The Spellshop

Chapter Twelve

“First, we need to catalog what we have,” Kiela said to Caz after Larran left. That was step one to identifying spells that would make appropriate “remedies.”

Caz rustled his leaves in excitement. “Ooh, I missed this!”

She’d missed it too. Granted, it hadn’t been that long in sheer number of days since she’d processed any books, but Caltrey felt like a world and several lifetimes away from the Great Library of Alyssium. When they’d docked in the overgrown cove, she hadn’t known that she’d ever feel like a librarian again.

“Do we have paper?” Caz asked. “Please tell me you packed paper. Or pencils? Do we have any pencils? I read once about a scholar who’d been imprisoned and had to write on his walls in his own blood.”

On her parents’ bed, Kiela opened her bag of personal items. She unpacked a set of pencils, the finest graphite in Alyssium, each sharpened carefully by her with a slim whittling knife that she kept exclusively for that purpose. Untying the ribbon around the set, she laid it out open on the bed. Caz danced above the pencils, so excited that he shed bits of soil on the quilt. She then took out one of her precious blank notebooks. “No need to use blood.”

“You’re a hero,” Caz told her solemnly.

She never traveled anywhere without a notebook, so it wasn’t a surprise she’d packed a few. She wished she’d packed a crate of them. She doubted that paper was readily accessible on Caltrey—there was the bakery, the mill, the fish market, the yarn and fiber store, and perhaps a shop for furniture? But she hadn’t seen a stationery store. Opening the notebook, she stroked the smooth, crisp, blank page. There was something so very beautiful about a notebook without a single note in it. It felt like touching pure potential.

“You write, or I write?” Caz asked. He was petting one of the pencils with a leaf.

It was obvious how much he wanted to do it himself. “You can write,” she offered.

Shivering in delight, Caz said, “I love you. You know that, don’t you? You are the best friend anyone could ever ask for.”

It wasn’t clear whether he was talking to Kiela or the pencil, but she grinned. “Same to you, Caz. Also, you have exceptional penmanship.” She wondered if that had been part of the original spell that created him or if that talent was inherent in who the spider plant was. It felt rude to ask.

“I’m blushing. You just can’t tell because of the chlorophyll.”

She laughed.

And then they got down to work.

Starting with the first crate, Kiela unloaded the books one by one. For each, she read aloud the title, author, publisher, island of origin, and year of publication, and Caz noted the information down in tiny, precise letters and numbers. They also awarded each volume a designation for topic: weather, vegetation, animals, stars, sea, etc., and a sub-designation for whether it was a practical spellbook, a scholarly study, or a historical record, as well as the secret librarian-only designation for “mostly bullshit.” Caz switched leaves often, and they paused only for Kiela to resharpen the pencil, careful to preserve as much of the graphite as possible—these too were a limited resource that she wasn’t certain she’d be able to renew. She wondered if you could use berries to make an ink that would last.

The pencils should last for a while, but if she was going to think long term . . . First things first, she reminded herself. She couldn’t afford the kind of tangents she loved to indulge in while she was at the library—here, whether or not she could afford to eat was dependent on how efficient they were at their research. She’d tackle the ink problem if and only if it became necessary. When they finished the first crate, they moved on to the second.

She was pleased to see that they had saved a great number of books on a healthy array of subjects, including a few she’d forgotten she’d chosen, and she was grateful for each one. So much knowledge, preserved. Even better: so much knowledge, at her fingertips.

After every book was recorded and categorized by topic (and piled throughout the room and on every inch of both her parents’ bed and her daybed, first by topic and then alphabetically by author), Kiela and Caz surveyed their treasure trove.

“Where do we begin?” he asked, wonder in his voice.

This wasn’t her usual indexing project, where she prepared a list based on a researcher’s specifications. Normally, a scholar or a sorcerer would come into the library, request all information on one specific line of inquiry, and she’d search her volumes and present them with a complete index of where to locate each mention. Normally, the deadline was “by the next symposium,” and the only stakes were the patron’s academic reputation. Normally, her research wasn’t directly tied to whether or not she’d have food.

