Chapter Text
By the time spring comes around again, March has developed several habits he refuses to acknowledge.
The first is positioning himself at the anvil so that he can see the path from town. He tells himself it is practical. Customers come and go all day, and half have them have no idea how to announce themselves properly before wandering into a working forge, so keep an eye on his surroundings is sensible. Necessary, even. A man can only have so many idiots drift too close to hot metal before he has to adjust. The fact that he can usually tell who has come by before he properly sees them—the cadence of boots on the floorboards, the scrape of a basket against the anvil, the irritatingly familiar little exhale someone makes after hauling something heavier than she ought to be carrying across half of fucking Mistria—is irrelevant.
The second is knowing Elowyn's schedule well enough to notice when she is late. That one is harder to justify.
March does not keep track of the farmer. He is busy. He has orders to fill, tools to mend, ore to sort, commissions to finish before people begin hovering around his workspace and asking whether they are done yet. He certainly does not know that she usually comes into town later on Wednesdays because she spends the morning removing the debris from the far field, or that she tends to visit the mines in the rain because farmwork is lighter, or that on market days she stops at the general store before the smithy and invariably arrives carrying more than she left home with. He does not know any of this in the meaningful sense. He has merely observed it. Repeatedly, and entirely against his will.
The third habit is considerably worse.
He has started expecting gifts.
Not gifts, exactly. That would be ridiculous. They are materials. Useful things. Things Elowyn happens to find while going about whatever reckless nonsense she has decided constitutes a reasonable day's work and then brings to him because, unlike most people in town with their perfect ores collecting dust in fucking museums, she possesses enough sense to recognise when something might be valuable to a blacksmith.
That is all.
It began, as far as March can remember, sometime in autumn.
There had been the pickaxe and the hot chocolate before that, of course. He still tries not to think about that. After all, it hadn't been a gift. He was just doing his job as a blacksmith and she was paying him for his services. The tesserae she also left on his workbench is irrelevant. Nearly a year had passed since she first arrived in Mistria then, all wind-tangled auburn hair and bright eyes and impossible determination, turning up in town with a ruined farm to restore and apparently no instinct whatsoever for leaving difficult people alone. March had known what to do with her when she was merely irritating. He had known what to do when she smiled at him despite his temper, when she argued back instead of shrinking away, when she marched into the smithy covered in mud and demanded he stop pretending she had dome something wrong by asking him a fucking question.
He had been considerably less prepared for her kindness.
The pickaxe had made that problem worse. Afterwards, something had shifted between them in a way he could neither name nor reverse. Elowyn had not become more cautious around him, which would at least have been sensible. If anything, she seemed more comfortable. She stopped hovering in the doorway waiting for permission to come farther into the smithy. She learned which workbench was safe to lean against and which one would earn her a snapped warning to move before she burned herself. She developed the infuriating confidence of someone who had realised his bark was considerably worse than his bite and intended to exploit that knowledge whenever possible.
Then the gifts started.
The first was a piece of unusually clean iron ore.
She had dropped it onto the workbench one evening in late autumn while March was sorting through a shipment that had arrived from out of town, the stone landing between them with a solid little clunk. He had looked at it, then at her, immediately suspicious. He hadn't placed any orders with her.
“What’s this?”
Elowyn had blinked as if the answer were painfully obvious. “Iron.”
He had stared at her for several seconds. “I know what iron is.”
“Well, that saves us some time.”
Even now, months later, the memory of her smile at that makes something irritatingly warm settle beneath his ribs.
She had found the ore in the mines, noticed the quality, and thought he might have use for it. No ceremony. No expectation. She had simply pushed it toward him, told him there was another vein lower down if he wanted to know where, and wandered off again before he could decide whether accepting it counted as encouraging her.
March used the iron three days later to make some nails for her new fence.
He did not tell her.
Winter brought copper, charcoal, and a length of strangely tough root she claimed Landen had said could be useful for treating tool handles. March had scoffed at that one until he tested it and discovered Landen had been right, at which point he was annoyed with both of them on principle. There were scraps of metal salvaged from who only knows where, bits of wire, a cracked bronze hinge she thought he might want to melt down rather than see thrown away. Once, she brought him a handful of nails she had pulled from a collapsed fence beyond her land because, according to her, they looked salvageable.
