“Oh, and you should do it soon,” Kiela said. “I don’t know how long the remedy will stay potent. We haven’t tested that, though I would think it would last. Better to just bury it now.” She wondered if there had ever been a study for how long a spell stayed potent before its effectiveness wore off. But that was a tangent. She wanted to focus first on techniques for restarting stalled spells, especially water spells—that had to be much easier than creating an enchantment from scratch. Plus there should be minimal risk of mistakes, which was a plus. She thought of the cactus running around in the garden.
Larran was staring at her, she noticed, and she realized he’d spoken again and she didn’t have any idea what he’d said. “Hope you have a good night,” Kiela said, and hoped that was a reasonable response to his words.
“Good night, Kiela,” Larran said.
She went back inside as he trudged toward the trail. The books she needed were in the third crate . . . As she passed Caz, he let out a dramatic sigh.
She paused. “What’s wrong?”
“You are hopeless,” he said.
Chapter Fifteen
Kiela didn’t intend to stay up late reading, but the water-magic texts were tricky—the answers always seemed just a few pages away, as elusive as a shadow. By the time she woke, the sun was streaming through the windows. She padded into the kitchen to help herself to a glass of water. As she primed the pump, Caz burst in from the back garden. His tendrils were flailing high above his root ball.
“Are you okay?” Kiela asked. “Is it the cactus? What happened?”
“It’s . . . we, uh . . . you have to come see. We have visitors. Lots of visitors.” He punctuated each sentence with another wave of his tendrils. She hadn’t seen him this worked up since . . .Since the library burned,she thought.
Leaving the sink, she hurried out the back door into the garden. Caz hopped behind her and bumped into her ankles as she halted abruptly and stared.
In every direction she looked in the garden, there were . . . oh my goodness, was that abear?Or not a bear exactly, because it wasn’t made of flesh and fur. It was . . . the idea of a bear, shaped from a cloud. Vast as a boulder but as insubstantial as mist, it hovered a foot off the ground above the daisies. Its shape wavered, wisps of cloud stirred by the air.
As soon as she saw one, she spotted another and another, cloud-smoke-wispy creatures that looked like bears of various sizes.
Beneath the pumpkin leaves: a tiny one like a puff of clouds.
Within the raspberry brambles: a tall and broad bear, made of smoke.
On the roof: the largest yet, spilled across the shingles, wider than her arms could reach, so large it obscured her view of the chimney, but soft and weightless.
Each of the bears had eyes that glowed like embers of a fire, flickering with an intensity that was both wild and beautiful.
“Forest spirits,”she breathed.
She’d read about them, in scholar Cypavia’sExaminations of the Function of Forest Spirits in Fact and Fiction,and she knew they weren’t technically spirits. Originally, their species was from the flying islands in the far western reaches of the empire. When their kind first floated down to the islands in the sea, they hid in the forests and were mistaken for ghosts. Later, when their connection to the trees was discovered, they became known colloquially as forest spirits or tree spirits.
She wished she had Cypavia’s books with her here. The scholar had studied them for decades, embedding herself in their most secluded forests, working to untangle the myths from the facts. On occasion, she could be coaxed to emerge from the trees to give a lecture at the University of Alyssium, and it was said those lectures were absolutely fascinating, especially given how animated she’d be about her topic. Kiela had been tempted to attend one once, but the idea of squeezing herself into the crowded audience . . . Shehadlistened to a secondhand description of the talk, though, and it was indeed riveting.
Fact: they were neither ghosts nor spirits. A more accurate name for them was cloud bears. Or, given their function, tree guardians.
Fact: they acted as guardians of the forests and were fiercely protective of the trees.
Fact: they were shy, solitary creatures.Solitary?she wondered, as she spotted several more, tucked into the corners of her garden and visible over the top of the fence.
Fact: they did not punish trespassers. They did not kidnap innocent children who strayed from the path. They did not destroy villages whose inhabitants ventured too far into the forest with their axes and saws . . . except for when they did.
Some of the stories about cloud bears were true. If you were a danger to their trees, they would sweep over your home, as silent as the fog, and when the mist cleared, you would be gone, never to be heard from again.
Kiela was thinking all of this as she stared at the creatures, and her heart began to beat faster, her palms began to sweat, and she was acutely aware that she and Caz were surrounded. What if they were here to punishher?She had cast a spell that caused the raspberries to spread into the forest. She had tried and failed with several apple trees before her eventual success. What if the cloud bears had decided she and her illegal magic were a danger to their protected forest?
Caz tucked himself behind her ankles. “What do we do?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered back.
“What do they want?” he asked.
She didn’t know that either. “I’ve never heard of them gathering like this. It’s extraordinary.” She tried to think positively. She and Caz had mastered the spell at the end. Maybe she could explain that? Did the cloud bears understand speech?
