The Spellshop

Chapter Six

At dawn, Kiela tackled the garden. It was key to her being able to stay here. The food she’d bought in the village wouldn’t last long, and she didn’t have enough coin leftover to buy much more—and after yesterday, she didn’t expect (or want) any more gifts from her overly friendly neighbor. She had to make this work.

Standing in the backyard, she put her hands on her hips and surveyed the tangle of green. The sun had warmed the air and now heated her shoulders and the back of her hair. She’d tied her hair back from her face with a ribbon, and she’d dressed in one of her mother’s old dresses, an earth-colored patchwork of soft browns and greens with lots of pockets for holding trowels and clippers and extra garden gloves. Her boots had been her mother’s as well, sturdy leather boots, softened with age, that could handle the dirt. The earth beneath the soles of her boots felt soft as a quilt, like it wanted her to lie down and be engulfed by the garden. Caz sat beside her, his leaves curled around his soil, as if nervous the vines would envelop him too. Vines had crept over the fence and swallowed whatever had previously grown here. Weeds had sprouted and taken over every inch of soil. Everywhere she looked was a riot of green.

Choked by vines, a tree bent over the right fence. A few of its limbs were leafless, and a bird with orange-and-green feathers perched on it. Puffing its chest out, it trilled a descending melody. Across the garden, another bird answered with a coo-like call. Elsewhere in the woods beyond the garden, more birds chirped and sang.

A breeze whisked across the garden, and the leaves shimmered in the sunlight as they fluttered. She inhaled the heavy scent of green, growing things—she could smell a hint of honey within the breeze, and she didn’t know which flowers it came from. Prickly bushes with pale flowers filled one corner, and shoots with balls of purple flowers towered over another. She breathed in again and thought the nobles in Alyssium would have paid fistfuls of money to smell as light and lovely as the air on Caltrey. Just breathing it in made her feel like she was waking up after a night of perfect, deep sleep. She’d never felt quite so aware of the taste and feel of the air, or of the sounds of the birds and the gentle rustle of leaves. It made her feel like she could tackle any challenge—if only she knew exactly how.

“Any idea where to start?” Kiela asked Caz.

“How am I supposed to know?”

“Well, I feel like you might be an expert on vegetation.”

He was quiet for a moment. “That is true.”

“So, tell me what’s a weed and what isn’t,” Kiela said.

“There’s no such thing as a weed,” Caz said. “That’s a cruel term made up by people who label some plants as ‘unwanted’ and some as ‘valuable,’ as if the worth of a living thing is measured by how useful it is to another living thing. As if a plant can’t have its own intrinsic worth.” He was so worked up that he raised his leaves high and shook them. It was the longest, most passionate speech she’d ever heard the spider plant make.

In her soothing librarian voice, Kiela said, “All right. From here on, the word ‘weed’ is banned in this garden.”

He lowered his leaves, pleased.

“How about you tell me which plants are which, and we’ll . . . organize them. So that they all have the chance to thrive. We can designate areas for different kinds of plants and transplant the rest outside the fence. Like at the library.” She walked toward the east side of the garden. “Here’s the Nonfiction section. Vegetables only here.”

“New Studies and Treaties,” Caz said, designating an area at the front of the Nonfiction section. “Your seeds can go here. And in the back, Histories—that’s the old growth.”

“In the front of the cottage, Fiction. That’ll be all the flowers.”

“What about the berries?”

“Journals of Scientific Papers,” she decided, because of the way the brambles both supported and strangled one another. “Along the far fence.”

They planned it out, giving each type of plant a corresponding book designation. Kiela hauled the gardening equipment out of the house. Caz held the smaller tools, the trowel and clippers, with his tendrils, and she wielded the hoe and shovel. Focusing on the front section, they set to work.

By the time the sun reached midday, they’d cleared a five-by-five-foot area in New Studies, which wasn’t much in the grand scheme of the overwhelming overgrowth, but it was enough, she judged, to plant some of the seeds she’d bought.

Caz coaxed her through the technique: a hole for each seed, then water, then soil on top, then more water. She spaced them out according to his directions and then sat back, satisfied. It was an excellent start. And it wasn’t so different from organizing a bookshelf. A bit dirtier, but she’d gotten just as sweaty hauling books from shelf to shelf. The birds continued to sing to one another, and the breeze cooled the sweat on her neck. Her lungs felt full of the sweet-as-honey air, and the ache in her muscles was a good kind of ache.

