This dorm’s clock had another kind of bird, not a mystral, not a Calico. I woke to it, and a cold breakfast of as much fruit as I could carry from the food hall was worth avoiding the masses the cooks were busy warming the ovens for. I gave myself another hour on the case study in my room, then took my hunting knife and the empty, ink-stained kit bag and strode out of the Institute. Down Hill Road. Into a Baronbridge still picking last night’s revelries out of its marble-clad nooks and crannies. And the sign on the door of Sterling Apothecary and Myriad Medicaments said it was closed, yet the door itself was open, so…

  “Excuse me, customer!” trilled a voice through a doorway behind the counter. “It’s actually half-past on Feldays that we –”

  “I’m here to work,” I said as he hastened into the room. Half a head shorter than me and under a heavy white cloak, hood up, and I swore I discerned a shade of bluish green on the skin beneath. But the hood was flat, no hint of horns. I blinked hard. Must be the early morning light in here. Might even be a Clearlander dermatological complaint – it wasn’t my place to be nosy. “I heard you offer good rates for supplies.”

  “Oh. Ah. Hm. Technically, I’m only the assistant, still, so really I’m not qualified to offer out any kind of contract placements. Could you perhaps wait for Miss Sterling herself? On a Felday she’ll be dropping in around midday. Or that’s what she said when I asked.”

  I’d waited all week for this and I wasn’t inclined to any more of it. “Not really.”

  “Oh. Hm.”

  “I don’t want a contract placement or anything. Or I can wait for that anyway. I just wanna go get you some things you need, now, and get paid for doing it.”

  “You sound urgent.”

  I bit the inside of my cheek. Despite the week, something in my gut told me to trust, just this once, just this one. “I’m new in the city and I need enough to pay for a few basics until I can get settled. Look.” I dipped my cowl momentarily, and there wasn’t much reaction from the assistant. I took that as a good thing. “See? I know the woods. I can get you whatever you need.” He did something I read as a curt nod and disappeared again.

  I’d been inside a Baronbridge apothecary thrice before in my life, every time to fetch ointments for an elderly neighbour’s onset of goat flu. Different neighbours each time, actually. It was a weird, arcane kind of illness they said to be magically derived from gout. Not as bad as it once was now treatments had been concocted, but gout was almost fashionable somewhere like Dreadfall. And none of the journeys had led me to a place as nice as this: it felt like a flipped version of the taverns that littered the streets of my town. While the taverns had rows of brews and grogs along the back wall, the shelves of bottles here in Sterling’s were orderly and precise, all meticulously labelled with a long name plus a little symbol. Where the taverns had open-faced bowls of meat cuttings and Fried Chunks of Mystery sitting out on the counters, this place had polished glass display cases of liniments and tinctures and infusions in delicate, decorated vases. While the tavern windows resolutely kept all the grease and the muck inside and delighted in wearing it as thickly as the bartender’s own apron, these double bay windows kept every speck of it firmly out in the streets.

  “Excuse me?” The assistant was back. I laid a hand on the edge of the counter. “If you’re still interested, we’re currently lowest on hyssop, borage, gripweed, and smuggler’s root. I believe we can offer a square per krull of the first three, and ten times that for a krull of smuggler’s root.”

  “...You wouldn’t offer anything for foxgloves, would you?”

  “Oh, why foxgloves? But no, not much. I think we have plenty of those anyway. Why, do you grow them or something?”

  “No. Just a thought. Much obliged. What time do you close?”

  “Today? At five. I believe our hours are on the sign on the door.”

  “Your door also said you were closed, yet look at me here.” I flashed a quick smile. “Thanks for your help. I’ll see you later, alright?”

  *

  A miscommunication of messenger horses – I think that’s the collective noun for them – trotted across the intersection outside the apothecary, and with the taverns of Dreadfall still on my mind, I hurried over. “Where are you heading?” I called up to the riders, and a couple offered places further out and down the Wrevon Valley. “Anyone going to Dreadfall?”

  One at the back raised a hand, the rider’s curly hair spilling from her tight hat. “Could you find the Oakleys? Large house a couple of streets back from the town hall. Looks like it’s about to fall over. Got a pitchfork embedded in the front wall. Don’t ask. Tell them: Morrigan’s doing fine, he’s at the front, he’s settling in well and doing much better than expected.” She did that single curt, upward nod that all the messengers did when they’d received the message and ostensibly remembered it, and I carefully fished in my pocket for a round – one of the few I had left – and handed it over, letting her trot over to more custom. I wondered if the messengers taught you that nod when you joined like some kind of secret society handshake, or if they all intuitively knew it from birth and it drove them to their destined fate.

