“Good?” he asked.
“It tastes like a memory.”
“Great.” Then: “Is that good?”
She smiled at him. “Very good.”
Carefully, Kiela poured the hot jam into the jar. “And as for how we’re going to pay for supplies . . .” She lifted the jar up to the window, holding the warm glass with a towel. In the sunlight, the jam sparkled like crushed rubies. “I have an idea.”
Chapter Nine
As soon as the jar cooled, Kiela covered it with a square of cloth cut from one of her father’s old shirts and tied a string around it to secure it. She surveyed her work.Pretty enough,she thought. It would be better with a ribbon, but that could be a later embellishment.
“You think the baker will go for it?” Caz asked anxiously.
“I think she’ll recognize that a raspberry croissant would be amazing.” Or a raspberry donut. Or a raspberry tart. Kiela hadn’t seen anything like that in Bryn’s bakery—perhaps there was a berry shortage on the island. It seemed likely, given all the other troubles they’d been having. Larran had mentioned the apple orchards failing; it was logical that other crops had failed as well. Certainly from what she’d seen, there was a distinct lack of jam on Caltrey, which meant that their little shop might be very welcome.
“You don’t think she’ll ask where you’ll get enough berries?”
Kiela peeked out the back window at the riot of berry bushes. With the sun shining on the leaves, they looked like they held a thousand shades of green, cradling the jewellike berries. She could smell the rich scent of the raspberries even from inside. It filled the house, joining with the scent of lavender—she’d filled pitchers with clippings of lavender and positioned them around the house, like her mother used to: on the table, the shelves, and the kitchen countertop. Drying herbs hung from the rafters. “I’ll tell her my family’s garden, left untended, has run wild and flourished.”
He bobbed a tendril in agreement. “Plausible. If you’re sure this is a good idea . . .”
“I’ll be careful,” she promised.
“I’ll have the other jars clean by the time you return,” he promised back.
Tucking the jar into a basket, Kiela headed for the door. Halfway out, she stopped and looked back at the spider plant perched on the edge of the sink. He’d wrapped a tendril around the pump and was about to fill the sink with water. Sunlight spilled through the window onto him, the pump, and the pitcher of lavender beside him. “Caz? Are you ever lonely?”
“How can I be?”
She thought he’d finish with,I have you.
But he said, “I have books.”
Smiling, Kiela headed for the path through the woods. She listened to the birds, the familiar coos and trills. She could parse a few out—there was the two-note call of the charmed warbler, the cascade of the crested parrot, and the . . . Wait, was that a chicken?
Yes, it was.My chicken,she thought, stopping midway down the trail. Peering through the green, she realized there was no way to identify where exactly the wretched bird was and certainly no way to reach the hen before she scuttled away through the underbrush.At least she sounds happy.
Kiela continued on.
She expected that this time, when she emerged from the forest, she wouldn’t be quite so stunned by the view—after all, she’d seen it already. But when she stepped out from the canopy of green, the blue smacked into her, and she stopped and just stared.
It was the vastness of the blue that was so breathtaking, as well as the variation: the bleached blue-white of the sky near the sun, the deeper blue of the sky near the horizon, the slate blue of the clouds, the black-blue and green-blue and fathomless blue of the sea, all contrasted against the pale sand of the shore, the bright colors of the houses, and the dark green of the trees. Far below, at the base of the cliffs, she saw the waves crash in foaming white and then caress the sand. It was high tide, and it reached nearly to the base of the stairs. She plucked a few rosebuds as she passed the bushes and began to pick her way down the steps.
By the time she reached the base of the cliff, the water was lapping at the bottom step. Reaching down, Kiela slipped off her shoes and waded across the beach. The seawater was chilled today, and it nipped at her ankles with each wave like a playful puppy. Sand wiggled between her toes.
Climbing up to the cobblestone streets, she glanced back toward Larran’s house, perched beyond the reach of high tide, and she thought she saw movement through one of the windows. For an instant, she was tempted to reverse direction, knock on his door, and show him the jam she’d made without any help from anyone except Caz, her parents, and the author of the spellbook. But she had a task to perform and no time for a chat with her overfriendly neighbor. She wanted to be back up the stairs before the sun set.
The winged cats of Caltrey basked on the roofs and in the street. She wondered if there was a spell that would help them thrive. A spell for cat-appropriate food. She didn’t think they’d eat jam. One cat with gray-striped fur and orange wings raised his head as she passed and then washed his front paw.
She passed a fisherman with a tackle box in his left hand and a net over his right shoulder, and he glared at her as if she was trespassing. She tensed and then reminded herself it was a public street, she belonged here, and she had a destination. Glancing back over her shoulder, she expected to see him watching her suspiciously, but he wasn’t. He shooed away one of the cats who was lounging on a doorstep and went inside one of the houses without a backward glance. Maybe the look had been unfriendly only in her imagination. Maybe he’d been scowling because she’d looked unfriendly. What had her face been doing when she passed him? Had she smiled? Had it been a weird smile? She practiced smiling and wished she had a mirror. She couldn’t tell if she was curving her lips too much or . . .
Ahead was the fountain and beyond it the bakery. Kiela dropped her face into a neutral expression and hoped that none of the bakery customers had seen her smiling inanely at no one as she walked through the streets.
She nodded at Eadie, the centaur woman, who was seated in the same bench as last time and had another cup of tea in front of her. The boy with goat horns was here again too, cross-legged on the street, absorbed in peeling potatoes. The skins were piling up next to him. Everyone else from the other day—the multi-armed woman, the grumpy man with scales, the older woman with more wrinkles than a raisin—was absent, thankfully.
“Hello, Binna’s girl!” Eadie called. “How’s the cottage holding up?”
