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“Do you have a name?” Terlu asked the winged cat.

He didn’t answer, of course. She wasn’t surprised.

She’d never heard of a talking winged cat.

She’d read a travelogue once about a distant island that was rumored to have a breed of talking lizards.

The explorer had claimed they were prophetic, but he’d also devoted an entire chapter to the glories of a type of hallucinogenic mushroom so his other claims were considered suspect.

“Is there someone around here who feeds you?” she asked. “You don’t seem feral.”

The cat was contorting himself so that she could pet beneath his wings. In her experience, strays were never this friendly… unless he’d been raised with humans and then abandoned? If so, that would explain why he was so desperate for cuddles.

“I know how you feel,” she told him. “That’s me too.”

That was the whole reason she’d cast the spell that destroyed her life in the first place: she’d been lonely.

It was that simple. And that pathetic, she thought.

She had believed that a position at the library would mean helping researchers find obscure bits of knowledge, educating curious patrons, and sharing her favorite books with like-minded colleagues.

She’d specifically requested and interviewed for a public-facing position only.

By the time she’d finished her training, though, the imperial laws regarding magic had tightened even more, restricting the vast majority of the volumes in the Great Library.

Only the most elite sorcerers were to be granted access to the spellbooks and related materials, and Terlu wasn’t senior enough to be assigned to those luminaries.

With apologies from the beleaguered librarian in charge of the second floor, Terlu had been reassigned to the stacks, where she was lucky if she saw another soul once a week, and then only briefly.

The library, as a rule, did not attract social beings.

Terlu was good at many things: she’d excelled at all her classes and proven herself to be a very organized and efficient researcher—her professors had universally recommended her for the librarian position when she’d asked for references.

She spoke nine living languages and could read six extinct ones, including the complex and highly nuanced First Language, plus she was fluent in several dialects used by the exclusively seafaring clans of the outer sea.

She could also bake an excellent blueberry pie (thanks to a cookbook she’d found in the library), play an eight-string guitar (at least a few primary chords), and sketch a reasonable facsimile of whatever she was looking at.

But she was not good at being alone.

She liked to talk, she liked to listen, and she wasn’t interested in listening to herself talk.

She was the kind of person who could walk into a shop and know everyone’s stories, from the customers to the stockers to their cousins twice-removed, by the time she walked out with a tub of butter and a half-dozen eggs.

This was not a useful skill, however, in the empty and quiet library stacks, and it wasn’t useful inside an abandoned greenhouse either.

I’m not alone here. There’s the cat.

“How about we look around and see if we can find anyone?” Terlu asked the cat. “And maybe see if they have something to eat?”

Now that she was warm and mostly dry, she noticed she was hungry. In fact, “hungry” felt like a massive understatement. Her stomach was writhing as if it wanted to punch all her other organs. Scooping the cat in her arms, Terlu stood.

The cat promptly squirmed out of her arms, fluffed his wings, and then climbed up onto her shoulder.

She tensed, hunching her back, unsure of what he was doing and how he could possibly balance there.

He flopped around her neck so that his front paws draped over her left shoulder and his hind paws draped over her right.

She laughed as she straightened, her new furry scarf snug around her neck. “Aren’t cats supposed to be aloof?” She loved that he wasn’t.

He yawned in her ear.

“Any suggestions for which way to go?” Several paths split from the white spiral stove and its toasty blue bench, disappearing into the greenery as they curved out of sight.

One led back to the door she’d come through, but any of the others could lead to help and (hopefully) an explanation.

Perhaps there was a grand house associated with this greenhouse.

Or even a village. She wouldn’t know until she looked, and she had zero interest in sitting around, waiting for someone to come looking for her, especially after her experience with nearly freezing outside in the snowy woods. “How about left?”

As if in answer, he swatted her face with his tail. She decided that was a yes.

She started down the gravel path between wide-leaf plants.