“You know they won’t sprout instantly,” he cautioned. “It’ll be weeks.”

That punctured her mood.

Yes, she knew intellectually it would take time before there was anything to harvest, but she hadn’t thought through the implications. It was indeed a problem, especially since she’d lost the chicken. She’d counted on the hen to lay eggs until the garden began to produce. She’d also hoped that some of the old growth (corralled into Histories) would be edible. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the vegetation was what some, not her, would call “weeds.”

“I don’t have that kind of time.” She needed to produce food quickly if she was going to be able to live here. After the incident with the chimney, she wasn’t about to ask Larran for handouts—that would completely undo the point she’d been trying to make, which she wasn’t sure he’d even understood to begin with—and she’d seen that the villagers didn’t have extra to spare. I won’t beg.

Kiela poured water on Caz’s soil ball and ate two more cinnamon buns, as well as the rest of the cheese that Larran had left for her. She was proud of the progress they’d made, but what was she going to do in the short term?

I could work.

If there were any jobs.

There certainly weren’t any librarian jobs. She hadn’t even seen a bookshop. She thought of Bryn and wondered if she needed any help in the bakery. Not that Kiela knew anything about baking. If Bryn did need an assistant, wouldn’t she have hired one of the locals already? The fact was there might not be any jobs to be had. Besides, any village job would take Kiela away from the spellbooks for too long, and she needed to be nearby to watch over them—that had to remain her first priority. She’d taken on that responsibility when she’d taken the books, and she wasn’t about to abandon it. She had to take care of the books.

She wondered, though . . . Could the books help take care of me?

“I have an idea,” she told Caz. A terrible, terrifying, wonderful idea. “Come on.”

Kiela went inside, washed the dirt off her hands and then dried them thoroughly, before heading to the back bedroom where the crates sat quietly. She threw off the tarp. She knew precisely what they’d packed into each crate, and she had a loose idea of which book she needed.

“Have a question you can’t answer,” she said, parroting one of her father’s favorite sayings, “what do you do?”

“Look in a book,” Caz answered. “But Kiela . . . Spellbooks?”

She pried off the top of the fourth crate. “I know.”

“It’s not permitted.”

She thought of the librarian who’d been turned to wood, and felt her heart thump hard in her chest. Her palms began to sweat. But she steeled herself. “By whom?” she said to Caz. The emperor had been tossed out a window. He wasn’t going to object. Or know. “Who will notice? More accurately, who will notice and care?” The ones who’d made the laws had been overthrown. Most likely, by now, they were all dead. A new government had been installed, and she’d read their pamphlets. “Magic belongs to the people now. I’m people. And we’re very far from Alyssium.”

She lifted out the spellbook on plantwork.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Kiela flipped the pages. She inhaled the familiar dusty scent of beloved old books and instantly felt like she was heading in the right direction. She’d read every book in these crates, and she knew there was a useful spell for plant growth somewhere.

On the use of roses for defensive purposes, she read.

Not that.

For aid in childbirth. The list of ingredients included chamomile and stinging nettles. A fertility spell followed, requiring sea urchin and seahorse eggs. She kept looking, wishing this grimoire had a table of contents. Maybe that could be her project while she was on Caltrey, creating indices for the volumes she’d rescued—after, of course, she figured out how to stave off starvation. If she did index all the books, maybe this transgression would be forgiven? Or maybe it wouldn’t need to be? Surely, no one would begrudge her keeping herself alive. Especially if no one ever found out what she’d done.

A few more pages and she had it: a spell for the accelerated growth of plants. It had been created by the sorcerer Laiken in the last century. Laiken was renowned for his greenhouses—they dominated half of the island of Belde and were said to include every species to grow anywhere in the Crescent Islands. One entire room was devoted to poisonous plants, another to varieties of orchids, and one was said to be full of ferns that grew so lush you couldn’t see more than a few inches in any direction. There was even whispered to be one section of the greenhouse full of plants that didn’t exist anywhere else, plants created entirely by magic. Like Caz.

