Wren wakes up to a smell that has no business existing in a well-run garden.
She lies there for a second, deciding whether to investigate or pretend it’s a dream, then the smell insists, loud and rotten and extremely rude, and she’s up and out the door before her brain’s even fully online.
The well water’s gone foul.
Not a little foul.
Committed, aggressive, someone-dumped-something-dead-in-there foul, the kind of smell that announces itself from ten feet away and dares you to come closer.
“Oh, you did not,” Wren says, to the well, to the universe, to whoever thought this was a good idea.
She peers over the edge, torch in hand, and finds the culprit floating face up in the murk.
A dead rat, bloated and unmistakably placed rather than fallen, because rats do not, as a rule, climb ropes and dive gracefully into wells on their own initiative.
“Mei!”
Mei arrives at a dead sprint, still half in her sleep clothes, takes one whiff, and physically recoils.
“That’s revolting.”
“That’s sabotage, is what that is.” Wren straightens up, hands on hips, doing the fast, furious math of someone who’s just realized her enemy has officially moved past watching.
“Someone came in here overnight, dumped a rat down our only water source, and left without waking either of us up.
That’s not clumsy.
That’s precise.”
“Should we be scared?”
Wren considers this honestly, which is more than the moment probably deserves.
“No,” she decides.
“We should be annoyed.
Very, very annoyed.
There’s a difference, and the difference matters, because scared people panic and annoyed people fix things.”
The garden’s not spared either.
Two of the newer beds, the ones they’d only just gotten seedlings into last week, have been trampled flat, footprints stamped carelessly through the soft dirt like whoever did it wanted the damage seen, not hidden.
Wren crouches over the ruined bed, running a thumb over one clear boot print, and something cold and focused settles into her chest, replacing the initial jolt of fury with something far more useful.
“Sloppy,” she mutters.
“Whoever did this wanted us scared, not actually starved.
If they wanted us starved, they’d have hit the older beds, the ones already producing.
This is a message, not an attack.”
“A message saying what?” Find the original chapter at g.com.
“Saying, we know you’re doing better than you’re supposed to, and we can reach you whenever we want.” Wren stands, brushing dirt off her knees with more force than strictly necessary.
“Charming.
Very on brand for whoever’s behind this.”
Casimir arrives twenty minutes later, summoned by Tan, who apparently decided this particular emergency warranted breaking his own rule about not involving royalty directly.
He takes one look at the trampled beds, the fouled well, Wren’s expression, and goes very still in the specific way he does right before he gets dangerous.
“Who did this?”
“No idea yet.
Somebody careful enough not to leave a name tag.” Wren’s already moving, sorting through the damage with brisk, efficient hands, salvaging what seedlings can be replanted, tossing aside what can’t.
“But careful people leave patterns eventually.
We just have to be paying attention when they do.”
“You’re remarkably calm.”
“I’m remarkably angry, actually, I’m just choosing to be productive about it instead of standing here shouting at a well.” She glances up at him, something sharp and steady in her eyes that’s new, or at least new to how she’s shown it around him.
“Calm doesn’t fix a garden, Casimir.
Work does.”
Something in the way she says his name, plain and direct, no title attached, makes his jaw tighten slightly, though whether from worry or something else entirely, Wren doesn’t have time to examine right now.
They work through the morning in grim, efficient silence.
The well gets emptied out, scrubbed with sand and vinegar Mei manages to trade for, refilled slow from the drip that’s still, thankfully, feeding it from somewhere underground.
The trampled beds get reworked, seedlings replanted where they can be saved, the soil turned fresh where they can’t.
“We need a second source,” Wren says, halfway through the work, wiping sweat and grime off her forehead with the back of one filthy hand.
“One they don’t know about.
If they can hit the well, they can hit it again.”
“A hidden well,” Casimir says, considering it.
“There’s rainwater catchment used in the northern territories.
Barrels, channeled off the roofline.
Simple.
Easy to conceal.”
“You know how to build one?” New chapters come out on g.com first.
“I know how it’s built.
Building it myself is a different skill entirely, as you’ve discovered with my thatching.”
“You’ve gotten better at thatching.”
“Marginally.”
Wren grins despite the exhaustion, despite the lingering fury still simmering under everything, because there’s something absurdly comforting about bantering over garden sabotage with a prince who’s slowly, stubbornly become someone she trusts.
“Fine.
Marginal prince skills it is.
We build the catchment system this week, quiet, out of sight from the wall.
And I want a proper fence up too, not this crumbling suggestion of a barrier we’ve currently got.
Something that actually keeps people out.”
“That’s a great deal of work.”
“So’s dying, and I’d rather do the work.” She looks around at the garden, dirt smeared and battered but not broken, not close to broken, and feels the anger settle into something colder and more useful.
Determination, maybe.
Or just plain stubbornness, refusing, once again, to fade the way everyone keeps expecting her to.
“They wanted to scare us.
Fine.
Let’s make sure the next time they try, there’s nothing left to actually hit.”
Casimir studies her for a long moment, something unguarded flickering behind his careful composure.
“You’re not going to run,” he says.
Not quite a question.
“Running’s never really been my style.” Wren picks up a shovel, rolling her shoulders, already eyeing the next stretch of ground that needs turning.
“Besides.
I’ve survived an avalanche and a canyon and several extremely personal grudges from wildlife.
A dead rat in a well doesn’t even crack my top ten worst mornings.”
She starts digging.
After a beat, he joins her, and Mei too, and the three of them work in stubborn, determined silence as the sun climbs higher, rebuilding what got broken and quietly, carefully preparing for whatever gets thrown at them next.