That added a flavor of urgency to the whole endeavor.

For their shop, she wanted practical spells with obtainable ingredients that could be dismissed as remedies by the casual eye, and she wanted them for an array of uses from plants to weather to (if it was possible) the merhorses. Start small, she cautioned herself. She didn’t even know if she could find a single appropriate spell. Right now, it was all just a wild idea.

A wild idea that has to succeed. She didn’t have a Plan B.

“I’d like to know everything about everything,” Kiela said, “but I suppose that isn’t a reasonable research parameter.” She chewed on her lip as she contemplated how to narrow it down. Choose wrong, and they could waste hours and hours in the fruitless pursuit of minutiae. She didn’t have that kind of time to waste. Fruitless, she thought, turning the word over in her head. She thought of their success with the tomato plant. “Let’s start with fruit.”

Caz turned to a fresh page in the notebook and dutifully wrote Fruit as the title.

“Larran talked about the orchards,” Kiela said. “If we can find a way to restore the fruit trees to full health, that will have a lasting effect on the island. Much more impactful than a single-season tomato bush and much less thorny than a lot of berry brambles.”

If it works, it could even keep him from thinking he had to go to Alyssium. Maybe. She didn’t know if healing an orchard or two would be enough, but it would be a start.

“So we focus on trees.” He added the word Trees beside Fruit.

They turned to the veritable mountain of books on vegetation.

“We need space to do this properly,” Caz said.

Kiela agreed.

Keeping the books in careful order, she returned the unrelated volumes to the crates—Caz noted which crate held which books. Until she had proper shelves and humidity control devices established in the cottage (which could be, she admitted to herself, a while away—those contraptions were expensive), as well as some kind of security system or at least a mechanism for hidden shelves, they were safest stored away in the crates. While she hated to make any book less accessible, it was for the best. Necessities first, she reminded herself yet again. She wasn’t trying to establish her own library; she was trying to create a jam shop, with a secret side business. And besides, there wasn’t much humidity on Caltrey; the books should be fine without fancy climate devices. She whispered an apology to the unchosen books as she closed up the crates and hid them beneath quilts.

She divvied up the remaining books, and the two of them dove in. As the evening deepened into night, Kiela brought in candles within lanterns. Every so often, one or the other would share what they’d found, and they’d swap books or Caz would add to the notes in the notebook. Otherwise, they read in companionable silence.

It was the most pleasant few hours she’d had since they’d fled Alyssium. She hadn’t realized how badly she’d missed this: sinking into the solace of words, letting the authors steer her toward answers or, at least, better questions. The books in her stack were written by scholars and sorcerers and, in the case of one heavily illustrated volume, a naturalist, and they each had a different perspective of how magic could be used to influence the natural world.

By the end of the night, they had a list of potential spells to try, with the tree-healing spell as the one with the most potential so far. None were momentous enough to keep Larran from going to Alyssium, but perhaps one would work for the shop? Or maybe another book would hold all the answers? Kiela wanted to keep going, but she’d reread the same paragraph three times and still wasn’t sure which verb paired with which noun—it was time to sleep.

She pulled on her sleep clothes and cleaned her teeth. Ignoring her daybed, she wrapped herself in a quilt and crawled onto her parents’ bed between the spellbooks. Caz extinguished the candles in the lanterns and curled up on a pillow.

With the moonlight spilling into the room and across the crates of precious books, they slept, and for the first time since fleeing the library, Kiela didn’t dream of fire. Instead her dreams were filled with apple trees.

At dawn, Kiela untangled herself from the quilt, stretched between the books, and opened her eyes to see Caz looming over her, perched on top of one of the stacks. “Are you ready to do magic today?” he asked.

She let out a shriek.

Startled, he tumbled off the books and landed in a poof of loose soil.

“Oops,” Kiela said. “Sorry. Are you okay?”

