We’re thrilled to share a second excerpt from Sarah Beth Durst’s romantasy debut The Spellshop, a lush cottagecore tale full of stolen spellbooks, unexpected friendships, sweet jams, and even sweeter love—publishing with Bramble on July 9. Meet Kiela and her assistant Caz, a magically sentient spider plant, in the chapter below—or read an earlier chapter here.
Kiela has always had trouble dealing with people. Thankfully, as librarian at the Great Library of Alyssium, she hasn’t had to.
She and her assistant, Caz, a magically sentient spider plant, have spent the last eleven years sequestered among the empire’s most precious spellbooks, preserving their magic for the city’s elite. But when a revolution begins and the library goes up in flames, she and Caz save as many books as they can carry and flee to a faraway island Kiela was sure she’d never return to: her childhood home. Kiela hopes to lay low in the overgrown and rundown cottage her late parents left her and figure out a way to survive without drawing the attention of either the empire or the revolutionaries. Much to her dismay, in addition to a nosy—and very handsome—neighbor, she finds the town neglected and in a state of disrepair.
The empire, for all its magic and power, has been neglecting for years the people who depend on magical intervention to maintain healthy livestock and crops. Not only that, but the very magic that should be helping them has been creating destructive storms that have taken a toll on the island. Due to her past role at the library, Kiela feels partially responsible for this, and now she’s determined to find a way to make things right: by opening the island’s first-ever secret spellshop.
Her plan comes with risks—the consequence of sharing magic with commoners is death. And as Kiela comes to make a place for herself among the kind and quirky townspeople of her former home, she realizes that in order to make a life for herself, she must learn to break down the walls she has built up so high.
Chapter 8
“Nope,” Caz said.
Kiela blinked at him. “Nope? What do you mean?”
“It’s a terrible idea,” Caz said. “I am assuming you threw it out there to soften me up for your real idea, which I won’t like but will at least be better than that.” He crossed his leaves like a professor preparing to listen to a student’s wildly incorrect theories. All he needed was a pair of wire-rimmed glasses perched on his root ball to complete the look.
“That is my real idea,” Kiela said.
“A spellshop. An illegal spellshop. A shop so illegal that the emperor himself—”
“He splatted,” Kiela interrupted before he could wind himself up into a full-blown rant. “You don’t know what’s changed since we left. Laws could’ve been rewritten.” She held up a hand. “Or not, I know. But we aren’t in Alyssium anymore, and it’s unlikely that anyone official would have ever heard of Caltrey, much less show up here. Besides”—she plowed on before Caz could argue back— “I’m not saying we should call it a spellshop.”
“Good,” he said, “because ‘Kiela and Caz’s Really Illegal Spellshop that Will Likely Get You Killed or Cursed’ would look ridiculous on a sign. You must as well just invite an imperial investigator in for tea.”
“That part will be hidden, a shop within a shop,” Kiela said. “And we don’t have to admit we’re selling spells at all. We’ll call them ‘remedies.’” She was sure she could extract a few useful spells from the wealth of arcane knowledge in her possession. She already had the quick-plant-growth spell, though it wasn’t ideal—it looked an awful lot like magic, plus it was more of a one-time emergency-use spell. She was certain she could find another equally useful spell that wasn’t so flashy, with a bit of research. If there was anything in the world she was good at, it was research.
Caz snorted.
“On the surface, the shop will sell…” Looking for inspiration, she scanned the cottage. She doubted anyone would buy cobwebs or old chipped plates or… Her eyes landed on the pantry with its rows and rows of glass jars that her parents had left behind when they’d abandoned their island lives and moved to the city. They’d used them to preserve fruits and vegetables, as well as nine-year-old Kiela’s favorite: “Jam.”
“Jam?” Caz squeaked.