  Maybe something in all of our bones drove us to our fates.

  Up the Hill Road, pacing myself, the route to the Institute’s castle at least a little easier without my entire worldly belongings on my back, and I continued on. Up and up. Past the odd, perfect little hut with the massive foxglove carpet. Deeper, onwards, eyes open for any of the plants on the list. Borage and hyssop would more likely be in the open valley and much more plentiful there too, and smuggler’s root was elusive anywhere, but I’d seen far too much gripweed exploring the woodlands around Dreadfall. My fingers brushed the knife in my pocket. I kept my eyes as sharp as my blade.

  An audience of reddening ferns lined the path, interrupted by a low tree stump which looked as if it’d grown there accidentally, quietly realised its mistake, and excused itself before it got in the way any more. I hopped over it, almost tripped, cursed myself. After the last couple of weeks bombarding my brain and senses, my natural keenness wasn’t what I’d spent years forging it to be. And if I wanted it back before the snow fell and made the whole place near inhospitable, I’d got some work to do. Ahead, the two paths diverged in the still-mellow woods, and I took the one I figured was less travelled, high, up to a jagged ridge. I’d take the other another day – I needed to learn where these all went before the frost arrived, if I really wanted to make a living from this. If I really wanted to be here at all. A scattering of seeds and pods littered the slope, mostly acorns, kept in place by stray surfaced roots like the frozen crests of lapping waves. I steadied myself against a gnarled bole, strode up to a jutting rocky footrest, but my heel skimmed the acorns and what at first was a trickle became a narrow avalanche of the things chittering and scattering downhill. One hand around a thick root, I barely avoided tumbling down with them. Too many things had happened since I’d last been in the woods. But I had to press on.

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  The sizzle of a stream drew me around a verdant boulder the size of Oldfield’s ego. I bent down and cupped my hands and drank from water crackling gently as it skipped over the stones in its course. I could try jumping it, but I wasn’t full of confidence. And the fallen trunk a length upstream was much more enticing.

  Long ago in another lifetime, Miles had followed me across one of these. I’d led the way, shown him the safe places to tread, and he’d traversed in my bootsteps over the brook. When the greengrowth bloomed each year, we went exploring together to see what the snows had left behind. Uncovering muddy relics like we were desperado treasure hunters on an expedition together, him and I. Him and I…

  I counted the years once my boots were back on the dirt. Three of them, three whole years. How the hell had it already been three years since we lost him? I’d kept his bed waiting the entire time, just in case… and now there’d be two empty beds every night in the Oakley household. Probably neither would ever be used again.

  So I carried on. I knew I had to, but that wouldn’t stop me wishing Miles was at my side again. Wishing I could point out all the herbs and plants and flowers and trees and shrubs to him, identifying almost all of them and giving funny names to those I couldn’t. Naming the insects that fluttered in the air and the calls of the birds from the canopies high above. The pinkjays that whistled mellifluously from their nests. The squirrel skittering through the branches, a few twigs falling from up high as it jumped from one to the next. And down on the path, the gripweed lay across –

  I leapt aside – not quick enough – the rubber tendril thick as an arm whipping out and lashing around my boot, knotting itself, already squeezing so tight my ankle throbbed and my howl of pain rang out through the trees. I fumbled to the knife in my pocket and the insidious weed tugged and I dropped the blade as I smacked the ground, grasping, snatching, stretching for it. Couldn’t get it. Too far. Too far. The vice on my leg yanked me back and constricted only tighter as I kicked and struggled, dragging me to its burrow, to the awaiting open stomach. I could hear it gurgling in anticipation. The acid pool was rarely deep enough to dissolve a whole person – if I was lucky, I’d keep my other leg.