He rolled upright and dusted himself off with his leaves. Collecting his dignity (and lost dirt) around him, he said, “I’ve been reviewing the list of spells we compiled, and I recommend we begin with the third variant of Ylindar’s spell for strengthening deciduous trees.”

Sitting up, she reached for the notebook with their preliminary index and located the reference. She’d remembered reading that—Ylindar had been from an island with a dry climate, very little rainfall, where deciduous trees had a difficult time due to the inhospitable soil. “That’s in her third compendium.” Her mouth felt woolly, and her eyes were sticky. She was fairly certain her hair poked out at all angles, but she didn’t care. There was magic to do!

Caz nudged the relevant spellbook toward her, and she flipped through the pages to the one he’d noted. It was one of the handwritten spellbooks, which was unfortunate because Ylindar liked to swoop her letters, making them tricky to read. “All the ingredients are local,” Caz said, pointing at the list with the tip of a leaf. “Except—”

“Mola sap,” she read.

“But according to Venik . . .” He flipped through another book.

She glanced at it. “Have you been up all night reading?”

“I have excellent night vision.”

“Still not entirely sure how you have any vision, given your lack of eyes,” Kiela commented, but she read the passage he was pointing to. “ ‘In some instances, pine sap serves as a reasonable substitute for mola sap.’”

He read over her shoulder. “That’s clear enough, but how do we know if this qualifies as one of the ‘some instances’?”

“Experimentation?” she suggested.

“Careful experimentation,” he said. “And I don’t know how I have vision either, which could be a problem if I ever become farsighted. No one has invented glasses for eyeless plants.”

“If the need ever arises, we’ll figure it out,” Kiela promised.

“Thank you. I worry about that.” He shuddered, and every single leaf shook. “I can’t lose books; I’d lose me .”

One of the librarians in the south tower had been a fixture in the Great Library for so long that it was said he’d been born in the stacks and had pledged his skeleton would become a bookshelf ladder after his death. He’d lost his sight when he was in his eighties, but it hadn’t slowed him at all—he’d had a cadre of assistants who would read to him incessantly. “If that ever happened, I’d read to you. You won’t ever lose books. That’s not on the list of things to worry about.”

“You have a list?”

“Of course. First: What if the shop fails and we can’t support ourselves, and I starve? Second: What if the books are discovered and stolen or damaged? Third: What if we’re arrested for possession of library property and transformed into statues, skunks, or salad? Fourth: What if the shop fails, we can’t support ourselves, and we freeze over the winter due to lack of firewood? What if the roof caves in? What if a storm sweeps us out to sea? What if a sea monster attacks? What if I contract a terrible, incurable disease? What if you get bugs? What if our spells backfire and we accidentally create a violent tree monster who—”

“Okay, stop!” Caz cried. “Is there any chance of us creating a violent tree monster?”

“Not with acorns and honey,” Kiela said. “Those spells are much more advanced.”

Returning to the book, she skimmed the rest of the ingredients. Most of the items she knew they could find nearby: an acorn cap, a pine cone, a stick with two prongs, a shard of eggshell (it didn’t specify what kind of egg, but she hadn’t disposed of the chicken egg’s shell from the other day—that would have to do), a variety of leaves that Caz could help her identify. It also called for a blast of easterly wind. Happily, that tended to be the predominant wind direction on Caltrey—she wasn’t even sure why she knew that. Her parents? A fisherman? Someone must have told her, or else it was just a stray fact she remembered. She did remember facts better than most people.

While Kiela pulled on clothes, Caz began gathering ingredients. She joined him a few minutes later, and they scurried about the house and yard until they had the full list. Unlike the prior spell, this one called for the ingredients to be clumped around the pine cone, with honey (substituted for mola sap) as the congealing agent. “Is the wind today easterly?” Kiela asked.

Caz held up his leaves to test the direction. “There’s no wind.”

“What if I blow on it?” Kiela asked.

“Could work. Just position yourself correctly.”

She turned so that her breath would be coming from the east and hoped this counted as an easterly wind. Carefully she blew as hard as she could on the sticky pine cone mess.