"They're fucking rusty."
"They're metal."
"Barely."
"You're welcome, March."
He had taken them with only a small grumble. That was the problem. Somewhere along the way, refusing had begun to require more effort than accepting.
March told himself that this was because Elowyn had learned. She no longer brought him random things merely because they were interesting. Everything had a use. Even when that use was small or inconvenient or not worth the trouble she had taken to carry it into town, there was at least a reason for it to end up in his hands. She understood the difference between something valuable and something merely shiny. She listened when he spoke about alloys, even if he suspected she only grasped half of what he was saying. She remembered what metals were scarce, what materials wore well, what he complained about running short of.
No one else did that.
Olric listened, obviously, because Olric was his brother and worked beside him, although even that came with the occasional disaster involving mislabelled crates or enthusiastic purchasing decisions that made sense only inside Olric’s head. Hayden sometimes brought useful scrap. Eiland often brought interesting metalwork he had found in the Western Ruins. Valen occasionally asked him to alter medical instruments and therefore had a functional understanding of metal. Generally, most people came to the smithy because they wanted something from March.
Elowyn came because she had found something for him.
It shouldn't matter.
It matters far too much.
By midwinter, March begins noticing her hands. He hates himself a little for that. They are working hands now, rougher than when she first arrived. Calluses from tools, thin scratches from brambles, little nicks along her knuckles from hauling stone or repairing fencing or whatever else she has decided must be done immediately rather than tomorrow. Sometimes, she brings him ore with dirt still beneath her nails. Sometimes her gloves are tucked through her belt and her fingers are red with cold. March finds himself looking at those hands and thinking about all the things they have learned to do over the course of a year, all the work she has dragged from ruined soil and broken timber and stubborn hope.
Then, inevitably, he remembers those same hands wrapped around a mug of hot chocolate, and gets irritated all over again.
He begins getting angry with her even more often. Not angry irritated, that would be easier. Instead it is the sharp, restless kind that arrives whenever she stands too close while examining something on his bench, or laughs when he complains, or tucks a loose curl behind her ear and leaves a smear of dirt across her cheek without noticing. He snaps at her to watch where she is going and then spends the next five minutes furious because she listened. He tells her she should not be wandering the mines alone and immediately resents the knowing look she gives him in return.
By the change of winter to spring, even Olric notices.
That is when March knows things have become intolerable.
They are working late one evening when the door opens and March looks up before the bell has finished chiming. Elowyn steps inside carrying a canvas sack against one hip, cheeks pink from the cooling air, and March's attention moves towards her so quickly it is almost embarrassing. He catches himself a moment too late.
Beside him, Olric stops hammering.
March feels the uncharacteristic silence before he spots Olric's face split into a knowing grin. He resolutely fixes his gaze back to the blade in his hands, ignoring the way Olric shuffles closer to him and the blush he knows is spreading to his ears.
"Fuck off, Olric."
"No." The answer is far too cheerful.
March glances sideways. Olric is still smiling at him.
"Stop that."
"Stop what?"
"That."
"I'm just standing here, bro."
"You're making a dumb fucking face."
Olric's smile broadens until March briefly considers hitting him with something. Thankfully, Elowyn reaches the bench before March can commit fratricide. She had brought a lump of dark ore from the deeper levels of the mine, dense and clean-edged, the sort of piece March would normally have to sort through half a cartload to find. She sets it down carefully, already launching into an explanation of where she found it and how much more might still be there, while March tries very hard not to notice the strand of hair caught against the high curve of her cheekbone.
He notices.
He also notices Olric watching him notice.
It is, without question, one of the worst moments of March's life.
"You look shit," he tells Elowyn, desperate to break whatever weird thoughts are creeping behind his brother's eyes.
She pauses, one eyebrow lifting. "Good to see you too, March. Hi, Olric."
