Here is a fact I have learned about ancient wells: they do not want to give up their secrets easily, and also there is usually something living in them that resents being disturbed.
I find this out approximately four seconds after sticking my arm down to the shoulder, when something down there brushes against my fingers and I make a sound so undignified that Mei actually drops the broom.
“Your Highness,”
“Wren.” I cut her off.
“Wren, is something wrong?”
“Something touched me,” I say, yanking my arm back and inspecting it for damage.
No blood.
No missing fingers.
Just vibes, and the vibes are bad.
“I don’t know what it was.
Could’ve been a frog.
Could’ve been a very committed eel.
Could’ve been the well itself, deciding it doesn’t like me.
We’re not ruling anything out yet.”
Mei looks at me the way you’d look at someone who just announced they’re going to keep petting a dog that bit them.
“We need light,” I decide.
“And something longer than my arm.
Is there rope anywhere?”
There is, as it turns out, a decent length of it coiled in a shed behind the collapsed east building, along with a rusted bucket, a hoe with half its handle rotted through, and a truly staggering amount of cobwebs that I choose to interpret as evidence nobody has bothered this place in years, which is good, because it means nobody’s going to bother me either.
I tie the bucket to the rope, lower it down slow, and…i listen.
Splash, eventually, further down than I’d like but not impossibly far.
I haul it back up half full of water the color of weak tea and, floating cheerfully in the middle of it, one extremely offended frog.
“There he is,” I say, delighted.
“Hi.
Sorry about earlier.”
The frog does not appreciate the apology and launches itself out of the bucket and into the weeds with the kind of speed that suggests it has strong opinions about being manhandled by empresses.
Mei watches it go like she’s witnessing a miracle.
“The water,” she says slowly.
“It’s not…
poison?”
“Won’t know till we test it, but a live frog living in it happily is usually a decent sign.
Clean-ish groundwater, probably fed from somewhere underneath.
We’ll boil it regardless, because I did not survive a mountain avalanche to die of parasites in a well.” I set the bucket down and wipe my hands on my ruined silk sleeves, which are already beyond saving.
“Step one, complete-ish.
We have a water source.
It needs work, but it’s there.
That’s actually great news, Mei.
Try to look less like you’re at a funeral.”
“I don’t know how you’re so calm about this.”
“Practice,” I say honestly.
“Now.
Garden.”
_______
The garden, in daylight and with slightly less panic in my chest, reveals itself to be exactly the kind of beautiful disaster I was hoping for.
Somebody planned this space once, a long time ago, before whoever owned this wing fell out of favor too, and their bones are still here under all the neglect.
Raised beds, mostly collapsed.
A trellis system, mostly fallen.
And weeds, so many weeds, but here’s the thing about weeds nobody tells you until you’ve spent six years eating whatever the forest hands you: half of them are just vegetables that stopped waiting for permission.
I get down on my knees in the dirt, which horrifies Mei almost as much as the well did, and start pulling things apart leaf by leaf.
“This one,” I say, holding up a scraggly green stalk with hollow, oniony leaves, “is basically wild scallion.
Bitter as sin right now, but it may mellow out if we actually tend it instead of letting it fight for its life against everything else.
This one,” a broad-leafed thing growing low and stubborn near the wall, “I think is some kind of amaranth relative.
Could be wrong.
We’ll cook a small amount first and see if anyone gets a rash, which is the least fun but most important step of foraging.”
“You want to eat it?”
“I want to eat everything, Mei, that is the whole plan.” I sit back on my heels and survey the plot properly.
Four raised beds, three of them salvageable with an afternoon of work.
A corner that gets full sun most of the day, judging by the angle of the light coming over that crumbling wall.
Soil that’s compacted but not dead, dark and a little sour smelling in a way that actually just means it needs turning and some green matter worked back into it.
“Okay.
Here’s the plan.
We clear one bed today, just one, don’t need to be heroes about it.
Turn the soil, pull anything that isn’t food or won’t be food with some encouragement.
Then we plant what we’ve got and see what grows.”
“Plant what, though?
We have no seeds.”
Excellent point, and one I have already been chewing on.
Liora’s memories are patchy on practical matters (nobody teaches an empress to garden, apparently, a real oversight on someone’s part) but they do include, buried under several years of court etiquette I will never use, a memory of a kitchen garden near the main palace kitchens, where scraps get composted.
“We don’t need seeds yet,” I say.
“We need scraps.
Root ends.
The little nub at the bottom of a scallion, the top of a carrot, anything with a growing point still attached.
If the kitchens won’t send us food outright, fine, we don’t need their charity.
We need their trash.”
Mei’s whole face does something complicated.
“You want me to go through the palace refuse.”
“I want us to go through the palace refuse, yes, but you’ll blend in better than I will, since apparently everyone here knows my face and none of them are fans currently.” I stand, brushing dirt off my knees, already feeling more like a person and less like a woman waiting to fade away scenically in a ruined wing.
“Think of it as…recycling.
Very forward-thinking of us, honestly.
They’ll thank us later, once we’re not starving and they are somehow still eating boiled turnip for the ninth day running.”
“You want to grow food from things people threw away.” She made it sound ridiculous.
“Mei.
My entire previous life was built on eating things people would throw away, on camera, for strangers.
This is basically my Olympic sport.”
She doesn’t fully understand that sentence, which is fair, but she nods anyway, because at some point in the last hour she has apparently decided that following the confusing woman with the dirt-covered hands and the very specific opinions about wells is better than the alternative, which was presumably sitting in a cold room and waiting to die quietly, and honestly, respect.
We’re an hour into turning the first bed, me swinging the half-broken hoe and Mei picking through the loosened dirt for stones and old roots, when something moves at the edge of the garden that is neither frog nor weed nor Mei.
It’s a chicken.
A scrawny, filthy, deeply unimpressed chicken, standing on top of the collapsed trellis like it owns the place, watching us with the flat, judgmental stare that only poultry can really pull off.
“Okay,” I say, straightening up slowly, hoe still in hand, “absolutely do not startle her.”
“Whose chicken is that?”
“No idea, but she clearly hasn’t been fed by anyone in a while either, look at her, she’s basically feral.” I crouch down slow, extending one hand with nothing in it, because I don’t have grain, I don’t have scraps yet, I have nothing to offer this bird except sincerity.
“Hey.
Hi.
We’re neighbors now, I think.”
The chicken considers this information, cocks her head, and then, with the confidence of a creature that has clearly survived worse than us, hops down off the trellis and struts directly into the middle of our freshly turned bed, where she immediately starts scratching at the dirt and eating something out of it with visible satisfaction.
Mei looks at me.
I look at the chicken.
The chicken looks at absolutely nobody, because she is busy and important and does not have time for our drama.
“She’s helping,” I say, delighted beyond reason.
“She’s turning the soil for us and eating the grubs.
This is the best thing that’s happened to me since I woke up in this century.”
“Should we…
catch her?
For eggs?”
“Absolutely not, we do not catch the free labor, we befriend the free labor.” I sit back down in the dirt, entirely undignified, watching a stray chicken systematically improve our garden bed out of what I choose to believe is mutual respect.
“Mei, I want you to write this down somewhere in your head, because it’s going to be important later.
Rule one of surviving anywhere: never turn down help just because it shows up looking a little rough around the edges.”
Mei glances at me, dirt-streaked, in ruined silk, grinning like an idiot at a chicken in the fading afternoon light, and something in her expression settles into place, like she’s starting to suspect this exile might not be the death sentence everyone told her it would be.
“I’ll get a coop built,” she says, and it’s the first time all day she’s offered something instead of just following it.
“Now you’re getting it,” I say, and mean it.