“Now, we bury it between the roots of a tree,” Caz instructed.

She fetched a garden trowel, and they chose a gnarled tree that grew in the far corner of the garden, well out of sight from the front of the house. It had several bare branches. Her heart was beating faster as she dug. If this worked . . . It might not work on the first try, she cautioned herself. After all, they’d taken a few liberties with the ingredients, and the spell itself . . . Kiela wasn’t one hundred percent sure if the third syllable was a “fah” sound or a “tah.” And as for the last syllable . . . She pointed to it. “Ray-sa or ray-va?”

He peered at it. “Ray-va.”

“You’re certain?”

“It’s a minor spell from a minor sorcerer,” Caz said. “If it fails, the results shouldn’t be catastrophic. Most likely, if it fails, it simply won’t work.”

She agreed with that assessment.

From her reading last night, it was clear that the most common result from failed spells was absolutely nothing. At worst, they’d have just buried a weirdly sticky pine cone, and the worms in the soil would eventually digest it, enriching the soil but at a far less magical rate.

Kneeling next to the buried pine cone, Kiela ran through the words in her mind, silently practicing the way they rose and fell as if they were a line of music. It was far different to read a spell as a scholar than it was to try to enact one. She needed perfection. When she felt comfortable in the rhythm of the spell, she recited the words out loud, and then she sat back cross-legged. This spell was supposed to strengthen the roots. She wasn’t sure if the results would even be visible, which was one of the aspects that had appealed to her about it—the less her “remedies” looked like magic, the safer they’d all be. It would be nice if the results were measurable, though, so she could know that it—

The soil erupted upward like a fountain, and a knot of brown the size of a fist punched through the ground. Shrieking, Caz skittered across the garden. Kiela stared transfixed.

As suddenly as it had happened, it stopped, and the knob of brown sat there.

That . . . was not what was supposed to happen.

Kiela leaned forward for a better look, and the brown peeled off to reveal a tender green.

“What is it?” Caz called from behind a tomato plant.

“I don’t—Oh, it’s not done yet.” As she spoke, the ball sprouted dozens of needles. “I think it’s a cactus?” Slowly, she stuck a fingertip toward it. She touched the plant between its needles. Its flesh felt springy and cool, clearly a living plant and not one she’d ever seen before. She remembered the author of the spellbook, Ylindar—she’d had trouble with deciduous trees on her rainless island, but perhaps she had an abundance of cacti? “Do you think it was the honey, the breath, or the pronunciation?”

“I think it was a disaster.”

“It’s not a disaster,” Kiela pointed out. “It’s a succulent.”

“No one needs a succulent.”

“Hey, weren’t you the one lecturing me about how a plant’s value isn’t dependent on its usefulness?” It was kind of beautiful, in a bulbous, pointy way. She was irrationally a bit proud of it—they’d created something that didn’t exist before. She wondered if it was a specific type of cactus, or if they’d invented a new species.

“Back to the books,” Caz instructed.

“But the cactus—”

“Gah!” He tossed his tendrils in the air. “Never mind the cactus! Books!” Grumbling about how they had no business attempting magic of any sort, Caz trundled himself back into the cottage, and Kiela followed, glancing back several times at the innocent and unexpected and strangely lovely addition to their garden.

Breath, several scholars concurred, was a key ingredient in spells that summoned new life. It was, she thought, a likely ingredient in the spell that had created Caz, but she didn’t say that out loud—she wasn’t certain if he was sensitive about his creation or not. At any rate, the substitution of breath for breeze was most likely responsible for the new cactus in their garden. “Looks like we need actual wind,” Kiela said.

“And we should have used pine tree sap instead of honey,” Caz said, showing a passage he found in another book. “ ‘When working with plants, one must bind the ingredients with a plant-based substance, not one produced by either insects or mammals.’ ”

“Makes sense,” Kiela said.

“Also, I found a copy of the same spell but in neater writing.”