  Fallen twigs littered the path and I snagged one, straining out, tapping at the blade of the knife, scraping it towards me. Almost close enough. A second vine – hissing through the air – my left wrist on fire, snared, pinned down, jerked backward. I rolled around and struggled and barely reached the handle with my right, whirled around and chopped at the weed, hacking through the sinuous tendril. It spasmed as we fought, spewing corrosive sprays of white ichor from its wounds, still reeling me into the dark maw in the undergrowth like some helpless sprat on a fishing line, the rotting and putrid stench shoving deep into my head. I chopped and strained and sawed through the last vine tendons and it snapped back like a whip’s recoil, and before it could send the reinforcements I knew too well were waiting in the putrid depths, I drew my blade arm high and axed clean through the one on my ensnared wrist. The excised part flopped uselessly to the ground, oozing viscous viscera, squirming a slow trail down the slope, and I scampered to safety on all fours and hissed at myself for the dreadful lapse of focus. The decapitated end of the tendril fumbled into my path, and I squoze it tight and kicked it whole-heartedly, sailing off into the distant undergrowth and landing with a splat.

  I spent the next hundred smiling grimly to myself, lifting heavy rocks from the stream, tossing them to the gripweed and then moving in and chopping the tendrils off when they lashed out at the sensation of movement near its roots. Wait a few minutes. Toss a bait rock again. A morbid way to spend an afternoon but I figured I’d earned it. Fuck the war front: I’d almost been taken out by a fucking plant. I chuckled wearily to myself, despite it all. And to think they’d hoped to see me on a battlefield. Spirits! Oldfield would turn in his grave.

  Not that he was on the south side of the soil yet, but can you blame a guy for entertaining the thought?

  *

  “Fresh gripweed,” I declared, heaving my stash onto the counter with a deliberate casualness I knew I had absolutely no right to. “Bag’s full of it.” I pulled a couple of segments on the top and dropped them onto the surface while the apothecary assistant watched from under his white cloak. He seemed nice. He didn’t need to know how close it had been to the gripweed hauling a bag full of me onto his counter. One of the cuttings still rolled around limply, the same way I did when I had to get up early on a Dreadfall morning. “I would’ve got more but I’m gonna use the first payment to get a handcart or something.”

  “Wow…” He poked at the moving one, and it poked back. “Wasn’t it difficult for you?”

  “Nah. How hard is it meant to be? The blighted thing can’t even run away.”

  He took the bag, stumbled, laughed nervously, made it into the back room, returned, anxiously fetched the other two pieces off the counter, disappeared again, and when he was finally back a couple minutes later, he said, “About fifteen krulls, give or take, so that’ll be fifteen squares of payment.”

  “That’s what we agreed.”

  He drew a slip of card from under the counter and pushed a pen in my direction, one of those fancy Clearlander pens with the ink already inside it, and I signed it as he asked me. He handed over the squares from a drawer, his fingers softly brushing over mine, and then he withdrew his hand into his sleeve and held it tightly with the other. “I, uh, gave you an extra couple of squares there. That’s intentional.”

  “Huh. Why?”

  “For – for being a good customer.”

  “I’m not a customer though.”

  He certainly said something after that, but I could not tell you which words even if I was offered a lifetime exemption from conscription. He fled into the back room. “Gotta start closing up now!” said the doorway. “Have a nice day!”

  I smiled to myself. On the way out, I caught sight of some soaps on a stand, so I doubled back and left a square on the counter as payment. Probably ten times what it was priced but the bars in the dorms made me feel way too floral, and I simply couldn’t stand sitting next to Kaspar and smelling like blossoming petunias anymore.

  Out in the early evening air, I still couldn’t shake that smile. Paid handsomely for a single diced gripweed by a guy who clearly took me for some dashing adventurer. This life might just be doable after all – provided the local flora didn’t take me down.

  *

  I did my best to scrub myself clean, but even I’d been finding the facilities cramped. A compact cubicle in the corner of the dorm for our restroom. I wouldn’t want to be Kaspar’s height and using the same space. Or Omen’s size, either. But I emerged feeling far better, much more like myself again, and since I was alone in the room, I tapped on the Ooh the same way I’d seen Holly and Grove do, and it glowed orange and warm and it felt like paradise.

  By the time Holly returned, I was long dry and well into the final chapter of this week’s case study. “Hey,” I said. She sagged and dropped a couple of folders on her bed and looked over. “I’m sorry for pushing you away when I wasn’t feeling so good. I know you mean well, even if… Yeah. Also, your Leafy was kind of a cute suggestion. I wasn’t in the right frame of mind at the time, but I can see that now.”

  Her face brightened like a freshly lit chandelier.