Chapter Nineteen
The storm had battered the trees, but as densely packed as they were, they’d held one another upright. Only a few had fallen that she could see. Leaves had been ripped from the canopy, and it looked as if the whole forest had been shaken. But she could still find the path, and in a few moments it opened onto her cottage.
Petals, leaves, and branches were everywhere—spread across the yard, tossed on the roof, leaning against the cottage. A pine tree had fallen but missed anything vital. It lay beside the cottage on the cove side.
“Caz!” she called. She skirted between the debris to the door.
The door hung open.
Why isn’t it shut? Where’s —
“Kiela!” Caz tumbled out of the front door, running as fast as he could on his tendrils, until he was close enough to launch himself upward and into her arms. He wrapped his leaves around her neck. “I thought you’d died.”
Ignoring the dampness of his soil ball, she hugged him back, her arms around his leafiness. “I’m okay. I’m glad you’re okay.”
“You could have been struck by lightning, swept out to sea, crushed by a tree—I’d half written your eulogy. I said very nice things.”
Kiela laughed. “Thank you, I think?”
“It was in iambic pentameter.”
“That’s amazing.”
“I had to create different versions, to match the different ways you died.”
Gently, she said, “I didn’t die. I was in town when the storm blew in, and I couldn’t make it back here. I took shelter at Larran’s. Until he dove into the ocean to rescue a woman from a ship that capsized.”
Caz pulled back from her, disentangling his leaves from her hair. “He has a real savior thing going on, doesn’t he? That can’t be healthy.” He climbed down from her, and she dusted the soil bits off the front of Larran’s shirt. She’d have to wash it before she returned it. “Sorry about the dirt, though it’s entirely your fault for dying six different ways.”
Kiela started to laugh again, half in relief—
“Now that you’re not dead anymore, I have to tell you we have a problem,” Caz said.
Her heart sank. Had the storm caused damage to the cottage? Had the roof leaked? Were the books okay? What about the garden?
Before she could ask, she heard a wail from the cottage—shrill, loud, inhuman. The hair on her neck stood up. What was that? “Caz? What kind of problem?”
“You won’t believe it until I show you.” Using his tendrils, he propelled himself back toward the cottage, and she hurried after him. She noted that the grass was flattened and smeared in a path leading to the door, as if something had been dragged through the mud.
In the cottage doorway, the cactus shivered. Its quills clicked as they rattled against one another. “Meep?” it said. Beyond it, she saw that several of the jam jars had fallen from their shelves. They’d shattered on the floor during the storm. The smear of muddy water continued through the shop.
“Glad you’re okay,” she told the cactus, and then she rounded the corner of the jam shelves, following the mud. To her surprise, she saw the copper bathtub from the privy was in the center of the room in front of the stove.
In it was a mermaid.
Kiela felt her jaw drop open. “Why? How?”
Her body was submerged, her silver tail flopped over the edge, and her head was in her arms with her seaweed hair draped over her. When Kiela spoke, the mermaid lifted her silvery-scaled face and wailed, a piercing sound like the cry of a seagull. Inside the tiny cottage, the wail was magnified until it rattled inside Kiela’s skull.
Rushing to her side, Kiela asked, “Are you all right?” Of course she wasn’t all right. She wouldn’t be wailing if she was. But why was she here? Was she injured? Kiela felt a hundred questions battering inside her.
Behind her, Caz said, “She hauled herself up the stairs from the cove. I found her at the top, with her baby.”
Baby? “Why—”
The mermaid pointed with a trembling webbed finger.
Lying on the hearth on top of a stack of quilts was the merbaby, the same merbaby whom Kiela had seen swimming in the cove. His pale green body was covered in jagged purple slashes that reminded her of the sky split by the storm, and tiny sparks arched over his closed eyes like stray bits of lightning.
Shedding leaves as he shook, Caz said, “He can’t be in the water, not with the sparks he’s giving off, but he’s drying out in the air. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what’s wrong with him. Meep and I—we took out the tub and filled it for the mother, but—”
“He’s storm sick,” Kiela said. She’d read about this—if a creature born of magic absorbed too much excess magic at once, it could overwhelm them. The merbaby’s tiny body hadn’t been strong enough to process all the power within the magic-driven storm. Left unchecked, it would stop his heart. “There’s a healer. Ivor. I’ll bring him here.” He should be with the rescued woman in Larran’s house—
As Kiela turned to go, the mermaid’s hand shot out and closed over Kiela’s wrist. Her fingers were wet and hard, like they were made of shell, not flesh. “No healer.”
