Read an Excerpt
After dinner, Lottie took down several jars of paint from the shelf along her wall, which she would start with as her base colors. Then she grabbed a fresh palette. She got to work adding in a little here, a little there, mixing them together until she had replicated the colors of the leaf cyclone from outside the treat shop well enough to start.
She quickly fell into a rhythm, first building in the background of the sidewalk and the corner of Felicity’s shop and working forward from there. The magic warmed in her chest and worked its way through her, tying her heart to her hands.
Time slipped by as Lottie worked, as the image on the paper formed and the light outside her window dimmed to dark. She swished a few final strokes, then set the brush down and lifted the painting.
Lottie’s heart leapt inside her as the painted leaves flickered, then fluttered, then swirled in front of her eyes exactly as they had while she waited for her father. She could even catch a hint of the scent of cider emanating out from the enchanted painting, and could hear the low murmur of the late afternoon streets. And, like all of her art, this painting felt exactly like the moment she’d captured. The flurry of the city, the contentment, the comfort of a delightfully predictable afternoon.
A final painting for this season’s collection. She set it down to dry and leaned back in her chair. Warmth flowed through her, pulsing in her fingertips from the use of her magic. Soon enough, she’d fall into a contented sleep.
Lottie pulled herself up and changed into her pajamas before crawling into bed. A few minutes later, her parents stopped by to tuck her in, say their good nights, and give her a kiss on the cheek.
As soon as they left, Lottie pulled a well-worn book from the shelf next to her headboard: The Enchanted Garden. It had been hers ever since she was a baby, a gift from her mother, and was a bedtime story favorite. The deep green cover and golden lettering winked in the light from her bedside lamp. She cracked the weary spine open and reveled in the bright illustrations. Then she read, for the hundredth, or maybe even the thousandth, time, the story of a magical garden that grew wild and free, spilling over its stone walls and spreading throughout the whole entire world. A garden that gave magical gifts and healed broken hearts.
The book started with a riddle, one Lottie didn’t fully understand. The gray words were printed in large angled letters on the center of the first page and were surrounded by an illustration of a desolate gray stone wall. Leafless gray ivy crept across the stone at all angles and nearly hid the wall behind it. It was all very strange for a book with life and color bursting from all the other pictures.
The riddle read:
There once was a door that wasn’t a door,
And a bed that wasn’t a bed.
Where mossy green carpet shot up from the floor,
This key with the heart must be ____.
“It’s okay if it takes some time to figure out what things mean,” her mother had said one night when Lottie had asked about it. That had been years ago—back in the days when they read The Enchanted Garden together as a bedtime story. “Sometimes answers don’t come until you ask the right questions.”
Lottie had nodded and snuggled into her mother’s shoulder.
Truth be told, Lottie had thought about the strange riddle very rarely since, caught up in all the other more important bright and beautiful things she had to do.
Like collecting color. And collect it she did. Lottie collected color in far more than just jars of pigment or on paint-stained fingers. She looked for it everywhere, gobbling it up in books, and films, and art, and more. She breathed it in and lived it out. She drank it through her eyes. Her magic flowed inside her as easily and fully as the wind wound through the trees.
And she would never, ever let it go.
