She heard Perri trumpet. Ahead of her, he breached, leaping out of the water, and then he crashed down again, clearly signaling her.
There was a flag.
She grinned.
Well, that was a beautiful excuse to be nosy. She was invited.
As Marin sailed into the harbor, a woman wrapped in a heavy coat with a red scarf skipped down the steps to the dock. The wind had picked up and was making her curls dance vertically around her head like cheerful snakes. She bounced from foot to foot as shewaved and waited. A green tumbleweed of branches and leaves was blown down the steps. It rolled down the dock and stopped next to her.
Closer, Marin saw the woman’s face: round flushed cheeks, lavender skin, and bright eyes. A familiar face, though Marin had only seen it cast in wood. She nearly laughed out loud.He did it. That’s the statue.
Or not the statue anymore. Clearly flesh. Awake and alive and all of it.
You did it,Marin thought at Rijes Velk.You saved your lawbreaking librarian.
And I helped.
On the heels of that realization, she had another thought:No one can know.
Transporting a statue and a letter wasn’t a crime, but if an imperial investigator thought that Marin had done so with the intent of aiding and abetting a criminal act, if they believed she’d known about Rijes’s plan and the spell in the letter…
AsSilverslid beside the dock, Marin realized she was going to need an extra second to process her reaction or it would be written all over her face. She tossed a line to the non-statue and said, “Tie it off, would you?”
The woman caught the line awkwardly, then knelt and tied it to one of the clamps on the dock while Marin took a moment to study her. The tumbleweed of greenery that had followed her down the steps was clumped by her ankles, but other than that, she seemed ordinary enough. No residual statueness. And more importantly, no spark of recognition.
She doesn’t know I’m the one who brought her here.
How could she? She’d been a statue, and Marin hadn’t seen the gardener when she’d made the delivery. If there was to be any backlash for the lawbreaking…It can’t fall on me if no one knows I was involved.
A little of the tension in Marin’s shoulders unknotted. All shehad to do was pretend she had no idea who the former statue was.I can do that.“You the one who raised the flag? What do you have for me?”
With a perky smile, the former statue said, “Hi! Thank you for coming. It’s really nice to… Well, lovely to meet you.” She pulled a letter out of her coat pocket.
Suddenly, the leafy clump of green at the woman’s feetspoke. “I’m Ree. And you… wow. Hi. You’re asailor.”
Startled, Marin laughed. “Hello, Ree. Yes, I am.” Just an ordinary sailor with no idea that the woman in front of her wasn’t supposed to be alive. She remembered what Rijes had said about the former librarian’s crime: that she’d made herself a friend. And here was a clearly enchanted plant.
Exactly how many times had the law been broken on this island?
Granted, it was an island known for its late floral-minded sorcerer. Perhaps this sentient bush was a legacy from his magic. It was possible that this woman was innocent. Or innocent-ish.
Marin said, “You could’ve just left the note in the box. That’s what the gardener does. You the new gardener? What happened to the other one? He okay?” Did the gardener know how very illegal all of this was? Did he care?
“He’s fine. I’m…” She hesitated.
Marin waited to see how she was going to finish that sentence. This woman was a terrible liar. It was plain on her face that she wasn’t going to cough up the truth. Marin supposed that at least showed some self-preservation instincts.
“I’m a friend. I’m helping with the greenhouse.”
“Huh. Good for him.” Marin smiled as friendly a smile as she could. The woman really didn’t seem like a criminal. She was too innocent, too open, too happy. It was easy to see why Rijes had wanted to help her. She was the kind of person you wanted to help, because if you didn’t, it probably meant you were some kind of soulless monster who was cruel to flightless kittens. As casually as she could, Marin glanced at the letter before tucking it into a pocket. “Not asupply list? He usually leaves a list of what he needs—flour and wax and yeast and such.”
“It’s a letter to his family in Alyssium. Do you know how long it’ll take to reach them?”
She clearly had no idea about the revolution, but why would she? She’d been made of wood. Marin wondered what effect the defenestration of the emperor would have on cases like this. If the revolutionaries had won, who was in charge of that part of the government now? More importantly, who was in charge of the imperial investigators? Her parents seemed to think there were no more imperial investigators. Were they right?
“Not to pressure you, but if I could give him an idea of when to expect a response…”
The shrub, Ree, blurted out, “I love the sea.”
