“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.
