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Yarrow hushed her.

“That’s it,” Terlu said. “It may not be enough, without Laiken’s full—”

The glass crackled. She watched as the paste began to glow a warm, sunny amber. It bubbled as it liquefied and then dissolved into the glass, spreading as a yellow haze.

The crack in the glass knit itself together as the yellow spread and dissolved. In minutes, the glass was smooth and clear. Terlu laid her hand on it. It tingled beneath her palm.

It was only a single pane. But it worked.

She grinned and turned around. “I know it’s not flashy or exciting, and it’s just a single crack out of thousands, tens of thousands, and at this rate, it will take weeks of work, many weeks, given the number of dead greenhouses, but—”

“It’s amazing,” Yarrow said firmly.

Terlu felt herself start to blush.

He added, “You’re amazing.”

She blushed harder. “If we make more paste—”

Yarrow nodded and began portioning out more ingredients into the mortar and pestle. Terlu tilted her head back and scanned the greenhouse—there were a countless number of cracks that ran through every pane up to the ceiling. “Lotti, how do you feel about climbing?”

“I’m an excellent climber.”

“Could you reach the cracks in the ceiling?”

“Just watch me.”

They set to work: Yarrow creating the paste, Lotti scampering up the walls of the greenhouse to smear it on the cracks, and Terlu reciting the spell for each one.

It’s working!

She started in on the next spell and tripped over a syllable, pronouncing “nessava” as “nessavara.” Instead of sealing the crack, it expanded it—the crack spread like the veins of a leaf.

Lotti, hanging upside down from a rafter, turned her petals toward her.

If the rose had had eyes, it would have been a glare.

Concentrating harder, Terlu repeated the spell.

She didn’t make any more mistakes.

After three nonstop hours of spellcasting, Terlu felt as if she’d been swallowing sand. Unfortunately, each itineration of the spell only healed a bit of broken glass at a time and so she’d had to recite the spell again and again. “Tea?” she croaked.

From the rafters, Lotti called, “I could use a break too, and a soak.”

Yarrow looked up, and she could tell he was counting the remaining cracks.

They’d barely done a sixth of one greenhouse.

At this pace… It’s not fast enough. She knew he was thinking it too, but he didn’t say it.

“We’re nearly out of ingredients,” he said instead. “It’s a good time to take a break.”

They trooped back through the dead greenhouses until they reached the warmth of the rose room. The sweet scent curled around them. While Terlu plopped down onto the edge of a flower bed framed by pink roses, Yarrow filled a bucket of water and carried it back to Lotti.

The resurrection rose lowered herself into the bucket with a sigh, holding on to the edge with her leaves and dunking her roots into the water. “Ah, that’s nice.”

“How much of the ingredients do we have left?” Terlu’s voice broke on the word “ingredients.” She swallowed to ease it.

“Rest your voice,” Yarrow said. He crossed to the enchanted stove in the center of the greenhouse and pulled out a kettle to boil. “Rose tea?”

She nodded but didn’t speak.

She sat in silence while Yarrow bustled around the greenhouse, pruning random rosebushes as he waited for the kettle to boil. Lotti soaked in silence as well, dipped in the bucket. From a nearby greenhouse, Terlu heard the faint sound of off-pitch singing.

When the kettle whistled, Yarrow prepared the tea, using rose hips and petals. He carried a mug over to her, and Terlu opened her mouth to thank him.

He put his fingers to her lips. “Rest.”

She was tempted to kiss his fingers, but he removed them too fast, and she wasn’t sure how he’d react if she did anyway.

Holding the mug under her nose, Terlu breathed in the steam.

It smelled heavily of roses, and perhaps another spice?

She didn’t know what he’d added to it, and it wasn’t worth using her vocal cords to ask.

She sipped the tea and then winced as a faraway singer hit a note that was more screech than song.

“Ugh, can’t someone stop them?” Lotti asked.

As another plant shrieked in dubious harmony, Terlu took another sip of tea and felt it scald the back of her throat, soothing it as it stung.

A few more sips later, and she began to feel better.

She wasn’t sure, though, how many hours she could do this for, if her voice felt so tired after just a quarter of one greenhouse.

“We need help,” she said. It came out scratchy.

She swallowed and tried again. “We can’t do it with just the three of us. ”

“You sent the letter,” Yarrow said. “No one replied. Either they didn’t want to return or they couldn’t. The fact is no one’s coming.”

“You don’t know that. It could just be a long journey.

” Or he could be right. Marin could have failed to find Yarrow’s relatives.

The chaos could have spread as far as wherever their florist shop was.

She didn’t say that out loud. It was equally likely the boat was just slow.

She was sticking with that explanation until proven otherwise.

“The fact is we don’t know if anyone’s coming or not. ”

He snorted.

“I was thinking of asking the plants.”

A grunt, but it was less skeptical. He was thinking about it.

Of course, enlisting all the sentient plants to help with casting illegal spells would absolutely be frowned upon.

But then, Terlu had already broken the law spectacularly by waking them, and then she’d compounded that by learning and casting a new spell multiple times.

How much worse would it be if she turned a dozen or so beings to a life of crime with her?

Yarrow and Lotti were already her accomplices, after all.

If an imperial investigator discovers what I’ve done here…

Hopefully, they were all too busy with the revolution to worry about one lowly ex-librarian on a distant, mostly abandoned island. If she were lucky, they’d been disbanded when the empire fell, though that seemed too much to hope for.

