“That’s not why I’m doing this,” Terlu said. But it was nice that she knew he’d return, unlike when she’d initially arrived, when he’d fled at the sight of her. In the maze, it felt like they were facing the world together. She’d liked their brief time as “we.”
“Whyareyou doing this?” Lotti asked, curling her petals around another charcoal pencil. Carrying it, she waddled closer to Terlu. “He’s right—you could leave. You don’t have to stick around and help us. You have plenty of reasons not to and no real reason to stay. You aren’t connected to Laiken or me or any of the plants here.”
But I could be.Rijes Velk had thought she could do good here. She’d given Terlu a second chance.And I’m not going to waste it.If she could be useful… if she could have a place here… if she could have a purpose… that was worth any amount of effort. It was why she’d left her family and her home island in the first place, and it was what she’d failed to find in the Great Library of Alyssium.
“Because I want to,” Terlu told Lotti, taking the spare pencil.
She did not say out loud:Because I need to.
She needed her second life to matter.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
It took Terlu another three days and many honey cakes to unravel the code.
On the morning of the third day, Yarrow joined her and Lotti in the workroom and placed a mug beside Terlu. She inhaled chocolate so rich that all unrelated thoughts flew out the window. “Did you make this?”
He nodded. “The trick is knowing when to harvest the cocoa pods.”
She cradled the mug in both hands, and the warmth sank into her palms. She breathed in the chocolaty steam and thought she’d never smelled anything so wonderful. He’d sprinkled bits of hazelnut on top, and ooh, was that a swirl of caramel? Yes, it was.
“You then have to ferment the beans,” he said. “I wrap them in banana leaves to ferment, then roast them, shell them—you want just the nibs—and grind them.”
She took a sip.
It was like drinking a sunset, where the sun had stained the clouds the deepest, richest rose. Molten sunshine was dripping down her throat.
“The sweetness comes from sugarcane syrup,” he offered. “You have to boil it down, strain the fibers out, then boil it some moreuntil it’s almost but not quite caramelized. Made a bunch of batches last winter.”
“You grow the sugarcane as well?” She took another sip, closed her eyes, and let the warm chocolate spread through her. It felt as if her blood had been replaced by chocolate. “Wow,” she said, opening her eyes to see Yarrow watching her reaction.
“Every type of plant in the Crescent Islands grows here.” Then his smile faded and his shoulders slumped as he added, “Or used to, before the greenhouses began to fail.”
Terlu wished she could say she knew how to fix everything, it would all be fine, and she had just the right magic spell that was guaranteed to work to solve all his problems and make the pain in his voice vanish, but fixing greenhouses that had been drenched in enchantments… that was magic so far beyond her it wasn’t even in the realm of possible. She had a single goal: waking the sentient plants, and shehadmade progress on that. “So I think I know—”
Lotti jumped in. “You know how to restore my friends?”
“Maybe.” Setting aside the hot chocolate reluctantly, she picked up a notebook and showed them the page she’d been studying. “This is one of the entries he made from around the time that Lotti went to sleep. It’s not that the spell that created them has to be recast—they’re still sentient. They’re just asleep, as Lotti said. I worried that she was being euphemistic, but it’s the literal truth.”
“Knew it!” Lotti said. “They’re still them.”
“It seems that after he let you fall dormant, Laiken began looking for ways to encourage the other sentient plants to sleep too.” She kept her tone light, but her word choice was deliberate. After reconstructing Laiken’s journals that held his notes on the sentient plants, Terlu was certain her interpretation was correct: the sorcerer had deliberately let her wither.
“Wait, excuse me, no.” Lotti hopped across the table to the journal. “He didn’tletme fall dormant. It was anaccidentthat I fell asleep. He forgot to water me. I don’t need much, and he lost track of days. He’d gotten more confused by then.”
Not from what his journal said. He’d kept meticulous notes, in code: he’d been stretching how long the little rose could go between waterings. He’dwantedher to be dormant. Terlu pushed on. “But you’re the only one of the sentient plants who could become dormant naturally. If he just stopped watering the others, they’d die, and that’s not what he wanted. So he experimented with them, after he’d reassured himself that you could survive your hibernation unharmed. As near as I can tell, he started his experiments about fifty years ago?” She glanced at Yarrow, who nodded.
The rose shook, and she wrapped her petals tighter together into a quivering bud. “No. You’re wrong. Laiken loved me. He loved all of us!”
Perhaps he did love her, in his own way. “I think he wanted to protect you. He thought if you were asleep, you’d be safe. If you were all asleep…” It was the kindest explanation for why Laiken had allowed Lotti to shrivel and fall into what was essentially a coma when he could have simply cared for her. Other explanations were much more cruel. Gently, Terlu asked, “What do you remember of that time, before you fell asleep?”
“He was absent a lot,” Lotti said, still closed into a bud. “Busy. With the greenhouses.”
“He’d already begun to dismiss gardeners by then,” Yarrow spoke up. “My father said Belde was on its way to becoming home to a small village about fifty years ago, but Laiken didn’t want that. He refused to allow new people to settle here, and he began to require that gardeners leave if they wished to marry, rather than allow their spouses to settle here, which was a change from earlier years, when my father was a child. As time went on, the sorcerer did more and more himself and kept more and more to himself.”
“He forgot about me,” Lotti insisted. “It wasn’t deliberate. I refuse to believe that.”
“It could have been an accident with you,” Terlu agreed. Who was she to say? She hadn’t been there. The only insight she had was what the sorcerer had written down. Let the rose keep idolizing hercreator, if she wanted to. She didn’t need to face her past or confront the truth or any of that if all it was going to do was hurt her—there was no point in unnecessary pain. None of them could change what happened; all they could do was shape what happened next. Terlu pointed to a spell. “Regardless, this is how he made the others sleep. It took him a number of years to perfect the spell, but eventually he did.”
