Location: Kaelport — the Lower School yard and the herb blocks below it
Date: 5 Emberwane 9943 AZI, Grindday, first light to mid-morning
Realm: Lower Realm
The mint had got into the creases of both of Bai Shu's hands, and it wouldn't come out with water.
She'd been on the ninth block since before it was light enough to see the rows, cutting the last of it. The frost had come down hard in the night and blacked the tips, and by noon the rest would go limp and brown and be good for nothing but the heap. So she cut it now, kneeling on a sack, with her knife and her bare hands, and laid it in the flat basket at her knee in bunches with the stems all one way. Nobody else weeded the ninth block. Nobody else cut it either. Every root in it was hers, and she knew what had gone into the ground and when, and she wasn't going to have somebody's well-meaning cousin pull the young sage because it looked like a weed.
