Page 48

At dawn, Terlu woke to the smell of honey cake. She blinked open her eyes to see six cakes already cooling on racks on the table, while Yarrow mixed batter for another batch.

“How many?” he asked.

“What?” Sitting up, she patted at her hair, which was poking out at odd angles.

“One for every three people, or one for every two? They’ll be hungry.”

“You’re making them all breakfast?” Of course he was. She thought of how he’d fed her, set up a bed for her, let her live with him, even before he knew her. That was what he did: he claimed not to care and then he did something like this that proved the opposite. She smiled.

“Nine cakes?” he guessed.

That was a lot of cake. Each tin made a loaf. “If you can manage that many, they can eat the leftovers for lunch as well.”

He nodded. “Will you take them?”

“Of course.”

“I can’t.”

“I know. It’s okay. I’d be happy to. Let me just get dressed.” She could take messages and deliver honey cakes and whatever as long as he wanted. Sure, maybe it wasn’t the healthiest way to handle it, but if he wasn’t ready, then he wasn’t ready.

Besides, she wasn’t in any kind of position to give advice on how to handle one’s family, given that she hadn’t even told her family she was alive.

“The last batch still have to bake, so take your time,” Yarrow said.

“I can help—”

He waved her off and then poured the batter into tins. “I’ll make twelve. Ten for them, one for us, and one for the dragons in the maze. They’ll like that, won’t they?”

“Yes, they’ll absolutely like that.” Terlu didn’t specify which “they” she meant, but it didn’t matter since she meant all of them. She slid out of bed and stepped over Emeral, who was lounging by the hearth.

By the time she was clean and dressed in her favorite soft pants and a warm top that cuddled her curves, Yarrow was stirring rose petals and sugar into a pot to make rose tea while the honey cakes baked. Without looking at her, he said, “I cut you a slice.”

She spotted a wedge of honey cake on a plate with a dollop of jam beside it. Just one plate and one fork. “Did you eat?”

“Not hungry.”

“Did you sleep?”

He shrugged.

“Do you want to talk or not talk?” Terlu asked.

Sitting, she dipped a bite of the honey cake in the jam and popped it into her mouth—sweet and airy with a tartness from the lemon-raspberry jam.

She almost let out a little moan. It made her feel as if she’d been dipped in sugar.

She had sugar for blood and raspberry for breath.

Shaking herself, she focused again on Yarrow.

He had no idea of the effect of his baking.

“I’ll listen, whenever you want to talk. But you don’t have to.”

If what he needed to do was bake, she absolutely had no objections.

Yarrow wrapped the finished cakes in cloth napkins.

Finishing, he stared at them and then spoke.

“When I was a kid, my uncle Rorick decided I needed to be toughened up. He said I was too dependent on my father, and if I was going to be a contributing citizen of the Crescent Islands Empire and, more importantly in his mind, the Greenhouse of Belde, then I needed to learn self-reliance.”

She studied his face. He was focused on the wrapped cakes as if seeing something else entirely. This isn’t going to be a good story.

“He said we were playing a game, and if I found my way back home, I’d win,” Yarrow said.

“He convinced me to put on a blindfold, and he led me for what felt like miles. He told me to count to ten, then remove the blindfold. When I did, I was alone in the dark. Pitch dark. I’d thought he was bringing me to a greenhouse on the opposite side of the island.

But instead he brought me into the caves beneath the island.

And he left me. Without light, without food, without water except what I could lick from the walls. ” He fell quiet. The tea began to boil.

“Did you find your way out?” Surely, his uncle had come back for him. Or maybe he hadn’t been far from the entrance.

“Three days. Never liked mazes after that. Or caves.”

Three days, under the earth, alone in the darkness, with no food and no water. She shivered. “How old were you?”

“Nine.”

“Nine years old, and no one came to find you? What about your parents?”

He shook his head. “My mom was years gone by then, and my dad… I’m told my grandmother fought with my father and Uncle Rorick to send a search party, but they refused. Up until the very end, I thought they’d come for me. It was supposed to be a game. An afternoon.”

She wanted to cross to him and hug him. Or march over to Birch and Rorick and yell at them loudly with very pointed vocabulary.

“When I got back, I asked my father why he didn’t come for me.” Yarrow poured the rose tea steadily and calmly but still without looking at Terlu. “He said he had work to do.”

