The rains had softened the roads into a slick, gray paste, but Eiggin navigated the herbal cart with the pride of a parade driver. Indrale sat beside him, bundled in her moss-toned shawl and balancing a tea tin in her lap, her sharp eyes scanning the fog-veiled horizon. She hummed as they rolled along, her voice a gentle accompaniment to the clatter of wheels.

  They were headed to Willowgrove—by request.

  A letter had arrived from Ilyari and Tazien that morning, neatly folded and stamped with a pressed marigold petal. It politely explained that this week’s harvest was ready but would need to be picked up directly. The garden had overgrown again in the night, and both siblings were too deep in tea setting and preservation to leave the estate.

  Indrale had raised an eyebrow at the note. “They’re working too hard,” she’d said aloud. “But they’re learning.”

  Indrale was humming as she adjusted the hood of her moss-toned shawl, glancing at her son with a fondness that seemed to steep her words like tea leaves.

  "You hold the reins like your grandfather did," she said.

  "He used a chariot pulled by sandcats," Eiggin mumbled.

  "Style, not speed, boy. That's what kept him alive."

  Then everything shifted.

  The cart jerked violently as Eiggin yanked the reins with a shout—just in time to avoid crashing into a cloaked figure who had stepped directly into the path.

  The figure didn’t move.

  "Are you mad?" Eiggin squeaked nervously, leaping down. "You trying to get flattened? Well... did you get hurt? Bougan didn't flatten you did 'e?"

  The man tilted his head, slowly drawing back his hood. He was older—white-streaked hair bound with copper wire, and a lined face tattooed faintly around the eyes with inked glyphs. His cloak shimmered faintly, not from wealth, but from spell-threaded grime.

  "I felt a pull," he said, voice low and strange. "An echo. Something old… in the direction you’re heading."

  Indrale’s breath caught. “…Samil?”

  The man’s gaze sharpened. “Young Lady Phindrase?”

  “Oh gods. You haven’t aged at all, you dusty wanderer.”

  “You have.” He smiled crookedly. “But only where it flatters.”

  Indrale laughed, then turned to the others. “This is Samil Runeglint. He was… part of my father’s caravan guard. A glyph broker. We thought he died years ago.”

  “I did,” Samil said. “Or enough that I stopped counting the years

  He stepped closer to the cart, brushing wet leaves from his sleeve. “You headed along the main road?” he asked, voice calm but with an undertone that made Eiggin shift slightly in his seat. “If so… might I ride with you a while?”

  Indrale studied him for a beat, then gave a short nod. “We’re headed to Willowgrove.”

  The man’s eyes lifted sharply. “Willowgrove? That place’s been abandoned longer than you’ve been alive.”

  “That’s not wrong,” Indrale said dryly, folding her hands. “But it’s not abandoned anymore.”

  He furrowed his brow. “I can hardly remember the name of the last owner. Some noble apothecary, maybe? But I thought the house had been claimed by the wilds—or torn down.”

  “It wasn’t,” she replied. “It was gifted instead. To a pair of foreign-born royals.”

  That got his full attention.

  Indrale motioned to the open seat. “We’re headed there now. For tea. You should join us.”

  The man hesitated for just a breath longer, then gave a slight, knowing smile. “I think I will.”

  At Willowgrove, Ilyari had spent the better part of the morning cutting down another half-acre of rare teas and companion herbs. The garden smelled of bergamot, lemon balm, and clover. The ironworkers, still lingering after their stairwell repairs, had offered their help in reinforcing the old gazebo. Galen had marveled that like the apothecary, the gazebo was still structurally sound, including much of its furniture—untouched by time, rot, or war. His apprentices had traced the wrought iron detailing along the rails with awe, noting they’d never seen metalwork like this before—nor could they identify the metal alloy used.

  Meanwhile, the siblings had spent the entire night before stitching outdoor cushions—each one enchanted with glyphs for water resistance, sun deflection, and mild temperature regulation. They’d arranged them around the gazebo and garden benches just before dawn. Ilyari had overspent a bit in the market for snacks but she didn't have time to make them herself. But with the spread in front of them, even Veska wouldn't have been able to find anything wrong with the set up of this tea party.

  Ilyari couldn’t help but notice—again—Samil’s eyes drifting toward the same patch of earth. The place where Laileeih had once stood tall and curious, her vines coiled protectively around the gazebo’s edge like a living sentry.

