Forcing dormancy was a cruel thing to do to a friend. Or even a stranger. But especially a being you supposedly loved. She thought of the judge at her trial and the vicious delight of the prosecutor. He’d seen her punishment as his moral victory. She wondered if the plants had known what would happen to them. Did they know they’d be left in a suspended sleep? Did they expect to ever wake?
I have to help them; I can’t just leave them like that.
“You can use the washroom before me, if you’d like,” Yarrow offered.
Terlu thanked him. Still thinking about the sentient plants, she cleaned up, discovering he’d gifted her a soft sheath for sleeping—another item left behind by a relative who’d left him, she assumed.She cleaned her teeth, brushed the snarls out of her hair, and then emerged.
He blushed and looked away quickly, mumbled something, and then slipped into the washroom past her. She glanced down at herself to realize that the sheath hugged her body and the neckline dipped down. Whoever had worn it before her had been smaller. No one had ever accused Terlu of being scrawny. She’d been born cuddly, and nothing in her life had changed that, including being turned into a statue. The statue spell had preserved all her curves and bulges, despite not eating for six years, and she was happy for it. She wouldn’t have known herself without the full softness of her flesh. Still, though, it did make the sheath cling to her curves.
If it bothers him, he doesn’t have to look.
And if it didn’t bother him… Well, she didn’t mind if he looked. Especially when he could cook like that.
Terlu crawled into the bed and felt all her muscles sink into the mattress. While she was eating the soup, she’d momentarily forgotten how tired she was, but the instant she lay in the bed, she felt as if a building had crashed on her—except it was a soft, comfortable building made of pillows.
From across the room, the winged cat flew up to her bed. He settled on top of her legs. She hadn’t quite finished getting into position when he arrived. Carefully, she tried to twist onto her side. Emeral fluttered his wings in protest. She held still. It was fine.
She lay beneath the blankets and the winged cat until she heard Yarrow climb into bed beside her. He’d extinguished the lights in the lanterns on his way, leaving the fire burning to cast its dancing amber light around the cottage.
Yarrow spoke. “I think Laiken was afraid of his own mortality. He knew he was going to die someday, though maybe not as soon as he did, but that’s why he made them sleep. I think he was afraid that after he was gone, no one would love them the way he did.”
If he was right, that was both sad and scary. “Did he ever try asking you to care for them?” She knew the answer to that. He hadn’t.Laiken had written his notes and spells in code, he’d never taken an apprentice, and he’d dismissed all his gardeners but a father and his son. How sad and difficult must that have been—to watch the person you were supposed to trust became more and more paranoid. If Laiken had reached out for help, what might have been different?
“I would have said yes,” Yarrow said. “I would have cared for them until my last breath, and I would have ensured they were cared for beyond that.”
“I’ll wake them,” Terlu said. She saw his silhouette beneath his blankets. So close. She wanted to reach out and touch his hand, to show him she meant the words—he was only a few inches away. It would be so easy… But she wasn’t sure how he’d react—he hadn’t liked it when she’d hugged him, and he was still an almost-stranger—so she didn’t move. “I promise.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Terlu didn’t know how she was going to keep her promise. After three days of struggling with the coded texts, she wasn’t any closer to cracking the cipher. Sighing, she rubbed her neck and stretched her arms.
Across the workroom, Lotti was muttering to herself as she, using a leaf as if it were a thumb and fingers, flipped through one of Laiken’s journals. He’d kept many. They dominated three-quarters of his shelves, plus Yarrow had found more in a chest under the stairs.
The problem was Laiken hadn’t intended his notes for anyone else’s eyes, especially as time went on. The early journals from before he created the greenhouse were written in a slightly archaic version of island standard, but as he aged, his paranoia had increased, and by the later journals, which appeared to hold the majority of his spells, he seemed to be employing not only a code system that she was becoming increasingly convinced relied on a codebook but also the occasional mirror writing or backward writing or, worse, both. And then there were the pages he’d destroyed: ripped out and presumably burned. Yarrow had found more half-burnt scraps beneath the stove. She had no idea what had been lost and whether the spell she needed still existed.
Lotti flopped backward and waved her petals in the air. “Gah! This is hopeless!” She shouted up to the ceiling as if the sorcerer were upstairs and could hear her, “Laiken, you’re the worst!”
“When is that journal from?” Terlu asked.
“The era where Laiken decided that he’d torture future readers with his experiments in sketching. Brilliant man. Genius sorcerer. Terrible artist. Look at this!” Scooting around the book, she propped it up so that Terlu could see. “Is that a rabbit? Is it a cat? Is it a fish? Is it a human liver with eyeballs? Who knows?”
Terlu grinned. “I think it’s a bird.”
Lotti trotted around to the front of the journal. “It would need wings.”
“The word next to it is Ginian for ‘sparrow.’”
“Ginian?”
“It’s a language that was spoken on the island of Ginia before the fourth emperor of the Crescent Islands Empire wiped it out about three centuries ago.”
Lotti gasped. “The empire wiped out a whole island?”
“Not the people, but they, like many the empire conquered, lost their language and a lot of their culture. Ginia was one of the islands who fought back against joining the empire, but they didn’t do it with ships or armies. Instead they turned their entire island into a labyrinth to trick and trap the imperial soldiers. Every building visible from the ocean was a facade, and you had to solve a puzzle to access the true homes, deep inside the mountains. It took an entire decade before they were conquered, and when they were, the emperor was determined to prevent this from ever happening again. All teachers, all elders, all keepers of wisdom—they were removed and rehoused to other islands, separated from one another, and he sent in imperial teachers to ensure the next generation wouldn’t rebel.”
“How sad.”
“Empires are not…” She trailed off before she said anything truly treasonous. Librarians of Alyssium were trained to be impartial, but how could anyone who studied history not have feelings about it? She’d never understood that. History was full of people, all of whom had lives and dreams that were affected by the dry laws and military actions that filled university textbooks. Emperor Mevorinliked to insist every action taken by the empire was for the good of its people, but far too many of its actions throughout history had been for the good of the empire, which wasnot—regardless of what the emperor espoused—the same thing. An empire, unchecked, was a selfish beast of insatiable hunger. Terlu took a deep breath and dredged up a smile. “It wasn’t all lost, though. You’ve heard of hedge labyrinths? Gardens with bushes shaped like mazes? The Ginians invented them, and so their legacy lives on.”