She skimmed the ingredient list:

Water (easy)

Blood (unpleasant but easy)

Duckweed (she wasn’t certain what that was, but Caz should know)

Elder-bush leaves (again, she’d ask Caz)

Rosebuds from a beach rose

The instructions were to mix the ingredients into a paste and add a teaspoon to the soil above each seed and then say the words, pronouncing them as precisely as possible.

Every spell was written in the First Language, a long-dead ancient tongue. According to all that Kiela had read on the subject, the First Language was the language of Creation, comprised of words that tapped into the core essence of existence. Utter the right syllables, in conjunction with the correct ingredients, and you could alter the shape of that existence.

A spell from one of these books had altered Caz from an ordinary houseplant to what he’d become. Other spells, more advanced than this one, had created the canals, shaped the mountains, and tamed the sea. But this was what she needed now.

“Are any of those shrubs outside elder bushes?” Kiela asked.

“Elderberry is a fast-growing deciduous shrub with little white flowers and dark berries,” Caz said. “And yes, I’ve seen several. Follow me.”

With Caz’s help, she identified and plucked the elder leaves from a bush in their garden, and then she dumped them in a bowl in the kitchen. Sunlight streamed between the vines over the window as she worked. First ingredient, done.

“Duckweed?” she asked.

“A fast-growing aquatic plant.”

Well, she knew where there was water. On a mission now, she led the way down the stone steps back to the cove. Walking out on the dock, straddling the broken slats, Kiela peered into the water beside the library boat. Gentle waves lapped at the posts of the dock. Shaded by trees that clung to the sides of the cove, the air was cooler, and it smelled of salt and seaweed, rather than flowers and honey. She loved both smells. She wondered what it would feel like to dip herself into the water . . . but she had a task to complete. She called to Caz, who was back on shore, “What does it look like?”

“Small, lentil-like beads of green that float just on or below the surface,” he recited from memory. “Usually found in still or slow-moving fresh water.”

Kiela raised her eyebrows. “Fresh water?”

“Oh. Yes. Sorry. I should have thought of that earlier. Back up the steps?”

“Back up the steps,” she agreed.

A hint of movement from within the water caught her eye.

Beneath the surface, a merbaby swam around the posts of the dock, weaving in and out as if it were a game. It was a little boy, with seaweed hair and a pale green fish tail laced with silver strands. He swam gracefully, the water curving around him, the sea grasses brushing his belly. Ripples flowed above him.

She hadn’t seen a merbaby in years, not since she was a child. They didn’t live in the canals of the capital city; too polluted. Waving at him, Kiela smiled. Bubbles rose through the water and then popped on the surface, sounding like giggles, as the baby waved back with his webbed hand and then flipped his tail fin and swam toward deeper waters.

A miracle, she thought.

Standing, she looked toward the jetty and saw a mermaid, half out of the water on one of the rocks, keeping watch. Kiela waved at her as well, and she thought she saw the mermaid smile before she ducked beneath the surface.

It was said if you weren’t welcome on an island, the merfolk would foul the water near your home and refuse to swim close to shore. The sighting of a merbaby . . . She knew it was only superstition that they predicted good fortune, but it made her feel as if her luck was turning. I’m doing the sensible thing. It’ll be all right. I’ll be careful.

“Let’s find that duckweed,” she said.

Climbing back up the steps, Kiela led the way, feeling full of energy and hope—and a sense that she was on the right track at last. She had memories of a quiet pool in the woods, where she’d retreat with her books, hiding from chores that needed to be done around the house. She remembered the sound of her parents after sunset, calling her to come home. The fireflies would flicker around her as it became too dark to read, but still she’d stay, to watch the fireflies over the water and listen to the birds and the squirrels settle in for the night and the night hunters, the owls and the cats, begin to wake. Once, she’d even glimpsed a unicorn sipping from the pond, but it could have been only a white deer and a trick of the twilight. Another afternoon, her father had come with her, avoiding his chores too. They’d read books side by side, and her mother hadn’t said a word when they’d returned. A week later, her mother had been the one to join her by the pond, arriving with lunch in a basket and presenting Kiela with a new unread book, a rare treasure on the island.

Kiela hadn’t thought about those memories in years. After her parents had died, it hurt too much to think about them. But now . . . to her surprise, it didn’t hurt. Or rather, it did, but it was a sweeter ache than it used to be.