  It was the third time he glanced there.

  “Why do you keep looking over there?” Ilyari asked gently, setting her tea aside.

  Samil blinked, then offered a faint, almost nostalgic smile. “A long time ago… there was a vine called Tavreliss Marrmarot that grew in places like this. Not often. Not wild. But cultivated. Carefully. They say it only sprouted when the land chose to remember a guardian.”

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  He tilted his head toward the earth. “There was something like that here. I can still see the weave in the soil. But… it’s gone now.”

  Ilyari hesitated. “There was something. Her name was Laileeih. She… helped us clear the corruption from the fountain. She gave a part of herself to do it. After that, she withered.”

  Samil’s gaze sharpened. “The fountain was clogged?”

  “It was infected with some kind of mold,” Ilyari said. “After we unplugged it, Laileeih started dropping all her pods and then even though we tried to water her with water from the fountain, she died later that night. Tazien stayed with her the whole time. Then… she stopped glowing. So we didn't find the heart to dig her up so we just left her and put a kind of memorial ring around her. So once she is gone, we'll still have a reminder of where she was.”

  He went quiet for a moment, fingers tracing a loose thread on his satchel.

  “If she was shedding her runner vines, then she wasn’t dying because of the mold,” he said at last. “She was already dying before she touched it.”

  “But that’s impossible,” Ilyari replied, shaking her head. “No one could’ve gotten close enough to harm her. She tried to eat everything that got near—birds, mice, a stray dog, and even a piece of my sleeve.”

  Samil’s expression turned grim. “She wasn’t traditionally poisoned. She was poisoned with mana.”

  Ilyari stared. “Mana…?”

  He rose to his feet slowly, walking to the edge of the stone ring where Laileeih had once rooted herself. He knelt, fingers hovering just above the soil.

  “There are glyphs here,” he murmured. “Old ones. Hidden. Blended with the root code of the land. I suppose the last owner tucked one beneath her, didn’t you?”

  Ilyari’s breath caught. “How do you—?”

  “Not your fault,” Samil said softly. “It was already here. Layered deep. You simply awakened what was dormant.”

  A crunch of boots on gravel interrupted them—Tazien, breathless, stepping out of the workshop with a misting jar still in hand. “What do you mean there’s a glyph underneath?”

  Samil glanced up at him. “I mean there’s a stone, lad. Directly beneath where she grew. And on that stone are not one, but several glyphs. All etched for containment. But something corrupted the sequence—turned preservation into decay.”

  Tazien’s eyes widened. “You can see it?”

  “Like ink on parchment,” Samil said.

  Tazien didn’t wait. He dropped the jar to the grass and sprinted toward the patch of earth, dropping to his knees and digging with both hands. Soil flew, and Ilyari moved to help, pushing back loose loam and broken root until Tazien’s fingers struck something hard.

  A slab of smooth stone, the size of a loaf of artisan bread curved and veined with shimmering, half-buried sigils. When Tazien looked at it, most of the code was a shimmery blue and silver, but scattered over it, seemed to be damage in black and red.

  "This killed Laileeih?" Tazien asked.

  Samil stroked his beard thoughtfully, gaze lingering on the exposed glyph stone. “This is… difficult,” he murmured. “The stone itself wasn’t just a marker—it was a vessel. Designed to contain the essence of your Laileeih. Like fertilizer, but encoded. More permanent. More intimate. Someone damaged it—likely long before you arrived. They may not have realized what she was… or maybe they did.”

  He let the words hang in the air like mist.

  “In a sense,” he continued, “you witnessed the last of her life. What she had stored up. She might’ve given you crystals—drops of her essence—if she had been whole.”

  Ilyari and Tazien exchanged a look. No words needed. The kind of silence that only siblings, or soul-bound conspirators, can understand.

  "Well she seemed lovely, and you did a good job with her while she was here. I can see in her glyphs she was a very happy plant. And who cut her so many times? She's got so many branches."

  Tazien grinned and rubbed the back of his neck. "So, in my defense, I was trying not to get eaten, but after a while I had to save other creatures from being eaten too. Was it bad to do so?"