"Hey El!" Olric says cheerily, but March doesn't feel his brother's gaze leave his face.
"You've got dirt all over your face," he says.
"I've been in a mine."
"That doesn't mean you have to wear it home."
Her mouth twitches, and March March knows immediately that he has lost whatever this exchange was supposed to accomplish.
He looks back toward the ore. “This is decent.”
From March, this is practically effusive praise.
Elowyn knows it, too. Her smile softens in that quiet way that always seems somehow more dangerous than laughter, and she pushes the piece a little closer across the bench.
“Thought you might like it.”
There it is again.
Thought you might like it.
As though thinking about him while she is somewhere else is the most ordinary thing in the world.
March mutters something about checking the composition before she starts congratulating herself and reaches for the ore. Elowyn only hums, entirely unbothered, then turns to ask Olric something about a repair she needs doing on one of the farm gates.
March misses half of what she says.
He is too busy holding the ore.
It happens more often after that.
A strip of workable metal from the ruins. A small pouch of coal when his supply runs low. A damaged buckle she thinks he can reuse. Once, absurdly, a handful of screws gathered from some abandoned contraption out beyond the eastern road. He complains every time, because by then the complaining has become part of the exchange. Elowyn expects it. Sometimes she even looks disappointed if he accepts something too quickly.
“You could just say thank you,” she tells him once.
“Probably.”
“You’re not going to.”
“No.”
“Thought so.”
"Why would I thank you? It's not like it's a gift."
"Of course not."
He says it later, after she leaves.
Quietly.
To an empty smithy.
March considers this particularly pathetic. The truth is that he has become accustomed not merely to the gifts, but to what arrives with them.
Elowyn leaning against the bench while he examines whatever she has brought. Elowyn recounting where she found it, usually with several details March did not ask for and pretends not to enjoy. Elowyn laughing when he points out she could have saved herself the trouble. Elowyn insisting it was no trouble at all.
Sometimes, she stays.
That is worse.
She sits near the open doors while he works, careful not to get in the way, talking about the farm or the weather or some impossible thing she has found in the mines. Sometimes, she goes quiet and simply watches. March should hate that. he usually hates being watched while he works.
He does not hate it when she does.
By early spring, the knowledge has settled into him with all the inevitability of cooling iron.
He likes her.
The phrase is so inadequate that it just makes him mad.
Despite what people may think, he likes plenty of people. He likes Ryis, usually. He likes Adeline when she's not giving him yet another rush order of a hundred nails. He loves Olric, obviously, though he would prefer death to an extended discussion of the fact.
This is different.
This is noticing her before anyone else in a crowded square. This is recognising her laugh from across the inn. This is remembering things she mentions once and then becoming angry with himself when those things resurface days later without invitation. This is wondering whether she made it home before the rain started. This is keeping an eye on the road when she has been gone in the Mines longer than expected. This is the ridiculous, persistent awareness of her presence whenever she is near, as if some treacherous part of his body has decided she matters and neglected to consult him.
He does not intend to do anything about it.
Elowyn is Elowyn. Warm where he is difficult, open where he is guarded, endlessly willing to offer pieces of herself to people without demanding anything in return. She belongs everywhere she goes with an ease March has never understood. Children wave to her. Animals follow her. Old people stop her in the street to talk. Half of Mistria seems to have adopted her within a year. March has no interest in becoming another person standing around smiling idiotically whenever she walks into a room.
Olric is already doing enough dumb fucking smiling for both of them.
Besides, March is reasonably certain he has everything under control.
Then, one afternoon near the height of spring, the bell over the smithy door rings, and March looks up immediately as Elowyn walks in carrying a small clay pot in both hands.
For one confused moment, March assumes there must be something inside it. That would make sense. Ore, perhaps, though carrying loose ore in a flowerpot would be an unnecessarily strange choice even for Elowyn.
Nails. Scrap. Some peculiar material she has dug out of the earth and decided he ought to inspect because she has apparently appointed herself Mistria’s sole supplier of things other people might have thrown away. His gaze drops automatically to the pot as she crosses the smithy, already searching for whatever useful object must explain its presence, and finds instead a compact cluster of thick green leaves rising stubbornly from dark soil.
