Seraphine's POV
She forgot for exactly five seconds.
That was how long it took - between waking up and opening her eyes fully - for her brain to be blank and soft and not know yet. Five seconds of just breathing. Just existing. Just being a person on a cot in a quiet room with a heavy cloak pulled around her shoulders and nothing wrong with anything.
Then it came back.
The throne room. The herald's voice reading charges she didn't write. The scratch of pen on paper. Daxton's hand. Her father's eyes fixed on the wall above her head like she was already gone before they even said the word exile.
She sat up fast.
If she moved quickly enough, the weight couldn't settle on her chest. She had learned that this morning in the carriage. Keep moving. Keep thinking. Fall apart later, somewhere private, where nobody needed anything from her.
She stood up, folded Kael's cloak carefully, and went outside.
Thornwall in daylight was worse.
She had known it was bad. She had seen it in the torchlight last night - the crooked fence, the tired faces, the way everyone moved like people who had stopped expecting things to get better. But daylight made it clear in a way torchlight didn't.
Three buildings leaning so badly she could see the sky through the wall cracks. The garden plots along the inside fence - six of them, sized for real growing - completely dead. Not just empty. Dead. Gray soil so packed and dry it had cracked into a pattern like broken glass.
And the children.
She counted seven of them in the first ten minutes. All too thin. All with that specific look she recognized from her mother's medical scrolls - the slightly dull eyes, the pale mouths - that came from not getting enough of the right food for too long.
Her hands curled at her sides.
Okay, she thought. Look at what you have. Then figure out what to do with it.
She found a quiet corner behind Maren's house and opened the pendant.
The spatial garden hit her like a breath of clean air after weeks underground.
Green. Impossible, lush, thriving green. Rows and rows of herbs growing in soft light that had no source she could identify. Silverleaf with its metallic shimmer. Coolroot growing thick and dark. Ashbloom in clusters, their petals the color of pale fire. And further back, three plants she didn't recognize yet - her mother's notes called them by names in the old language, the one she could only read partially.
But she didn't need to know everything today.
She needed to know what she had, what Thornwall needed most, and how to match them up.
She spent an hour inside the garden taking stock. Counting, measuring, reading her mother's notes on each plant's uses. Ashbloom for the ashfever cases - she already had three more to treat this morning. Coolroot for the void-rot she had spotted on two adults' hands last night. Silverleaf for the water - if she processed enough of it and added it to the well, it could neutralize the metallic contamination over time. Not immediately. But over time.
She had enough.
Not comfortably enough. Not leave-some-aside-and-relax enough. But enough to start, and starting was everything.
She climbed back out of the pendant and began.
By midmorning she had treated the three new fever cases, started two adults on coolroot wraps for their hands, and explained the silverleaf water treatment to Maren clearly enough that Maren could do it herself going forward. She was kneeling in the dirt beside the first garden plot - pressing soil between her fingers, trying to understand what she was working with - when she heard footsteps behind her.
Familiar footsteps.
Small and quick and slightly uneven on the right side from an old ankle injury that had never healed properly because a certain palace physician had decided a maid's ankle wasn't worth full treatment.
Seraphine went very still.
Then she turned around.
Lyris looked exactly the same as she always did - small and sharp-eyed and wearing an expression like she had just walked through something difficult and was completely uninterested in discussing it. Her travel bag was over one shoulder. Her hair was a mess. There was ash-colored dust on her boots that meant she had been walking through the Wastes for at least half a day.
Seraphine opened her mouth.
"Don't," Lyris said.
Seraphine closed it.
"I followed your trail from the border drop point," Lyris said, matter-of-factly, like she was reporting on a grocery run. "Took me most of the night. The gray ground makes tracking annoying but not impossible." She looked around at Thornwall. At the crooked buildings. At the thin children. At the dead garden plots. Her jaw tightened slightly - the only sign that she was feeling anything at all.
Then she looked at Seraphine.
Something passed between them that neither of them would ever put words to. Twenty-two years of Lyris being the one person in that entire palace who saw Seraphine as a person. Who slipped her extra food during the long court ceremonies. Who once stood between her and a senior court lady with nothing but a tray and a look that could cut glass.
Who chose to walk into the Wastes rather than stay somewhere safe.
"Lyris-" Seraphine started.
"I said don't." But Lyris's voice was rough now. Just slightly. "What are we working with?"
Seraphine breathed in. Breathed out. Pointed at the garden plots. "Six dead plots. Soil is packed, dry, possibly void-contaminated. I have seeds from the pendant but I don't know if anything will grow in this."
Lyris walked to the nearest plot, crouched down, and pressed her palm flat against the gray soil. She made a face. "This is terrible."
"I know."
"Like trying to grow something in ash."
"I know."
Lyris stood up and looked at her. "Right," she said simply. "What do we start with?"
And something in Seraphine's chest - something that had been pulled very tight since yesterday morning - loosened the smallest amount.
She crouched beside the first plot and pressed both palms flat against the soil to feel its texture properly.
The soil was cold. Packed. Dead, exactly like it looked.
And then - beneath her palms - she felt it.
She froze.
A pulse. Deep under the surface. Faint, like a heartbeat heard through a thick wall. Not her pendant. Not her own mana. Something in the ground itself, slow and buried and ancient, pushing back against her hands with a pressure that was almost - almost - warm.
Like something had been asleep under this soil for a very long time.
And her touch had just made it open its eyes.
Seraphine looked up at Lyris. Her voice came out barely above a whisper.
"Lyris. The ground isn't dead."
Lyris stared at her. "What?"
"It's not dead." Seraphine pressed harder. The pulse pushed back harder. Steady. Insistent. Awake. "Something is down there. Something alive." She swallowed. "And I think it knows I'm here."