“Definitely going to storm,” one of the fisherfolk on the dock said.
Kiela didn’t wait for others to express their opinions. As soon as the imperial ship cleared the rocks that marked the mouth of the harbor, she ran down the dock, through the streets, and to the pebbly beach.
Seeing her, Larran waved from the jetty. He then signaled to the merhorses to swim out into deeper water before he strode across the stones and jogged along the beach. Reaching her, he caught her in his arms and swung her in a circle, pulling her close. “They didn’t take you,” he whispered in her ear. “You’re safe. You’re still here.”
She wanted to kiss him. She wanted to thank him for moving the boat, for leaping to do what he could to keep her safe, for helping even when she didn’t think to ask for help. She wanted to melt into his arms and stay there. But the purple clouds were blotting out the sun. “Storm’s coming,” she said. “With the cottage wrapped in vines, Caz and Meep can’t get inside to safety. And Radane . . . What if the tree she’s in is damaged in the storm? We can’t leave her stuck in there.”
He took her hand and, without a further word, ran with her up the cliff stairs. She clung to the railing with one hand and to his hand with the other, and she ignored the way the wind slapped into her—it was no longer a gentle breeze. The roses at the top swayed hard, and the pine trees bowed as they ran between them.
“Caz? Meep?” Kiela called.
Caz poked a tendril out from beneath the brambles. “Kiela! Are we safe?”
Without pause, Larran attacked the brambles that blocked the front door. He sawed away the thicker ones and yanked the vines back. He then switched to the hammer, using the back to pry off the boards that he’d used to block the door.
“The imperial ship is gone, but a storm’s coming in,” Kiela told Caz. “Where’s Meep?”
Meep popped out from beneath the brambles. “Meep?” Behind them, she spotted the chicken. Somehow they’d prevented her from running away, even with the chaos of the excess growth and the intrusion of the soldiers.
“We need to let Radane out,” Kiela said. “Larran, do you have—”
He produced clippers from one of his pockets.
“Perfect.”
She ventured into the garden, using the clippers to cut her way through the brambles. She wished he’d had his scythe, but at least the clippers worked. It was incredible how thick the brambles had grown. She could see the spots where the soldiers had hacked through, but thanks to their captain, they hadn’t ventured deep enough.
All the work she and Caz had done to clear space for new growth . . . They’d have to begin again, which was far better than being hauled away from this place altogether. It’s only time and sweat. She told herself to be grateful it wasn’t worse. “Tree guardians?” she called as she continued clipping. “Can you bring our friend back, please?”
What if the cloud bears didn’t hear her? What if they couldn’t or wouldn’t release Radane? They’d been so desperate . . . It worked. But it was pointless if Radane was stuck inside a tree forever. She wished she could have asked more questions or done more research.
When this was over, Kiela was going to research nonstop: everything she wanted to know about forest spirits, everything about garden spells, everything about storms, everything about everything. She’d record all of it, of course—her own book about Caltrey.
Frankly, it sounded like the perfect life.
But first, Radane was still in a tree.
At last Kiela succeeded in climbing, squeezing, and cutting her way through enough of the growth to reach the tree that held Radane. Her arms and legs were crisscrossed with tiny scrapes, and her skin stung.
In the distance, she heard the rumble of thunder.
She knocked on the bark. “Radane? Can you hear me? They’re gone. You can come out. Actually, you really should come out, because we have to get to shelter—there’s a magic storm coming, and I don’t know if it’s a good idea to be inside a tree during it.” She remembered her parents shooing her inside whenever thunder and lightning swept over Caltrey. They’d cautioned her never to stand under a tree when there was lightning. She wasn’t sure if that applied to being in a tree, but she didn’t think it was a risk anyone should take, especially since this wasn’t an ordinary storm.
“Radane?”
No answer, and the garden was growing darker. She looked up in time to see a streak of silver zigzag above her, breaking the purple. Rain began to fall, hitting her face like tears.
“Radane!”
White fog drifted around the tree, and Kiela stepped back. The fog writhed, and she saw the flash of ember eyes. She couldn’t tell where one cloud bear began and where they ended—they were a mesh of cloud.
A moment later, they parted, and Radane fell onto the ground at Kiela’s feet, hands and knees slapping into the vine-covered ground. Kiela helped her stand. “Are you all right?”
“That was . . .” Radane sucked in a gulp of air. “Very, very strange. Varrik?”
“Gone.” Kiela glanced toward the sea beyond the cove. She wondered if the ship was as fast and as sturdy as they claimed. She wasn’t certain Alyssians knew how bad the storms could be in the outer islands. Maybe they should have stayed.
Except that was dangerous.
No, surely they knew what they could handle. “He was sent to find you.”
“To kill me or crown me?”
“Kind of think the former.” Kiela added quickly, “But I don’t think he wanted to. I think he wanted you to escape.” She helped Radane through the garden. It was slow going—Radane’s legs wobbled as if she hadn’t used them in months, and the vines and brambles were thick.
