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Birch sighed heavily. “I am doing a terrible job of apologizing.”

“Yes, you are. I told you—I don’t need you to say any of this. I don’t blame you for leaving. You were sick. You couldn’t stay.”

“You blame me for not coming back.”

“I don’t blame you for that.” Yarrow slammed the supply box shut. “I blame you for everything before that.” He stalked out of the greenhouse without a backward look.

Birch slowed when he reached Terlu. “I don’t know how to fix this.”

She didn’t know what to tell him. Maybe Yarrow needed time?

Or maybe he needed space? Or maybe he needed the opposite.

She tried to think of something helpful to say.

It sounded as if Birch wanted to make things right but had no idea how to do so.

She knew that feeling. Gently, she asked, “Are you apologizing for his sake or your own?”

“I just want things back the way they were.”

“Maybe they weren’t great the way they were?

” Terlu said. She was aware this wasn’t her conversation to have, and she didn’t want to accidentally make anything worse.

On the other hand, there wasn’t much worse she could make it.

Yarrow had already left. “He hasn’t told me much about his childhood, but there was one story, about his uncle Rorick and a ‘game’ where he was abandoned in the caves? ”

Birch blinked. “That? He was fine.”

“He was a kid, and he was scared.”

He dismissed it. “It was a long time ago. He can’t still be angry about that.”

Terlu tilted her head and stared at him. Yarrow wasn’t still angry about the cave specifically, but he clearly saw it as representative of how he’d been treated. Abandoned, over and over.

“I can apologize for that, but I think he’s overreacting,” Birch said. “He was always overdramatic. In fact, that’s exactly what we were trying to fix. We wanted to teach him to be more self-reliant.”

Yarrow? Overdramatic? It wasn’t the word she would have ever applied to someone who communicated primarily through grunts and shrugs.

“You taught him he can’t trust the people who are supposed to love him,” Terlu said, continuing to keep her voice as gentle as she could when what she really wanted to do was shake his shoulders until he understood he’d caused pain.

Birch looked shocked. “It was a rite of passage. We celebrated when he made it out.”

She shrugged, Yarrow-like. “Not everyone sees the same event the same way. Laiken thought he was doing the right thing for those he loved too.”

Birch scowled. “I’m nothing like Laiken.”

She didn’t want to be arguing with Yarrow’s father, especially without knowing all of what Yarrow felt, and she’d never even met Laiken, besides the remnant that was his ghost and the words he’d left in his notebooks. “You could ask Yarrow what he wants.”

“Ask him? Just… ask him?”

She shrugged again.

“Huh.”

After marking the door of the finished room, they followed Yarrow into the next greenhouse, where he was scowling at both of them.

“Yarrow…” Birch began.

Ignoring him, Yarrow leveled a finger at Terlu. “I am not a broken spell. You need to stop trying to fix this,” he growled at her before he pivoted and stomped toward the next greenhouse door.

Okay, maybe he is a little overdramatic.

He had his family back. He had a chance to be with them and make up for lost time.

On the other hand, they’d hurt him, especially his father, and she had yet to hear a real apology from Birch.

He hadn’t shown any sign of trying to understand how Yarrow felt, nor had he made any real attempt to change.

It wasn’t just about what happened in the cave beneath the island—

Terlu halted as an idea occurred to her. “Yarrow? Stop!”

“I don’t want to talk.” But he halted at the door and listened.

“The caves, the ones you were left in, the ones like a maze,” Terlu said, “they run beneath the greenhouses, don’t they?

” She remembered what she’d noticed about the cracks in the last dying greenhouse: they started at the point where the glass met the earth.

Whatever mangled spell broke the glass and ripped through the enchantments… it came from below .

Birch answered her. “They do. The whole island is riddled with them.”

Yarrow turned back toward her. “You think—”

“Yes,” Terlu said. “I do.”

Only a few minutes later, the three of them bundled in coats and trudged out into the snow. It fell in tiny, dry flakes, like a mist in the sky. Flakes landed on her eyelashes. Yarrow was speckled in flecks within seconds.

“I should be the one to go,” Birch said.

Yarrow snorted. “No.”

“As your girlfriend has very recently pointed out, I owe it to you.”

“You owe it to me to tell the others if we don’t come back,” Yarrow said. “Send someone in after us if we don’t return by sunset. Do what I need, not what you think I need, for once.” He headed for their cottage, saying to Terlu, “We aren’t going without supplies. Water. Food.”

He did not, Terlu noticed, comment on the word “girlfriend.” It was, she decided, not the time to discuss it, but she held the word tight.

“How about we bring string? So we can unspool it and find our way out?” She’d read a story once about a child who used a string to find his way home through a dark and twisty forest, filled with shadowy monsters.

Now that she thought about it, it was an old Ginian folktale that she’d read when she first learned the language.

It made sense they’d have stories about navigating mazes.

To his father, Yarrow said, “Can you find us a spool of string?”

“I can do that,” Birch said, clearly relieved to have been given a task.

As he trotted away, barely using his cane, Terlu and Yarrow let themselves into the cottage. Warmth and the lingering smell of baked honey cakes curled around them. Both of them unbuttoned their coats, and then he bustled to the kitchen counter.

“You don’t need to be the one to do this,” she said. “He’s right about that. It’s not like you know the caves better than other people. We could send your uncle Rorick. It would be appropriate.”

His lips quirked. “Tempting. But I need to see this through. As you said, these are my greenhouses.” Searching through a cabinet, he located a water bottle.

“Have you been in the caves since then?” Terlu asked.

“Has anyone? Is there a map?” She hadn’t seen one in Laiken’s notes, but that could have been because he was paranoid enough to not want anyone to follow him to where he cast the spell.

He most likely had known every inch of this island without needing any notes.

If we do this… if it works… if I somehow have the time…

I am making maps of every inch of this island.

And she’d make notes about all of it too. Proper notes, not in code.

“No map. And I only returned once. I didn’t stay.” Yarrow filled the bottle with water and tucked it into a bag. “You don’t need to come with me.”

“Obviously I am. You keep thinking you need to do things alone, and you don’t. Anyway, I had an idea.” She crossed to the cabinets and the icebox and added several jars of honey and a pot of honey butter to Yarrow’s bag. “I think we should bring some dragons.”

He laughed. “What? Why?”

“They know mazes, and they know treasure.”

“You think they’d understand what we wanted?”

“I think they’d be happy to exchange treasure for honey, and I think they’d see shells hidden in a cave as treasure. I don’t know if they’ll want to leave their sunflowers, but we could ask.” You never knew who was willing to help if you didn’t ask.

“You always surprise me,” Yarrow said.

Basking in the praise, she grinned at him.

He grinned back.

“All right, it’s a plan,” Terlu said. “We’ll bring snacks, water, lanterns, string, and dragons. And we won’t stop until we’ve saved Belde.”