Biana te biana me vi pri rinaka.
She finished.
Silence.
“That’s it?” Lotti asked.
Yarrow hushed her.
“That’s it,” Terlu said. “It may not be enough, without Laiken’s full—”
The glass crackled. She watched as the paste began to glow a warm, sunny amber. It bubbled as it liquefied and then dissolved into the glass, spreading as a yellow haze.
The crack in the glass knit itself together as the yellow spread and dissolved. In minutes, the glass was smooth and clear. Terlu laid her hand on it. It tingled beneath her palm.
It was only a single pane.But it worked.
She grinned and turned around. “I know it’s not flashy or exciting, and it’s just a single crack out of thousands, tens of thousands, and at this rate, it will take weeks of work, many weeks, given the number of dead greenhouses, but—”
“It’s amazing,” Yarrow said firmly.
Terlu felt herself start to blush.
He added, “You’re amazing.”
She blushed harder. “If we make more paste—”
Yarrow nodded and began portioning out more ingredients into the mortar and pestle. Terlu tilted her head back and scanned the greenhouse—there were a countless number of cracks that ran through every pane up to the ceiling. “Lotti, how do you feel about climbing?”
“I’m an excellent climber.”
“Could you reach the cracks in the ceiling?”
“Just watch me.”
They set to work: Yarrow creating the paste, Lotti scampering up the walls of the greenhouse to smear it on the cracks, and Terlu reciting the spell for each one.
It’s working!
She started in on the next spell and tripped over a syllable, pronouncing “nessava” as “nessavara.” Instead of sealing the crack, it expanded it—the crack spread like the veins of a leaf. Lotti, hanging upside down from a rafter, turned her petals toward her. If the rose had had eyes, it would have been a glare.
Concentrating harder, Terlu repeated the spell.
She didn’t make any more mistakes.
After three nonstop hours of spellcasting, Terlu felt as if she’d been swallowing sand. Unfortunately, each itineration of the spell only healed a bit of broken glass at a time and so she’d had to recite the spell again and again. “Tea?” she croaked.
From the rafters, Lotti called, “I could use a break too, and a soak.”
Yarrow looked up, and she could tell he was counting the remaining cracks. They’d barely done a sixth of one greenhouse. At this pace…It’s not fast enough.She knew he was thinking it too, but he didn’t say it. “We’re nearly out of ingredients,” he said instead. “It’s a good time to take a break.”
They trooped back through the dead greenhouses until they reached the warmth of the rose room. The sweet scent curled around them. While Terlu plopped down onto the edge of a flower bed framed by pink roses, Yarrow filled a bucket of water and carried it back to Lotti.
The resurrection rose lowered herself into the bucket with a sigh, holding on to the edge with her leaves and dunking her roots into the water. “Ah, that’s nice.”
“How much of the ingredients do we have left?” Terlu’s voice broke on the word “ingredients.” She swallowed to ease it.
“Rest your voice,” Yarrow said. He crossed to the enchanted stove in the center of the greenhouse and pulled out a kettle to boil. “Rose tea?”
