The Spellshop

Chapter Thirteen

The apple orchard was a boneyard.

Every tree was a skeleton, with bare limbs that twisted like arthritic fingers. Several had shriveled leaves that looked pasted onto them, and a few had the rare apple, not yet ripe, hanging lonely on its branch, hardly a harvest. Kiela halted at the fence around the orchard and felt a lump in her throat.

“This shouldn’t have happened,” Caz said.

Kiela nodded. It was a crime, to allow these trees to wither. “It’s not the right soil for them,” she said. “They were only kept healthy with magic. Withdraw the magic . . .”

“Good thing we’re here then.”

Were all the orchards on the island like this one? She remembered there used to be hundreds of fruit trees across all of Caltrey. Apples, cherries, peaches, pears, plums. As she climbed over the fence, she said, “We have to fix this. All of this.”

“Our first goal has to be to keep you fed, especially through the winter,” Caz reminded her. “Selling spells in addition to jam is a good idea, if and only if we can figure out how not to get executed for it. You need to eat.”

She strode to the nearest tree and began to dig a hole for the first pine cone. He was right, of course, but she couldn’t help but want to fix all of this. They still had a couple hours until sunset, thanks to it being summer, but still, there was no time to waste. “Fine. We sell remedies—not spells, remedies —for a fee. But whenever we have extra time and extra ingredients, we come out here and heal more trees for free.”

“Do you really think that just rebranding the spells will solve the problem? We write ‘Not at all illegal magic’ on the label and hope that people believe what they read?”

“It’ll work because people will want to believe it’s true,” Kiela said. “They need this to work.” If we can make it work. The willow tree could have been a one-off. “Okay, here goes.”

Kneeling by the roots of the apple tree, Kiela recited the spell.

“How long do you think—”

A second later, the tree was bathed in white blossoms like a sudden snowfall. She breathed in the fresh, heady scent of apple blossoms and watched as the petals peeled back and the heart of the flower swelled into a green orb the size of a baby’s fist. Leaves cloaked the tree, and the roots stretched, causing the earth around it to buckle. Half a minute later, it was finished: a perfectly healthy tree, with fruit ready to ripen in the fall. The light and heady scent of apple blossoms filled the breeze.

“It worked!” Kiela said. “Same spell, same result. Proof of concept!”

“Excellent!” Caz punched the air with one tendril. “Except that it looks like magic, and I don’t think we can assume the revolutionaries won and changed all the laws, as much as I want that to have happened. So, how do we make it look less like magic?”

That was the trick.

If she was going to convince the islanders that these were harmless remedies, not illegal spells, then they couldn’t look so spectacular. There was no imperial investigator stationed on an island this small and remote, and so long as no one became suspicious enough to summon one . . . Well, they just had to make sure no one became suspicious. She and Caz had brought a bucket of pine cones, along with as many of the other ingredients as they could collect in a few hours.

It was time to experiment. “First, fewer ingredients . . .” Kiela replicated the concoction but used the smallest pine cone and only a fraction of the other ingredients. “I’m cutting everything to a fifth of the amount.”

Caz took notes.

First result: unimpressive.

Only a few new leaves and a handful of fruit, but they popped out just as quickly; too quickly to be mistaken for anything but a spell.

For the second experiment, she returned to the full recipe but substituted a scraping of oak bark for the fern fronds—according to one book, fern fronds added oomph to nature spells, whereas oak was used for slow-reaction spells. (The actual language of the book was denser than that, but once Kiela boiled it down to its meaning, that was what ten pages of text equaled.) This time, when she planted the pine cone, it didn’t react immediately. And then all of a sudden, blossoms popped into bloom all over the branches, but instead of hardening into apples, the petals burst from the tree and flew into the air as butterflies. Kiela tilted her head and squinted at the sun as the butterflies scattered across the orchard.

“Test three?”

She continued adjusting the ingredients.

The third tree shrank to half its size.

With the addition of apple blossoms to the spell, the fourth tree transformed into a red-apple-colored bird with a tail of white blossoms and flew over Kiela’s head to disappear into the forest. It trilled joyfully as it flew.

“Oh dear,” Kiela said.

“Do you think anyone will notice?”

“The other birds will.” Maybe it would stick to the forest. She hoped it found things it wanted to eat. What did an apple bird eat? If it had stuck around, they could have tried to help . . . But it hadn’t. She turned back to the orchard and consoled herself with the thought that it was unlikely that anyone would connect the bird to her and Caz. “Maybe it’ll be happier as a bird.”

