“You might not be able to stop them.”
“If my family is right, ‘they’ might not exist anymore. While you and I were… distracted, things changed in the outside world. But you aren’t in the outside world anymore. You’re on Belde. Everything’s different here.”
Maybe he was right. She wasn’t in Alyssium, and the empire had fallen. Maybe that meant she was safe. Still, though, she couldn’t ask anyone to put themselves at risk for her. She’d been the one to learn the spells; she’d take the blame if an imperial investigator came. If she had to, she’d claim she forced the plants to cooperate.
“Besides, the plants won’t allow you to be taken away from them,” Yarrow said, as if he could hear what she was thinking. He squeezed her hand. “You aren’t alone anymore either.”
The words felt like a jolt. She’d been saying them over and over to Yarrow—he wasn’t alone, he didn’t need to be alone, it was better that he wasn’t alone—but she had stopped thinking about how they applied to herself, even though he’d said it before too. This time, she allowed the words to sink in. He’d been trying to show her that with every honey cake he’d baked, every greenhouse he’d shared with her, every afternoon he’d spent with her experimenting with spells.
I’m not alone.
She’d found a place for herself. She’d found companionship. Not just with Yarrow, but with Emeral and the plants and the dragons, and now with his family.
Somehow this deserted island had become so very full.
Yarrow halted as the tunnel opened into a cave as massive as a concert hall. “I remember this.” He held the lantern before them, but there was already light, a sliver of sun from high above, piercing the darkness, illuminating the vastness with a whisper of day. Stalactites and stalagmites reached toward one another in pillars of dripped stone. The rare hint of daylight danced off the watery sheen, catching the delicate colors of the stone.
She gawked beside him. “It’s beautiful.”
On one side, water dripped down a wall of ivory stone. It stained the rock green and copper. She hadn’t guessed so much beauty lay under the island.
“Come,” he said.
He led her between domes of limestone. She looked up at a ceiling of stone icicles, arrested mid-drip, and wondered if anyone else knew what magnificence was hidden beneath the greenhouses. Had Laiken been here? What had he thought and felt when he saw this? Had he been awed by its beauty or was he too consumed by his misguided purpose?
Ducking through an opening, Terlu followed Yarrow into an alcove, untouched by the sole beam of sun from the crack above the cavern. He lifted his lantern. Here, the stone had formed delicate lacelike curtains. “I did come back here,” Yarrow said. “Once, years later. I wanted to prove to myself… Well, it doesn’t matter because it didn’t work. I lasted an hour and then I ran out, but I remember this room.”
“I love it.”
He smiled.
She didn’t know that stone could form like this. It looked as if it were made by magic, not by water and time. Or maybe water and time was its own kind of magic.
“I wanted to see this again with you,” Yarrow said. “To see if you being here would change it. And it did. You change everything.”
“Wow,” she said. She winced at herself.Thatwas her response? The man she loved just said the most romantic, the most—Loved?This was the second time that the word had popped into her head, as naturally as if it belonged.Do I love him?She’d known him for a handful of weeks. Not even a full season. But she already felt entwined with him and his life. He felt as much a part of her as breathing.
She heard a flapping sound.
“I think that’s…”
“Either bats or dragons.”
“Bats are quieter.” Terlu followed the sound back into the great hall. Up by the stalactites, the red dragon was flying in figure eights. It had something clutched in its talons.
She waited with Yarrow for the dragon to spot them and fly toward them, toward the lantern that Yarrow held aloft.
The dragon dropped the object into Terlu’s palms.
It was a seashell.
Her heart beat faster. Yarrow gripped her shoulder, squeezing. “Is that—”
“Show us where you found it?” Terlu asked the little dragon.
The dragon led the way, back into the darkness. Yarrow keptthe lantern steady, and they continued to unspool the thread. After about an hour of walking, Terlu noticed they were running low on the thread. Maybe they could mark the walls? That should work.
When the thread ran out, she used her charcoal pencil to make arrow marks on the cave walls. “How deep does it go?”
