him a passage on the eighth page of the journal. “He was experimenting here with variations of the word that means protect, which is also found in the bubble spell.”
“Eat your fish before it gets cold.”
Emeral sauntered over to the table and wove between Terlu and Yarrow’s legs.
“Or before the cat eats it.”
She put down the notebook, a safe distance from the food, and took a bite of the fish. Closing her eyes, she savored how light and fresh it was. Not fishy at all. It tasted of salt and sweet, with a hint of bite from the cranberries. She opened her eyes and realized he was watching her. “Perfect.”
He smiled.
Together, they ate.
He slipped a chunk to Emeral beneath the table. She raised both her eyebrows at the cat. “How do you still have an appetite?”
Smug, the cat returned to the hearth and curled up next to the fire. He began to wash his fur and his feathers.
It was nice to eat together, knowing they were each wrapped in their own thoughts and knowing those thoughts overlapped. She wasn’t wondering what he was thinking of her or what he wantedfrom her. As soon as she finished, she moved to clean her dish, but he intercepted her. “Read,” he said. “I’ll clean.”
“Thanks.” She returned to curl in the blankets with the notebook.
When he finished, he sat beside her with his book on orchids. He brought a lantern closer, positioning it so that the light fell onto her lap. “Let me know how I can help.”
“You are helping,” she said.
He smiled again and opened his book to the sixth chapter, where he’d left a bookmark.
They read side by side as night nestled over the forest and the greenhouse. In the distance, she heard voices rise, then fall. An owl hooted.
Her fingers began to cramp, and she shook out her hand.
Yarrow covered her fingers with his and massaged her palm. She let him caress the base of each finger, the back of her hand, and her wrist. “Better?”
“Yes.”
She kept reading until her eyes felt like they hurt when she blinked. She bit back a yawn. “I’m close,” she said. “I should…”
“You can sleep. No one would blame you.”
“But we don’t know when the next greenhouse will fail.”
“For the first time, we were able to save nearly every plant before the temperature plummeted,” Yarrow said. “We’ll do it again if we need to. You have time. You can sleep.”
Perhaps he was right.
She put the notebook and her stack of notes on the desk near the beds. He lifted the quilt, and she burrowed in, curling up against him. He wrapped his arm around her.
The winged cat flew from the hearth onto the bed, curling up in the dip between their bodies. Pressed together, all three of them slept.
Terlu had never had such a peaceful and deep sleep.
At dawn, she woke.
She launched herself out of bed so fast that Yarrow sat up abruptlyand Emeral sprang into the air with a yelp. Yarrow asked, “Are you okay?”
Terlu flipped to near the end of the book. She stabbed her finger at a line. “He cast it, I’m sure of it. He cast it to test it”—Just like I’ve been doing, casting bits of spells and learning from them—“to make sure the spell would stay viable after his death. He was checking the longevity of the spell, not the functionality, so it was an incomplete spell. He meant to disable it as soon as the test was done and recast it when it was complete, but then he died. Maybe he was distracted and rushing because he’d realized the spell had a fatal flaw, and that’s why he fell. Or maybe it was just an unlucky coincidence. But regardless, he never stopped the spell. It lurched on, incomplete and flawed, but here’s the key: the spell was built with a delay. An intentional delay. So that after his death, there would be a couple months during which any remaining residents could leave the island. Do you see? He intentionally left time in the spell for his funeral and for you to leave.”