The fifth tree, whose pine cone had been wrapped in debris from an abandoned bird nest, began to sing a wordless melody. As the branches crooned, Kiela joined Caz by the side of the orchard. I didn’t want a literal singing tree. “Original recipe seems best,” she said.

“It’s a nice tune,” Caz said.

“Mmm.” Definitely an irrelevant detail. It shouldn’t be singing at all, though he was right that the tree had chosen a pleasant melody. Perhaps with luck, passersby would think it was a trick of the wind. A lot of luck.

Sitting on a rock near Caz, she ran through the different variations she’d read in the various books last night. She’d committed several to memory, as well as taken notes. “Maybe we need to use the recommended ingredients but vary the words.”

“Maybe we need to read a lot more books and take multiple years’ worth of classes,” Caz said. “Do you think that bird will be all right?” It still hadn’t returned from the forest.

“It’ll probably become friends with my chicken.”

Taking the notebook from Caz, she studied the notes they’d made so far. He was right that one day of reading and another of experimenting wasn’t a replacement for the rigorous training that an actual sorcerer underwent. I’m not trying to be a sorcerer, though. All I need is to perfect this one minor spell. She wasn’t trying to change the world. Just heal a tree. It should be doable.

Giving the notebook back to Caz, she looked out at the view. Beyond the orchard was the sea. She knew there was a fence to keep anyone away from the cliff, but from where they were, she couldn’t see it—it looked as if the orchard melted into the sea. Sun glinted on the water, like diamonds strewn out onto satiny blue. Far in the distance, she saw the scaled back of a sea serpent rise and fall.

They did have a spell that healed trees. Couldn’t they just stick with that?

Not if our secret is immediately discovered.

There had to be a way to slow the effects of the spell.

Most sorcerers wanted their magic to be as showy as possible, to prove their worth. She’d once witnessed four sorcerers work together to create a spectacular light display over the city, to celebrate the anniversary of the emperor’s ascension to the throne. They’d been raised up on a dais lit by hundreds of candles, and their voices had been amplified to echo the spell through the city. Fire had danced in the night sky, drawn by their words. The display had begun as ribbons of light, but then the dance became more complex. It formed the shape of a sea serpent with the moon behind it, and then a lion racing between the stars, before it split into a thousand birds and then burst into flowers. She remembered later one of the other librarians saying the true magic wasn’t filling the sky with fire—it was extinguishing it later. For that, the sorcerers had embedded spells within the highest towers of the city. As the show drew to its end, the spells released and quenched the sky with rain. It had smelled like lilacs.

“What if I say the words before the pine cone is buried? All the same elements will be there so it shouldn’t change the outcome, but it could change the timing.” As she spoke, she was already assembling another sticky pine cone.

Caz frowned at the orchard. “The spell was written in a specific order . . .”

“It was also written with specific ingredients, and we varied that. One more experiment, Caz, and if it doesn’t work, we just sell jam.” She noticed that the singing tree had switched from an aria to a lullaby. Perhaps it would be silent soon. At least it was on pitch.

“Do it,” Caz said. “But if you start sprouting leaves . . .”

She faked a smile. “Then we’ll be plants together.”

“It would solve the food problem if you had chlorophyll.”

She finished preparing the pine cone and wondered if she was making a terrible mistake. If she activated the spell while she held it, would it turn on her? As much as she loved and respected Caz, she did not want to become anything other than a person.

On the other hand, if this worked and she proved she could enchant the pine cones before she sold them, then no one would witness her speaking the First Language, which would go a very long way toward convincing islanders this wasn’t a true spell.

“Kiela . . . you know this is a risk,” Caz said.

“Everything we’ve done from the moment those fires began has been a risk.” Speaking the words directly to the pine cone, she recited the spell. And then she held her breath.

She didn’t feel any different.

“No leaves,” Caz reported.

Holding out her arm, she checked for any bark, leaves, or blossoms, but her arm looked the same shade of blue as always, if a little dry from being out in the sun all afternoon. She felt the same. Still blood in her veins, not chlorophyll. And she didn’t feel the urge to sing, which was nice. “All right, let’s see if the magic works at all.”

Kiela picked another apple tree and buried the pine cone between its roots. She stepped back without speaking and waited. Slowly, from the roots up, the tree came back to life. Leaves unfurled from the branches, the trunk thickened, and buds appeared. A few minutes later, the buds opened into blossoms.

“What if you wait longer between the spell and the burying?” Caz asked.

By sunset they had it: a slow-release spell to heal trees, encapsulated in a sticky pine cone.

Kiela and Caz spent the next day making jam, assembling pine cones, and preparing their shop for opening day. She positioned the jam jars on the new shelves, changed her mind and repositioned them, and then repositioned them again until Caz at last said, “It’s ready.”

