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It took Terlu another three days and many honey cakes to unravel the code.

On the morning of the third day, Yarrow joined her and Lotti in the workroom and placed a mug beside Terlu. She inhaled chocolate so rich that all unrelated thoughts flew out the window. “Did you make this?”

He nodded. “The trick is knowing when to harvest the cocoa pods.”

She cradled the mug in both hands, and the warmth sank into her palms. She breathed in the chocolaty steam and thought she’d never smelled anything so wonderful. He’d sprinkled bits of hazelnut on top, and ooh, was that a swirl of caramel? Yes, it was.

“You then have to ferment the beans,” he said. “I wrap them in banana leaves to ferment, then roast them, shell them—you want just the nibs—and grind them.”

She took a sip.

It was like drinking a sunset, where the sun had stained the clouds the deepest, richest rose. Molten sunshine was dripping down her throat.

“The sweetness comes from sugarcane syrup,” he offered. “You have to boil it down, strain the fibers out, then boil it some more until it’s almost but not quite caramelized. Made a bunch of batches last winter.”

“You grow the sugarcane as well?” She took another sip, closed her eyes, and let the warm chocolate spread through her. It felt as if her blood had been replaced by chocolate. “Wow,” she said, opening her eyes to see Yarrow watching her reaction.

“Every type of plant in the Crescent Islands grows here.” Then his smile faded and his shoulders slumped as he added, “Or used to, before the greenhouses began to fail.”

Terlu wished she could say she knew how to fix everything, it would all be fine, and she had just the right magic spell that was guaranteed to work to solve all his problems and make the pain in his voice vanish, but fixing greenhouses that had been drenched in enchantments…

that was magic so far beyond her it wasn’t even in the realm of possible.

She had a single goal: waking the sentient plants, and she had made progress on that. “So I think I know—”

Lotti jumped in. “You know how to restore my friends?”

“Maybe.” Setting aside the hot chocolate reluctantly, she picked up a notebook and showed them the page she’d been studying.

“This is one of the entries he made from around the time that Lotti went to sleep. It’s not that the spell that created them has to be recast—they’re still sentient.

They’re just asleep, as Lotti said. I worried that she was being euphemistic, but it’s the literal truth. ”

“Knew it!” Lotti said. “They’re still them.”

“It seems that after he let you fall dormant, Laiken began looking for ways to encourage the other sentient plants to sleep too.” She kept her tone light, but her word choice was deliberate.

After reconstructing Laiken’s journals that held his notes on the sentient plants, Terlu was certain her interpretation was correct: the sorcerer had deliberately let her wither.

“Wait, excuse me, no.” Lotti hopped across the table to the journal. “He didn’t let me fall dormant. It was an accident that I fell asleep. He forgot to water me. I don’t need much, and he lost track of days. He’d gotten more confused by then.”

Not from what his journal said. He’d kept meticulous notes, in code: he’d been stretching how long the little rose could go between waterings.

He’d wanted her to be dormant. Terlu pushed on.

“But you’re the only one of the sentient plants who could become dormant naturally.

If he just stopped watering the others, they’d die, and that’s not what he wanted.

So he experimented with them, after he’d reassured himself that you could survive your hibernation unharmed.

As near as I can tell, he started his experiments about fifty years ago? ” She glanced at Yarrow, who nodded.

The rose shook, and she wrapped her petals tighter together into a quivering bud. “No. You’re wrong. Laiken loved me. He loved all of us!”

Perhaps he did love her, in his own way.

“I think he wanted to protect you. He thought if you were asleep, you’d be safe.

If you were all asleep…” It was the kindest explanation for why Laiken had allowed Lotti to shrivel and fall into what was essentially a coma when he could have simply cared for her.

Other explanations were much more cruel.

Gently, Terlu asked, “What do you remember of that time, before you fell asleep?”

“He was absent a lot,” Lotti said, still closed into a bud. “Busy. With the greenhouses.”

“He’d already begun to dismiss gardeners by then,” Yarrow spoke up.

“My father said Belde was on its way to becoming home to a small village about fifty years ago, but Laiken didn’t want that.

