She used to secretly hate being invisible.
Used to resent the way voices dipped when she entered a room, the way no one asked her opinion unless it was about poultices or poisons. Used to wonder what it would be like to belong so thoroughly that her presence made others shape themselves around it. A quiet, traitorous part of her had even envied Rowan—how easily she took up space. How naturally people moved to accommodate her.
But here, in the capital, Yunhua had discovered something worse than being unseen.
Being visible.
Not fully. Not clearly. Not truthfully.
No—seen like a novelty. A curiosity. A fragile, clever half-thing. She was no longer invisible, but she was interpreted, constantly, and always incorrectly. Her silences now read as mystique. Her habits as wisdom. Her quickness as a miracle.
"She's rather bright, for what she is," one courtier had said over wine and sweet plums, loud enough for her to hear.
A laugh. Not unkind, but cutting anyway. "Like watching a hound walk upright."
And then another voice, half-genuine, half-mocking: "I find her fascinating, really. Like a bird trained to speak."
She hadn't flinched.
Not then.
Just inclined her head slightly—elegant, composed—and excused herself with all the polish Lady Sairen had taught her. But later, in the dark solitude of her borrowed chamber, the words pooled under her skin like cold ink. They clung to her.
Yunhua sat at the edge of the bed, bare feet on the tile, fingers curled into her palms.
They weren't even cruel, most of them.
They were amused.
That was the worst part.
They didn't think they were being cruel. Just clever. Just honest.
She missed the silence now. The old silence. The kind that came not from judgment, but from dismissal.
There had been comfort in that.
Comfort in being overlooked. It had made her sharper, more observant. It had given her space to exist without being interpreted. To collect herself like water in a still bowl.
At the outpost, they'd whispered behind her back. Here, they said things to her face—with smiles, with polite tones, like it was an invitation to agree. Like she should be grateful to be spoken to at all.
She wasn't used to this kind of visibility. Not the kind that saw only a fraction and assumed the whole. Not the kind that smiled at her like a pet doing tricks.
Sairen had tried to explain it once. "The capital does not know how to meet people quietly. It only knows how to label or discard."
Yunhua was learning that in the way a fire teaches—slow burn, then sudden pain.
She missed Rowan most in those moments.
Not just her voice, her steadiness, the way she saw through pretense like it was glass.
But the before.
Before the fight. Before the closeness became dangerous. Before either of them realized how far they'd leaned into the quiet pull between them.
Back when things were simple.
When Yunhua's world was made of routine and observation and occasional, irritating conversation.
When Rowan made things brighter, not heavier.
When her presence didn't haunt every still moment of the day.
It came to a head during a formal review.
An inner chamber. Four of the Elders seated in a crescent. She was there to explain the herbal classifications of the Eastern borderlands—requested by name, no less.
She bowed low, answered their questions with clarity. Kept her voice steady.
And still—
"The girl speaks well," said one, Elder Vaelor whose ring bore the crest of a house known for purging "impurities" in their lineages. "Though I wonder if her cleverness isn't simply mimicry." If he indeed tried to contain his lips curving up in a mix of contempt and satisfaction, he must've been doing an incredibly terrible job.
A pause. Another joined in with a hum. "Such fine diction. Has she been trained to recite?"
A third, Merion: "No, no. It's the quiet ones who surprise us, isn't it? The wild-bred ones always seem to want so badly to be useful."
They chuckled. A low ripple of amusement, as if they'd just praised a monkey performing in a circus.
Yunhua said nothing.
She didn't move. Didn't blink.
She just looked at them, letting the weight of her gaze settle into their amusement like a stone dropped into syrup. Their smiles faltered.
But it didn't matter.
Because the damage was done.
And she—gods, she felt it now, how fragile her stillness had always been. How easily it could be cracked.
Sairen found her later.
In the herb courtyard, kneeling in the dirt without gloves, sleeves rolled high, her hands elbow-deep in a patch of paleleaf as if it were her job to maintain it.
"I heard about the session," Sairen said gently, tentatively.
Yunhua did not look up. "Did they say I did well?"
"They said worse."
A pause.
"Then I suppose it's not worth saying."
That night, she stared at her reflection in the polished glass above her writing desk.
There was nothing wrong with it. Her face was unchanged. Pale skin, her ever present markings, barely visible speck of freckles, long black-blue hair drawn back in a neat coil.
But she looked... blurred.
Like a version of herself she'd painted carefully, for years, and now the paint was running, colours mixing together into a grotesque, muddy mess.
She had spent so long building an identity out of precision.
Now she couldn't tell where it ended.
Who was she, without her quiet? Without the comfort of being overlooked?
Who was she, now that people smiled at her and threw poorly veiled insults mixed in with praise one would offer to a pet? Now that she was both admired and despised in the same breath?
Now that she could be seen, and still not known?
In the half dark, she pulled out a small slip of parchment and stared at it. Empty. Unwritten.
It wasn't much.
She thought, briefly, of writing Rowan. Telling her about everything, spilling her guts out.
Then didn't.
Instead, she traced invisible letters across the page with the tip of her finger."
I miss you.
I'm becoming someone I don't recognize.
They see me now, but not how you did.
And I don't know which hurt more—
Being nothing.
Or being something I'm not.
I'm sorry.
She folded the blank parchment neatly, pressed it under her pillow, and tried to sleep.
The silence did not comfort her that night.
It echoed.