They broke camp before full light, Wren rousing Corbin and Silas with a briskness that didn't match how little any of them had actually slept. The morning air was sharp and still, cold enough to fog with every breath.
"Another half day," Wren said, checking a hand-drawn map against the treeline. "The grove sits in a hollow past that second ridge. Guild notes say it's been productive three seasons running."
The road gave out less than a mile past camp, the packed cart-ruts thinning to nothing. Past that, it was open forest, with nothing to guide them but Wren's sketched map and whatever Corbin remembered from the guild's notes.
Henry fell into step beside the cart, watching Corbin adjust its balance on the uneven ground without being asked.
He'd pegged the man as quiet the first day. By the second, quiet looked more like careful. Corbin checked every wheel, every strap, twice, and said almost nothing while he did it.
Silas was the opposite. He'd found a reason to talk to Hannah three separate times since breakfast, none of the reasons especially good.
"You really cracked F-rank without a mage attribute?" he asked her now, jogging a couple steps to catch up. "Guild instructors back home said pure sword types usually cap out lower."
"Your instructors were wrong."
"Right, no, that's, that's fair." Silas laughed, a little too loud for how quiet the woods were. Corbin didn't look up from the wheel he was checking, but something in his shoulders relaxed, like this was a familiar rhythm he didn't need to referee anymore.
Dez fell back to walk near Henry, adjusting the strap on a short sword that had clearly seen better decades. "He does that with everyone new," he said, low enough that Silas wouldn't hear. "Give him a week. He'll settle."
"You two known each other long?"
"Grew up two streets apart. Failed our Bronze rank trials on the same day, actually. Different reasons." Dez's mouth twisted, somewhere between a grin and a wince. "Fenn choked on the written half. I choked on the spar."
"And now you're both here."
"Now we're both here." Dez glanced ahead at the alchemists, then back at Henry. "Beats the alternative. There wasn't a lot else waiting for us back home."
Henry understood that better than he felt like explaining.
The hollow, when they reached it, opened up wider than Henry expected, a shallow bowl of ground where the pines thinned enough to let real light through.
Low plants carpeted the slopes in dense red-veined clusters, leaves the color of drying blood against the pale mountain grass.
"That's it." Wren's voice had lost its edge the second the grove came into view, replaced by something closer to reverence. "That's Crimson Sage."
She knelt at the nearest cluster, showing Corbin and Silas how to cut just above the root rather than tearing the whole plant free.
"Leave the base intact and it grows back by next season. Rip it out and you've killed the patch for good. Guild fines you double if they catch it, and rightly so."
Henry watched the demonstration without needing to be told twice.
It was the kind of information that mattered less to him than the ground around it, the sightlines down into the hollow, the two ridgelines flanking it, the single narrow approach they'd walked in on.
"Good spot to defend," Hannah said quietly, echoing the same read.
"One way in. High ground on both sides." He crouched near the treeline, running a hand along a patch of disturbed earth that turned out to be nothing, just old rain and roots. "Something watching this place would have to come through the same gap we did."
"Comforting."
"Wasn't trying to be comforting. Just accurate."
She almost smiled at that.
The work settled into a rhythm by midmorning.
Wren, Corbin, and Silas moved through the grove in a slow, methodical line, filling crate after crate while Dez and Fenn split perimeter duty at the hollow's mouth, trading nervous energy for genuine focus the longer the day went uneventfully.
Henry took the high ground on the eastern ridge, close enough to see the whole bowl at once.
From up there, everything looked almost peaceful. Simple.
Nobody screaming, nobody bleeding, three people who'd sunk two years of savings into this exact patch of dirt finally getting to see it pay off.
He thought about what Wren had said the first night, about the shop she was trying to build. Something with her name on it, something that would still be there a year from now whether or not she personally showed up to run it.
He turned the thought over again, the way he'd started doing since the campfire the night before, and didn't get any further with it than he had then.
Whatever he built here stayed filed under a classification level with his name nowhere on the paperwork. He didn't resent it, exactly. It was the job, and he'd known that going in.
But there was a difference between not resenting something and being at peace with it, and he wasn't sure yet which side of that line he actually stood on.
Hannah climbed up to join him a while later, dropping down onto the same flat stone without asking.
It had become enough of a habit between them that he'd stopped noticing it as a question.
"You've gone quiet," she said.
"Thinking."
"About the shop-with-her-name-on-it thing."
He glanced at her, surprised she'd caught it from the night before without him saying so directly.
"You're not subtle," she added, before he could ask.
"Didn't realize I needed to be."
"You don't. Just an observation." She looked down at the grove, at Wren straightening up to stretch her back before crouching again for the next cluster. "For what it's worth, whatever you're chewing on, you've got time to figure it out. This isn't going anywhere."
"Feels like it might, some days."
"Everything feels like that some days." She said it simply, without any weight behind it, like a fact rather than comfort. "Doesn't make it true."
Below them, Silas said something that made Corbin actually laugh, a short, surprised bark of a sound like he hadn't expected to.
Wren shot them both a look that had no real heat in it.
Henry watched the three of them work, and let the thought sit there a while longer instead of chasing it toward an answer it wasn't ready to give him yet.