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Kiela hurried across the room to the jars. She picked one up and blew on its top. Dust plumed up in a mini-cloud. Yes, this would do nicely. Clean them up, fill them with jam, wrap a ribbon around them, and they’d make lovely merchandise. She’d already noticed the lack of jam and fruit items in the bakery, which meant there was a market for it. “We’ll sell jam. Raspberry jam. Blackberry jam. Blueberry jam. Apple and berry jam.” She’d seen lots of berry bushes in the garden—they’d begun to corral the brambles into the Journals of Scientific Papers section, near the back fence. She didn’t know what kind of berries they were, but surely they were something that could be jam-ified.
“Jam,” he repeated. “You want us to build a new life based on… jam?”
She pulled out the jars, counting them as she went. “Do you even like jam?” he asked.
Twenty, twenty-five, thirty… Ooh, there were smaller ones on the third shelf, easily several dozen of them. Her parents had canned lots of food. Everyone on the island did. It was a way of life here: grow as much as you can in the summer, harvest in the fall, and preserve for the winter. She could offer a discount to anyone who returned a jar when they finished so that she wouldn’t run out of them. “Of course. Who doesn’t like jam?”
“I don’t.”
“You’re a plant. I imagine the bulk of our customers will be non-plants.”
“It makes my leaves sticky.”
“Then maybe don’t put your leaves in the jam?” She lined the jars up on the counter, filled the sink with water, and began to wash them.
“Jam? Really?”
“We don’t need to make a fortune from the jam—it just needs to sell well enough to serve as a cover for our real product.”
“This is a terrible idea.”
Kiela held up a clean jar. Streaming between the vines over the window, the sun hit the glass and sparkled all over the kitchen. “This will work,” she promised. All she had to do was coax the brambles into producing ripened berries, teach herself how to make jam, and package it all up. Also, turn part of her cottage into a shop. And learn more usable spells. Okay, it was a lot.
Maybe she was fooling herself. She didn’t really know anything about running a shop or magic or jam… But I do know books—and that meant there was nothing she couldn’t know, eventually. That was a magic in and of itself. Drying her hands so she wouldn’t drip on anything, she searched the kitchen shelves.
Joining her, Caz climbed up onto the third shelf. “Now what are you looking for?”
“A cookbook.”
“Oh!” He very much approved of that, she could hear in his voice. If there was a book involved, that automatically made any course of action much more sensible. Without complaint, he pulled himself up onto a shelf within the closet. He squeezed his leaves between jars, searching for a cookbook, and then hopped root-ball-first to the next shelf. She looked through the cabinets beneath the sink.
After a few minutes of searching… “Aha!” Caz cried.
And then: “Oops.”
She turned around to see one of the glass jars tumbling from the top shelf. Caz stretched out his leaves—the jar landed in a net of leaves with a plop. Kiela rescued it and set it beside the sink. “What did you find?” she asked.
He pulled out a dusty and battered book with his tendrils.
She took it and gently brushed the dust off with the dry towel. Sitting on the floor cross-legged, she flipped through it. It was exactly what she hoped it would be: her parents’ recipe book. Look, there was the potato soup that her father had loved. Oh my, it had a lot of butter. And here was the muffin recipe. She twisted the book to see her mother’s handwritten notes in the margin, doubling the cinnamon in her father’s recipe. Two pages later, she found a peach pie recipe in her mother’s handwriting with a note from her father that read, Delicious. And a wet drop landed on the ingredient list.
Quickly, Caz swiped it away with a leaf.
Kiela leaned backward and wiped her eyes. She hadn’t even realized she’d started crying. Awkwardly, Caz patted her back with a tendril.
“It’s the dust,” Kiela explained. “Of course.”
She kept going until she found it: a recipe for raspberry jam. Like the pie, this one was in her mother’s handwriting with notes from her father in the margins. Hers eyes blurred again as they filled with more tears.
“Your parents left this for you,” Caz said. “They would’ve wanted you to do this.”
Kiela let out a hiccup-laugh that was half a sob. “No, they really wouldn’t have.” They’d left this island with dreams of a better life for all three of them, and their plans for her future had never included her coming back, especially without them. She touched the berry-stained recipe and traced the loops of the letters. “But they did like jam.”
* * *
The recipe called for two ingredients: berries and sugar.
