POV: Kaelen (ML)
She didn't get to ask her question.
The footsteps came back.
Not moving past this time — stopping. Right outside the gate. Multiple people, and with them the kind of heavy silence that only happens when someone in charge raises their hand to signal the others to be still.
Liana heard it the same moment I did. She was already folding the wanted notice and tucking it into her own robe, moving without sound, eyes on the door.
I crossed to her in three steps and kept my voice at almost nothing. "There's a space under the floor. Trap door behind the storage shelf. I built it two years ago."
She looked at me.
"I grow rare plants," I said. "Sometimes people want to take them. I planned ahead."
She held my gaze for one second — that same look, the math-problem look, trying to figure out what I was — and then she slid off the bed and moved to the shelf. Her legs were still weak. She didn't let it show more than once.
I moved the shelf. Showed her the handle cut into the floorboard. She lowered herself down without a word. The space beneath was dry and dark, lined with living moss I'd cultivated specifically to absorb sound and moisture. It smelled like earth and something faintly sweet.
She looked up at me from below.
"Don't do anything foolish," she said quietly.
"I'm very good at foolish," I said. "That's exactly the plan."
I closed the door over her and moved the shelf back. Then I grabbed my watering pot, knocked it sideways so water spread across the worktable, swore loudly at nobody, and pulled open my front door just as the knock landed on it.
There were three of them. Golden Sun Sect robes — better quality than anything anyone in the Drifting Leaf Sect owned, and they knew it. The one in front was around my age, sharp-eyed, with the posture of someone who'd been told his whole life that he was important. Behind him, two larger disciples stood with their arms crossed, there to look threatening.
They were doing a good job.
"You." The one in front looked me up and down with the specific expression of someone who has decided not to be impressed. "You live here?"
"Yes!" I said. Too brightly. I let my face arrange itself into something open and slightly dim — the expression I'd spent three years perfecting. The village simpleton. The harmless gardener. The person not worth looking at twice. "Yes, this is my hut. Can I help you? I just spilled my water, I was going to check on my pepper plants, they've been drooping a little on the east side and I think it might be the soil — do you know much about soil? The drainage here isn't—"
"We're looking for someone," he cut in.
"Oh!" I blinked. "Who? Is it Brother Tao? He goes wandering sometimes, Elder Yun always says—"
"A woman." He held up a copy of the wanted notice. "Have you seen her?"
I took the paper and held it at arm's length, squinting at it with great seriousness. Liana's face looked up at me. I made a show of thinking very hard.
"She's very pretty," I said.
The disciple stared at me.
"I haven't seen anyone like that," I continued, handing the paper back. "I've been in the garden all day. Yesterday too. I don't get out much, my pepper plants really do need constant attention, especially the ones near the east wall, the soil composition there is—"
"We'll need to search the hut."
My stomach dropped. My face didn't move.
"Of course, of course!" I stepped aside, waving them in with genuine-looking enthusiasm. "Sorry about the mess. I was doing extractions this morning — do you know much about extraction methods? There's a cold press technique I've been working on, I could show you, it takes about three hours but the results are really—"
They weren't listening. The lead disciple was moving through the room with sharp eyes, lifting herb bundles, checking behind the drying rack, nudging the storage shelf with his boot.
The shelf didn't shift. I'd built it heavy on purpose.
He turned and looked at me. "You live alone?"
"Just me and the plants." I smiled. "The plants are better company. They don't complain."
He almost smiled. Then caught himself and went back to being important.
The two larger disciples finished checking the corners and shook their heads. Nothing. The hut was empty, messy, and smelled aggressively of dried herbs. The lead disciple looked faintly annoyed in the way people do when they expected to find something and didn't.
He turned to leave.
Then he stopped.
He'd reached the door, and something through the window had caught his eye. He was looking at the garden.
I felt the shift before I understood it. He stepped back outside, and I followed, still chattering about drainage. He walked along the garden path slowly, scanning the beds.
I watched his eyes.
He slowed at the medicinal section. Moved past the standard herbs — ginger root, goldthread, the common things. Then his gaze snagged on a plant near the back corner. Low to the ground, with pale silver-green leaves that caught light in a specific way.
Silverbell Root.
Extinct, according to most catalogues. Worth more than everything else in this garden combined. I'd regrown it from a single damaged specimen over the course of eighteen months, protecting it through two winters, feeding it a nutrient blend I'd developed specifically for its root system.
It was my second greatest achievement in this life.
I watched him crouch down and look at it. Really look at it.
My chattering had stopped. I hadn't meant it to stop — that was a mistake. The silence was too sudden.
He looked up at me. The dim-cheerful look in his eyes was completely gone.
"Where did you get this," he said.
"Oh, that old thing?" I laughed. It came out mostly natural. "Found a scrap in the storage shed, years ago. Probably nothing, I mostly keep it because it's pretty—"
"This is Silverbell Root." His voice had gone quiet and careful, the way people go quiet when they realize they're holding something valuable. "This hasn't been seen growing anywhere in this region for over a century."
"Really!" I said. "Wow. I just thought it looked nice."
He stood up slowly. He wasn't looking at me like a fool anymore.
He reached down and broke off a cutting — clean, precise, taking the healthiest stem. Something inside me clenched hard. I kept smiling.
He held the cutting up and looked at it. Then he looked at me. Then he looked at the garden again with entirely different eyes, like he was seeing it for the first time.
"I'm coming back," he said.
Not a question. Not a threat exactly. Worse — a fact.
"With my master," he added.
He tucked the cutting carefully into his inner robe, turned, and walked away. The two larger disciples followed.
I stood in the garden until they were gone.
Then I stood there a little longer.
The Silverbell Root sat in its bed with one bare stem where the cutting had been, and I thought about what it meant that a Golden Sun Sect disciple was currently walking away with proof that the Drifting Leaf Sect's supposedly useless gardener had regrown an extinct plant.
I thought about who his master probably was.
I thought about Liana, under the floor of my hut, waiting for me to tell her it was safe.
It was not going to be safe for very much longer.