Morning came in gray over Rootharbor, and Hikaru was already outside, working through push-ups in the wet grass behind the guest house before anyone else had stirred. His ribs pulled tight with every dip, and he ignored it. He counted the reps under his breath and didn't stop when his arms started shaking.
He heard someone moving around inside the guest house behind him, and he didn't turn to look. He just kept going, faster now, like speed could outrun whatever had been sitting in his chest since last night.
By the time his arms gave out and he dropped flat into the grass, he still hadn't looked at the door once.
Senna stepped out onto the porch just as he pushed himself back up onto his knees, arms still trembling, breath ragged. She didn't say anything about the state he was in, not right away. She just looked at him for a long moment, the way she looked at everything, like she already knew the answer to a question she hadn't asked yet.
"You've been out here a while."
He wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist and didn't answer.
Senna came down off the porch steps, unhurried, and crouched beside him in the grass. She reached out and pressed two fingers lightly against his ribs, testing, and he flinched before he could stop himself. It wasn't really a question, the way she said it next.
"Still tender. Figured."
He opened his mouth to say he was fine, and she was already standing back up, brushing grass off her knees like the conversation was over before it started.
"Come on. I need a second pair of hands in the village, and Zaria's busy."
He reached for his other boot anyway, half out of habit.
"Tch. I've still got rounds left in me."
Senna started walking, not waiting to see if he'd follow.
"You don't. Come on, don't be such a workhorse. Come hang out with me today."
He sat there a second longer than he meant to, boot in hand, and then he pulled it on and went after her.
The path out of the guest house cut past the edge of the market square and into a stretch of Halgrove he hadn't seen yet, narrower streets, houses grown close together with roots showing through the packed clay underfoot. Small motes of something pale drifted loose from the trees lining the road, catching the early light as they spun down, and one landed on his sleeve before dissolving into nothing.
He stopped walking for a second, watching another one fall.
"Haah? What's that stuff?"
Senna glanced back at him without breaking stride.
"Seed-fluff. Comes off the trees lining the road this time of year. Give it a few hours and half the street'll be covered in it. Herbfolk don't plant most of what grows here, not the way we would back home. Half the city just seeds itself, and this is what that looks like when it's working."
He reached up and caught one out of the air before it landed, turning it over between two fingers. It didn't weigh anything at all.
"So it's just trash, basically."
Senna flicked one off her shoulder without looking at it.
"It's food, actually. Birds love it, and the kids around here collect it in jars for something to do. Give it a season and whatever doesn't get eaten just turns back into dirt on its own."
The market stalls came up ahead of them, and none of them looked like anything he'd have called a stall back home. No wood, no metal frames, just counters that seemed to have grown straight up out of the ground, woven root shelves holding baskets of things he didn't have names for yet.
He slowed down in front of one, looking at a shelf that was still faintly alive, small new leaves budding along its edge even with the weight of produce sitting on top of it.
"Wait. They grow the furniture?"
Senna picked something round and dark purple off the stall without asking the vendor, turning it over in her hand.
"Grow it, shape it while it's growing, then keep using it while it's still alive. Rootharbor's the same, if you ever get out that far. Nothing here gets built once and left."
She paid for it before he could ask what it even was, pressing a few small coins into the vendor's hand without checking the price first, and held it out to him.
He took it on reflex. It sat heavier in his palm than it looked, skin smooth and a little warm, like it had been sitting in the sun all morning.
"Eat it. Skin and all."
He bit into it before he could think too hard about it, and the skin gave way easy, tart at first and then sweet underneath, something like a plum crossed with nothing he actually had a word for.
"Okay." He chewed, surprised. "That actually beats protein bars by a mile."
Senna watched him take a second bite, something in her expression settling like she'd already known he would like it.
"You get that same look when you're cooking, you know. Right before you taste something and decide it needs more."
"Tch. I don't have a look."
She said it plain, like she was reading a fact off a page and not paying him a compliment at all.
"You do. Furrowed, then satisfied. Same one, every time. Your sisters ever tell you that?"
He didn't answer that one, focused overly hard on the last bite instead.
Senna let it go, watching a pair of Herbfolk kids chase loose seed-fluff across the square.
"Let's play a game."
He glanced at her sideways.
"...What kind of game?"
Senna laid out the rules like she'd explained them a hundred times before. One look at a stranger, that was all anyone got, no cheating by watching longer than a few seconds. From that single look, you had to guess what their whole life was actually like underneath it, the part nobody else saw. Getting it wrong didn't matter. Confidence was the only thing that counted for anything.
She picked her mark before he could argue with any of it: a Herbfolk crossing the square with both arms full of baskets stacked higher than looked safe.
What came out of her after that arrived without a single pause, like she'd been holding the whole thing ready and just waiting for an excuse to use it. The woman wasn't only late, she was the groom's cousin, roped into hauling the wedding baskets after oversleeping on the one morning she couldn't afford to. Somewhere behind her, a groom's family was already furious, a bride's family was pretending not to notice, and buried somewhere in that crowd was an aunt rehearsing exactly what she planned to say about the whole mess for the next ten years.
Hikaru let her get most of the way through it before he cut in.
"You made all of that up in like three seconds."
Senna shrugged, still watching the woman disappear into the crowd.
"Give me five, I'll have names."
Senna nudged him with her elbow.
"Your turn."
He scanned the square and settled on a young Herbfolk crouched at the edge of it, running through the same set of hand movements over and over, restarting every few seconds.
