The Spellshop

But I do know books—and that meant there was nothing she couldn’t know, eventually. That was a magic in and of itself.

Kiela tried to think of what to talk about. “You said you herd merhorses?”

He smiled, and his smile lit up his face. “I do. I can show them to you sometime. You could even ride one, if you’d like.”

If Caz hadn’t been alert, she wouldn’t have even noticed that the other librarians had fled. Not one of them had said, “You should come with us. Or at least save yourself.” But this man who had known her for all of five minutes … or since childhood, if that was true … he’d rushed here, not knowing if he’d have to pull her from a burning fire. She stared at him, unsure what to think of him,

She tried to think of the last time she’d had a meal with anyone but Caz, and she came up with nothing. Huh, that’s rather sad

Let the plant teach you. First you talk, then you talk, then you…”

Kiela blushed, and Larran laughed. It really was such a nice, warm laugh

Confused, he frowned. “I didn’t ask for any payment.”

And I didn’t ask you to fix my chimney.

What do chickens eat?”

He gawked at her. “You bought a chicken without knowing how to feed it?”

“I lit a fire in a stove without knowing the chimney was clogged,” Kiela pointed out. “I think it’s safe to assume I don’t know what I’m doing.”

My imagination? She’d been part of more conversations today than in the past … well, in a very long time. The voices were still ringing in her head

She hadn’t actually meant to buy a chicken—she’d been thinking of the eggs that her new neighbor Larran had left her and how nice it would be to have a regular supply of them when the word had come out of her mouth, and Bryn had insisted on it.

She remembered early in the revolution, a man—really, a boy; he couldn’t have been more than seventeen years old—had tried to liberate one of the spellbooks from the first floor of the Great Library. He’d said in his trial that he’d wanted to use it to end a drought on one of the eastern islands. As his punishment, he’d been forced to drink water until his body convulsed. She didn’t know if he’d survived or not. She did know that his image had been printed in the revolutionaries’ pamphlets the following week.