By the time they reached the front of the cottage, Larran had the door partway open. They all piled inside. Caz and Meep were already in the kitchen, along with the chicken, and Caz was lighting several of the lanterns with the fire-starter. Between the dark clouds and the vine-covered windows, it was nearly as dark as night within the cottage.
“It’s going to be a bad one,” Larran said grimly.
“Your merhorses?”
“They’ll be fine. They’ll dive.”
“What about the village?” Kiela asked. A lot of the homes were close to the water. They’d mostly escaped damage during the last storm, but it was clear that a stronger one could rip the roofs off the buildings, bash the boats, destroy the dock—there was a lot of harm that strong wind and rain could do.
Using his hammer, he knocked a board off the front window.
“If it is as bad as all that,” Radane said, sinking into one of the chairs, “are you sure you shouldn’t leave the boards? I know that I feel safer with them.”
“Just one. I want to see the sky.” He peered out. “Whoa. Yeah, it’s going to be a bad one. They’ll have sounded the harbor bell. The villagers know to stay in.” He didn’t sound certain, though.
She wondered how bad a “bad one” could be. What if it flooded the village? What if it leveled it? What if . . . “What about the warship?” Kiela asked. “Do you think it got clear in time? Imperials don’t know how bad the storms are out here. They don’t have this kind of weather in Alyssium.”
Radane waved her hand in the air. “Please tell me you are not really worrying about the people who came here expressly to bring me to my death?”
“Captain Varrik didn’t want to,” Kiela reminded her.
“Yes, but he was still going to follow orders if he found me.”
She wasn’t so certain about that. Maybe, but maybe not. He hadn’t had to invent the lie about the poison berries, after all. And she had no idea what he would have chosen to do if he’d discovered her library boat. “You don’t know that for certain. Sometimes we have to choose between terrible options. You don’t know what pressures he was under.” Kiela had absconded with crates of priceless books. Radane had impersonated an imperial investigator. Perhaps Captain Varrik had volunteered to search for Radane because he knew he was the only one who wouldn’t try hard to find her. “He seemed like a good person.”
Radane sighed. “He is a good person. But now his fate is up to, well, fate. I told you a single wind-speaker can’t stop a storm. There’s nothing I can do to help. We just have to ride it out and hope for the best—”
Kiela glanced at Caz.
Caz scampered into the back room and emerged with a slim volume: On Storms. Swinging himself up onto the table, he plopped it in front of Radane and opened it. “Do you know this spell? It says it’s only taught to wind-speakers.”
Radane peered at it. “Yes, but—”
“You need a coven to cast it,” Kiela said.
“Exactly,” Radane said.
Caz tapped his tendrils against the table. Agitated, Meep scooted around the table legs. It would be a risk, but was it a necessary risk? Kiela looked over at Larran. “Do you think the ship is in danger?” she asked him again.
He checked out the window once more. “Yes. A storm this size? Absolutely, they’re in danger. If it capsizes, though, I can’t save them all. There are too many of them.”
“It will not capsize,” Radane said. “It is a massive ship.”
“It’s a massive storm,” Caz said. “I can feel it in my leaves.”
Larran headed for the door. “I’ll mobilize as many merhorses as I can—”
Kiela blocked him. “Their ship will be farther out than Radane’s was. She was coming toward Caltrey; they had a healthy start away from it. You won’t be able to reach them in that chaos.” The waves, the wind, the lightning—he’d never make it.
“I can’t just let them drown. If I can only save a few, then that’s—”
She interrupted him. “I think the best chance of saving everyone on that ship and protecting everyone on the island is if we stop the storm.”
Radane shook her head. “Absolutely not. Please, be practical. It takes an experienced, trained coven. You and I alone . . . Can the plants cast spells? Larran, do you have any experience with spellwork? Have you ever spoken a word in the First Language?” Without waiting for an answer, she turned back to Kiela. “This is not magic for amateurs. Do you have any idea of what can go wrong with a spell of this magnitude?”
Kiela crossed to the window and looked out the slit that Larran had opened. Between the vines, she saw a strip of angry purple sky. “Can we make it to the town? Bryn, Eadie, and Ulina—we need them.”
Larran shook his head. “The stairs won’t be safe.”
She thought of Ivor. “Can we fly?”
“That’s a terrible idea,” Caz said.
The cactus agreed. “Meep.”
“But it could work,” Kiela said.
They didn’t fly.
Instead they glided. Ivor produced a polished walking stick that he held horizontally. Larran grabbed one side, and Kiela and Radane held on to the other. Meep tucked themself into one of Kiela’s pockets, while Caz wrapped himself around her neck.
“Hold on,” Ivor said as he ran off the edge of the cliff.