She can speak! Kiela hadn’t thought a mermaid’s throat was shaped to be able to utter land-dweller words. This was remarkable. Did scholars know— Stop, focus on the baby. “He needs help, and I don’t know how—”
“You.”
Kiela shook her head. “But I don’t know—”
Sloshing water out of the copper tub onto the floor, the mermaid lurched closer until her face was inches from Kiela’s. Her breath smelled like the ocean, heavy with fish. Her teeth were pointed like a shark’s. “You.”
Tears pricked her eyes. She wanted to help, but how? What did the mermaid expect her to do? “Tell me what to do. I don’t know how to help.”
“Spell.”
Kiela shook her head. “I don’t—”
“Of course!” Caz said. “She needs magic! It’s magic-caused, so she needs a spell to heal him. If there was a sorcerer—”
But there wasn’t. There was only Kiela and her stolen spellbooks.
“You. Heal. Trees.” The mermaid flinched, as if each word hurt her. “Heal. Him.”
That’s why she came here, to us. She thinks we can help.
But the tree spell was a single remedy, only discovered after a lot of research and experimentation. She thumbed through her memory for books that could help—did she have any on storm sickness? She knew she’d read about it, but where? Had she brought those volumes with her?
Yes.
Yes, she remembered a book. Green cover. Deckled edges. Two authors, a sorcerer and a healer, had cowritten it. She’d stored it in the third crate. “Caz, speed-research.”
“Whoo!” Caz cheered.
The mermaid hissed, baring her sharklike teeth.
“Taking it seriously! I swear!”
Kiela barged into the back room and threw the quilt off the third crate. She began pulling out books and piling them on the bed. “Green cover. Two authors.” He joined her and helped pull books out of the crate. “It was mostly a collection of spells for sick livestock—it was published as a veterinary companion—but there was a section on magic-infused creatures.” She hoped the mermaid wouldn’t be offended. Merfolk were people—classifying them as “creatures” was rude, though common in earlier texts—but knowledge was knowledge, and that was the closest bit that Kiela had.
She and Caz dug deep into the crate. The cactus darted around the room. Kiela had the sense that it wanted to help, which was a surprise, but she didn’t have time to think or worry about what it meant for the cactus to be so alert and aware. She filed the oddity in her head to mull over later, when there wasn’t a life at stake.
“Aha!” Caz held up a slim green book with his tendrils.
Kiela plucked it out of his leaves, dropped cross-legged onto the floor, and began to read as fast as she could. Storm sick, storm sick, storm sick . . . Yes, there was the chapter! She skimmed it quickly. There had to be a cure . . . Why write about it in a book like this if there wasn’t? “We need these ingredients.” She held the book up for Caz to see. The cactus scooted beside him and appeared to be peering at the book. Kiela wondered if the cactus could read. She still wasn’t clear how Caz knew how to read. He’d been created with the knowledge. She guessed it was a side effect of being created by a rogue librarian. Looking at the cactus, Kiela wondered if that was the case here as well. I suppose I’m the rogue librarian now.
Most of the items on the list were natural and easily obtained: sap from a tree struck by lightning (she’d seen one on her journey back to the cottage), spit from a grown human (she could supply that), a feather (she hoped the chicken was still in the backyard), a handful of soil (plenty of that in the garden or even attached to Caz, though she wouldn’t take that, of course) . . . but it also called for the leaves of a verisad plant. “What’s a verisad plant?”
“Rare, shiny leaves, very tiny plant that grows in the shade of other plants.” Caz’s leaves rustled. “I haven’t seen any in the garden. I don’t know if it grows on Caltrey.”
The cactus darted out of the bedroom with a “Meep!”
“Then we’ll research substitutions.” She wasn’t going to let the mermaid down, not when she had all the knowledge of centuries around her. “You want to start on that? I know where to find a pine tree struck by lightning.”
“On it,” Caz said.
Rushing out of the bedroom, Kiela told the mermaid, “We have a plan. Just . . .” She didn’t know what to tell the mermaid to do—make sure her child didn’t die? “We’ll be back. We need supplies.”
