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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 of how, these plants were why . 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.

I can trust him.

She trusted the head librarian, and Rijes Velk had sent her to him.

“Then why did you say…” Yarrow began.

“Because I did it before. Or I did something closely related. I… cast a spell.” Terlu had to look away, afraid of what she’d see in his eyes: disapproval, disappointment, pity.

“I hadn’t planned to. I discovered the spell while I was cataloging journals from the collection of a late sorcerer…

” It was only when she stumbled on one of the rare ingredients in a shop that sold gently used accessories, she started to daydream about it.

“It was like a game at first, seeing if I could find the ingredients. No, not a game. An intellectual exercise. I told myself that perhaps I’d write a paper about the difficulty in casting a complex spell.

Not that anyone would publish it. I’m not a sorcerer or a professor.

But it was a fascinating challenge—the spell itself is linguistically convoluted, with unfamiliar words that you do not want to mispronounce.

” She’d heard plenty of cautionary tales of sorcery gone wrong—they were presented as proof of why the stricter laws against spellcasting were necessary.

Once, a sorcerer was trying to start a fire and instead he set himself aflame.

Another time, a young sorcerer tried to summon a water horse to carry her across the waves, but instead she drew a herd and destroyed her village.

And another time, a young girl had experimented with a spell and lost ten years before she was discovered—she’d transformed herself into a rock.

Moss had grown on her by the time her family finally found her.

“But I became more convinced that I could do it. I researched the history of the words in the spell, studying their etymology, until I was certain of each one. Over the course of multiple months, I located every ingredient.”

Lotti had stopped shaking the pots and was now listening to Terlu. She hopped closer to Yarrow, who hadn’t said a word. Terlu felt the weight of their silence, thick and heavy as a blanket of snow. She hugged her arms over her chest, the letter from Rijes Velk clutched tight.

This wasn’t a story she’d wanted to tell to an audience.

She’d done it once already, and she was never going to forget the condemnation in the judge’s eyes or the vicious victory in the imperial investigator’s.

But she’d started, and now she had to finish.

“His name was Caz, and he was a spider plant. He was kind, he was smart, and he was funny, and they took him from me as soon as they found him.” She risked a glance at Yarrow.

He was holding himself very still, watching her as if she were a bird that might startle and fly away. She couldn’t read what he was thinking, but she didn’t see disapproval or pity. If anything, she would name the look in his eyes hope .

“They wanted to make an example of me,” Terlu said, “and so they sentenced me to be transformed into a statue. There was to be no reprieve.” In the spaces between words, she could still hear the drums that sounded after her sentence had been announced.

She imagined she’d be hearing those drums echoing inside her for the rest of her life.

“But I was sent the spell to revive you,” Yarrow said.

“Luckily for me, not everyone agreed with my sentence.” Holding up the letter, she showed him the seal and the signature.

Lotti hopped closer to see too. “It’s signed by the head librarian at the Great Library of Alyssium, the woman who defended me at my trial.

I don’t know how, but somehow she got your letter and thought I… ”

“‘I hope to provide a solution to multiple problems at once,’” Yarrow read.

Lotti gave a high-pitched shriek. “You know the spell to wake them!”

Terlu shook her head. “I don’t.” She’d cast a spell to create a sentient plant, not wake one.

“And even if I did, I can’t cast it. I can’t…

I can’t face that again. You don’t know what it was like.

The silence. The helplessness. The loneliness.

” Please don’t ask me to. Except that she had already been asked, indirectly at least, by the one woman who had shown her kindness during the nightmare of her trial—the woman who had saved her.

“We wouldn’t ask you to do something you don’t want to do,” Yarrow said.

“ You wouldn’t,” Lotti said in a growl. “ I would.”

The mere act of telling them what she’d done and what she could do was almost akin to volunteering, but still… She felt as if she had a lump the size of a fist in her throat. It was hard to swallow, hard to breathe. The drums in her head were as loud as they’d ever been.

“You could cast it,” the rose said, “but you won’t. Coward. These plants are innocent.”

Terlu flinched. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to help, but… “If I’m caught…” She closed her eyes. It was far too easy to remember how it felt, without a breath, without a heartbeat, without a voice. A solution to multiple problems at once. The words echoed in her head.

“You won’t be caught,” Yarrow said.

“You don’t know that.” Terlu opened her eyes again. He had moved, stopping inches in front of her. She had to tilt her head up to look at his face—his eyes earnest, his lips soft. She read sympathy, understanding, maybe resolve, but not pity. He has a kind face, she thought.

“I do,” Yarrow said. His hands twitched as if he wanted to touch her, but he didn’t. He kept his arms by his side. “There’s no one here. Just me. And Lotti. There’s no one but us on all of Belde. You’re safe.”

“We’d never, ever betray you if you do this!” Lotti cried. “They’d have to pry it out of me with a hand trowel! No, with pruning shears . Please, Terlu Perna. Without Laiken…” Her voice broke. “Please, these plants are all the family I have left. Please, wake them.”

“I…” She looked at Lotti, at Yarrow, and then at the letter from Rijes Velk, the woman she most trusted and admired in all the Crescent Islands Empire. It was clear what they wanted her to do. The words of the letter were louder than the remembered drumbeats.

“Please, Terlu,” Lotti said. “Without them, I’m alone.”

Terlu raised her eyes to gaze at the plants—asleep, silent, and drifting in and out of nothingness, like she had been.

She knew what that was like, to be held in a prison within your own body, alive but unable to live.

“I don’t know the exact spell—waking a sentient plant is a different task than creating one—but I would recognize it if I saw it, for example in a sorcerer’s workroom. ”

“And once you saw it?” Yarrow asked.

She met his green, hope-filled eyes. “Once I have the words… I can cast it.”

It was past sunset when they reached the late sorcerer’s tower.

Inside, it was shrouded in shadows until Yarrow lit the lanterns that hung from hooks on the wall.

He placed a few on the worktable as well.

Soon a warm amber light spread across the table, desk, and shelves. It was still chilly but not as shadowy.

“Where do you want to begin?” Yarrow asked.

Just inside the workroom, Terlu froze for an instant—it was a simple question, but he said it with such trust that, for a heartbeat, she forgot to breathe. He trusts me.

Cradled in Terlu’s hands, Lotti piped up. “How about we begin by putting me down?”

“Right. Of course.” Terlu set Lotti down on the worktable.

The little rose waddled over to one of the jars, examining herself in the reflection. “Ooh, I’m looking nice and prickly.” She twisted to view her leaves from another angle.

“You look great,” Terlu told her.

Lotti sniffed. “Obviously.”

The workroom, on the other hand, did not look great.

Terlu unbuttoned her coat, then shivered as she scanned the room with her hands on her hips.

It wasn’t as cold as the outside, but it was close.

Now… where to begin? The desk? The shelves?

Maybe she should start with the worktable, since it held the sorcerer’s in-progress experiments?

Or maybe she should start upstairs in the sorcerer’s living quarters?

Or maybe I shouldn’t be doing this at all. What if this is all a truly terrible idea? “Just… once more, before we really begin… you don’t think this is a mistake?”