She found the pond closer to the house than she’d remembered. Her memory had said it was deep within the woods, but it wasn’t. Only a stone’s throw.

Staring at it, she realized that she’d never truly hidden from her parents. They’d always known exactly where she was and how to find her. But they’d chosen to let her come here. They’d given her those afternoons of peace as a gift, joining her when they could.

“Kiela?” Caz said, interrupting her thoughts. “Duckweed.”

She blinked at the water and at the tiny, lentil-like plant floating over half the pond.

“Are you all right?” Caz asked.

“Somehow I didn’t expect this to feel quite so much like coming home.” She’d made the library her home and, after her parents’ death, hadn’t looked back. She hadn’t ever considered visiting Caltrey. She hadn’t missed it. But now . . . She suddenly found that she wanted to stay. She wanted to make this work.

Even if that meant taking risks that she previously never dreamed she’d take. Times have changed. The world has changed. I can change too.

Kneeling, she scooped up a handful of duckweed and slid it into her sack.

She knew where to find the rosebuds: on the bushes on the cliff above the village. Following the trail through the forest, she and Caz emerged into the sunlight. Everything looked just as picturesque as the day before, but this time, she found herself appreciating it more. She didn’t look on the village with trepidation. Instead she admired the bright colors of the houses and the blue beyond, dotted with boats.

From this distance and height, the village didn’t look run-down. You couldn’t see the too-thin children or the peeling paint or the storm damage. You saw a picture, framed by the sea. Kiela gathered the rosebuds while watching the merhorses frolicking by the shore. On the cliff, the breeze tasted like both the garden and the cove: honey-sweet mixed with salty-fresh.

As soon as they had all the ingredients, they returned to the cottage. She mixed them in a bowl, mashing them with a pestle she’d found in the utensil drawer. With Caz working the pump, she added water, and she used a knife to nick the tip of her index finger. She squeezed in a drop of blood. Following the instructions, she mixed it all into a paste.

“Do you really think you can do this?” Caz asked.

Today, after the merbaby, she felt as if she could do anything. “Yes. I don’t see why not. It’s ingredients and a recipe,” she repeated Bryn’s words. “Anyone could do it.” She wasn’t trying to create a canal or craft a palace, after all. “It’s just about being the one to choose to do it.”

“You’re a librarian, not a sorcerer.”

“Is there a difference?”

“They’ve trained.”

“And I’ve read,” Kiela said.

“If it’s so simple, why all the laws to keep spells out of the hands of people?”

She’d never questioned the laws before, or really thought about them much. She’d had a job, to maintain the spellbooks in her area’s collection, and she’d never considered how they were used or weren’t used by the library’s patrons. “Because knowledge is power, and the powerful want— wanted —to keep it all to themselves.” Their greed had brought about their downfall.

“Not because it’s dangerous?”

“Of course knowledge is dangerous.” Kiela felt herself grinning. She’d never done anything the least bit dangerous before. It felt like a deep breath of sea air. Maybe the taste of the breeze is going to my head. “But ignorance is even more dangerous. In this case, ignorance means failure, and failure means no food, no way to stay here, and nowhere else to go.”

Caz accepted that and followed her out to the garden, where they’d planted the seeds. She sat next to them cross-legged and laid the spellbook open on one of her father’s old (but now clean) shirts to protect it from the dirt.

Using a spoon, she scooped a teaspoon of the paste onto each of the mounds where she’d planted a seed. She then read from the book:

Rywy cryf chi dor

Rywy cajon rhoi i

Rywy gobai tremadon se hia . . .

She pronounced the words precisely and carefully, drawing on her knowledge from her studies. There was scholarly debate over the inflection on certain words, and she had followed all the discourse. She knew which syllables to stress and which to swallow, and she knew how long to stretch the vowels and which required a guttural sound. This was a magic made from the music of words, and she spoke the syllables to the seeds with every bit of conviction that this was right and that this would work.

When she finished, she closed the spellbook and waited.

“Did it work?” Caz asked.

Side by side, they stared at the earth, willing the little seeds to sprout and grow. “It’ll work,” Kiela said. “I know it will.” She’d seen the merbaby in the cove. If that wasn’t a sign that she was supposed to be here and thrive here, then . . .

It was a sign, she thought. And they will grow.

From within the house, she heard Larran call, “Anyone home?”