At dawn, Kiela tackles the overgrown garden behind her parents' cottage, knowing she must produce her own food to remain self-sufficient and avoid relying on Larran or the villagers. Wearing her mother's old dress and boots, she enlists Caz's botanical knowledge. Caz objects to the term 'weed,' so they reorganize the garden using library categories—Nonfiction for vegetables, Fiction for flowers, Histories for old growth—and clear a small patch to plant seeds.

Caz reminds her that seeds take weeks to sprout, which she cannot afford given her dwindling food and lost chicken. With no available jobs and her need to stay near the smuggled spellbooks, Kiela conceives a risky plan: use a spellbook to feed herself. Reasoning that the emperor is dead, the laws overturned, and 'magic belongs to the people now,' she retrieves the plantwork grimoire and finds a plant-acceleration spell created by the sorcerer Laiken—the same kind of magic that originally transformed Caz.

To gather ingredients, Kiela and Caz collect elder leaves from the garden, then go to the cove for duckweed before realizing it requires fresh water. At the dock, Kiela sees a merbaby playing and a watchful mermaid—folkloric signs of welcome and good fortune that bolster her resolve. They find duckweed at a remembered childhood pond near the cottage, where Kiela realizes her parents had always known her hiding place and gifted her that solitude. The memory aches sweetly rather than painfully, and she suddenly wants to make a home here.

They gather beach rosebuds from the cliffs above the village, then return to mix the paste with water and a drop of Kiela's blood. Caz questions whether a librarian can truly cast spells; Kiela counters that knowledge is power, the laws were meant to hoard that power, and ignorance now means starvation. She spoons the paste onto each seed and carefully recites the First Language incantation, applying her scholarly knowledge of pronunciation. As she and Caz wait to see if it worked, Larran's voice calls from the house, interrupting them.