The story came together fast, and he didn't bother slowing it down for her. Not homework, a speech, the kind you only got one shot at, practiced over and over because timing was everything. Some festival, probably, or whatever counted as one here. The kid would get up there, nail the whole thing perfect, and the second he finished the entire crowd would lose it. Somebody would probably cry.
Senna let a beat pass before she said anything.
"You just described a proposal."
"I didn't say that. Not specifically."
"You did. Word for word."
That did it. A laugh got out of him before he could stop it, and Senna caught it half a second later, shaking her head like she couldn't quite believe it either.
They kept walking, the laugh still hanging between them. Near a cluster of doorways, a few Herbfolk knelt briefly at their own thresholds, pressing a palm flat against the ground before standing again and going about their day.
"What's that about?"
Senna didn't slow down.
"Something about asking the ground's permission before you disturb it for the day. Every house does it a little different, nobody agrees on the wording."
"That's kind of nice, actually."
"Try telling that to the one who does it wrong on purpose just to annoy his neighbors."
The square thinned out behind them as the path climbed, packed clay giving way to bare rock and root. Neither of them said much on the way up. The light had already started sliding gold along the edges of things.
The path opened out onto a ledge overlooking the fields below, and the whole stretch of crops was moving, not swaying, moving, color rolling across it in one long wave every time the wind passed through. Hikaru stopped at the edge of it without meaning to.
Senna dropped down onto a flat stretch of rock like she'd sat there before, patting the space next to her without looking up.
He sat down next to her, close enough that their shoulders almost touched, not quite. The rock still held some of the day's heat under him.
For a while neither of them said anything, just watching the fields move. Senna was the one who broke it first, still looking straight ahead.
"Reminds me of a world I stopped on years back. Grass did the same thing there, except it sang when the wind hit it right. Full chords, whole valley at once."
"Sang. Like actual singing?"
"Actual singing. I got so distracted by it I walked straight into a fence post."
He turned that over for a second, genuinely fighting to picture it.
"You. Walking into a fence post."
"In front of an entire valley. Very dignified moment for me."
"You stick around there long?"
"Long enough to learn the grass wasn't even the strange part. Best soup I've ever had came from that place too. Some root they only pull up once a season, tastes like nothing else I've had before or since."
He filed that away, already halfway to how he'd cook it given the chance.
"Bet I could do something with that. Depending on the texture."
"You'd have to fight three old women for it first. They ration it."
He shifted his weight, and his ribs pulled tight enough that he couldn't fully hide the wince.
Senna's eyes cut toward the movement before he'd even finished flinching.
"Left side, low. That's not new. That's from your stance."
He went still for a second.
"You've been watching me train?"
"Once or twice." She said it the same way she'd said everything else, flat, unbothered. "You drop your guard on that side when you're tired. Same spot that's bruised now. Isn't a coincidence."
He didn't have anything to say to that right away.
"You still going for that belt? The one you keep mentioning."
Something in him eased at the actual question, different from the technical stuff.
"Undefeated. My weight class. It's still sitting there waiting for me, soon as all this is done."
"You talk about it like it's already yours."
"It is. Just gotta go get it."
They sat without talking for a while, the fields still rolling gold below them.
"You ever think about home? Actual home, not just wherever you're stationed."
Senna took her time answering that one.
"Not really. Not the way you mean it. Haven't had one fixed spot in longer than I can explain anymore. Wherever the people I actually like end up, that's usually close enough."
She turned the question back around before he could ask anything else.
"What about you? You ever miss it?"
He answered before he'd decided to.
"Yeah. More than I let on, probably."
He kept going, easier than he expected.
"My sisters used to fight me for kitchen space every morning. Older one thinks she's better at it than me. She isn't."
"That so."
"Grandma's the one who actually taught me. Curry recipe's hers. I make it exact, every time, no shortcuts, because if I mess with it even a little my littlest sister notices and won't let it go."
He trailed off, and the quiet that followed sat different than the ones before it.
"You've been somewhere else all morning. Even now."
She said it plain, no tease waiting behind it.
"Why'd you go in alone last night?"
No joke behind that one either.
He opened his mouth for the easy answer, the same one he'd already given Zaria and Lyra. Something about timing. Something about not having a choice.
None of it came out.
"I don't know. I just..." He stopped, started over. "I usually just try to handle stuff myself. Instead of trusting you guys to actually be there."
He heard himself say it and didn't try to take it back.
Senna didn't reach for a joke, didn't reach for anything. She let it sit there between them, the same way she'd let it sit for anyone else's worst moment, and let him carry it without being alone in it.
Eventually they got up, and the walk back down felt shorter than the one up had.
Near the edge of the market square, an old Herbfolk vendor noticed them together and said something to her neighbor, something about a fine-looking pair, loud enough to carry.
His ears went hot.
Senna didn't correct her. She kept walking, and didn't say anything about that either.
The liaison post came into view not long after, Zaria and Lyra already back and sorting through supplies on the porch.
Lyra noticed them first, something in her expression shifting like she'd caught onto something she wasn't planning to say out loud yet.
"You two look... different."
"We went for a walk." Senna didn't slow down. "That's all it was."
Before anyone could push on that, Thess came around the side of the building faster than any of them had seen him move before, tripping over the hem of his own wrap.
He was out of breath by the time he reached them.
"They've struck again. Near the old stones, past the east ridge. Word just came in."
Zaria was already on her feet.
"How bad?"
"Bad enough that the runner didn't stop to explain further."
Nobody needed telling twice.
Within a minute they were moving, gear already in hand, the whole warmth of the day folding itself away behind them like it had never happened.