Kiela had bought some sugar from the bakery and had enough for a trial batch at least, but the berries… She put her hands on her hips as she contemplated the brambles in the backyard. Untidy, the branches had knotted themselves into a leafy morass of prickles. She’d trimmed them yesterday but hadn’t truly tamed them yet. They sprawled across the far corner of the garden so thickly intertwined that she couldn’t tell where one plant began and one ended. A few pale raspberries were growing tucked here and there beneath the leaves, but she didn’t see any ripe ones.
“More magic?” Caz asked.
“Did we save the extra duckweed?”
He sighed heavily. “Yes, and we have a few rosebuds left too.”
She considered the brambles while Caz trotted back into the house to retrieve the spell ingredients. Maybe if she did just a small poultice this time… They didn’t need the bush to grow from a seed, the way they did with the tomatoes; they just needed it to hurry its cycle and produce ripe berries. So, a touch of magic?
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Caz said as he returned.
“I absolutely do not know what I’m doing. I thought that was clear?”
Plopping on the ground between what looked like a celery stalk and a squash vine, Kiela combined the ingredients into a paste. She consulted the spellbook to refresh her memory of the words—she did not want to accidentally drop a syllable or two. She’d heard stories of what happened to sorcerers who slurred or stumbled over their spells. There were sorcerers who’d transformed themselves into trees, their houses into solid stone, their meals into poison… The storm that destroyed the island of Virand was said to be caused by a weather spell gone awry. A few years ago, one of the emperor’s sorcerers had tried to enchant a songbird and instead had sprouted feathers herself. She was said to molt every spring, and her feathers were worth a fortune. Kiela had seen one once, in the hat of a library patron—brighter than peacock blue, with a shaft that looked to be made of gold. At any rate, Kiela didn’t want to sprout feathers or bark, so she took great care as she dropped a dollop of paste at the base of a raspberry bush and chanted the words.
“That should do it,” she said.
“It took a bit of time with the—whoa!”
Caz scrambled back as the brambles exploded into a burst of growth. Kiela grabbed the spellbook, clutched it to her chest, and retreated across the garden. The raspberry bushes slammed into the fence and flowed over it into the forest. Green burst from the branches as new leaves unfurled from the slender brown stalks, and flowers popped into bloom up and down the stalks. The white petals opened and then broke apart before raining down on the lawn, while the hearts of the tiny blossoms swelled and hardened into pale berries. A few seconds later, the berries darkened into red.
And then there was silence.
A bird chirped.
Kiela gawked at the bushes. She had no idea how far into the woods they’d penetrated, but they’d swallowed the back fence. Now, with the berries ripened, they seemed to be done with their unnatural growth, but she still couldn’t bring herself to move closer.
“I think…” She swallowed. Her throat felt very dry. “…less magic next time?”
“Next time?” Caz repeated.
“Well, it worked.”
She gathered up her courage and approached the berries. At least the brambles hadn’t grown toward the house. They could have devoured the entire garden. Yeah, she really couldn’t sell this spell in their shop. It was absolutely not subtle magic. On the plus side, though This will make a lot of jam, she thought.
She picked a raspberry, stared at it a moment, and then popped it into her mouth. For an instant, it felt smooth and tasteless, and then she squashed it. Sharp sweetness exploded gloriously over her tongue. It was so overwhelmingly raspberry that it felt as if it invaded her skull and displaced every thought—there was only flavor. Powerful, intoxicating flavor. She’d forgotten what a freshly picked berry tasted like.
On Alyssium, the fruit was imported. There wasn’t space on the city island for gardens or orchards or berry patches. The emperor had had his greenhouses, filled with delicacies, but a librarian… She hadn’t tasted a just-ripened raspberry since her childhood.
It tasted like a bite of sunshine.
Caz poked her ankle. “Are you poisoned?”
“I’m in ecstasy,” she corrected.
“Huh,” Caz said. “You really think this will work?”
Kiela opened her eyes and again surveyed the wealth of berries before her, a glorious chaos of ruby-red riches, enough to create many jars of jam. “I think it’s perfect.”