The winds were smacking into the island, but Ivor knew how to ride them. He picked a current that was sweeping along the side of the cliff and used it to glide straight into town. Kiela felt the wind in her face, and she didn’t know whether to scream or laugh as they sailed above the rooftops where the winged cats often sunned themselves. She’d never felt the world disappear beneath her before or been surrounded by forces that felt so immense. For the minutes they were part of the sky, she felt both unstoppable and incredibly fragile.
As lightning skittered across the sky, they landed near the fountain. Rain pelted the streets diagonally. All of them were soaked through. She felt Meep’s prickles through her shirt but didn’t complain—of all of them, they were the one least suited to a downpour. Ivor kept his wings spread to block the worst of the rain and led the way until they reached Bryn’s bakery. He knocked on the door with his antlers.
Kiela heard a plaintive yowl from beside the steps and squinted through the rain to see one of the cats, a tabby with bright parrotlike green wings, huddled under the bakery window. “You shouldn’t be—”
Throwing the door open, Bryn gawked at them. “What on all the islands—” She yanked Ivor inside by his antlers and then shooed the rest of them in. “Kiela, you too.”
Kneeling down, Kiela called to the cat, “Get inside. Come on.”
“Meep!” the cactus ordered, from within Kiela’s shirt.
At Meep’s command, the cat darted into the bakery, his wings plastered to his sopping-wet fur.
As soon as they were all inside, Bryn shut the door against the wind and demanded, “Why are you out in this? We’re way past the harbor bell!”
Huddling together, they dripped on her floor. The winged cat hid beneath the counter, shivering, and Kiela wished she could join him. Now that they were here . . . This is too wild a plan. It’s too great a storm. We’re too inexperienced. But she’d dragged everyone this far. Kiela pulled a piece of paper out of a pouch and laid it on a counter, being careful not to drip on it. “Radane wrote out the spell, but it’ll take all of us to cast it.”
“It works if and only if it’s done correctly,” Radane said. “It’ll stop a magic storm, but it needs to be cast by at least five sorcerers simultaneously.”
Bryn peered at the spell. “It doesn’t list any ingredients.”
“We’re the ingredients,” Kiela said.
“It’s explained in the papers of Ivini,” Caz said. “Fascinating theory, actually, that the breath of the sorcerers acts as the ingredients, if every exhale is coordinated.” Ivini had won a medal for his pioneering research. It was displayed in the North Reading Room—or it used to be.
“It’s imperative that the spellcasting be absolutely simultaneous, including inhales and exhales,” Radane said. “Usually the wind-speakers practice for hours until they match one another in cadence. I think this idea is foolish at best. Reckless at worst.”
“Like diving into the ocean during a storm to rescue a woman on a capsized boat,” Kiela said, with a smile at Larran.
Smiling back, he didn’t argue. “I’ll bring Eadie and Ulina here.”
Without another word, he headed out into the rain-drenched street. Wind slammed into the bakery door, flinging it open, and Bryn forced it closed. “The storm will pass,” Bryn said. “We’ve weathered them before; we’ll do it again.”
“The imperial ship is out there,” Kiela said. “It didn’t leave early enough to escape. It’s exposed, with no protection against the wind and the waves and worse.”
“Are you certain we want to rescue them?” Bryn asked. “I mean, we just escaped them.” Her gaze fixed on Radane, and Kiela could see the worry in her expression.
“They will guess we used forbidden magic,” Radane pointed out.
It’s what Larran would do. She couldn’t put into words why it was important to do this, but if she didn’t . . . if she hoarded the knowledge she’d taken and didn’t use it to help, then she’d be no better than the emperor and his sorcerers. “We have the power to help. How can we not use it?”
“I’m just saying it’s a risk,” Radane said.
“We can’t control what Captain Varrik chooses to do,” Kiela said. “We can only control what we do and hope other people make the right choices.” She did have hope, given his actions at the cottage, but it was a sheer guess that he wouldn’t simply follow orders when faced with a more difficult choice.
“It’s the right thing to do,” Caz said. “I’m with you, Kiela.”
“Obviously I am with you too,” Radane said. “I provided the spell. I came to the bakery on his wings.” She flapped her hand at Ivor, who’d helped himself to a cup of tea. His hands were shaking as he sipped it. “I simply want it clear that there could be consequences. For instance, if we save them and they return to ‘thank’ us, or arrest us, what will they do if they see me? What will they do to you if they know you hid me?”
“We won’t let them see you,” Bryn said.
“You will stuff me back in a tree?”
Bryn looked confused.
Before they could explain, Larran shoved his way back into the bakery. He had his arm around Ulina. Eadie trotted in behind him. She shook the water out of her mane and tail. “What’s the emergency?”
“Did you tell them?” Kiela asked Larran.
“He said the words ‘pine cone coven,’ ” Eadie said. “We didn’t need to hear anything else.” She flashed a smile at everyone who was crowded into the bakery, from Ivor to Radane to Meep and Caz. “I see our coven has expanded.”
Kiela waved them all close. “Everyone, this is what we’re going to do . . .”