“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.
