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Lotti flapped her petals. “Ugh! How can it be a mistake to save lives?”

“You won’t be…” Yarrow stopped. “… statued? Statue-ified?”

I was right, there’s no word for it. “I didn’t think I would be before. I wasn’t harming anyone. I didn’t think anyone would mind. What makes it different this time?”

“This time,” he said simply, “you aren’t doing it alone.”

There were no more perfect words he could have said.

Still… “I’m going to look upstairs first. He might have kept his most important notes closest to him.” She managed to walk across the workroom without looking as if she wanted to flee.

Lotti hopped across the table toward the cold fireplace. “How’s the chimney? Can we light a fire? And by ‘we,’ I mean ‘you,’ garden boy, because that’s obviously not my thing.” She waved her leaves. “I don’t want to be tinder.”

Yarrow stuck his head beneath the chimney. “A few abandoned nests. Some cobwebs. But it’ll be fine for handling the exhaust from the stove.” Opening up the wood-burning stove, he added, “Might smell a bit.”

Leaving them to figure it out themselves, Terlu climbed the stairs. She held on to the walls as the steps creaked and groaned. Halfway up, she halted—the drums were loud again in her memory, or maybe that was just her heartbeat.

This time, she told herself, it’ll be different.

This time, she wasn’t doing it for herself—Lotti needed this, so did Yarrow. And the sleeping plants. Firmly, she took all of her doubts and fears, wadded them into a ball, and shoved them down. She climbed the rest of the way up. I have to help them.

Resolved, she took a deep breath of the dusty air… and coughed.

Upstairs was sad, drab, and mostly bare. A bed with dusty sheets and blankets was in the center of the room. A grimy mirror hung on one wall. Curtains were pulled over the windows, keeping it all dark and shadowed. No desk. No bookshelves. Only a bedside table with a solitary notebook on it.

Terlu picked up the notebook—her fingers felt instantly grimy—and blew the dust off its green leather cover.

Flipping through, she saw it was handwritten, and the notes quit halfway through.

The rest was blank. Perhaps it was his most recent notebook?

If so, it wasn’t going to be of much use.

She needed spells from his early work, from when he established the Greenhouse of Belde and first created the sentient plants.

Closing it, she wondered what this sorcerer would think of her searching for his spell.

Would he support her or condemn her? These were his plants, after all. Perhaps he’d approve.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a dusty mirror with a hint of herself: brown untamed curls, round lavender face, slightly frightened purple eyes. And then a shadow flitted across the mirror.

Terlu glanced behind her—no one was there.

Still, she shivered. There was something unsettling about the abandoned bedroom. Even though the sorcerer was long gone, she couldn’t help feeling as if the shadows were watching her. It felt like the kind of place that held ghosts.

“Sorry for intruding,” she said out loud.

No one answered.

There’s no one here. Just my imagination.

She’d never encountered a ghost herself, but she’d heard plenty of stories.

On the sixth floor of the Great Library, it was said that the ghost of a librarian lingered in the stacks, unwilling to rest until she’d read every book in her section.

The current librarian would leave a new book open each week, flipping the pages every so often.

Terlu wouldn’t have minded the company of such a ghost, but she hadn’t had the seniority to be allowed up on the sixth floor.

Regardless, there was nothing useful in the late sorcerer’s bedroom.

Taking the green-leather-bound notebook with her, she returned downstairs.

“Looks like he kept all his work downstairs.” She dropped the notebook onto the table and then shed her coat and scarf.

The workroom was already warmer now that the fire was lit.

“This was the only item up there, and it’s too recent to be useful. ”

“Not surprised to hear it,” Lotti said. “He worked here. Slept there. But it was still a good idea to check.”

“Only thing upstairs is the remnant of his memory,” Yarrow said. “Unless the bats came back. I had to clear out an infestation of bats the first winter after Laiken died. Relocated them to the island caves. You didn’t see bats, did you?”

“No bats. Just dust and a lot of creepy shadows.”

Defensively, Yarrow said, “Cleaning abandoned buildings hasn’t been my priority.”

“It wasn’t a criticism,” she said quickly. “You’ve done amazing, especially on your own, with all the greenhouses and your own cottage and no one else to—”

Lotti slapped the table with her leaves impatiently.

