His father agreed with him. “He wasn’t good with people.”
Nudging Terlu’s foot with her leaf, Lotti piped up, “Take me! If Laiken is there, even a piece of him… I want to talk to him. He’ll listen to me. I think.”
She might be right.Lotti held up her leaves, and Terlu bent down and lifted her up. Closing her petals tighter, the rose curled her leaves around her root ball.
“Come with us,” Terlu pleaded with the two men.
She expected an argument or even excuses, but instead Yarrow merely nodded. Sighing, Birch nodded as well.
While the other gardeners and sentient plants reorganized the singing plants and took stock of what survived—nearly all the plants this time, thankfully—Terlu headed out of the greenhouse with the resurrection rose, Yarrow, and his father.
Back in the sorcerer’s tower, Terlu, with Lotti, climbed the stairs first, followed by Yarrow and Birch. They’d quit arguing and dropped into an angry silence, which she didn’t think was an improvement, but at least they’d both come.
She lowered Lotti onto the bedside table. “Can you sense him?”
Lotti waved her petals and leaves in the air. “Laiken? Are you here? Papa?”
Terlu wondered if she should leave the rose alone with him. But no, she had important questions to ask. Or try to ask. There was no guarantee that a ghost could understand anything the living said—it depended how much of him remained.
She shivered.
Was that him, the chill in the air, the shadows on the wall?
“If you’re here, your plants need you,” Terlu said.
“Why did you— No, that’s not what we’re here to ask,” Lotti corrected herself. She folded her petals as if she were petitioning a judge. “We need your help. Your children need you. We’re awake, you see, but the greenhouses are failing. Can you help us stop it?”
The windows rattled.
“Wind or ghost?” Terlu whispered.
“Wind,” Birch said, arms crossed. He was scowling hard, more bearlike than Yarrow had ever been. “He doesn’t care.”
Another whoosh, and the sheets on the bed shifted.
Lifting his voice, Birch said, “Isn’t that right, Laiken? You don’t care about anyone or anything. You don’t care about the gardens—you just made them because of how powerful they made you feel. You didn’t care about your daughter—you just wanted to control her.”
He knew the daughter,Terlu guessed. Dendy had said she’d died before Yarrow was born, but Birch and the other older gardeners may have known her personally. They’d watched the tragedy unfold, and they’d seen Laiken become more and more paranoid and been unable to stop any of it. They’d been there when he forced the plants to sleep—and then when he forced all of his dedicated gardeners to leave their jobs and their homes.
“Quiet,” Yarrow growled at him. “You’ll anger him.”
Birch snorted. “What does that matter? He turned his back on us. All of us. We devoted our lives to this place, to the vision of what it could be. We believed it was important, that it was bigger than ourselves. But to him… it was a toy. A toy he discarded.”
“I’m more than a toy,” Lotti said.
“Absolutely you are,” Terlu said firmly. “You’re more than what anyone made you to be.” She wished she could propel those words right into the little rose’s heart, so she’d believe them. She deserved so much more than he’d been capable of giving her.
“He made me out of love,” Lotti insisted. “He loved me. He loved all of us. He just… got so scared he’d lose us that he went too far.” She turned in a circle to face her bloom toward all of the room. “But we’re alive. We’re awake. Dendy. Risa. Amina. Tirna. Nif. Zyndia. We’re all alive and well, and we want to stay that way. Won’t you help us?”
A breeze blew through the room, and the curtains rustled.
There was no open window, no source for the wind.
“I think that was a yes?” Lotti said.
“Ask him if there’s an enemy causing the failures,” Birch said.
Yarrow shook his head but said nothing.
