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Yarrow didn’t stride off to the caves on his own to prove that he needed no one but himself, which was a pleasant surprise. Instead, after accepting the spool of thread from his father with a grunt that resembled a thank-you, he followed Terlu to the sunflower maze.

He unlocked the puzzle door with ease. “After you.”

Stepping inside, Terlu held up the pot of honey butter. “Hello, little dragons?” she called.

Overhead, the false aurora rippled over the glass, while the tiny dragons flew like honeybees between the sunflowers. A shining red dragon chirped a greeting or an alert—she wasn’t sure which, but it sounded friendly enough.

Lifting the pot higher, she asked, “Want to come help us find a treasure?”

Yarrow began, “I don’t know that they can understand—”

Three dragons—the red one, a gold-and-black one, and an iridescent emerald one—darted toward her. Flapping their butterfly-like wings, they settled on her: one on each shoulder and the red one on her head, curled in her hair. “See?” Terlu said. “They want to come.”

With a touch of exasperation, Yarrow asked, “Does everyone like you?”

She laughed. “I can give you a list of people who don’t.”

“Then it’s a list of fools.”

She grinned at him again.

Together, they walked out of the greenhouse toward the dock.

Overhead, the snow had stopped, and the sky was now a cloudless blue that made the fresh-fallen snow sparkle like diamonds.

As they walked, she explained to the dragons where they were going and why, as well as what they hoped to find.

She couldn’t be certain they understood her, but they didn’t disappear into the woods in search of all the sparkles they could find, so perhaps they did understand. Or maybe they just liked the ride.

A half mile from the greenhouse, after the last cottage but before the sorcerer’s tower, Yarrow veered off the road in between the pine trees.

The snow had iced into a crust. Yarrow broke through it with each step, and Terlu followed behind, stretching her stride to fit into his footsteps.

It was colder than the day before, and everything was coated in ice that sparkled piercingly bright in the sunlight.

Unaffected by the cold, the dragons chirped happily from her shoulders and the top of her head.

Birds called back at them, a medley of songs that sounded like an unpracticed orchestra.

Yarrow led them to the shore. “Careful.” He held out his hand so she could steady herself as she followed him down onto the beach.

The emerald dragon cooed in her ears.

The waves crashed onto the sand in foamy kisses, and she followed Yarrow along the shore to the entrance to the caves.

It looked like a doorway into shadows, which she supposed that’s exactly what it was.

There was no reason for the caves to be lit.

She didn’t know why that should make them frightening.

After all, she didn’t have any traumatic event from her childhood here, unlike Yarrow.

It’s just darkness, she told herself. And I’m not going into it alone. Neither is he. In case he needed to hear it out loud, she said, “You aren’t alone this time.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“I am. It’s all dark and cave-like.”

He grinned. “Do you want to hold hands?”

“Always, but that’s unrelated.” She took his hand, and they walked into the shadows.

He released her to light the lantern as the daylight diminished around them, and then he reached for her hand again, holding the lantern in his other hand.

The dragons chirped as the lantern light spilled into the shadows.

The red dragon flew from her head and circled the lantern.

“These caves are a maze,” Yarrow told the circling dragon, “and we’re looking for treasure in them. Do you want to help us? You can have all the honey you want.”

“We’re looking for shells.” Terlu picked up a stray shell from the bit of sand that had flowed into the cave.

She’d explained this to them on the walk, but she repeated it now, hoping they understood.

“Like this, but a lot of them and all different kinds. Bird shells, turtle shells, nutshells, and seashells.” She held out the honey butter again.

The red dragon grasped the pot in its tiny talons and then, with a squawk, flew into the darkness.

“Do we follow?” Yarrow asked.

She didn’t speak dragon. “I don’t know. Yes?”

He unwound the string and tied one end to a rock. “All right. Let’s do this.” They walked into the darkness. A few steps in, Terlu felt the dragon on her right shoulder lift off. It flew forward, its scales sparkling in the lantern light, and soon it disappeared.

They turned with the cave, and then the third dragon flew into the shadows.

Terlu missed the weight of them on her shoulders. She knew this was what she’d asked, but still… She squeezed Yarrow’s hand tighter. “You okay?”

“It’s different this time. Yes.”

“Good. I’ve never been in a cave before.

And it seems that I’m not a fan of the dark, which isn’t something I realized until, well, now .

After I was turned into a statue…” She stopped, swallowed, and then continued.

“They put me in a closet for a while. Just left me there, while they made the pedestal in the North Reading Room. I was in with other storage items. Just a thing to be stored and for gotten. I thought I’d been forgotten.

I think… I think I forgot myself for a while.

” She hadn’t thought the cave would dredge up those memories.

She’d prefer they stayed relegated to the back of her mind.

“I’m sorry you went through that.” His voice felt like an embrace.

She kept going. “When they brought me back out into the light, I woke up a little. I remember when they installed me in the North Reading Room. I remember…” Her voice shook.

“I thanked them. Thanked them. In my head. I couldn’t talk, of course.

But I was grateful because of that little bit of kindness, because of the sunlight, because I wasn’t alone.

I could watch people as they came to stare at me.

I could listen as they told my story. Mangled it of course.

Until I stopped listening. And eventually, they lost interest in me.

I became a familiar decoration. They stopped seeing me as someone who had once been someone.

I think… I think I can’t blame them, because I was a familiar decoration. For years.” Six years.

“Can I at least hate them for you? The ones who did it to you.”

“I did it to myself. I broke the law and was caught.”

“Your punishment exceeded the crime.”