“Yes, yes, he’s great, but my friends are comatose.

Can we get back to that? You know, before you lose your nerve and I have to face the fact that the man who was like a father to me is gone—long gone—and my siblings and friends are, like, one step up from inanimate objects. ”

“Sorry. Yes, of course.” I won’t lose my nerve. I’m doing this. Terlu began to riffle through the brittle papers. Hundreds of loose papers were strewn over the table, coated with a layer of dust. “The first step is to figure out the organizing principle behind all his notes.”

Hopping up onto the top of a thick dust-laden book, Lotti gave a flowery snort.

“Laiken was a brilliant man. A revolutionary mind, bursting with creativity. He was capable of leaps that other sorcerers could only dream of. But he was not organized. He was constantly losing his socks…” Trailing off, she let out a little sob. “Ah, Laiken.”

“How do you constantly lose socks?” Terlu asked, her voice light, wishing she could hug the little rose. “Don’t you just keep them on your feet?”

“He had itchy toes,” Lotti said.

By the stove, Yarrow grunted. “That’s more than I wanted to know.”

“It was probably a fungus,” Lotti said.

“Much more than I wanted to know.”

Lifting a paper up to the lantern light, Terlu frowned at the words. “This isn’t…” She turned the paper sideways and then upside down. “Huh. That’s… odd.”

Concerned, Yarrow asked, “What’s wrong?”

“I can’t read it,” she admitted.

“Let me see,” the rose said. “Ah, it’s in the First Language. You found a spell!”

Terlu took the paper back and scowled at it again.

“It’s not. I can read the First Language, and this…

” It was extremely unusual for her to encounter a language she couldn’t read even slightly.

Fascinating, really. She should at least be able to sort out the root of the words, if not their precise meaning, but the etymology of these phrases eluded her, as if they weren’t even…

“You can read First Language?” Lotti asked, awed.

“Yes, fluently. And this isn’t it. How old was Laiken?

” Terlu asked. Perhaps he’d written in an extinct language?

One that shared some of its linguistic markers with the First Language?

She didn’t know every extinct language, though she’d encountered many of them in her studies.

When the Crescent Islands united under its first emperor, there had been a concerted effort to standardize the language of the islands—a practical convenience that, in its often brutal enforcement, had led to the terrible loss of many beautiful languages and dialects. She mourned the lost languages.

“He never said,” Yarrow replied, joining them at the worktable. “He was ancient, though. Lived well beyond an ordinary lifespan. How can I help?”

“Are you good with languages?” Terlu asked.

“Not at all. But I can clean the table.” He began neatening the worktable, starting by carrying anything made of glass or ceramic—beakers, tubes, jars, pots, cups, mugs, plates, saucers, bowls—over to the wide sink on the side.

He filled the sink with soapy water and dunked them in.

She watched him for an instant, then returned to studying the sorcerer’s texts.

Lotti scooted herself forward so that she was directly in front of Terlu. “I want to help! I demand you let me help!” Her petals were rolled up like little fists.

“Sure,” Terlu said absently. She continued to stare at the vaguely familiar yet not-quite-right words.

Putting it down, she picked up another sheet of paper, and this one was written in standard island speech.

Same handwriting. It was a list of supplies for the greenhouse.

“We need to identify which papers are important and which are day-to-day minutiae. I am thinking that the less important texts are going to be in standard Crescent Island speech and the spells will be in the First Language. We can make a third pile for the unknown language and figure out its significance later.” She skimmed the next page.

A recipe for potato soup, using twelve varieties of potatoes and fistfuls of roasted garlic.

“Lotti, how about you do the first sort, and then pass the interesting ones to me?” She picked up the paper in the unknown language again.

It bothered her that she didn’t recognize it as any of the languages she’d studied.

The pattern of words was familiar, but the letters…

They shouldn’t be combined in that way. Belatedly, she realized that Lotti hadn’t budged.

“Sorry. You don’t have to, if you don’t want to.

Would you rather do something else?” She hadn’t meant to boss the plant around.

“You… you want me to…”

Terlu glanced at Yarrow. She didn’t know what she’d said to upset the little rose.