  Samil laughed. "What a mischevous guardian you had. She didn't eat people, but she did know that the more vines you cut the more she could house. She probably did it on purpose. In fact the only thing that this plant can actually eat is ... spores. Anything else she probably just would have held and let go later. "

  Tazien’s jaw dropped. “What?! You mean I spent three weeks terrified of a vine that just wanted to… gum me to death?”

  Even Ilyari had to bite back a laugh.

  Samil shrugged. “Some plants have humor. Yours clearly did.”

  They looked up to find Indrale and Eiggin wandering a winding path through the overgrowth, nearly swallowed by waist-high greenery and nodding seedheads. Indrale’s hands flew as she gestured excitedly, her voice rising above the rustling leaves.

  “Eiggin, do you see this?!”

  “Yes, but would you please not dive headfirst into every thornbush you find—” he huffed, trying in vain to hold her shawl back from a particularly wicked-looking bramble.

  “I’m telling you, this cannot be real—this plant hasn’t been seen on the market since before you were born.”

  She turned, half-tangled in stems, and shouted toward the gazebo. “Ilyari! Is that Shavari leaf?”

  Ilyari stepped down cautiously. “Shavari?”

  Indrale pointed with a gleam in her eye. “Dark silver veins, twinfold curls, pinkish serration on the edges—yes, yes, I’d stake my reputation on it! No one’s cultivated it in thirty years. It was thought lost. Some claimed the seeds no longer germinated.”

  Tazien came up beside her, brushing dirt from his palms. “Is it valuable?”

  Indrale’s expression turned shrewd. “More than valuable. I will pay you fifteen percent of every sale—if you’ll harvest those leaves and let me take them today.”

  Ilyari blinked. “That much?”

  “Yes. And that’s a fair offer, not a favor,” she said firmly. “This could put Willowgrove on the lips of every tea merchant from here to the Inner Ring.”

  Ilyari nodded once. “Then it’s yours.”

  What followed was a surprisingly wild affair of tugging away thorns, hauling back overgrowth, and trying not to trample roots as they cleared a safe path to the abundant patches of Shavari leaf. The rare tea shimmered slightly in the sunlight, curling like silverfire around clusters of rocks near the back of the overgrown arbor.

  Tazien got scratched across the arm. Eiggin nearly fell into a patch of suspiciously large slug slime trails. Ilyari ended up with mud caked halfway up her boots.

  But they were grinning when they finished.

  By the time the herbal cart was fully loaded, Indrale was seated regally inside, arms wrapped protectively around two massive bundles of Shavari leaf, smiling like a queen who’d just won a war.

  As Eiggin clucked the reins and the wheels creaked into motion, Samil stepped to the side of the path, waiting as the cart turned to leave.

  Before it did, he turned to Ilyari.

  “I’ve a gift for you,” he said quietly, reaching into his satchel. From it, he drew a fragment of curved glass, no larger than her palm—faintly smoked, with a barely-visible glyph etched inside like a scar caught in crystal.

  “This came from a failed peace talk,” he said. “In a country not unlike this one. The discussion ended with shattered glass, broken promises, and a bleeding steward. I picked this up from beneath a broken stein.”

  He handed it to her.

  “I also met a woman there. She had your eyes. Tazien’s too.”

  Ilyari’s fingers closed gently around the shard.

  Tazien narrowed his gaze. “How do you go around dealing in glyphs and Code… and not get arrested or executed by temple law? It’s blasphemy here.”

  Samil smiled. Kind and sad. “Who said I haven’t?”

  They both fell quiet.

  “But keep your ways clean,” he continued. “For now. If I’m right… you’ll need to make it all the way through the Academy. Together. Only then will you be able to make real change—and perhaps restore what was lost.”

  He stepped back with a nod and turned to follow the cart down the road.

  The gate creaked closed behind them.

  And as it latched shut, Tazien turned—just in time to glimpse movement in the shadows beyond the outer path.

  A tall, hooded man stood still against the tree line, ink-stained gloves moving quickly across parchment. A falcon perched on his arm, feathers gleaming with coded rings and a red string.

  The man tied the message, lifted the bird, and sent it soaring into the clouds.

  ??? Who do you think the hooded man at the end of the chapter is writing to?

  And what message do you think the falcon carried?

  Drop your thoughts below—and if you’re enjoying the journey so far, a rating or comment goes a long way in helping Willowgrove’s story reach more readers. Thank you for joining me. ????