“The judge didn’t think so.”

“I won’t let that happen to you again,” Yarrow said. The cave twisted, and they followed it, unspooling the thread behind them. She wondered where the dragons had flown. She couldn’t hear the flap of their wings or anything but the crunch of pebbles beneath her and Yarrow’s shoes.

“You might not be able to stop them.”

“If my family is right, ‘they’ might not exist anymore. While you and I were… distracted, things changed in the outside world. But you aren’t in the outside world anymore. You’re on Belde. Everything’s different here.”

Maybe he was right. She wasn’t in Alyssium, and the empire had fallen.

Maybe that meant she was safe. Still, though, she couldn’t ask anyone to put themselves at risk for her.

She’d been the one to learn the spells; she’d take the blame if an imperial investigator came.

If she had to, she’d claim she forced the plants to cooperate.

“Besides, the plants won’t allow you to be taken away from them,” Yarrow said, as if he could hear what she was thinking. He squeezed her hand. “You aren’t alone anymore either.”

The words felt like a jolt. She’d been saying them over and over to Yarrow—he wasn’t alone, he didn’t need to be alone, it was better that he wasn’t alone—but she had stopped thinking about how they applied to herself, even though he’d said it before too.

This time, she allowed the words to sink in.

He’d been trying to show her that with every honey cake he’d baked, every greenhouse he’d shared with her, every afternoon he’d spent with her experimenting with spells.

I’m not alone.

She’d found a place for herself. She’d found companionship. Not just with Yarrow, but with Emeral and the plants and the dragons, and now with his family.

Somehow this deserted island had become so very full.

Yarrow halted as the tunnel opened into a cave as massive as a concert hall.

“I remember this.” He held the lantern before them, but there was already light, a sliver of sun from high above, piercing the darkness, illuminating the vastness with a whisper of day.

Stalactites and stalagmites reached toward one another in pillars of dripped stone.

The rare hint of daylight danced off the watery sheen, catching the delicate colors of the stone.

She gawked beside him. “It’s beautiful.”

On one side, water dripped down a wall of ivory stone. It stained the rock green and copper. She hadn’t guessed so much beauty lay under the island.

“Come,” he said.

He led her between domes of limestone. She looked up at a ceiling of stone icicles, arrested mid-drip, and wondered if anyone else knew what magnificence was hidden beneath the greenhouses.

Had Laiken been here? What had he thought and felt when he saw this?

Had he been awed by its beauty or was he too consumed by his misguided purpose?

Ducking through an opening, Terlu followed Yarrow into an al cove, untouched by the sole beam of sun from the crack above the cavern.

He lifted his lantern. Here, the stone had formed delicate lacelike curtains.

“I did come back here,” Yarrow said. “Once, years later. I wanted to prove to myself… Well, it doesn’t matter because it didn’t work.

I lasted an hour and then I ran out, but I remember this room. ”

“I love it.”

He smiled.

She didn’t know that stone could form like this. It looked as if it were made by magic, not by water and time. Or maybe water and time was its own kind of magic.

“I wanted to see this again with you,” Yarrow said. “To see if you being here would change it. And it did. You change everything.”

“Wow,” she said. She winced at herself. That was her response?

The man she loved just said the most romantic, the most— Loved?

This was the second time that the word had popped into her head, as naturally as if it belonged.

Do I love him? She’d known him for a handful of weeks.

Not even a full season. But she already felt entwined with him and his life.

He felt as much a part of her as breathing.

She heard a flapping sound.

“I think that’s…”

“Either bats or dragons.”

“Bats are quieter.” Terlu followed the sound back into the great hall. Up by the stalactites, the red dragon was flying in figure eights. It had something clutched in its talons.

She waited with Yarrow for the dragon to spot them and fly toward them, toward the lantern that Yarrow held aloft.

The dragon dropped the object into Terlu’s palms.

It was a seashell.

Her heart beat faster. Yarrow gripped her shoulder, squeezing. “Is that—”

“Show us where you found it?” Terlu asked the little dragon.

The dragon led the way, back into the darkness. Yarrow kept the lantern steady, and they continued to unspool the thread. After about an hour of walking, Terlu noticed they were running low on the thread. Maybe they could mark the walls? That should work.

When the thread ran out, she used her charcoal pencil to make arrow marks on the cave walls. “How deep does it go?”

“Endless,” Yarrow said.

“That’s unlikely.”

“I don’t know. Beneath every part of the island?”

“Much more likely. Are you okay?” she asked.

He paused before he said, “The charcoal is a good idea.”

“It won’t last forever.”

“We stop when it does,” Yarrow said. He lifted the lantern higher, and the light danced on the limestone. Shadows writhed at their feet. She noticed she could no longer smell the sea, only a damp, coppery sourness. “We’re not becoming lost down here. It’s not worth it.”

“But she found a shell.”

“Not worth it,” Yarrow repeated.

“If we don’t destroy the ingredients…”

He stopped walking. She noticed his hand was sticky with sweat, and he was squeezing her fingers tighter. “Then so be it. We let the enchanted greenhouse die, and we build our own, saving as many plants as we can. I’m not going to risk you for the dream of a dead sorcerer.”

“But you love the greenhouse.”

“I love you more,” he said.

“Oh.” Her voice was a squeak.

Yarrow’s eyes widened as he looked beyond her. “I don’t think we’ll have to do that, though. Look.” He gestured with the lantern, and she turned to see what he was seeing: in the center of the next cave, the three dragons circling what looked like an altar of stone.

At the center was a tortoise shell, filled with hundreds of other shells.