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“You trust me to…” Lotti sniffled. “I didn’t think you’d say yes.

He never let me help, no matter how badly I wanted to.

Said I was too little, that I was to look pretty and not…

” The rose appeared to be crying, even though she had no eyes and no tear ducts.

Water pooled on the tips of her purple petals.

“I’d always ask, and he’d always say no. ”

Yarrow dabbed her petals with a towel.

“Thank you,” she sniffed.

“When I was little,” Yarrow said, “I wanted to help one of my uncles cut firewood. That was his job every winter, and I know it was an important one—we needed cut wood to survive. But my father told me I was too little. I wouldn’t be able to lift the axe. I’d hurt myself. I hated hearing that.”

“What did you do?” Lotti asked. “Did you do it anyway?”

He shrugged. “My uncle taught me how to properly stack wood, so it wouldn’t rot, and I did that instead.” Without adding anything more, he resumed washing the beakers and bowls.

“That was a terribly unsatisfying story,” Lotti complained.

She turned to Terlu. “Was he trying to make a point? I think he was.” Raising her voice, she called to Yarrow, “Hey, garden boy, did that have a moral? Am I supposed to stack wood? Wait, no, never mind. I don’t care.

My point is I was never allowed to help at all. I was decorative.”

What a terrible thing to tell someone. “You’re more than decorative,” Terlu said. Her resolve to help the little rose strengthened. She deserved to have her friends around her, supporting her, especially while she mourned.

“I most certainly am!” The rose vaulted herself over a crumpled-up paper. Using her leaves, she picked up a page and then abandoned it. “Not that one.” She moved to the next. “Nope, boring. Ah, here’s an unreadable one.” She passed it to Terlu.

Terlu started a pile for each type of paper, while Yarrow cleaned around her. Wordlessly, he lifted up the stack and dusted underneath it, and then he cleaned a stool for her to sit on. Perching on it, she continued examining the pages, while Lotti sorted.

Yarrow began to hum to himself as he cleaned, which was more than a little surprising to hear. He didn’t seem like the humming type, but she liked it. It made the workroom feel more alive. It also helped that the stove was beginning to pump out heat.

As they continued to work, she began to feel more and more convinced that she was doing the right thing. This wasn’t a terrible, horrible mistake that was going to lead to her being re-statue-ified. It’s the right thing to do.

Outside, the wind picked up, and she heard it whistle through the pine trees.

She was grateful for the crackling fire inside the stove and for the light from the lanterns.

As she studied the pages that Lotti passed to her, she began to notice a pattern.

It wasn’t so much that she recognized the language. It was—

“It’s a code,” she said out loud.

Yarrow looked over from the bookshelf, where he was straightening volumes.

Lotti was trying to knock away a smudge of soil she’d left on one of the papers.

“A code?” the rose said. “Oh, that makes sense. He did worry all the time that people would misuse his spells. I don’t know what he thought they’d do, specifically, or who ‘they’ were, but it was one of his favorite rants. ”

Now that Terlu knew what she was looking at, the arrangement of letters made much more sense. She still couldn’t read it, of course, but she understood why she couldn’t read it. “He wrote his spells and his notes on spells in code.”

She glanced over at the pile of burnt pages.

Any spell he hadn’t written in code he must have burned.

Wow, that was… cautious of him. But it did match what Lotti had said about him—he hadn’t started out like the kind of person who would put his notes into code, but by the end, he’d become one.

Something had changed him, and what remained in his workroom was the detritus of his fear.

“Can you crack it?” Yarrow asked.

That was an excellent question. “It depends what kind of code it is. If he did a simple one, such as shifting the alphabet, it will be easy, but I doubt he did anything that straightforward. If I can find a text that I recognize…” Perhaps a spell she knew, or even just a common phrase.

She could use that to crack the rest. “Or there might be the key to the code somewhere in this room. A codebook.” She didn’t know if Laiken would’ve written his secret down or trusted himself to remember it.

“Lotti, you knew him. Do you think Laiken would have created a codebook?”

Lotti considered it. “I never saw one. If he had one, wouldn’t he have had to consult it?”

Excellent point. “If that’s true, then it has to be the kind of code that isn’t impossible to remember, which means it won’t be impossible to crack.

” She felt more and more excited. She hadn’t had a puzzle like this to unravel in…

Well, she had no idea how long. Certainly not since the last time she was flesh.

“I need to find more examples.” With enough texts to compare, it should be possible.

All three of them set to work:

Yarrow piled papers and journals into a stack, combing the workroom to find more, while Lotti scanned through them, dismissing most to the “useless” pile and the rest to the “possibly not hopeless” pile. Perched on her stool, Terlu studied the growing number of examples written in code.

Outside, the night deepened. Moonlight glistened on the snow, making the windows of the workroom almost seem to glow a magical pale blue.

The crackle of the fire was louder than the wind outside, and Terlu thought despite being as far from the Great Library as she’d ever been, this was what she’d imagined being a librarian would be like: sorting through texts in the companionship of others who cared just as much as she did.

When Lotti began to sing in a voice that sounded as sweet as water in a stream, Terlu thought it was just perfect. Yarrow hummed in harmony with her, his voice as deep as the sea. The fire continued to crackle, and Terlu worked on into the late hours of the night.