She examined the syllables. Really, that was supposed to be a “fa”? If she ever met Ylindar, she was going to suggest the sorcerer work on her handwriting skills. “So basically we did everything wrong.” Perhaps they should have done a bit more research before jumping into spellcasting, but at least they hadn’t done any harm. “Ready to try again?”

“Let’s pick a tree somewhere out in the woods, in case we create more cacti.”

“You don’t like cacti?” she asked.

“I support all plants,” Caz said loftily. “But I do know whatever that is, it’s not native to this area. More of it will draw a lot more attention than overabundant raspberries.”

Fair point. “How about the willow tree by the pond where we found the duckweed?” She remembered it had looked spindly, with sparse leaves on its limp branches.

Caz agreed, and they gathered a fresh supply of ingredients, using sap from an oozing pine tree to bind the elements together. Checking the wind, Kiela held the pine cone up so that the easterly breeze hit it, and then she wrapped it in a cloth in case the wind direction shifted.

“Attempt number two,” she said.

Together, while the late-morning sun streamed through the leaves and the squirrels rustled in the branches, Kiela and Caz strolled into the woods.

It wasn’t far to the pond, but it was far enough that no one would blame them for any abnormalities— Hopefully. As they picked their way between the ferns and overgrowth, the birds chattered overhead. She listened for the squawk of an errant hen, but she only heard the familiar calls of the songbirds, trilling and cooing and warbling. She heard a trickle of water before she saw the pond, fed by a stream, and she followed it until the forest opened.

Last time she’d been focused on the pond itself, with its light spread of duckweed, but this time she climbed around the pond and over a mossy fallen tree to reach the willow. It was a great old tree, with bending branches that swept the surface of the water with gentle kisses. Its ancient trunk was twisted, frozen mid-dance, and the old bark looked as if it had been stretched too far and cracked from the strain. In its day, it must have been a magnificent sight. She could see the shadow of the tree it had been, echoed in the graceful drooping branches. Once, those branches would have been thick with teardrop leaves, and they would have rustled in the wind as if they were singing. She thought of Larran singing the old lullaby. Her mother could have sung that to her too, but she had no memory of it. She wondered if the old willow remembered.

Suddenly, Kiela wanted this spell to work as much as she’d ever wanted anything. It felt important that the tree’s leaves sing in the wind again. Kneeling at the willow’s knobby roots, she used the trowel to dig a hole and placed the sticky pine cone in it. She folded the soil over the pine cone as she said the words, correctly and precisely and intensely.

Side by side, Kiela and Caz watched the soil.

“Odds that it’ll be another cactus?” Caz whispered.

“Eighty-twenty,” she whispered back. She wasn’t sure why they were whispering, but it felt appropriate.

“Eighty it will be a cactus?”

“Eighty it won’t,” Kiela said. She believed it would work this time. And if it didn’t . . . there were plenty more ways it could fail other than producing another cactus. Some outcomes were potentially even more dramatic. She began to wonder if any of this was wise. “It’s not doing anything yet.”

Both of them stared so intently at the roots that Kiela almost missed the moment when the leaves above began to tremble. She heard them first, a whistle and then a rustle. She looked up to see a cascade of green as branches waterfalled from the trunk of the willow. Beside her, Caz let out a gasp as the tree healed: the branches softened into supple strands instead of brittle whips, leaves popped out as thick as fur, the bark shifted to a younger, greener shade. In front of them, the roots thickened.

“It worked,” Kiela breathed. It wasn’t any more subtle than the plant-growth spell, but wow. As an added benefit, it didn’t force the tree out of season. If they could adapt it to be less showy . . . Of course, that all depended on whether this was a one-time miracle or whether the spell was replicable . . .

Caz did a little dance next to her. “Let’s make more!”

She grinned at him as she stood up and brushed the dirt off her knees. “Absolutely,” she said. She laid her hand on the trunk and thought she could feel the fresh life flooding through the tree. “It’s beautiful.”

As she marveled at the reborn tree, Kiela thought she heard a soft voice repeat in a whisper, “Beautiful.” Listening, she heard nothing further. It must have been the wind.