The mermaid flopped her tail and hissed, “Go.”
Kiela raced out of the cottage, skirting the broken jam jars. Where exactly had she seen the lightning-burned tree? It had been on the path to the cliff . . . She plunged into the forest without a backward glance. Around her, the birds called, and she realized this was the first time she’d heard them since the storm. She hoped they’d weathered it okay. Scanning the trees, she looked for the apple-blossom bird but saw only sparrows. She wondered if the cloud bears were okay. Was there one attached to the damaged tree? Would her pine cone spell help heal it? First, though, she needed the sap—
She found the lightning-struck tree, a third of the way down the trail. Skidding to a stop, she murmured an apology to whatever tree guardians were out there watching her. She grasped a bit of the bark and ripped it off, taking care to get some bark with char and some without. She didn’t know which exactly the spell called for, but it was safest to have both.
Kiela pivoted and darted back toward the cottage. She beelined through the house, past the mermaid in the copper tub and the merbaby on the hearth, out the back door, and into the garden. Several of the plants had been flattened in the rain. Mud stuck to her shoes. The chicken was still in her muddy pen. She had survived fine. Kiela plucked a feather from the hen’s back.
She squawked and ruffled her feathers.
“Sorry.”
Kiela scooped up a bit of soil that was at least partially dry from being close to the house. Running inside, she dumped the dirt, the feather, and the bark into a bowl on the counter. Behind her, the mermaid splashed in agitation as the merbaby let out a weak moan. Kiela spat in the bowl and mixed. The only ingredient missing was the leaves.
“Any luck with a substitution for the verisad leaves?” Kiela called to Caz.
Emerging from the bedroom, Caz waved his tendrils in the air. “No! No luck at all! I can tell you the substitute for basil, for goat cheese, for goat hooves, for goat spit—why do so many spells involve a goat? You can use a chicken egg to substitute for a goose or swan egg so long as you are okay with the result only taking effect close to home. Apparently chickens don’t like to wander and that’s why? Except for our chicken, though she seems happy enough now. But no mention in any books of any viable substitute for verisad leaves, because no other spell requires it, and I can’t—”
“Meep.”
Kiela turned around.
In the garden doorway was the cactus, with a collection of small, shiny leaves stuck to its needles. “Caz?” Kiela asked. “Are those—”
“Oh, you beautiful genius,” Caz said to the cactus. “Verisad leaves.”
Kiela plucked the precious leaves off the cactus’s spines and mixed them with the rest of the concoction into a paste. “You’re a hero,” she said to the cactus. “Thank you.”
“Meep.”
Carrying the paste to the hearth, Kiela knelt beside the merbaby. He’d curled into ball. His tail was wrapped tight around himself, and he was trembling. His mother had to stay in the tub to keep her skin moist, but she couldn’t bring him into the water with her—the magic lightning from the storm still skittered over his body. If he submerged, it would worsen the effects. But if he didn’t . . .
“It’s going to be okay.” She didn’t know if that was true, but she had to say it. Aside from the storm sickness killing him, he’d been out of the water for far too long. His skin looked flaky and pale, and his breath wheezed as if every inhale and exhale hurt. “Caz, would you hold the spellbook open?”
The merbaby whimpered in pain, and his mother wailed again.
His outer leaves trembling, Caz held the book steady beside Kiela.
Carefully, she spooned the concoction onto the merbaby’s back, along his spine as the book instructed, and then she read the spell out loud. She pronounced each word as clearly as a bell, focusing all her attention on the child.
It felt as if every breath of wind in the forest, every call of a bird in the trees, every heartbeat inside the tiny cottage was silent.
As she spoke the last syllable, the concoction sank into the merbaby’s skin, leaving only a patch of brownish-green that faded as she watched. She held her breath. Slowly, very slowly, the bits of lightning vanished, and the merbaby uncoiled.
He opened his eyes and held out his arms.
The mermaid let out a cry and launched herself out of the tub. Water splashed onto the floor, the hearth, Kiela, and Caz, as she gathered her child into her arms—Caz protected the spellbook with his leaves. Flopping, she pulled herself back into the tub with the merbaby, who instantly submerged.
“Meep?” the cactus asked.
Popping back up, the merbaby laughed, a sound like waves crashing into the sand, and Kiela smiled. “He’s all right,” she said. “We did it.”