The burrow-hounds took a single morning — nasty, snapping, tunnel-fast things, but Bruno plugged the main burrow with his bulk while I flushed them toward him using nothing but my walking-bait aura, and Vera and Lila cleaned up the stragglers. Easy money. I was almost disappointed.
Then Osla handed us a gathering contract, and I discovered that the entire economy of the Wildmarch runs on plants that would very much like to kill you.
[Contract: Harvest 20 Nightbloom stalks from the Weeping Grove.]Reward: 3 silver.]Note: Nightbloom is a controlled alchemical reagent. Handle gloved.]
"Alchemists pay stupid money for Nightbloom," Lila explained on the walk out, practically luminous with the joy of getting to explain something. "It's the base reagent for mana-recovery draughts — half the Guild runs on the stuff. And it only grows where the ley-lines run shallow." She swept an arm at the forest around us, at the wet grey light and the way the air seemed to hum faintly against the teeth. "That's the whole secret of the Wildmarch, Adrian. The ley-lines — the rivers of raw magic under the world — run close to the surface out here. Thin spots. Places where the world's power bleeds up through the dirt." She grinned. "Which is why the monsters grow so big out here. And why the plants are worse than the monsters."
The Weeping Grove earned its name honestly. The trees stood pale and close, and each one wept a slow, clear, sap-like fluid down its bark, so the whole grove glistened and dripped in the grey light like something recently cried over. And in the hollows between the roots grew the Nightbloom: tall stalks crowned with flowers that glowed a soft, sourceless blue and swayed gently when there was no wind at all.
"Rules," Lila said, tossing me a pair of thick gloves. "One: never touch the petals bare-handed. Two: never — and I cannot stress this enough — never cut a stalk while it's facing you. They spit."
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"They what—"
The stalk nearest Bruno chose that exact moment to demonstrate, coughing a cloud of blue pollen directly into his face. He spent the next ten minutes sneezing with a violence that startled birds out of trees three groves over, tears streaming, bellowing "IT GOT ME, IT GOT ME AGAIN," while Lila laughed so hard she had to sit down in the wet moss and hold her ribs.
It was, against all odds, one of the best afternoons of my new life. We worked slow and careful, gloved and cursing and giggling, filling the sack one spitting stalk at a time. And I found myself asking Lila questions just to keep her talking — about ley-lines, about mana, about how a girl her age knew so much forbidden monster-lore.
She went quiet at that, just for a second. Her hands kept cutting, but her voice dropped out of its usual bright register. "My village had a scholar," she said. "An old woman. Kept every book in the valley, the ones you're allowed and the ones you're not. She taught me to read the demon-lore — the real texts, not the Church's scare-stories. Everyone else in the valley thought the Demon King was a bogeyman to frighten children into bed." She cut another stalk. "I read the old accounts and thought he sounded lonely. The most powerful thing in the world, and everyone born already terrified of him, before he'd done a single thing." She looked up, and the manic grin slid back into place like a mask finding its face. "And then the universe handed me a real one who complains about instant noodles and lets a deer bow to him. Best day of my life. I'm not being sarcastic, Adrian, this is genuinely my favorite thing that has ever happened."
[Contract complete: 20 Nightbloom harvested.]+3 silver. Rank E: progress 12%.]
Twelve percent. Slow. Grinding. Exactly what we needed — coin in the purse and no one looking our way.
As we shouldered the sack to leave, my Beast Sense gave a soft, low pull — something at the far edge of the grove, still, and watching, the way the town cat used to. Large. Warm. Patient. I turned toward it, and the ferns there were empty, the drip of the weeping trees the only movement.
"Adrian?" Vera said.
I let my sense reach after it — but it was already fading, sliding away through the trees, unhurried, and it left nothing behind but the memory of being looked at.
"Nothing," I said. "Probably nothing."
I was getting very, very good at saying that.