It had been a week now. A week of gruelling work. Wake up before everyone in the morning to cook breakfast. Prepare the sandwiches for the workers' lunch. Clean the whole house. Go to the market. Wrestle back enough food for her army of gardeners, despite the meagre money allowed for that by the housing supervisor. Lunch late. Prepare dinner. Wait for everyone to be in bed to clean kitchen and main room again. Sleep, rinse, and repeat. No off days, even on the tenth, when she just could restrain cleaning to the kitchen. Resting gardeners have to eat too. And thank the gods that she was experienced enough to know it was earlier to clean a bit daily, or the situation would have easily gone out of control. And praise them that laundry was tasked to someone else!

Despite her experience as an itinerant tavern keeper, Shi was discovering that tending the gardener's house she had been assigned to was very hard work. Despite professor Benstrum's assurance, Shi had not been allowed in the central kitchen, or anywhere inside the inner campus. Actually, she had quickly discovered she was the only wick in the grounds, even in the outer campus. Without the professor introduction letter, and the lack of an experienced landlady to replace that house hostess, she probably wouldn't have been allowed there at all.
So much for them needing my cooking suggestions!

Little did she know that she was better off that way. That the passives reaction to her presence in their sanctuary would have passed the human gardeners suspicious looks for a warm welcome (the lack of wicks in their team showing how Mackay Benstrum admiration for wickish gardener's skills was out of touch with reality). That at least, she had a fair pay and not an indentured servant status. And that the fear of her imagined cursing possibilities was in a good part for keeping the lock of the chest containing her treasured family heirlooms away from some curious hands, possibly along with her very own body.
What she knew was that all the magic knowledge that was her goal, whether the professors holding it, the library books, or the crypts hinted at by the professor, were out of reach inside inner campus buildings. Her grandmother, and for all she knew her mother, had entered those buildings. But she couldn't. And her pay, for the first week, had been pretty eaten by her bad management of the food money, forcing her to chip in with her own if she didn't want to let her gardeners go hungry. Hopefully, she had now learned to be much harder on the farmers in the market, and much less ambitious with her cooking. And how to be quick enough to get some time for a short but needed nap in the afternoon.

Shi was not sleeping well, which did not help. Now that she thought she had accepted Neti's death, it seemed her ghost was intent in visiting her every night. The witch was living in a big city now. It was very different from Vienda, but that did not seem enough for her mind not to believe they might encounter her daughter inside. On the market, her heart raced each time she met a tall brunette. The worst was that spice's shop daughter, or even worse, the laundry maid. From behind, that tall tanned girl looked so much like Neti could have, that when she saw her walking away with her heavy basket, she had to bite her tongue not to call her Ti or propose her help.
The offer wouldn't have been well received anyway. The look of suspicion Shi had received the first time she had even approached the basket had taught her to go back to her cold Hoxian manners and bother the human girl as less as possible.

But that night, there had been a dream of different material. Shi could not remember it, but echoes of long searchs - for what? - in deserted tunnels floated in her mind, along with, strangely, memories of Hoxian tea and friendly voices.

I cannot continue like that. Something has to move. Now!
Today, she was going to find a way to make one step closer to her goal. Even if it had to cost her a few hours of sleep.
After lighting the fire under the stoke for the breakfast's soup, Shi stepped out in the drizzle, taking in the damp cold, and watched the barely discernible shapes of the clouds fleeing in the faint grey light of early dawn.
Things were going to change!

((comments authorized in my LITs))
((edited to stay canon with clarified Brunnhold description in wiki))