Radane frowned at the jam, but she picked up a knife and spread some on the roll. She took a bite and chewed. Politely, Kiela and Bryn sipped their tea and nibbled their rolls with jam. Kiela wondered if she should make apple jam next. Caz swung himself onto the table and then sent a tendril down and helped Meep up onto the table as well. The plants waited for Radane to think.
After a little while, Radane said, “I’d like to make a life here.”
Bryn nodded briskly. “Then you can start as I offered: by cleaning up the mess you made in my bakery. I’ll hire you as my assistant, at least temporarily. If you like working at the bakery, you can stay. If not, I’ll help you find another job in town. Regardless, I live above the bakery and have a spare room. It can be yours. If anyone comes to look for you, we’ll tell them you’ve lived here a decade and worked at the bakery for just as long.”
Radane swallowed her mouthful of jam and bread. “I was terrible to both of you. Why are you being so kind?”
Kiela thought of Larran, leaving cinnamon rolls and eggs in a basket on her step the first morning she was here, and went for the simplest and truest answer: “Because we can.”
Chapter Thirty
Kiela heard Larran whistling before he appeared, carrying his tools on a belt at his waist, as well as a stack of wood balanced on his shoulder. He deposited the wood just outside the cottage door, beside the rosebushes. “I’m picturing shelves all along the walls on either side of the bed. Every wall.”
Kiela smiled happily. So many shelves! “Itisa lot of books.”
He laid his saw and the other tools from his belt on a nearby stump. “How did you manage . . . Never mind. Not my business.”
“We started preparing when we first heard about the unrest,” Kiela said, watching him organize his tools with the same care he did everything. “I only wish I could have saved more. I didn’t believe it would get as bad as it did. By the way, in case it’s not clear already, you really shouldn’t go to Alyssium right now.”
He nodded. “Got that. But the storms are—”
“Meep!” the cactus said from the cottage doorway.
“Okay, yes,” he said with a laugh. “I’m not going anywhere.” Kiela, Bryn, and Radane scooted the crates and the bed out of the way to clear room for the shelves, while Larran cut the wood. Radane had never held a hammer or saw before, but she was adept at measuring. Kiela and Bryn hammered the shelves in place, and Caz, with Meep, issued instructions: floor-to-ceiling shelves, twelve inches for the bottom three, eight inches for the top. Unlike the jam shelves, these would be built into the wall. As they worked, they talked about things close to their hearts—Kiela and Caz about the library, Bryn about the bakery, Radane about the university where she’d studied, and Larran about Caltrey and the merhorses.
It took them two very pleasant days to complete the shelves: beautiful shelves of multicolored wood on every wall of the bedroom, floor to ceiling, framing the windows. They filled the cottage with the scent of fresh-cut wood. At night, Radane slept in Bryn’s above-the-bakery apartment, while Larran returned to his house to care for the merhorses. And Kiela dreamed about being in the heart of the forest, with the cloud bears and the unicorn.
On the second day, Eadie and Ulina stopped by to visit. Eadie brought a basket of ruby-red cherries, and Ulina brought a spare harp for Caz to keep, a lap harp with two sets of strings that was nearly the same size as Caz. They all paused construction for a meeting of the Pine Cone Coven and to snack on the cherries that hadn’t been pitted for jam, while Caz played on his new harp and Meep swayed their needles to the music.
Kiela had never been happier.
On the third day, only Radane returned at dawn. Bryn couldn’t spend any more time away from the bakery, and Larran was needed with his herd out with the fishing boats.
“Bryn said I can start my bakery job tomorrow,” Radane explained when she arrived. She withdrew a tattered and familiar book from a pouch. “I wanted to come bring you this.”
It was her parents’ cookbook.
“I was going to bring it sooner, but I wanted to repair the page that ripped.”
Kiela took it and clutched it to her chest. She felt like a piece of her was slotted back into her heart. “All right.” She wasn’t going to say thank you since Radane had taken it against her will in the first place, but shecouldsay it was all right, especially since she’d taken the extra step to try to repair it. “Caz and I were about to shelve. Would you like to join us?”
“You’ll let me handle the books?”
Only if she did it carefully. Certainly not unsupervised. But yes, she would let her help, if she wanted to. She’d earned that much trust. “You can take them out of the crates and pass them to us. We’ll organize them.”
“Fair enough.”
They set to work.
As they shelved, Kiela told Radane about her experiments with the tree and water spells, and Radane told her and Caz about which books she’d studied for her degree. There wasn’t much overlap between the two, but Kiela found the conversation fascinating. She was familiar with some but not all of the books Radane had read, and Radane was fascinated by Kiela’s experiments. At the university, they had not been permitted to alter any spells or even try any that hadn’t been thoroughly tested by their professors—the city was considered too crowded and the spells too volatile to take any risks.
“I’d like to find a spell to help the merhorses.” Kiela explained how they had difficulty with both conceiving and birthing without the aid of city sorcerers. “I haven’t run across any text that addresses it directly, but there are a few avenues that look like they have potential.”
Caz pulled out the books with relevant spells to show Radane. None were specific to merhorses, but they’d thought that with some study, perhaps they could be adapted? Sitting on the edge of Kiela’s bed, Radane began to study one of the books. “This one is for horses. If it were combined with spellwork on pure magical creatures, it could work. Do you have Stigard’s third, no wait fourth, volume on the physiology of spell-born constructs?”
Kiela consulted her notebook with the index. “Third crate.”
Abandoning the shelving project, they began to pore over the various books. Kiela knew of several in their collection that had been too advanced for her—they’d required a background in spell-work that she didn’t have—but Radanedidhave training.
