“My cottage is just outside the greenhouse. You can stay there until you, um, leave.” As if that resolved everything, he began to walk away.
“Wait, where are you going?” Terlu asked.I’m supposed to leave? Leave and go where?Why was he walking away from her?
“I… ahh… I have to think…” He picked up his pace. “I just… I have to go. I have work to do?”
If she weren’t fully aware that she was the least intimidating person ever to exist in the Crescent Islands Empire, she would have thought he was fleeing her.That’s not possible.He was dismissing her because she wasn’t a sorcerer and therefore not worth his time. Once again, like home, like the library, she was somewhere she wasn’t wanted and didn’t belong. Except this was worse, because she didn’t know how she’d gotten here.
“Please,” she called after him. “I still don’t understand why I’m here or who sent me here or wherehereis or anything.”
“Neither do I,” the gardener said over his shoulder. He then turned a corner, leaving her staring at only roses.
CHAPTER FOUR
The cat meowed from the ceiling and jolted Terlu out of her shock. She hurried after the gardener. “Wait, please! I don’t understand—” She rounded the corner and saw the path split five ways, each vanishing beneath a canopy of roses.
Had he really just… left? Who did that?
Sure, he’d said she could rest in his cottage, which was lovely of him, but she didn’t know where it was. Or whohewas.
“Come back, please! I don’t even know your name.” She picked a path at random and started down it. A few yards in, she decided he couldn’t have gone this way—there were too many roses that crisscrossed the walkway for him to have used it. She pivoted and hurried back to the junction. “You can work while we talk. Or I can help you work. I know how to make myself useful. Favorite family story: Once, there was a storm coming, and no one had given me a job to do, so I decided to move every single chicken into the house. I was three years old, determined to help, and the chickens were feisty, but I got them all in before the wind hit. My parents retold that every time it stormed—they said it was the funniest sight: three-year-old me waddling determinedly with my arms full of fussy poultry. Hey, you can’t just bring someone back to life and then walk away!”
Except that was exactly what he’d done. He’d fled, as if he were the criminal and she an imperial investigator. She hurried down thesecond path, which ended in an arbor overflowing with copious amounts of roses. A cascade of snowy white roses spilled over dark green leaves, stunningly beautiful but unhelpful.
I lost him.She wanted to weep, which wasn’t like her at all. She was more of a put-a-smile-on-and-blunder-ahead kind of person than a weeper, at least under usual circumstances. But she hadn’t been under “usual circumstances” for a while, and right now she was hungry, achy, and bone-deep tired. She wished she were back in the library, even as quiet and empty as it was, by one of the great fireplaces with a mug of hot chocolate in her hands. “Get it together, Terlu,” she said out loud. “At least you know there’s someone here.”
It wasn’t much consolation since he’d practically run from her, but she was still better off than she’d been before she knew there was someone else on this island, wasn’t she?
The silence was beginning to sound loud. She thought of the storage room, and she hugged her arms, reassured to touch flesh and not polished wood.I’m not there anymore. I’m alive again. And I’m not alone.
Returning to the heart of the rose room, Terlu looked up at the rafters. “Kitty? Want to come with me?” She spotted a bit of gray fur and a flash of green feathers, but he didn’t fly down. Of course she didn’t expect the winged cat to come when she called—as friendly as he was, he was still a cat. It was nice that he hadn’t abandoned her entirely. “What do you think I should do?”
He didn’t answer, but it didn’t matter because she’d already decided to walk down a third path. If it failed, she’d try the fourth and then the fifth. Rest and food could wait.I’m not giving up. I’ll find him, and hewillanswer my questions.
Hopefully.
In addition to the roses on the trellis above her, this path also had miniature rosebushes tucked along both sides that boasted blossoms with tiny overlapping petals in pale pink. Fallen petals were strewn over the slate stones as if the garden were a bridal bower.
Thankfully, this path ended in a door. As she opened it, the catswooped low over her head to fly through above her. Following him, she stepped into an array of flowers more varied than she could have imagined. While the first and second greenhouses had been saturated in green and the rose room had been filled with delicate and elegant pastels and jewel tones, this one looked as if it had been drenched by a rainbow.
“Wow,” she said, gawking at all of it.
Lilies bloomed in a thousand different shades of yellow, red, orange, and white, with stripes and polka dots. Bell-like flowers in pink and blue clustered on bushes. Fat firework-like clumps of brilliant white flowers exploded on another.
Between them flew butterflies like no butterfly she’d ever seen—their wings changed color with each flap: red to blue to yellow to black to silver to purple. She marveled at the ripple of rainbow as they floated from blossom to blossom.
“Hello?” she called, more out of politeness than any belief the gardener would answer.
She walked through and wondered: What was this place? Where did all these plants come from? And the flower bird, the dancing dragonflies, and the color-changing butterflies? Why were these extraordinary greenhouses here? Leaning over, Terlu inhaled the scent of a cluster of purple flowers on a bush. Lilac? She’d never seen a lilac with such large blooms, but it smelled like lilac, heady and sweet.
“Rrr-eow.”
The cat flew past her, his feathers brushing her cheek.
“Oh? Do you know where he went?” Terlu asked.
Whether he did or not, following the winged cat seemed like a much better idea than wandering aimlessly, hoping to stumble across a man who’d made it very clear he was done talking with her. She kept the cat in sight as she wound through the glorious flower beds.
She noticed there were no weeds in any of the beds, despite the riot of colorful growth. The ones with lilies had only lilies, and the lilac bushes were rooted in weed-free soil. A wheelbarrow by the side of the path was piled high with plant debris. These were clearly notabandoned greenhouses, as she’d first thought. A butterfly landed on a lily and closed its wings. Colors shimmered over it in waves, red to purple, chased by blue then green, green then gold.There could be more than one gardener.She’d already walked through more enormous greenhouses in this complex than could possibly be cared for by a single person, and there seemed to be no end in sight. She liked the idea of finding a different, friendlier gardener.