All of the pine cones had been wrapped neatly in strips of cotton from clothes that were too shabby to be worn, and they were in a basket behind the shelves, ready to be offered to prospective customers. In total, they had several dozen jars of raspberry jam and an equal number of enchanted pine cones. Everything suspicious was hidden in the back bedroom, with quilts artfully arranged over the crates to make them look like extra tables. She’d added vases of daisies and roses on top to complete the effect, on the off chance that someone wandered back there before she could stop them. The bedroom door would be closed while the shop was open, though, and she and Caz had no intention of leaving any stranger alone in the cottage.

It was all as ready for tomorrow as they could make it.

She just hoped this wasn’t all a mistake.

Shortly after dawn the following day, Kiela ventured into the village to let the baker know that her jam shop was ready to open. She’d expected that Bryn would spread the word, and Kiela and Caz would see their first visitor later in the afternoon.

To her surprise, Bryn, despite the line of customers waiting for their early-morning pastries, turned the sign on the door to “Closed” and shooed everyone out. She left Tobin with a tray of muffins and strict instructions to sell them, not eat them. She then ordered Kiela to hurry back to the shop ahead of her. “Open it up,” Bryn said. “I’ll recruit your first customer and be there quicker than a serpent can sink a ship.”

“That can’t be a real saying,” Kiela objected.

“Knew a sailor who said it all the time,” Bryn said. “Admittedly, it was cuter when she said it. Go on, scoot. Get ready to hawk your wares.”

Thus ordered, Kiela scooted. It had all happened so quickly that she felt as if she’d been spun in a circle three times fast.

As she bounded up the stairs on the cliff, she wondered if she was more excited or more nervous, and she decided there should be a name for an emotion that was both equally: “excivous” or “nercited.” Glancing behind her, she saw Larran’s house—the merhorse herder was on his porch, his back to the cliffs, looking out at the sea—and she hesitated.

I wish he was my first customer.

She shook herself, not certain where the thought had come from. It didn’t matter who was first. What mattered was making the shop a success. Impressing Bryn and whoever the baker brought with her was all Kiela should be focusing on.

This has to work.

She didn’t really have any kind of backup plan.

Jogging through the greenery, Kiela let the bird calls buoy her. She felt as if the forest was cheering her on. She burst out of the woods in front of the cottage—and a chicken, the chicken, her chicken, lifted its head and clucked at her.

She skidded to a halt.

She looked at the chicken.

The chicken looked at her.

And then it darted into the woods again.

Kiela sighed. But as she crossed the yard to the door, she spotted, nestled in a clump of grasses, an egg. She scooped it up. The shell was warm, clearly just laid. Feeling as if it was a good-luck sign, she carried it into the cottage and called to Caz as she placed the egg in a dish so it wouldn’t roll away, “Customers are coming!”

He scurried out from the back bedroom and climbed onto the kitchen counter, which afforded a line of sight into the front. “What should I do? Should I welcome them? Or should I hide? Is a sentient spider plant a plus or a minus for a business?”

“You are always a plus,” Kiela told him firmly.

It was one thing to not risk Caz in town, but the cottage was their home. If the islanders couldn’t handle Caz, then she didn’t want their business. Or their friendship. It wasn’t as if talking plants were unheard-of. It was only on the outer islands, where there were fewer sorcerers to (legally) create them, that they were rare. She readjusted one of the jars on the shelf and then turned with a bright smile on her face as she heard voices approach the shop.

Bryn was coming up the path, followed by the centaur, Eadie. The baker had removed her apron and was dressed in teal pants and a white blouse, which complemented her tawny fur. A leaf had gotten stuck on one of her antlers.

Beside her, Eadie trotted on her four hooves while gesturing animatedly with her human arms. She wore a cloud-white top over her human half and a silvery-gray skirt over her horse hindquarters, and she’d braided silver ribbons into her black mane. The ribbons draped across her horse body down to her hooves. She had a wide, friendly smile, and Kiela told her heart to quit hammering. Both Bryn and Eadie had been nice before; there was no reason to think they wouldn’t be happy shoppers now. Clearly, they’d both made an effort to dress up, as if this were an event, not an errand.

Giving herself a silent pep talk, Kiela met them at the door. “Welcome! Thank you for coming to Kiela and Caz’s Jam Shop.”

“Who’s—” Eadie began.

“Hello!” Caz called. He waved his leaves.

Eadie blinked, stared, and then blinked again.