“I’m so sorry, Yarrow.” I’d come for you, she wanted to say. She took her cup, the tea warming her hands. She breathed in the sweet steam. “That wasn’t right, what he did. You were a child. Even if you hadn’t been… I’m sorry.”

He nodded abruptly. He looked so tense that she thought he’d shatter if he stepped out into the wind. He didn’t touch his tea. “If they ask why I didn’t bring the cakes myself…”

“I’ll tell them you have work to do.”

He almost smiled.

Alone, Terlu carried the honey cakes and the kettle of tea down the snowy road to the sorcerer’s workroom.

She listened to the soft whoosh of wind over the snow.

Overhead, the sky was a cloudless blue, and the air smelled of pine and sea.

In the distance, she heard cheerful voices and the echoing ring of a hammer.

Yarrow’s relatives were swarming over the blue cottage.

Terlu called to them, “So you know, that one”—she pointed up the road at the first cottage she’d visited—“has feral gryphons. Also, I brought breakfast.”

Grinning, a woman with gold-and-black hair hurried over—Yarrow’s sister, Rowan.

Terlu recognized her instantly from the prior day.

She had the same cheekbones as Yarrow but a wider smile.

She was wearing a heavy brown coat over sturdy work clothes.

She’d tied back her braids today with a purple ribbon.

“You are a gift. And yes, we know about the gryphons. That was our late Aunt Misla’s house, and she confessed before she passed that she’d left cake in the cabinets, which was a crime against cake and an invitation for a feral flock—wild gryphons have a sweet tooth. You’re Terlu Perna, yes?”

“Yes, and you’re Rowan? Welcome home.” She remembered Yarrow had said the blue cottage, the one she’d set her sights on before she knew Yarrow would welcome her into his own cottage, was his sister’s.

It was also the one that would be easiest to make livable, perhaps because it hadn’t sat abandoned for as many years.

She noted the relatives seemed to have helped themselves to Yarrow’s tools and supplies and wondered what he’d thought of that.

Probably fine with it, so long as he didn’t have to talk with them. “Hope you slept all right.”

“Oh, yeah, slept like a hibernating bear. The upstairs folk had a restless night, due to the ghost, but we’ll get the cottages back into shipshape in no time.

” Rowan relieved Terlu of the kettle. “Come, let’s bring it back to the workroom.

Most of the others are there, getting themselves up and ready. Hey, Ambrel! Terlu brought breakfast!”

Ambrel trotted toward them. She was shorter than Rowan and had sky-blue skin and an apple-round face. She wore a puffy blouse with embroidered flowers underneath a blue coat. She’d already collected sawdust all over the coat.

“My wife, Ambrel,” Rowan introduced her.

Terlu greeted her. “We met yesterday, but I— Ghost, did you say?”

“The old sorcerer, Laiken,” Rowan said. “Not a surprise. He was both magical and unhappy, exactly the type to leave a ghost behind.”

“ I was surprised,” Ambrel said.

Rowan shrugged—a move so identical to her brother Yarrow that Terlu felt her eyes bulge as she stared at her. “He’s harmless. Mostly just moans.”

“He could be singing arias, and I still wouldn’t want to live there,” Ambrel said.

Laiken’s ghost was upstairs from his workroom?

She’d thought it felt haunted, but she hadn’t made the leap to realize it was actually haunted.

She remembered how shadowy and creepy it had felt and how she hadn’t wanted to go upstairs since the first time she climbed the stairs—she’d even thought to herself that she wouldn’t be surprised if his despair had lingered, but she hadn’t made the leap to thinking that he himself had.

It might have been useful to know his ghost was still in residence.

“Can he communicate?” If he could tell her what spells to use and which were purely experimental or, worse, dangerously flawed…

“You’ve never met a ghost before, have you?

” Rowan said, with just enough of an air of tiredness that Terlu was certain she had met at least one.

As far as Terlu knew, they weren’t very common.

She wondered what stories lay behind that tone of voice.

“They’re bundles of leftover emotions. Whatever was strongest while they were alive. No real awareness or thought process.”

“Just a whole lot of sad leaking all over the place,” Ambrel said.

Rowan wrapped her arm around her wife’s waist. “Which is why I convinced everyone to fix up my cottage first,” she said to Ambrel. “So it can be our cottage.”

“It’s a lovely cottage,” Ambrel said. “Ghost-free and gryphon-free.”