Chapter 161 Everyone Needs a Little Common Sense

Chapter 161 Everyone Needs a Little Common Sense
Rae
I am still admiring the pearl when the sun disappears.
Has Bright Thorn decided to add sudden ominous darkness to the feast?
Shit.
Then I look up.
Oh, it’s just a fae woman standing over me.
She’s very tall, sharp-faced, dressed in bronze and wheat-gold, with dark hair braided down her back and rings on every finger. Familiar? No. Important? Unfortunately, probably.
Menace lifts his head from my shoulder and bares one tiny tooth.
The woman’s gaze drops to the pearl between my fingers, then lifts to my face. “Heartroot.”
No…
Today was only starting to become relaxing.
Cian’s hand settles at the back of my chair. “She has a name,” he says.
The woman blinks, then inclines her head. “Rae, then.”
“That’s better,” I say, tucking the pearl safely into my pocket. “Slightly less terrifying.”
Her expression does not change. “My court has need of you.”
Of course it does.
Apparently, one fae asks, and then all the others remember they also have catastrophes sitting at home in need of a small barefoot woman with no official training and a questionable relationship with mushrooms.
By the time the feast ends, I have six invitations, three warnings, two symbolic tokens I refuse because absolutely not, and one alarming offer of temporary stewardship over a valley I have never seen.
I tell Cian later that I am starting to suspect being the Heartroot is just customer service with more moss.
He laughs hard enough that his shoulders shake.
That helps slightly.
The next few days become roads, and we move through them one after another.
Cian’s hand carries us from one court to another while the realm keeps placing its wounds at my feet and looking very hopeful about it.
The first court is called Harrowmere, and its problem is a border.
Two hills stand on either side of a valley road, both ruled by courts with old grudges and big egos. The path between them should carry grain, cloth, medicine, and letters through three smaller courts. Instead, it is choked with thorn gates, toll charms, spite markers, and enough petty legal arguments to make me want to chew bark.
The leaders bring me to the road and wait.
I stare at the two locked gates standing twenty feet apart, each decorated with a crest, each proudly useless.
“So,” I say slowly, “the road is sick because nobody wants to share?”
Several fae look as though I’ve spat in their face.
The earth beneath my bare feet hums, not in pain exactly. More irritation. Grumpy dirt. Yes. The whole valley feels as if it has been forced to listen to rich people argue for far too long.
I place one hand against the nearest gate, and nothing grand happens.
I feel the roots beneath the road. I feel where trade used to move, where hooves and wheels and feet pressed purpose into the soil. I also feel where greed fucked everything up.
My magic rises, quiet and green.
I could tear the gates down, but I don’t.
Instead, I turn to the two courts and tell them the road will open when both crests are removed.
They wait for more, but there is no more.
Apparently, this is very disappointing.
It takes three hours, two arguments, and Cian looking silently murderous beside me before both crests are pried loose. The moment the second one hits the grass, the thorn locks soften and fall away on their own.
I quietly roll my eyes, accept their thanks, and we move on.
The second court is smaller, tucked in a green hollow where houses are built around a spring that no longer sings.
That is how they describe it.
The spring used to sing.
Now it sits silent beneath a ring of stones, clear but still, while two families stand on opposite sides and refuse to look at each other.
I try touching the water.
It is cold enough to sting, but it’s definitely not singing.
Beneath the surface, the magic is folded in on itself. Waiting. Hurt in the strange, stubborn way water can be hurt when everyone keeps taking from it, and no one admits what was spilled.
I look around at the tight faces, the crossed arms, the children watching from doorways.
“What happened?” I ask.
The story comes out in pieces from an old woman with tears down her face. Something about a boy, a girl he should not have loved, and a promise that was broken badly enough for two families to build their whole future around the pieces. By the time she finishes, I’m not sure anyone still knows where the truth ends, and the punishment begins.
There is no real miracle to fix it.
They simply speak.
They lay out their pain in jagged little pieces, and while they speak, the spring listens.
Second by second, word by word, the water begins to move with a tremble across the surface. Then a tiny trickle over stone. Then one soft note, so small I almost miss it beneath someone crying.
By the time they’ve all laid out their own truths, the spring is trying to sing.
And somehow, everyone cries harder for that.
After that, the visits blur together.
Court after court—road after road. Halls made of stone, trees, glass, wind, flame. People in crowns, people in work clothes, people with dirt under their nails and worry sitting heavy in their eyes. They all bring me to whatever has stopped working and look at me with that same careful hope, as if I am about to lift one hand and make everything beautiful again.
Except most of the time, the magic is not broken.
It is simply waiting.
Waiting for someone to say the thing everyone has been avoiding. Waiting for old agreements to be honoured, old lies to be named, old grief to stop being fed as if it is a family pet. Waiting for people to stop being selfish, and use a little common sense.
So I listen to rivers and winds, and fires and trees and fae, and then I tell them what feels painfully obvious.
Share the road. Feed the village. Stop poisoning the insects and acting surprised when the birds leave. Tell your daughter the truth. Apologise to your brother. Move the stone back where it belongs. Stop making the land carry every ugly bloody thing you refuse to say out loud.
A few look as if I have performed the most shocking magic of all by asking them to take responsibility for their own mess.
But when they do it, even awkwardly, and badly, with pride still stuck between their teeth, the realm answers.
And I start to understand.
Being Heartroot is not being queen of every broken place. It is not being saint, judge, miracle worker, or gardener with divine pruning shears, despite what the name keeps threatening to imply.
It is listening. It is balance. It is knowing when to touch the soil and when to make people put their own hands in it.
Then Bellgrave sends word.
And somehow, before I even hear the message, I know silence will not be so easily weeded.