Unearthed - Paperback

Yarrow Fen won her tribunal. She did not win much else.

Eight weeks on, she is a healer on probation. Every plant she asks for help has to be written up on the appointed form and sent to the guild officer she is accountable to, and nobody will tell her his name. She has filed four. Nobody has ever written back.

Then Nettle sends her digging in the back corner of the patch, the part that never had a name, and what comes up is not a weed. It is a living root, cut through thirty years ago and buried ever since, and when it wakes it wants to know where Sorrel has got to. As though it had shut its eyes for an afternoon.

Sorrel Fenwick kept this shop thirty years ago. The guild expelled her, sealed the file and let the town forget her name, and she was not the only one. Proving it will take a public hearing, a compliance officer who has to write down everything Yarrow does, and one night when a man comes over the garden wall in the dark with a blade meant for cutting a plant to the crown.

Every technique Yarrow has belongs to a plant. Every one of them pays for it.

Unearthed is the second book in Sold as Weeds, a complete four-book cozy LitRPG. Small magic, slow growth, and a garden that remembers what the guild wrote down.