He refused to allow new people to settle here, and he began to require that gardeners leave if they wished to marry, rather than allow their spouses to settle here, which was a change from earlier years, when my father was a child.

As time went on, the sorcerer did more and more himself and kept more and more to himself. ”

“He forgot about me,” Lotti insisted. “It wasn’t deliberate. I refuse to believe that.”

“It could have been an accident with you,” Terlu agreed.

Who was she to say? She hadn’t been there.

The only insight she had was what the sorcerer had written down.

Let the rose keep idolizing her creator, if she wanted to.

She didn’t need to face her past or confront the truth or any of that if all it was going to do was hurt her—there was no point in unnecessary pain.

None of them could change what happened; all they could do was shape what happened next.

Terlu pointed to a spell. “Regardless, this is how he made the others sleep. It took him a number of years to perfect the spell, but eventually he did.”

Yarrow bent over her to look at the page. She felt his warm breath on her cheek. His breath smelled like sugary chocolate. “So, you’re saying they’re in an enchanted sleep?”

“Essentially, yes,” Terlu said. “I’ve identified the spell he used, and, I think, the counterspell, though he never tested it so I don’t know if—”

Lotti flapped her leaves in alarm. “You think ? You don’t know ? And what do you mean ‘he never tested it’? Does that mean you’d be trying a new untested spell on my friends? What if you make it worse?”

She’d thought about that. “There isn’t much worse than the not-life they’re in.”

“How do you know what they’re—oh.” Lotti closed her petals into a bud, this time in embarrassment. “Sorry. I forgot. Your statue phase. It’s just… What if the spell goes wrong?”

Statue phase. What a way to describe her lost years.

“It’s a risk,” Terlu said. She looked at Yarrow, into his deep-as-the-sea eyes.

He was so close that she felt like she could see every emotion within him: hope, fear, pity, pain, sorrow—but what won was hope.

“I could try this, and the plants might die. Or transform. There are a thousand ways a spell can go wrong. It’s why the emperor made it illegal for anyone but a trained and approved sorcerer to work magic.

But I’ve been studying this spell. I understand what the words are doing.

” It was all about the language—the syllables conveyed the intent, and the sentences executed the command.

That’s what magic was: words that brought thought to life.

And Terlu was very, very good with words—or at least with words like this.

She couldn’t guarantee that the right ones were going to come out of her mouth in a random conversation, but this…

this she felt confident about. Mostly confident. Pretty confident.

“I trust you,” Yarrow said.

That was the most beautiful sentence she’d ever heard anyone utter.

Blushing magenta, Terlu turned back to the page.

“It requires specific ingredients.” She showed him the list she’d made: an apple blossom bud, an acorn that hadn’t sprouted, pollen from a daffodil, as well as another half-dozen plant-based items that she was only half-certain she knew what they were, but one hundred percent certain that Yarrow did.

“Got it.”

For anyone else, any where else, it wouldn’t have been possible, especially in winter, but for Yarrow, in this place…

She wondered if that was why the sorcerer had created the greenhouse in the first place, to have access to anything he’d need for his spells.

I don’t think so. From his notes, he didn’t seem to have been amassing power for any other purpose than tending the plants, but if he’d wanted to…

Perhaps that was what had made him so paranoid, knowledge of what other sorcerers could do with these resources if they had access to them.

She wondered if the emperor had known what a jewel was hidden away here.

Had Rijes Velk realized how valuable this place was when she decided to answer Yarrow’s letter?

Or had she just seen a problem that required a solution?

So many wonderful spells could be cast with the plants on this island. Had Laiken ever paused to consider the good that he could have done if he’d opened his greenhouses to the world, instead of trying so hard to isolate them?

She supposed that was the question: How much did you trust people to do the right thing?

Yarrow trusts me.

She wasn’t going to let him down.

“I’ll have all of this within an hour,” Yarrow promised, taking the ingredient list. He nodded at the mug. “Drink your chocolate before it chills.”

Less than an hour later, the three of them met by the shelves of sleeping plants.

Enchanted sleep, Terlu thought. It sounds kinder than statue-ified, but is it?

She doubted it. She wondered if they dreamed and, if so, what plants dreamed about.

She only remembered her dreams in fragments—each filled with all that she’d lost.