March stares.
The plant stares back, insofar as a plant is capable of such a thing.
It is small enough that Elowyn can cradle the pot comfortably between both hands, though there is something solid-looking about it, a dense little arrangement of blunt leaves spreading outward from the centre without so much as a bud in sight. No blossoms. No trailing vines or delicate fronds threatening to wilt the instant someone looks at them incorrectly. March knows almost nothing about plants beyond which kinds of wood burn well, which weeds grow through the cracks behind the smithy no matter how often he pulls them out, and which flowers he dislikes sufficiently that everyone in town ought to have learned not to hand them to him by now. This thing, at least, is emphatically not a flower. That is perhaps the only point in its favour.
Elowyn stops at the edge of his workbench and looks down at what she is carrying with an expression that makes suspicion gather almost immediately in the back of his mind. She does not have the pleased little spark she gets when she has found especially good ore, nor the smugness that usually precedes informing him that something he dismissed as junk has turned out to be useful after all. If anything, she looks faintly uncertain, though she is trying to hide it beneath a casualness that would probably fool anyone who had not spent the better part of the past year learning all the tiny ways her face betrays her.
Unfortunately for March, he has.
His eyes narrow. “What is that?”
The question comes out more accusatory than intended, but Elowyn only glances down at the pot as though checking that the answer has not changed on the walk over. There is soil dusting the side of one thumb and a faint smear of it near her wrist, and for reasons March refuses to examine too closely, that detail catches at his attention almost as much as the object itself.
“A plant.”
"Why the fuck is it in my forge?"
"Because I brought it here."
March gives her a flat look, which earns him the ghost of a smile before her gaze drops again. She turns the pot slightly in her hands, studying the leaves as if there might be some correct angle from which to present the thing, and that hesitation does more to unsettle him than her teasing. Elowyn does not usually hesitate over gifts. She arrives, deposits whatever piece of metal or useful rubbish she has acquired somewhere during the day, ignores his objections and carries on with her life. There is no reason for her to look as though this one matters.
That thought arrives unpleasantly close to another.
No reason unless it does.
March puts down the tongs he is holding.
The movement is deliberate, because the alternative is continuing to stand there with a tool in his hand while staring at a potted plant as if it has personally offended him. Heat from the forge presses against his back, the familiar weight of it settling through his shirt, and somewhere farther inside the smithy Olric is shifting stock around with enough noise that March knows his brother is nearby without having to look. Excellent. Exactly the audience he needs.
His attention returns to the pot.
There must be some explanation.
Perhaps it produces something useful. The leaves might have some property he does not recognise, though why Elowyn would bring medicinal herbs to him instead of Valen is anyone’s guess. Maybe it is one of the crops she has been experimenting with at the farm. Something rare, perhaps, or difficult to grow. He waits for her to explain, but Elowyn only continues holding it, and the longer the silence stretches, the more certain he becomes that something is wrong.
“What does it do?”
That gets a proper look from her. Her brows draw together slightly, green-blue eyes moving from him to the plant and back again. “Do?”
“Yes. What’s it for?”
A tiny pause follows. March watches confusion pass openly across her face before something in her expression shifts, understanding dawning with such visible clarity that he immediately dislikes it. Her mouth curves, not quite into a smile, but close enough to put him on edge.
“Nothing, really.”
March waits.
Elowyn does not continue.
He glances at the plant again, increasingly convinced she has misunderstood the question. “Nothing.”
“Not nothing,” she amends after a moment, apparently deciding the distinction matters. “It grows.”
March can feel his patience beginning to fray. “Most plants do.”
“Yes, March.”
“And?”
“And that’s about it.”
There is a maddening steadiness to the answer. No reveal. No explanation that the leaves can be crushed into some rare oil for quenching metal or that the roots produce fibres stronger than hemp. It simply grows. March looks at Elowyn once more, waiting for her to crack, but she seems entirely serious now, both hands still curved around the little clay pot as though she is offering him something perfectly reasonable.
