Ten days into my second life, and the scallions are ready.
whoohoo!
I know this sounds like a small thing to be embarrassingly emotional about, but I stand over that garden bed at dawn, dew still clinging to the leaves, and feel something in my chest go warm and stupid and proud in a way I haven’t felt since a video of mine hit a million views for the first time and I cried actual tears into a bowl of instant noodles I definitely didn’t earn that reaction from.
“They’re just scallions,” Mei says, watching me crouch over the bed like I’m inspecting a newborn.
“They’re not just scallions, Mei, they’re scallions that we grew from garbage.
Actual, literal garbage.
Ten days ago these were the sad ends of something someone else threw away, and now look at them, standing up straight, being useful, having a whole life.” I pull one gently, feeling the satisfying give of roots letting go of loosened soil, and hold it up like a trophy.
“This is the best thing I’ve ever grown, and I once kept a sourdough starter alive through a move across three states.”
“You’re going to cry over a vegetable.”
“I’m not going to cry over a vegetable,” I say, definitely not crying over a vegetable, and pull three more just to prove my point.
The garlic’s not far behind, the amaranth patch has gone from cautious experiment to genuine abundance, spreading further than I planted it with the enthusiastic confidence of a plant that has never once doubted its right to exist, and the carrot tops have produced actual, if slightly stubby, carrots, which I dig up with the reverence normally reserved for buried treasure.
It’s not a lot.
If I laid the whole harvest out, it wouldn’t even fill Mei’s apron properly.
But it’s ours, grown from nothing, in soil everyone else had written off, and there is a very specific flavor of pride that comes from turning “nothing” into “something” with your own two hands that I don’t think anyone who hasn’t done it can fully understand.
“Tonight,” I announce, “we cook a real meal.
Not a survival experiment.
An actual, sit down, taste good on purpose meal.”
Mei looks almost giddy at the prospect, which, considering she’s spent the last ten days watching me eat mystery weeds and argue with a well, feels like a genuinely earned reaction.
Dinner that night is, by any objective palace standard, extremely modest.
Scallion and amaranth stirred together over rice we stretched thin from the salvaged grain, a few shavings of the stubby carrots tossed in at the end for sweetness, all of it seasoned with the small hoard of salt Mei managed to trade a mended shawl for from a kitchen maid who owed her a favor.
No meat.
No proper spices.
Nothing that would impress anyone eating in the main palace tonight.
But it’s good.
Genuinely, actually good, the kind of good that comes less from the ingredients themselves and more from every hour of dirt under my fingernails that went into getting them onto the plate, and Mei and I eat sitting cross legged on the floor of the main room, Duchess and her two increasingly less judgmental hangers on pecking around our feet for scraps, and for a while nobody says anything at all, because the food’s doing all the talking that needs doing.
“We did this,” Mei says eventually, quiet, like she’s trying the sentence out to see if it fits.
“We did this,” I confirm. This chapter was taken from novelping.com without permission.
“First of many, hopefully.
Assuming the frost doesn’t come early and ruin my whole personality.”
She laughs, actually laughs, bright and unguarded in a way I haven’t heard from her yet, and something about the sound settles a worry I didn’t fully realize I’d been carrying since day one, that maybe I’d dragged a sixteen year old into a slow, doomed project out of nothing but stubbornness.
Watching her now, cross legged and laughing over stir fried garbage vegetables, I think, actually, we’re going to be fine.
The knock at the gate the next morning belongs to someone I haven’t met yet, a young guard, maybe twenty, with the specific nervous posture of a man who’s been assigned somewhere he’d rather not be and is trying very hard not to let that show.
“Steward Hao sent me,” he says, not quite meeting my eyes, “to confirm the, ah, condition of the wing.
For the records.”
“For the records,” I repeat, amused, because I know a check-in disguised as bureaucracy when I hear one.
“Sure.
Come in, have a look.
Try not to trip on the chickens.”
He steps through the gate looking like a man walking into a haunted house, clearly braced for collapse and misery, and I watch his expression do something complicated when instead he finds mended thatch, tidy garden beds, and three fat, extremely unbothered chickens patrolling the yard like tiny feathered generals.
“This is…” He trails off, apparently unable to find a diplomatic way to say not at all what I was told to expect.
“Better than advertised, I know.” I lean against the doorframe, arms crossed, watching him take it in.
“What’s your name?”
“Tan, my lady.”
“Tan.
You hungry, Tan?
We’ve got extra scallions and I’ve been told my cooking’s not terrible.”
He looks genuinely startled by the offer, glancing toward the gate like he’s checking whether anyone’s watching, before something in his face relaxes and he admits, quietly, “I haven’t had a proper vegetable in a season, my lady.
Rations have been thin since the harvest tax went up.”
Which is interesting information, delivered entirely by accident, and I file it away the way I file away everything useful these days.
I scooped up some food for him.
It’s not a grand gesture, just a bowl of the same stir fry from last night, but the way his shoulders drop after the first bite tells me it’s been a while since anyone offered him something without an angle attached, and by the time he leaves he’s promised, unprompted, to let me know quietly if the wing ever comes up in conversation among the staff, good or bad.
“You just recruited a palace guard with vegetables,” Mei says, watching him go.
“I recruited a palace guard with kindness that happened to come in vegetable form,” I correct.
“There’s a difference.
Also, free intelligence network, Mei.
Works on chickens, works on guards, I’m assuming it’ll work on most things eventually.”
“Even princes?”
“Especially princes, apparently, though in his case it was more forced labor than kindness.” I think about Casimir, about the thatch panels going up one by one, about the careful, guarded way he’d handed over information last night like it cost him something real each time.
“Still counts, though.
Same principle.
Give people something real, they start giving you something real back.”
That evening, sorting the last of the day’s harvest into what we’ll eat fresh and what we’ll try to preserve for the coming cold, I catch myself doing the math on all of it without meaning to.
The garden’s producing.
The roof’s nearly sealed.
We’ve got a guard on our side, however small that favor, and a prince who keeps finding excuses to climb over my wall instead of using the gate like a normal person, which I’ve decided to interpret as a compliment rather than examine too closely.
Ten days ago this was a wing nobody expected to survive the season.
Tonight it smells like food cooking and looks like somewhere people actually live, and there’s a very specific, very satisfying feeling in watching a place come back from nothing because you refused to let it stay that way.
“What are you thinking about?” Mei asks, watching me stare off at nothing over a basket of drying garlic.
“That we should plant more,” I say, which is true, but not quite the whole thought.
The whole thought is bigger and warmer and a little dangerous to look at too directly, something about home, about the strange, unearned gift of getting a second chance at being useful to people who actually notice, but that’s not really dinner conversation, so I keep it folded up small and private for now.
“Bigger beds.
More variety, if we can manage it.
If word’s already getting back to the steward’s office that we’re not fading on schedule, I’d rather they find out we’re thriving instead of just surviving.”
“You think that’s dangerous?
Being noticed?”
“Probably,” I admit.
“But being invisible didn’t keep the woman whose life I’m living safe either, did it.
Might as well be noticed on my own terms, doing something worth noticing.” I toss her a fresh scallion, and she catches it out of reflex, laughing despite herself.
“Besides.
Nobody expects the disgraced empress to be dangerous because she’s good at growing vegetables.
That’s exactly the kind of underestimating I intend to enjoy for as long as it lasts.”