Page 11

After the cottage with the artwork, she found one that seemed like it could be livable, with a more reasonable amount of work: a blue cottage, its walls painted a pale noonday blue and its door and shutters a deep twilight blue.

Cobwebs clung to the rafters, but she saw no inhabitants other than spiders.

It had a hammock-like bed strung from the ceiling, though she wasn’t sure she’d trust it—she didn’t know how long it had been there—but she could pull in a proper cot from one of the other cottages.

In fact, she could take her favorite pieces from each of them and assemble them here.

It could be nice.

Lovely, even. She imagined it clean and neat and full of flowers. She hoped Yarrow would let her pick blossoms to fill her cottage. My cottage. That had a nice sound to it, didn’t it?

Well, didn’t it?

I’m not a child anymore. I can handle living on my own. She’d had her own space in the library, and she’d been fine. She’d hated it, but she’d managed. Sort of. For a while. Until she’d been statue-ified.

Okay, she hadn’t been fine.

“You can make this work,” Terlu told herself out loud.

She could try to convince Emeral to stay with her, so she wouldn’t have to bear the silence and solitude. His purr was capable of curing any kind of sadness.

Crossing her arms, she tried to look at the cottage objectively.

It wasn’t as nice and cute and sweet as Yarrow’s cottage.

And the amount of work to make it as lovely…

It was daunting enough that she wanted to pivot and race back to the comfort of his home.

She’d have to clean the chimney and, well, everything.

Plus there were a few holes here and there that could do with patching so the wind wouldn’t whip through on stormy days.

She wondered if the roof leaked. She supposed she’d discover that the next time it rained.

Craning her neck, she examined the ceiling—she didn’t see much water damage on the roof above the rafters, though there were stains on the wall beneath the windows.

Terlu tested the pump at the sink, and after a few hearty pumps, brown water spurted out. She kept pumping until it ran clean. That’s a plus, she thought.

Seeing the fresh, clean water, her heart felt lighter.

She could see a little bit of a glimpse of a future here, if she worked at it, at least an immediate future if not a long-term, life-full-of-purpose kind of plan.

She wasn’t afraid of work, which was a good thing since there was a lot to do before the cottage would be livable.

But what to do first?

Heat, definitely. She had to clean the chimney. She’d need… She wasn’t quite certain what she’d need. A brush? With a long handle and stiff bristles. And a broom to sweep all the soot out once she’d knocked it down. Perhaps a ladder so she could climb up onto the roof.

Oh dear. She’d never climbed up onto a roof in her life.

She wondered how slippery it would be with all the snow and ice.

She wondered if Yarrow expected her to fix any broken bones herself with the tools from the shed behind his cottage.

And what if she couldn’t make it livable enough before nightfall?

Would he let her return to his cottage? She wouldn’t take his bed again, of course, but she could curl up like Emeral by the hearth.

Surely, he’d lend her a blanket. At least by his fire, she wouldn’t freeze to death.

Making to-do lists in her head, Terlu left the blue cottage.

For thoroughness, she continued down the road, though she thought the blue cottage was likely the best she was going to find.

She also loved that it was blue, which she knew was superficial of her, but it made her think of the sky on a summer day on Eano when the waves played at your feet and the dolphins swam just offshore.

It felt like a good-luck color. Maybe she could make a home here, at least for as long as she was allowed to stay.

Or for as long as she wanted to stay, whichever came first.

Terlu followed the road to where it ended, on the western edge of—what had Yarrow called this place?

The island of Belde. Stopping, she wrapped her coat tighter and looked out at the sea.

On Alyssium, you rarely had an uninterrupted view of water—there were other islands and tons of ships, both sailing and cargo ships, going to and fro.

On her home island of Eano, you’d see fisherfolk out in their canoes, sometimes a dolphin or two frolicking in the waves.

But here, there was only the blue sea. There was no sandy beach, only rocks, and the waves crashed against them, white froth billowing up with each crash.

In the distance, she saw the shadows of what could be other islands, smudges of a grayer blue, but they could also have been clouds.

A dock led out into the water, but no boats were tied to it.

Just a dock with an empty flagpole at the end, with a box beside it, secured to the deck.

She thought of Yarrow’s offer to summon a ship to take her away.

I could do it right now. Walk out to the end of the dock, raise a flag, and summon a stranger to come and take her wherever she wanted to go, but where would that be?

Home? In disgrace? She couldn’t do that to her family.

It wasn’t just that they’d be disappointed in her or that she’d be embarrassed to admit she’d failed to thrive, though that was all true—it was the fact that reaching out to them could endanger them.

She was still a convicted criminal. Her parents, her sister…

She wished she could tell them she was alive, but without knowing whether or not she’d been pardoned, how could she risk it?

She still had no clear idea why she was here.

Why had someone sent her here in response to Yarrow’s request for a sorcerer?

The plaque on her pedestal had been very clear she’d been a librarian.

Sending her had to have been a mistake. And if so, the second that soon-to-be-in-trouble official discovered the truth, she’d be shipped back to the Great Library and reinstalled in the North Reading Room.

No, she couldn’t ask her family to harbor a convicted criminal.

It was better if no one knew she was here, and it was smarter to stay until she knew who had made this mistake and why—and what she wanted to do about it.

She’d never had any real vision for what she wanted to do with her life.