A thought occurs to him.
His eyes sharpen. “You brought me a fucking flower?”
Elowyn’s expression changes at once. “No.”
The speed and certainty of it catches him off guard.
“No flowers,” she adds, and now there is a hint of indignation beneath the amusement, as if the accusation has personally insulted her. She tips the pot a fraction toward him, inviting inspection of the obvious absence of anything remotely resembling a blossom. “I know you hate flowers.”
March does not know why that hits him the way it does. It shouldn't, he has complained about flowers before. Everyone knows he hates them, or ought to. There is nothing remarkable in Elowyn remembering something he has made very little effort to conceal. Yet the words settle strangely between them, catching somewhere deeper than they have any right to, because of course she knows. She knows which metals he runs through fastest and which customers are most likely to make him swear after they leave. She knows not to set anything on the left side of his main bench when he is working because that is where he reaches without looking. She knows when he is actually angry and when he is merely complaining because complaining feels more natural than admitting he is enjoying himself.
And apparently she knows not to buy him flowers.
March hates that this pleases him.
He hates even more that Elowyn seems to catch some fragment of the reaction before he can bury it, because her expression gentles—not smug, not triumphant, simply warm in that quiet way of hers that always makes him feel as though he has accidentally stepped too close to an open flame.
“It’s just green,” she continues, rescuing him from having to answer. “And fairly sturdy, from what I was told. It doesn’t need much fussing over. A bit of light, a little water. I thought that sounded more your speed.”
“My speed.”
“You’d resent anything needy.”
The remark is delivered lightly, but March cannot find enough irritation to put behind the glare he gives her. She is right, which is objectionable enough on its own, but beneath the teasing sits that same careful thoughtfulness she applies to everything she brings him. She has not simply seen a plant and decided he should have it. She has considered what he dislikes. Considered what he might tolerate. Chosen something that asks little and persists anyway.
Something about that feels dangerous.
March folds his arms. “Why?”
For the first time since she entered, Elowyn truly stills, her posture shifting slightly into something more cautious, more defensive. Someone who knew her less well might not have noticed. Her fingers merely tighten by a fraction around the pot, and her eyes lower briefly to the leaves before returning to his face. The uncertainty he spotted earlier is there again, clearer now, and March feels an odd twist low in his chest at the realisation that she had anticipated this question.
He ought to let it go.
Instead he waits.
Elowyn shifts her weight, one boot scraping softly over the stone floor. Behind her, sunlight pours through the open smithy door in a pale golden square, catching copper threads in the loose curls around her face. Spring has warmed her skin again after winter, freckles scattered more visibly across her nose and cheeks, and March is abruptly, intensely aware of how close she is standing.
"I saw it the other day," she says at last, quieter than before. "Growing between the tulips at the farm."
March nods once, because that explains where it came from and absolutely nothing else.
Elowyn's lips press together as though she is deciding whether he deserves the rest, and March has the unpleasant sense that if he says something sharp enough now she will laugh, call him impossible and take the plant away with her. The possibility produces such an immediate stab of resistance that he almost frowns.
He does not want her to take it away.
That realisation is bad enough that he misses the beginning of her next breath.
“I just…” She glances down, brushing her thumb absently over the rim of the pot. “I thought you might like it.”
There it is.
The same phrase she uses when she brings him ore, scrap, charcoal, some battered hinge dragged out of a ruin because she has looked at it and thought of his forge.
Except this time there is no forge in it.
March looks at the plant again, searching almost desperately for the practical reason he has somehow overlooked. There is none. It is green. It sits in dirt. It will apparently continue sitting in dirt provided someone occasionally pours water over it. It cannot be smelted, sharpened, traded into anything worth the space it occupies. It will not improve his work or replace a dwindling material or save him the cost of ordering something from outside Mistria.
It is utterly, profoundly useless.
And Elowyn brought it to him anyway.
The understanding creeps in slowly enough that March has time to resent every inch of it.