Orange-and-blue flowers grew on either side of her, their petals shaped like bird wings.

Other plants leaned above the path as it curved and wound between their stalks.

After a few twists, though, the walkway ended in a circle with an empty bird cage in the center, its door wide open.

Ornate with jeweled flourishes, it looked large enough to hold a peacock. “Your former lunch?” she asked the cat.

Terlu heard a flutter above her, and she looked up. Perched in the rafters was a bird with flowers growing out of its feathers. Roses cascaded from its tail, a lilac sprig sprouted from its head, and bluebells coated its wings.

“Not lunch,” Terlu said, “for either of us.”

The flower bird opened its mouth and sang a trill like a soprano’s aria. Even more remarkable, with the song came the delicate scent of a just-bloomed flower.

“Beautiful,” she said.

The winged cat swatted her cheek with his tail, as if offended she was admiring another creature. She grinned and reached up to pet his chin.

Returning to the white stove, Terlu tried another direction, and her second-choice path meandered for longer through the thick greenery before ending in a glass door rimmed with fancy ironwork. “See, I knew it had to lead somewhere.”

She opened the latch and went inside… into another equally large greenhouse.

This second greenhouse was so thick with humidity that the glass walls dripped with moisture. Sweat pooled in Terlu’s armpits, and she was grateful her tunic was thin. The air felt heavy, and it was an effort to fill her lungs.

She looked up and squinted at the top of the greenhouse.

Cradled beneath its glass peak was an orb that looked to be made of molten gold.

An imitation sun, it swam with every shade of yellow, from pale lemon to deep amber.

Circling it were dragonflies with sparkling diamond-like bodies and golden wings.

They danced together in pairs and trios in a musicless promenade.

Beneath the false sun and its insect dancers, the plants in this room smelled like stew, in particular one with cabbages that had been allowed to simmer for too many hours.

She wrinkled her nose, and the cat sneezed.

He shifted, tickling her neck with his feathers, as he sat upright on her left shoulder.

“Yeah, I think it stinks too,” she said to him.

The flowers, though, were extraordinary: six-foot scarlet blooms shaped like trumpets, sprays of yellow heart-shaped blossoms, and deep purple flowers with thorns as long as her arm.

Most grew directly in beds of soil, but a few cascaded from pots.

Oblivious to the heat, more diamond dragonflies flitted between them, each exquisite, twinkling as they flew, drawn to the lurid blossoms.

Holding her sleeve over her nose, Terlu hurried through the swampy greenhouse.

Moss and vines choked every inch of the plant beds, and she heard water dripping and trickling all around her.

The gravel was soggy beneath her feet, and frequently she had to hop over puddles.

But the path was straight and soon she and the cat reached the door on the opposite side, framed by two more scarlet trumpet flowers. She opened it and plunged through.

Greenhouse number three was full of ferns.

It smelled like a summer forest and was far cooler than the prior room, with fans that rotated overhead instead of a miniature sun.

Even the colors were more restful: soft, almost furry green in every direction.

“Much better,” Terlu said, and the no-longer-overheated winged cat flopped bonelessly around her neck as if in full agreement.

She walked farther in along a path made of gray and blue slate of various shades.

Like in the prior rooms, it split into multiple branches that were swallowed by greenery.

On the side of every path were more and more ferns.

She’d never imagined the world held this many different varieties of ferns: fluffy fronds and pointy fronds and red ones and yellow-spotted ones and…

Goodness, it was an excessive number of ferns.

Terlu tried calling out again, just in case. “Hello? Is anyone here?”

She didn’t expect an answer, and she didn’t get one.

The silence pressed in on her, and she felt herself gulping for air. You’re okay, she told herself. You’ll find someone. Reaching up, Terlu stroked the cat’s neck. There had to be someone here, at least to feed the cat.

She kept to the widest route, hoping it would lead to the exit. Above her, two fans whooshed softly, drowning out the soft patter of the falling snow.