From their big grins it looks like their escort also expect to appreciate that.

The herb gardens are neatly laid out in a rough semicircle around behind the building, with sturdy wooden raised beds and gravel pathways.

The herb beds are dominated by four varieties: a plant with vibrant, hairy green leaves in great profusion, one with thick, fleshy leaves and intense blue butterfly-shaped flowers that seems to be very popular with actual butterflies, one with oxblood trumpet flowers and reddish brown leaves, and one which looks a bit like giant bolted cabbage, four feet high. There are also beds that look fallow at first glance that have a few meandering strands of leaves.

"I don't recognize the plants. Though maybe I just wouldn't, I'm not a gardening type."

"The hairy one's true vervain, the blue one's cerulean mazzarine, the red one's imperial roseweald, the huge one's marrowart and the one you can barely see is bladeroot. Those are the basic medicine herbs, although obviously there's a load more minor ones for if you have a normal stomach upset or something."

"What do they all do?"

"Vervain patches you up as long as there's nothing wrong with you that wouldn't heal with time, works best on things under the surface, you'll still look a bit banged up.

Mazzarine helps set bones and mend ligaments and anything where you've got something big wrenched out of place and need to glue it back together in a more precise kind of way.

Roseweald - I always get these the wrong way round..."

"Roseweald does venom and Bladeroot does weakness. And green lung," contributes a friendly gardener, who looks mostly human apart from the gill flaps on his neck.

"Thank you. Roseweald purges most poisons and infections, anything that's wrong with your blood; Bladeroot does the more subtle ones, and helps with breathing and productive coughing and all that good stuff.

Marrowart makes you feel better - but it doesn't actually make you better - generally it's used to let you drag yourself off the battlefield so a physick can have a proper look at you."

"Is mazzarine literally used as a glue or does it just help with those things if applied some other way?"

"It helps your body heal that kind of thing pretty much however your physick uses it, I've had some that insist on doing surgery and dabbing it on the right bits and some that were, like, 'here, chew this!', and all my limbs still work surprisingly well, considering."

"Huh, weird."

"People have tried to teach me medicine or magical healing a few times, I can do the rituals because they make any kind of sense, I can patch someone up so they stop leaking, I'm afraid you'll need someone else to explain the rest, other than 'it was used on me and worked fine'. And you'll probably find when you ask three people you'll get five different answers."

"That's different from how medicine is at home, but I guess I should expect that what with the magic."

"Yeah, physicks tend to say it's not strictly magic, but most of it is at least hearth magic. If I'm in a hurry or out of bandages I can stop someone bleeding with a smear of blood in the right pattern, or a crystal that focuses light if they're fussy or we might need to worry about hygiene more than imminently dying."

"Hearth magic?"

"So, there's magic as in stuff you do with mana, either your own or in crystal form, and there's hearth magic as in stuff that just works without a really good explanation.

The minor effects of runes when you inscribe them in things is hearth magic. That bright light purifies things, that a veil or mask can make a Herald not recognise you, that bells remind the dead of their lives and calm down angry ghosts, those are all hearth magic."

"There are ghosts?"

"...yes? You don't have ghosts? I guess if your world is more advanced, maybe terrible things happen to people less often.

Mostly you get ghosts because there was a terrible atrocity; they're the echoes a soul leaves behind when it was interrupted in a particularly awful fashion."

"We don't get ghosts even in those situations!"

"Probably for the best, sometimes they're actually trapped souls and in general they rarely help."

"Yeah, I can't think of many advantages to having ghosts. Does this support the hypothesis that we don't have souls?"

"Yeah, I wasn't going to say it, but Heralds don't leave ghosts either. I'll check you out when we get to Seren and you definitely don't urgently need the liao."

"Thank you."

They have completed the circuit of the herb farming operation, which isn't all that large.

"Want to try every door in the building, or head straight to Seren? I can't usefully give you odds, thresholds often have some resonance with portals but you did appear outside and usually those return outside as well."

"Let's try doors."

The large front door of the building is an arched double door with vines growing artistically over the top, and one side is already propped open.

Just inside there's a front desk with a receptionist, who is keeping an eye on the flow of people in and out, and smiles at them; Allegra spares him a quick glance and a wry smile, which seems to be all they need to pass.

Everything is neatly wood paneled and decorated with carvings of leaves and twining thorny branches, as well as some more abstract patterns. The furniture, but not the walls, is also 'decorated' with the kind of graffiti one can quickly do with a knife, mostly proclaiming the past presence or relationship of various people, usually only by their initials.

There is a significant staircase that could really do with some better carpet than the ratty hessian that has been stapled to it, corridor stretching off to both sides, and a grand hall accessed by doors either side of the stairs - the under-stair space forms the backstage area.

Pelape's trying doors as fast as she safely can, not stopping to admire the decor, though the carvings are nice.

They interrupt a few music students in small practice rooms who look mildly annoyed, and several classes in progress, but the sight of Allegra seems to mollify them; a couple of the students look angry enough that she tells them, "Vate business," in an apologetic tone of voice and this seems to be taken as adequate explanation.

There are also storerooms, a cluttered and busy kitchen, a workshop space for herb preparation, another for instrument repairs, and a couple of mildly horrible shared privies.

Upstairs is mostly bunk rooms, linen closets, some individual living spaces for the instructors and head gardeners.

Nobody gives them any trouble, but neither do they manifest any portals.