“Ah, so you’re the one that Tobin has been chattering on about,” Bryn said. “Pleasure to meet you, Caz. Welcome to Caltrey! It’s so nice to have new residents. We haven’t had new islanders since . . . well, I can’t have been the most recent arrival, but certainly there haven’t been many, unless you count newborns. How do you like our lovely island so far?”

“Very plant-friendly,” Caz said.

Kiela stepped away from the door so her two customers could come inside.

“Oh, isn’t this lovely!” Bryn said. Gushing, she admired the shelves with their alternating wood grain, the flowers that Kiela had put in vases and extra glasses, and the rafters with drying herbs hanging from them. “Every detail is charming. Ooh, I love the painted flowers on the chairs—I once wanted to be an artist, and I borrowed my sister’s paints and decided the stairs would look prettier with flowers. Let’s say that painting is not my strength, and my mother was not pleased, nor was my sister, or really anyone, and I haven’t painted since. Luckily, I’m far better at baking.”

Eadie clopped in halfway, with the back half of her horse self still outside. It occurred to Kiela that she should have made the shop larger or the door wider or . . . “It is charming,” Eadie said, pleased. “Don’t work yourself into a lather, Binna’s girl. I’m used to not fitting everywhere. One suggestion—and you can take or leave it—you could use your front window for window service like Bryn does at her bakery, to accommodate Caltrey’s larger residents. Ivor in particular has difficulty with ordinary-size doorways.”

Bryn tapped her delicate antlers. “He’s a twelve-prong.”

“I love that idea,” Kiela said. Perhaps she could add a counter to the outside of the window. She wished Larran had left his hammer. Not that she knew how to make a counter, but how hard could it be? He had left some wood behind . . .

“So much beautiful jam,” Bryn said, examining the jars. “Eadie, look how they sparkle, packed with so many berries—you can see how rich they must taste.”

“I wanted to preserve the berries while they were at their peak ripeness,” Kiela said. “I plan to make other flavors soon, as well as experiment with adding various spices and herbs. I think cinnamon and cloves would work well with cherry, for example.”

Eadie snorted. “If you can find a healthy cherry tree, more power to you. Remember the lovely cherry tree beside my house, Bryn?”

“Yes, it used to sag with so much fruit the branches would touch the ground, and—”

“And we’d stuff our faces and spit out the seeds on Fenerer’s yard,” Eadie said. “Only when he wasn’t watching, of course. Such a wonderful tree. Joy and petty revenge in every branch.”

That was a perfect intro to their other offering . . .

Caz heard it too. He hopped off the counter and waddled himself into the shop. “To special customers, we’re also offering a special remedy that improves the health of trees.”

Both Bryn and Eadie looked at him.

Kiela held her breath—this was it, the moment that it could either all work or all fall apart. If they didn’t accept the fiction of a “remedy” . . .

“What sort of remedy?” Eadie asked.

“A family recipe,” Caz lied. Kiela felt her eyes go wide. Luckily, neither the baker nor the centaur was looking at her. He continued with blithe confidence. “Handed down through the generations, plant to plant.”

“Ooh,” Eadie said. “And it works?”

“Plants know what plants need,” he said in a lofty tone.

That was absolutely brilliant. Kiela wished she’d thought of it. Nice work, Caz. She ducked behind the shelves and pulled out one of the wrapped pine cones. “Simply bury it between the roots of the tree. Don’t delay, though, or it will lose its potency.”

Eadie accepted the package. “Just bury it? No . . . anything else?”

She guesses, Kiela thought. She hoped it wasn’t obvious the way her heart was hammering against her rib cage. She rubbed her suddenly sweaty palms on her shirt and wondered when it had become so hot in here. “That’s all.”

“And what do I owe you for this remedy?” Eadie asked.

She looked at Caz, who shrugged his leaves. “It’s the first one we’ve sold . . . How about this: try it, and if it works, then pay us what you think it’s worth to you?”

Eadie considered the wrapped pine cone, the sentient spider plant, and Kiela. “Fair enough,” she said. Beside her, Bryn was beaming at both of them.

Kiela felt the muscles in her shoulder unknot, though her heart continued to race. She smiled at the centaur. Our first sale. “Can I also interest you in some jam?”

“Absolutely,” Eadie said.

“I’d like a few jars as well,” Bryn said. “There’s a pastry recipe that would be perfect with it, spread with a layer of goat cheese, which adds the nicest flavor.”

Caz rustled his leaves and groaned, “Ugh, goats.”

As Kiela negotiated payment, Bryn launched into an anecdote about an overfriendly goat who loved to eat buttons—everyone who passed by had to watch their coats and their sweaters because he’d pluck off any button he could reach. Even Caz laughed as she described the lengths one islander went to to retrieve her buttons . . .