The outpost changed little with the seasons. Even in summer, when the mountain air softened and the moss warmed underfoot, the daily rhythms remained undisturbed. Students came and went. Lessons droned on. Assignments accumulated and were quietly fulfilled.
Yunhua continued her usual habits. She ate alone. She read alone. She catalogued medicinal plants for the old herbalist with the same steady diligence that marked every other part of her life. No one told her what to do anymore. They had long since learned she did what was needed without prompting.
She did not bother with the younger apprentices and newcomers. They had too much energy, too much noise, too many questions. And most of them were gone by winter anyway — reassigned, dismissed, or recalled to whatever House had sent them.
Trouble, in Yunhua's experience, came in many forms. But the loudest kind was always young and bored.
She avoided both as a matter of principle.
And then the red-haired girl arrived.
It was midday. Yunhua had taken her usual position on the back ledge of the herbarium, tucked between a shelf of moldy rootcutters' manuals and an open window that overlooked the gardens. She was copying a series of diagrams on bloodroot identification — a dull task, but preferable to sorting dried lichen in the cellar.
The lecture hall below was humming with voices. Another new group of initiates. They came in waves every few months, bright-eyed and eager to prove themselves.
Yunhua paid them no attention.
Until she heard a voice — sharp, clear, and laughing — rise above the rest.
It wasn't just the sound of it. It was the rhythm. The utter confidence.
Most new initiates walked softly, kept their tones low, unsure of their place.
But this voice was bold.
Then she appeared.
Yunhua didn't notice her at first. Only the motion — a flicker of color through the door as the group passed through the corridor.
And her hair—
Gods.
Her hair was a riot of red — not copper, not auburn, but the full-throated crimson of maple leaves in the dead of autumn. It tumbled past her shoulders in wild curls, untamed and bright as fire.
Yunhua stared.
It wasn't that she hadn't seen redheads before. But this was not the mild rust of aging scribes or the dull sun-burnished orange of farm girls.
This was a vivid, shameless color. It didn't match the dull stone walls or the gray robes or the colorless porridge mornings.
It was alive.
The girl turned her head mid-laugh — catching some remark from another student — and Yunhua caught a flash of her profile: high cheekbones, sun-kissed skin, a mouth pulled into a half-smirk that looked like it belonged to someone who caused trouble for sport.
Yunhua lowered her charcoal.
It wasn't interest. Not quite. And certainly not curiosity.
More like... a shift in wind pressure. The sense that something unpredictable had entered the room, and it would be foolish to ignore it.
Later, in the refectory, the red-haired girl sat at the center of a bench, laughing with her elbows on the table, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and a trail of ink smudged along one wrist. Her laughter wasn't loud in the annoying way. It had shape. It had control. The kind of laugh that came from someone who already knew how to make friends before they'd finished unpacking their bags.
Yunhua chewed her stew and kept her eyes on her bowl.
"Rowan, was it?" someone at the table asked.
The redhead raised her spoon in mock salute. "That's right. Rowan of House Valandrin. Please, no curtsies."
Someone laughed. Someone else looked mildly scandalized.
Yunhua kept chewing.
House Valandrin. She knew the name — an old one, politically minor, but with deep connections in the northern provinces. The Valandrin crest was on one of the scrolls in the upper archives — the one about ancient elven treaties. Curious place to send a daughter.
But again: not her business.
Not yet.
Rowan, as it turned out, was not like the others.
She was loud, yes. But not in the same way the others were. The others clamored to be seen. Rowan assumed she would be. She didn't posture. She didn't boast.
She belonged.
Yunhua watched — discreetly, distantly — as Rowan worked her way through the lessons. She wasn't especially skilled in theory. She often forgot obscure names or misquoted incantations. But she remembered people's names. She cracked jokes that made the stone-faced instructors blink. She borrowed ink and returned it with handwritten thank-you notes that included the doodle of a snake wearing a scholar's hat.
Ridiculous.
And strangely... effective.
By the end of her first week, Rowan knew everyone's names, had made friends with two kitchen apprentices, and had already received three unofficial warnings from the scriptorium for "spirited commentary."
By the end of the second week, she'd been assigned herb rotation duty.
With Yunhua.
The pairing was not random. Yunhua suspected the herbalist, who had developed a habit of foisting loud students off on her whenever possible.
"You're quiet," he once said. "Balances them out."
Yunhua didn't respond. Not because she agreed. But because argument only encouraged elaboration and frankly she didn't care for any — especially not from an old elf going senile (according to Yunhua).
That morning, she arrived in the garden early. She preferred to work before others arrived — the soil was softer with dew, and the insects had not yet begun their noise.
She was halfway through trimming the feverwort patch when she heard footsteps behind her.
"Morning, ghost girl," came Rowan's voice, chipper as if greeting the sun.
Yunhua straightened slowly. Turned.
Rowan grinned at her over an armful of garden tools. Her curls were tied back in a haphazard bun, wisps falling loose around her ears. Her sleeves were rolled again, and she had a smear of dirt across one cheek already, as though she'd preemptively gotten into trouble just walking here.
"I'm not a ghost," Yunhua said, coolly.
"Could've fooled me," Rowan said, dropping the tools into the crate beside her. "You've been haunting the library longer than the dead."
Yunhua returned to her trimming.
Rowan crouched beside her without further ceremony.
For the first several minutes, they worked in silence.
Rowan, to her credit, was competent with her hands. She didn't ask where the tools went. She didn't whine about the dirt. She didn't fill the air with unnecessary words.
It was... tolerable.
Even oddly companionable.
Then, of course, Rowan spoke again.
"So what's your story, anyway?"
"No story," Yunhua said.
"Everyone's got one."
"Then mine's very short."
Rowan gave a mock-hurt gasp. "You wound me. And here I thought we were going to bond over bloodroot and dirt."
Yunhua glanced sideways.
Despite Rowan's tone her smile wasn't mocking. It was... warm. Genuine.
Infuriatingly difficult to deflect.
She turned back to the plants.
"I don't talk to pass the time."
Rowan nodded, unfazed. "That's fine. I talk enough for two."
Yunhua should have found that irritating.
She didn't.
Which was, frankly, more irritating.
And so began the pattern.
Rowan was assigned to garden duty for the rest of the month. She arrived every morning — always late by a few minutes, always with some excuse involving spiders, breakfast, or the vague threat of academic disgrace. And every morning, she talked.
Not constantly. But enough to remind Yunhua she was there.
She talked about her family — "stuffy but tolerable." About the House politics she didn't care for. About her older brother, whom she called "the noble prune." About how she didn't mind being sent away. About how she liked the mountains. About how the air smelled different here — like pine sap and cold mornings.
Yunhua never asked her to stop.
And Rowan, curiously, never asked Yunhua to speak.
She just talked — like pouring warm water into a cracked cup, knowing it would find its own way in time.
And slowly, carefully, Yunhua began to listen.