It’s not a coincidence that I’m here.
Yarrow was talking. “I must have been… around eight or nine?… when they went silent. It was the first indication we got that there could be something wrong with the magic, though it was years before any of the greenhouses themselves failed.Thatonly began after Laiken’s death.”
“You have to wake up,” Lotti pleaded.
As Lotti continued to beg the plants to talk to her, Terlu turned the words over in her head:It’s not a coincidence. I’m meant to be here.They felt right. True. Yarrow had appealed to the capital for a sorcerer to help his plants, which included a greenhouse of enchanted plants who were supposed to be awake and aware but weren’t, and in response, they’d sent Terlu Perna.
While Lotti pleaded with the silent plants, Terlu asked Yarrow, “Who sent me here?”
His eyes were glued to the little rose.
“Please,” Terlu begged, “I need to know.”
Glancing at her, he withdrew a letter from the inner pocket of his jacket and handed it to her. “My request was passed around awhile before it was answered. A long while.” He then shifted his focus back to Lotti, who was pleading with a silent philodendron.
Terlu opened the envelope and unfolded the letter. It was on very familiar stationery, emblazoned with the seal of the Great Library of Alyssium. She felt the silken softness of the paper, and she smelled the rich, dusty scent of the stacks held within the fibers. There was a humming in her head, and she made herself sit down cross-legged on the gravel path while she read the words. It was written in an elegant hand and very brief. Addressed to the Head Gardener of Belde, Yarrow Verdane, it said that the writer hoped to provide a solution to multiple problems at once, and it directed Yarrow in how to perform the spell that would release Terlu, with the spell written out phonetically and a clear list of ingredients.
It said nothing of who Terlu was or why she was a statue or whyshe was sent here, nor did it mention any pardon or any official end of her sentence.
But there was a signature at the bottom, in clear swooping letters:
Rijes Velk, the head librarian of the Great Library of Alyssium.
She’d sworn in court that Terlu wouldn’t work magic again, staked her reputation on it. Yet she’d sent Terlu here, with a spell to be cast illegally—why?
A solution to multiple problems, she’d written.
Terlu’s heart beat faster as she turned those words over in her head.
In front of her, Lotti was screaming at the philodendron to wake and crying for Laiken to come back, to not be dead, to not leave them like this. Yarrow was trying (and failing) to console her. He had a panicked look on his face, as if he were seconds from fleeing.
I know why I was sent here.
“I’m supposed to wake them,” Terlu said out loud.
CHAPTER NINE
It was the only explanation that made sense.
Yarrow stared at her. “What do you mean?”
Using her leaves, Lotti shook a pot as she shouted, “Wake up, wake up, wake up!”
Terlu wrapped her arms around herself, but it didn’t make her feel any safer or less exposed. She didn’t know how Rijes Velk had gotten her statue out of the Great Library and all the way to the island of Belde, but she very much doubted it was with anyone’s permission. If she were here, Terlu would’ve asked her how she’d done it. You didn’t just remove a full-size human statue from the library without anyone noticing, especially from as prominent and well-guarded a site as the North Reading Room. She couldn’t imagine how the head librarian had managed it. She hoped Rijes hadn’t endangered herself in the process. But regardless of how…
It seemed clear to her that regardless ofhow,these plants werewhy. It was far too much of a coincidence otherwise. She was guilty of plant magic; suddenly, here she was in an enchanted greenhouse that needed magical help.
“Rijes Velk thinks I can help,” Terlu said.
“Can you?” Yarrow asked.
Her throat felt closed. Unable to form the words, she shook her head. She couldn’t use magic again.I don’t want to go back.If Yarrow knew what she’d done, if he knew she was a convicted criminal, he’d…
He was looking at her, his green eyes wide, unreadable.
He wouldn’t do anything,she realized with a start.Because they’d arrest him too.
He wasn’t a sorcerer, yet he’d cast a spell to restore her. If he turned her in, he’d have to admit where she came from and what he’d done—he’d be in as much danger as her. He wasn’t going to turn her in.
