Chapter Text
“So you’re the new pellar?”
It’s hot out, even though it’s late September. It’s the kind of heat that makes Laurent think of long summer days filled with sunshine, with short sticky nights that are barely any cooler for the sun’s absence. The kind of heat that makes winter feel like a mythical event, like the feeling of frozen fingers or numb toes is just a story people tell because they can't conceive of anything that isn't hot.
It’s the same kind of heat he can hear in the man’s words, and so he doesn’t look up from his work and continues to till the small patch of land that sits next to his cottage.
“Pellar, cunning man, witch, sorcerer,” Laurent says, stomping hard on the shovel as he hits a particularly nasty root. “I’ve been called lots of things.”
“And what do you like to be called?” the man with the summer voice asks him.
Laurent turns, at this, and looks at the man who’s approached his cottage.
He’s tall, with bronze skin. His clothes are simple but quality, a fact that Laurent notices and tucks away almost unconsciously. His hair sits in unruly brown curls on top of his head, unfortunately attractive despite looking wild and unkempt. Perhaps because of that, in all honesty.
“Laurent,” he says shortly, and when the man makes a face, he rolls his eyes. “My name. It’s Laurent. Believe it or not I prefer to go by my name.”
“Laurent,” the man repeats, and Laurent feels a shiver go through him despite the heat. “I’m...my name is Damen.”
“Nice to meet you, Damen,” Laurent says, turning back to the troublesome root that won’t give up the space he wants for his fall vegetables. “How can I help you today?”
“Maybe I just wanted to come over and introduce myself.”
“Well, we’re introduced. Mission complete. Thanks for stopping by.”
“Wow,” Damen says, laughing. “Not really one for small talk, are you?”
Laurent bites back the first retort that springs to his lips, reminding himself that he needs customers, and can’t really afford to offend anyone in a village as small as this.
“I inherited this cottage from the previous pellar,” he says instead. “Who was apparently an extremely old man who had little care for farming or for fixing the holes in his walls. As I rather prefer not to starve to death nor freeze to death during the winter I find that I have a tremendous amount of work to do before the cold sets in. So you’ll excuse me if I have more important things to do right now than make small talk.”
He stabs the shovel into the ground to punctuate this point, hoping the man will get the implication and leave. Also hoping--fruitlessly, it seems--that the shovel will finally break apart this stubborn root, but it doesn’t.
“I can help with that root, if you like,” Damen says gently.
“I don’t need your help. Now, do you have something you need my assistance with, or did you just come to ogle me?"
“I am not ogling ,” Damen says, stepping nimbly out of the way as Laurent sets the shovel he's carrying aside and grabs the snippers from his toolbox. “I actually did come here for a reason.”
“Ah yes. Small talk. Well,” Laurent says, giving up on digging and settling on cutting the root as far back as he could manage, “I’m afraid I’m all out of that today.”
“No, it wasn't just that. You're a pellar, right? That means you can help me. I have...a cow.”
“Congratulations.”
“Thank you. The problem is…” Damen stops, for a moment, and Laurent takes advantage of the silence to plant his starters. Cucumber, pumpkin, potatoes. It might be too late in the season, but he had to try--either that or depend on the goodwill of the village to carry him through winter, and he knew how that would likely go. They hardly knew him and wouldn’t trust him yet. Might not for years.
“The problem is,” Damen tries again, “she moos too much.”
“Cows moo,” Laurent says, indulging himself in a pause in his work so he can send the man a withering glare. “It’s kind of their thing. That’s not a problem.”
“Okay, how about this,” Damen says. He smiles and the smallest dimple appears in the corner of his mouth. Laurent grips the handle of the snippers so hard the wood grain is imprinted onto his hands. “I lost my favorite necklace. My mother gave it to me--it’s hers, actually, and I don’t wear it but it reminds me of her--but I misplaced it, and I have no idea where it is.”
“It’s on the mantle,” Laurent says.
“What--how would you even know that?”
Laurent shrugs. “People keep pictures of their loved ones on their mantle. They get maudlin, like to stare into the fire and contemplate their misery, and they bring over objects that remind them of said loved ones. You get the idea.”
“I’ll check as soon as I get home. I’ll let you know if you’re right.”
“If I’m right I expect more than just that. Most villagers leave their payment in the box down the path there, you can do the same.”
“Mercenary, aren’t you?”
“I told you, I prefer to eat rather than starve to death. Call me old fashioned.”
