Mine is being unable to move, unable to speak, left alone for years to lose all sense of time, of place, of self…She lied, “Sometimes I have a nightmare about falling.”
“It’s the flytraps,” Ambrel told Rowan. “That’s what makes it unusual.”
“Have you ever seen a flytrap? They dissolve their prey. An insect will take ten days to be digested.” Rowan shuddered. “I’m not saying that they aren’t fascinating and precious and whatever Yarrow would say about them—he’s never met a plant he didn’t like, and I suspect that hasn’t changed—but they make my skin itch, thinking about it.”
“The one I met was nice,” Terlu volunteered.
“I will strive to be polite if I ever meet them,” Rowan said. “Now… if I remember correctly… Ah, yes, this way to the dream flowers!” She tugged them toward the next door, and they walked into a room that was filled with lilacs: deep purple, lavender, and white. The aroma filled the air so thickly that for a moment, none of them spoke; they walked through, breathing in the lilac. Thick, the bushes grew up to the ceiling, their branches weaving together, tangled behind their green leaves. Clusters of lilac flowers cascaded from the green.
“Beautiful,” Ambrel breathed.
“Did you know any of the sentient plants?” Terlu asked Rowan. “I mean, from before you left?” She couldn’t remember how old Yarrow had said he was when they fell asleep. A child? From the order of Laiken’s notes, she knew that he’d already begun to dismiss his gardeners when he’d begun to experiment with the sleep spell. She wondered if any of the gardeners at the time had suspected it wasn’t a natural sleep.
“Dendy used to babysit me when I was younger. Keep me from falling into the ocean or ingesting any poisonous berries, that sort ofthing. He was great.” Rowan opened the door to the next greenhouse, which was filled with row after row of leafy bushes. “And Hosha—they’re the prickly pear—they used to offer up their flower, whenever they grew one. I didn’t know Lotti. Guess she was already dormant by the time I was old enough to be loose in the greenhouse, or else he kept her in his tower, away from us. Anyway, when their magic failed and they all stopped talking… yeah, that wasn’t a good day.”
She missed them.Had she missed her brother? Had she ever planned to come back? Would she have come back if Alyssium hadn’t fallen? Would any of them? “If you don’t mind me asking, why didn’t anyone come back to Belde before now?”
“Why didn’t Yarrow ever come to us?” Rowan countered. An edge crept into her cheerful voice. She marched faster through the greenhouse into the next one and then the next, without pausing to look at the blossoms that overflowed their pots, the towering trees whose leaves kissed the ceiling, the delicate vines that wound up the pillars, or the countless flowers that bloomed around them. “Do you have any idea of how many letters I wrote him that he didn’t answer? How many times I begged him to come to Alyssium? Even if it was just to visit? I saved up. After school, I worked in the florist shop, and I saved every little coin that I earned so that it could pay for Yarrow to take a boat to come see us. Enough for a return trip, if he didn’t want to stay. I just wanted him to come. Do you know how many times he wrote back to me, to explain why he wasn’t coming?”
She could guess, but it was a rhetorical question.
“I needed my brother with me. And my father. When at last Dad came and Yarrow wasn’t with him… I wrote him a big letter after that, explaining all the reasons he should join us.”
After two more lefts through greenhouses that Terlu had never seen (one full of decorative cabbages of various shades of green, white, and purple, and one full of thick greenery that was speckled with caterpillars who resembled tiny stretched-out cats), they reached a door with smoky glass. Or maybe the greenhouse on the other sidewas dark and hazy? Squinting, Terlu tried to see through—she saw shadows of pillars and trees. It was oddly dark.
Stopping, Rowan stared at the glass door as if not seeing it. “Not once. He didn’t write a single letter back to me ever.”
Then she pushed through the door and pulled Ambrel in with her.
Terlu lingered behind, thinking about Rowan’s words. She’d never asked Yarrow if he’d reached out to his relatives, and he’d never said. Granted, it wasn’t her business, but she’d privately dumped all the blame on his father, sister, cousins, aunts, and uncles for leaving him behind. She hadn’t thought about the fact that he’d chosen not to go just as much as they’d chosen not to stay. Following them through the door, she asked, “Was the letter I sent the first time he’d ever tried—”
She halted and stared.
False moonlight bathed the greenhouse in a pale blue light. At the peak of the cupola, an imitation moon was cradled in a web of glittering strands. Swirls of sparkling cloud drifted through on a breath of impossible wind. The flowers were a deep blue, black, and gray—the colors of a garden at night. Even their leaves were a dark gray. Starlike sparkles drifted up from the blossoms, as if the flowers were breathing out stardust.
It smelled like jasmine. Terlu inhaled deeply as she walked forward.
“You’ll want to sit down for this,” Rowan said.
Ambrel dropped to sit cross-legged on the ground, and Terlu sat nearby. Rowan plucked the nearest flower. It looked like a black teacup, with petals that curved in her palms. She knelt and held it out to her wife first.
“Is it safe?” Ambrel asked.
“Would I tell you to do something that wasn’t safe?”
“You would if you thought it would be funny,” Ambrel said. “Is this going to be make me act like I think I’m a monkey?”
“Embarrassing isn’t the same as unsafe,” Rowan said, a wide smileon her face. “And you were a cute monkey.” She bopped her wife on the nose.
Ambrel bared her teeth at her and made monkey noises. Both of them laughed. “Sorry,” Ambrel said to Terlu. “This was several months ago, back in Alyssium, before the revolution, when we all thought everything would be fine and it would be resolved peacefully. Rowan and I went to a party thrown by a minor sorcerer. He’d offered as entertainment spell-candies that were supposed to transform you into an animal for five or ten minutes.”
“In reality, the spell was a trick. It only made youthinkyou were an animal.”
“Rowan believed she was a hedgehog.”
“Spent the entire time rooting around the carpets, searching for insects with my nose,” Rowan admitted with a grin. “I’m told I made snorting noises.”
“But at leastyoudidn’t try to swing from the chandelier and throw pâté at all the other guests,” Ambrel said. Her eyes sparkled with the memory, and Terlu thought their experience of Alyssium had been very different from hers. She hadn’t been to any parties, except the Winter Feast at the Great Library. Sorcerers, minor or not, did not consort with Fourth Librarians.Or at least they never consorted with me.There had been one once, a lanky green-skinned sorcerer from one of the outer islands, who had acted like he wanted to woo her—it hadn’t taken her long to figure out he just wanted access to restricted books. He hadn’t been subtle. She’d cried for a few days over him.