* * *
Following her parents’ recipe, Kiela chopped up a bowlful of raspberries and sprinkled a half cup of sugar over them. Her fingers were stained wine red by the end, and she washed them while the sugar soaked into the berries. Her mother had written two hours, and her father had scrawled Overnight, but Kiela wasn’t patient enough for that. Two hours would be fine.
She used the time to assess the extent of the damage the spelled bushes had caused. Tromping around the fence, she squeezed between trees, ducked under vines, and waded through underbrush until she reached the back of her garden.
The raspberry bushes had invaded the forest by about fifteen feet, which she supposed could have been worse. At least brambles hadn’t overwhelmed any trees—they’d simply filled all the space in between the trunks. Everywhere, the bushes were thick and about as high as her shoulder, and they were covered in beautiful red berries. Finding a couple buckets in the house, Kiela returned and picked as many as she could reach. Every dozen berries, she’d pop one in her mouth instead of the bucket, but she still had three full buckets, as well as arms covered in tiny scratches, by the time the berry-sugar concoction had finished macerating.
With Caz reading the recipe, she lit the stove and set the berries to boiling. She’d have to stir continuously until they thickened. She found a wooden spoon in her parents’ drawers. My drawers now. My home. She wasn’t sure it felt like hers, though.
As she stirred, she imagined her parents in this very kitchen. She could picture them: dancing around the table, her mother laughing, her father singing off-key. They’d been happy together. Kiela felt an ache just behind her sternum as she thought of them. Her father had once told her he hoped she found someone who made her smile. Just that. No fireworks like in tales and ballads. He didn’t wish her the shiver of romance or the endless ache of desire. “You should marry your best friend,” he told her. All those grand emotions, he said… they’re fun, but eventually they fade. They always fade. What was better, he’d said, was companionship. He’d wanted her to find someone who would be there for her, who’d laugh with her through the years. Every time she’d visit for dinner in the city, her parents would ask her if she’d met anyone, if she was making friends, if she was lonely, and she’d always said, Of course I’m not lonely.
She had her classmates. She had the other librarians. She had her parents. And she had her books. If everyone living failed her, whenever they did, she had all the immortal voices caught in pages. Her father had clucked his tongue and said, “But can a book be kind to you?”
Yes, she answered him now as she lifted the spoon out of the boiling jam.
Her parents’ book had gifted her with this, a way forward.
“To see if it’s done,” Caz said, “you’re supposed to spoon a bit onto a plate and drag your finger through it to see if it’s runny or not.” Perched on the counter, he peered into the pot. “And you’re supposed to skim off that froth.”
She dutifully skimmed off the whitish, cloudy foam and dumped it in the sink. Testing the jam, she dropped a spoonful onto the counter. Caz pulled a leaf through it, and it ran across the surface. “Almost,” he said.
She got a jar ready.
The jam began to bubble. Quickly, she returned to stirring it, and the mixture settled down. It felt thicker than before, which had to be correct, didn’t it? The wooden spoon was stained a deep berry red. She doubted it would ever recover its original shade. Oh well. It’s now my jam spoon.
“You’re supposed to seal it with wax,” Caz said, reading. “I don’t think we have any wax. But you melt the wax in a double-boiler pan, whatever that is, and after the jam is in the jar, you pour in the liquid wax. It hardens and seals in the jam. It’ll last months that way.”
“I’ll buy some extra candles when I buy more sugar,” Kiela said. “With what money?” Caz asked.
Not having an answer to that, she tried the jam again. This time, it smeared as she dragged it with her finger. Popping her finger into her mouth, she tasted it—sweet raspberry so intense that she could almost hear her father’s voice as he spread jam on toast. And ow, hot! But richly sweet.
“Good?” he asked.
“It tastes like a memory.”
“Great.” Then: “Is that good?”
She smiled at him. “Very good.”
Carefully, Kiela poured the hot jam into the jar. “And as for how we’re going to pay for supplies…” She lifted the jar up to the window, holding the warm glass with a towel. In the sunlight, the jam sparkled like crushed rubies. “I have an idea.”
Excerpted from The Spellshop, copyright © 2024 by Sarah Beth Durst.