Becoming a librarian had been a suggestion of one of her professors, and it fit her skills, but it had never been her passion, the way sailing was for her cousin Mer or carving for her aunt Siva or fixing things for her sister Cerri.

She’d wanted, when she left her family and her home, to find some kind of life goal.

That’s what she’d be missing on Eano: a passion and a purpose.

That’s why she’d felt she had to leave. She knew she had no future there, and she was tired of being the one in the family who hadn’t yet found her path.

She just wasn’t sure where she did have a future or what her destiny was supposed to be.

Staying here for a bit might be good for me. Terlu could think about what she wanted and what her life should be, now that she had a second chance.

Yes, that’s what this is: a second chance. And maybe the solitude will be nice for figuring all of it out. It could even be essential.

Or she’d miss the sound of voices so much that she’d start talking to the trees.

She turned back from the sea and noticed one more building that she hadn’t explored.

Set back from the shoreline, it was more of a squat tower than a cottage.

Made of stone, it was two stories tall with a conical roof that was blanketed in snow.

A lighthouse? Except it didn’t have a light on top.

A grain silo? She trudged across the snow toward the tower.

A key was dangling from a hook beside the door. She plucked it off and tried it in the lock. It opened easily, and she poked her head inside. “Hello?”

She was getting a bit tired of saying that, especially given how infrequently her greeting was returned, but still, she wasn’t going to barge into a previously locked whatever-this-was.

What was this place?

Sunlight filtered in through murky windows and lit dust that floated in the air.

It sparkled like flecks of gold above the sturdy worktable that stretched the length of the room.

She walked inside. Every wall was filled with shelves that were overloaded by books, journals, and papers in haphazard stacks, to the dismay of her librarian heart.

Gardening gloves and pots of various sizes were heaped in one corner.

A desk piled precariously high with papers sat beside one of the filthy windows, facing the dock and the sea beyond.

It was very much the opposite of Yarrow’s warm and tidy cottage.

It looked more like a laboratory. Or a workroom of some kind?

Not a living space. In one corner, she spotted a narrow set of stairs—perhaps they led to the owner’s living quarters?

She doubted that anyone lived here now. It was draped in the kind of undisturbed dust that only can accumulate in the absence of anyone.

A cold stove sat in one corner of the room.

Cobwebs clung to it, and Terlu shivered.

It was clear that this place hadn’t been used in years.

She touched one of the papers on the nearest shelf.

It was stiff but not brittle to the point of dissolving into dust. Definitely a workroom, she decided.

All the notes, the random garden supplies that looked more like unfinished experiments, and the overflowing desk…

Terlu examined the desk. In the center of all the papers was a pot with a dried-up ball of leaves.

The leaves had curled in on themselves as if hugging their core of desiccated soil.

She picked up the pot. “Oh, you poor thing.”

Tucking it under her arm, Terlu prowled through the rest of the workroom, examining everything like a detective searching for clues. A pile of mostly burnt papers lay next to the stove. She knelt to look at them.

Why would any scholar burn their own work?

Studying the few words that were still legible, she realized she recognized them: this was written in the First Language, the extinct tongue of sorcerers—the language of spells.

Ah, it’s a sorcerer’s workroom.

This could have been the workroom of the sorcerer who’d made the greenhouse. It seemed likely. She wondered if there was a clue in this tower as to who the sorcerer was and why they’d done all of this. “Or I could be just jumping to conclusions,” she said to the dead plant in the pot.

She wished that Yarrow wouldn’t keep wandering off so quickly. She still had a hundred questions bubbling inside of her, and each minute she spent on this island seemed to generate more.

What had happened to the sorcerer? Why was this place abandoned? Why had the people left, abandoning their homes? Why had Yarrow stayed? Why had no one else come to fix the greenhouses? And why was she the one who’d been sent, when at last Yarrow’s request had been answered?

Clearing a space, Terlu set the pot on the worktable and studied it.

There had to be something special about this shriveled bit of plant to be the only one on the sorcerer’s desk.

His last experiment? His legacy? She wondered if she could determine what kind of plant it had been.

Perhaps that would give her some insight into this place and its sorcerer.

She reached into the pot and touched one of the brown curled-up leaves.

Crisp, it felt like an autumn leaf. It looked fernlike, with a brittle, lacelike quality to the leaves, but it was difficult to tell, as shriveled as it was.

If she added some water, would that plump it up more?

If so, it could make it easier to see the shape of it.

“What are you?” she whispered to it. “Tell me your secrets.”

She went to the sink and pumped the pump a few times until water flooded out of the spout.

Finding a glass, she rinsed it and then filled it with water.

She supposed this was a silly idea. Even if the water did loosen up the leaves enough to examine the plant, the odds of her being able to identify it were low.

She wasn’t a plant expert. Still, though…

it could be another question she could ask the gardener, the next time he popped up.

He’d probably respond better to a plant question than an existential why-am-I-here-and-what’s-the-purpose-of-my-life query.

Terlu poured the water over the knob of plant matter. She waited a minute for the moisture to sink into the leaves, and then she poked it to see if it had softened enough to unfurl.

The plant yawned, stretching out its leaves to reveal a deep purple bud.

“Ooh,” Terlu said.

The bud unfolded to reveal purple petals. It looked a bit like a rose. She studied it before reaching in to touch one of the petals.

And then it spoke. “Just what do you think you’re doing?”

Terlu felt her jaw drop open as she, wordless, stared at the impossible rose.