Regardless, she wasn’t going to stop helping now.

Perhaps there was a way, though, to keep the other plants innocent.

What if they merely gathered the ingredients and didn’t cast the actual spell…

? Of course that still left her repeating the spell a thousand times, which didn’t really solve the problem.

I should just ask them. Put the choice in their hands.

Or leaves. So long as she was clear about the risks…

“If it’s their choice…” Yarrow said, echoing her thoughts.

“I’ll talk to them,” Terlu decided.

“You might want to bring earplugs,” Lotti said.

Carrying her mug of rose tea, she opened the door between greenhouses and entered the room with the singing plants and trees.

She was swamped with a wave of sound—the lovely harmonies of the enchanted flowers, but above it a caterwauling that sounded like raccoons arguing over a tree. As for the sentient plants—

The ivy, Risa, was dangling from one of the rafters. They cradled the daisy in a loop of their vines and was swinging her like a child on the world’s most dangerous playground, while the daisy shrieked, “Higher!”

The fireweed, Nif, was spurting sparks into the air like he was attempting to emulate a fireworks display, while the flytrap, Sut, tried to catch the sparks between the lobes of his trap. The calla lily cheered them on.

In the center of the greenhouse, Dendy had his leaves raised, swaying them from side to side as he sang in his soothing, pleasant voice:

“In the morning, the skyyy is bluuue,

And the birds all caaall, ‘Coo-coo-coo,’

They flyyy so that they get a viewww

Of the ocean that’s alsooo bluuue…”

Sure, it was all a little circus-like, Terlu thought, but it wasn’t so terrible. Dendy had a nice voice, a deep baritone, while the enchanted plants crooned a chorus of—

Three of the other sentient plants chimed in, each of them off pitch in a different way. “Blue so blue!” The thistle joined in with a shrill arpeggio that did not match any note producible by any known instrument. Nearby, the delphinium warbled discordantly.

Terlu winced. I take it back. That’s terrible. “Um, Dendy?”

He kept singing while the polyfloral chorus harmonized (or more accurately failed to harmonize) with his melody:

“The fish beeelow swim in the stewww

Of the ocean that’s alsooo bluuue…”

She raised her voice. “Dendy?”

“Hmm?” He stopped singing and swaying. “Oh, heyyy, Terluuu. Wait. That also rhymes! Want me to sing a song about youuu and your eyes so bluuue?”

“They’re purple, and I’m sorry to interrupt your creative pursuits, but we could use your help, and the help of the other plants, if they’re willing.”

Nif shot a three-inch flame into the air, and the flytrap doused it.

“Ignore them,” Risa said. “Go on.”

She explained about the spell—how it repaired the cracks, but it was a painstakingly slow process.

They’d experimented with smearing more paste over cracks, but regardless of the amount of ingredients used, each utterance of the spell only seemed to work until it hit a fork in the crack, which meant that for a badly splintered pane, it needed to be repeated multiple times before it was smooth.

“It’s the first step to fixing the greenhouses.

If we can make the glass sound, then we can focus on how to insulate the greenhouse and then how to regulate the temperature, provide the water, and handle all the other necessities.

” She couldn’t, though, spend her time researching other essential spells if all she was doing for hours on end was sealing cracks in glass.

“It needs to be your choice, though,” Terlu continued.

“According to imperial law, only trained sorcerers are permitted to work magic. What I’m asking—well, I shouldn’t be asking at all.

It’s illegal, and if you’re caught, the consequences could be serious.

You absolutely should say no if you feel at all uncomfortable. ”

Breaking off their cacophony, the sentient plants began to whisper to one another. The enchanted trees and flowers that belonged to the room continued to croon, softly and sweetly. Risa lowered the daisy onto the floor, and the fireweed stomped out the last of his sparks.

“Think about it,” Terlu said, backing away. She did not want to pressure them into this decision. She could keep healing the cracks herself, if she had to. “You don’t have to decide right now—”

“I caaannot speak for the others,” Dendy said. “But it is a yes for meee.”

She cautioned, “There is a substantial risk—”

“Weee all saaaw the greenhouse die,” Dendy said. “If I caaan help, then of course I waaant to help.” The other plants crowded forward, all of them chiming in that they agreed with the philodendron.

The morning glory, Zyndia, rose up on her vine and proclaimed, “For light and life!”

The others cheered.

“For glory and love!” she cried.

More cheers.

Terlu smiled. She hadn’t expected this much enthusiasm. She’d thought maybe a handful… but all of them seemed adamant.

“For—” Zyndia began.

“That’s enough, dear,” the fern, Mirr, said. “But yes, we will help.”

“It’s not glamorous work,” Terlu warned all of them. “And it might take a while—there are a lot of failed greenhouses, and they each have hundreds, if not thousands, of cracks. You’d be risking your freedom, even your lives, for a tedious task.”

“A necessary taaask,” Dendy said. “Correct?”

“Well, yes, if the glass can’t be fixed, the greenhouses can’t be used,” Terlu said.

The ivy vine coiled around Terlu’s feet and wound up her calf to her knee. “Then we will do it,” Risa said. “It’s nice to be alive, but we also want to matter. Besides,” they added as they slithered down and coiled themself in a pile, “I hate singing.”