“Alright,” Damen says, laughing. “I have one more. Let’s see if you can help me with this one, and if you can I’ll happily share all the food I have.”
“All of it? That’s quite an offer.”
“Maybe I’m just confident you won’t be able to help.”
“All right, go ahead then.”
“I have an orange tree in my yard, and she's not doing very well,” Damen says, and he’s still smiling, which is really just so unfair in the face of how much work Laurent needs to get done. “Her leaves are yellow and sickly, and she droops at night. Can you tell me why she’s not giving me any fruit?”
Laurent huffs and stands up, stretching out his sore legs and dusting his dirty hands off on his pants. His clothes are rich too, like Damen’s--or they had been, a long time ago. Time and dirt had taken their toll, and they no longer shone like they used to.
“Firstly, we are much too far north for orange trees,” Laurent says, stepping out of the garden and closing the gate firmly behind him. “It’s too cold here for them to take root naturally, so if you're trying to start an orange grove you're in the wrong hemisphere. And secondly, if you really did have an orange tree in your yard that wasn't doing well, which I'm beginning to doubt, you could just ask her yourself why she wasn’t blooming, dryad.”
This time when Damen smiles Laurent is hit with the full force of that toothy grin, those wretched dimples. It’s September; it should be cold, and yet he can feel a drop of sweat drip down his back, trailing down the contours of his spine, and knows he hasn’t done nearly enough gardening to work up such a sweat.
“You knew,” Damen says.
“It took me a moment to pin down exactly what you were, but yes,” Laurent says. “I knew you weren’t human from the moment you opened your mouth.”
“I have to say, it’s not so bad being pinned down by you,” Damen says, and Laurent has to close his eyes against the force of it, imagines stepping into a river, water running over him, washing everything away. “What gave it away? Did I leave a branch in my hair? Did I accidentally make a flower bloom as I walked by?”
“No,” Laurent says, turning to grab a bucket that he could fill with water. “It wasn’t that. It’s the way you stand, like you might at any moment put down roots and never move again. And the way you take up space, like you’re a tree in a forest that the rest of us can’t see.”
You smell like sunshine, Laurent doesn’t tell him. You look like you’d taste like the wild spaces of this world.
The dryad just hums, and Laurent fights the urge to peek over at him and instead focuses on filling up his bucket at the pump, splashing some of the water on his face. Not as good as stepping into a river, certainly, but refreshing all the same.
“You shouldn’t water those plants,” Damen says, looking up at the sky. “It’s going to rain tonight.”
“No it’s not,” Laurent says, dragging the bucket over, sloshing half of the water over the sides. “The heat won’t break until next week. It’ll rain then.”
“All right,” Damen says, reaching over to take the bucket from Laurent’s hands. He’s strong and lifts it like it weighs nothing, and the water calms immediately. Laurent scowls. “Your payment, then. Since you helped me with all my problems.”
Damen reaches into the pocket of his impeccably tailored pants and brings out an object, which he hides in his hand theatrically. He gestures at Laurent until Laurent finally relents, sighing and putting his palm out as instructed, and Damen drops an object into his palm and curls Laurent’s fingers over it. When Laurent steps back and looks at what he’s holding he sees that it’s a seed of some sort, or maybe a kind of nut. Either way he's never seen anything like it before--and even more troubling, he’s never once come across anything that even looks remotely like it in all of his studies.
“And what sort of wonders will come up out of the earth if I plant this?” Laurent calls out to Damen’s retreating form. “A beanstalk that grows up into the sky? A golem that will serve me until the end of my days?”
“You’ll just have to take a chance and see,” Damen calls back, and then disappears between one sigh of the wind and the next.
Laurent rolls his eyes and puts the seed into his pocket, fingers trailing against the rough contours of the husk. He has work to do, and no time to indulge in silly games with a handsome dryad.
He goes over to pick up the bucket of water--and pauses. He looks up. It’s a clear day with no hope of respite from the sun’s warm rays, just an endless expanse of empty blue sky, the same as any summer day he’s ever seen.
But--no, that’s not quite accurate. There’s a small cloud on the horizon, a tiny little thing, really, just a speck, and it’s white and puffy and looks picturesque enough to have floated right out of a painting. Just big enough to mar the perfect blue canvas of the sky. Just enough to promise change.
Laurent leaves the bucket where it is, and goes inside to start patching his roof.