She had been living her life as she does. She had seen this ridiculous little thing. Nothing about it had demanded his expertise or suggested some practical need he could fill. She had simply looked at it and, somehow, he had entered her mind. March had existed for her in a moment when he was not standing in front of her, when she did not need a tool repaired or a blade sharpened or advice about whatever piece of ore she had dragged home from the mines.
She had thought of him.
Then she had spent time and effort potting it and carrying it here.
His throat feels unexpectedly tight.
March deals with this in the usual way.
“That’s stupid.”
The words land harsher than he means them to.
Elowyn blinks.
Regret comes so quickly that it is almost an instinct, hot and immediate beneath his ribs, but pride closes around his tongue before anything useful can escape. For a second he expects her to bristle. She has never been afraid to snap back when he deserves it, and some treacherous part of him would almost prefer that. Anger is easy. He understands anger.
Instead her gaze moves down to the plant, and the little smile she had been wearing fades at the edges.
March feels terrible.
It is an unfamiliar enough sensation that his first response is irritation.
“I mean—” He stops, because apparently every word available to him is worse than the last. His eyes flick toward the pot and then away. “It doesn’t do anything.”
The hurt does not vanish from her face, but something softer replaces it as she looks back at him. Understanding, perhaps. March likes that even less, because understanding means she has seen straight through the insult to the discomfort beneath it, and there are few things in the world more unbearable than Elowyn looking at him as if she knows exactly where all his sharp edges come from.
“No,” she agrees.
There is no defensiveness in her voice.
March frowns. “So it’s useless.”
Elowyn considers that. Then she gives a small shrug, one shoulder lifting beneath the faded fabric of her shirt, and some of the warmth returns to her expression. “I suppose it is.”
The answer wrong-foots him completely.
He had expected an argument. Elowyn likes arguments, particularly when she thinks he is being unreasonable, and March has given her plenty of practice. He had expected her to explain why plants are important or useful or good for the air or whatever nonsense farmers tell themselves to justify spending half their lives coaxing things out of dirt. Instead she accepts his verdict without protest and looks down at the plant with what appears to be genuine fondness.
“Things can be useless, March.”
She says it simply, almost absently, as though the idea requires no defence.
March does not answer.
Elowyn finally steps forward and places the pot on the clear corner of his workbench.
It makes a soft, dull sound against the wood.
The sight of it there is absurd. The smithy is iron and stone, dark timber and heat, tools arranged according to purpose and materials stacked according to use. Everything has a place because everything has a function. Even the battered old objects March refuses to throw away can be justified if pressed; spare parts, examples, things awaiting repair. The little plant belongs nowhere in it. Its leaves are impossibly green against all that soot-darkened practicality, alive in a space built around fire and metal.
March cannot stop looking at it.
“You don’t have to keep it,” Elowyn says.
That snaps his attention back to her.
There is no challenge in her face now. No teasing. She means it. She has placed the gift between them and released any claim to what happens next, just as she always does. It should relieve him.
Instead, the thought of her picking it back up is immediately intolerable.
March reaches out before he has quite decided to.
His fingers close around the rim of the pot.
Elowyn’s eyes drop to his hand.
He almost lets go purely because she noticed, but doing so now would be worse. So he curls his fingers more firmly around the clay and drags the plant several inches farther onto his side of the workbench.
“It’s already here,” he mutters. “Might as well.”
Something bright flickers across her face.
March looks away before it can become a smile.
The silence that settles afterwards is not uncomfortable exactly, though he has no idea what to do with it. Elowyn does not thank him for accepting the gift, which would be ridiculous anyway, nor does she make some smug observation about his obvious attachment to a plant he has owned for less than thirty seconds. She only rests her hands against the edge of the bench, now empty, and for the first time March notices the faint red marks the pot has left across her palms from carrying it.
She had carried it all the way here.
He exhales through his nose.
“Where am I supposed to put it?”
The question escapes before he can stop it.
Elowyn’s head turns toward him, and there it is again—that tiny dangerous curve at the corner of her mouth. To her credit, she does not laugh. Much.
“Somewhere with light.”
March glances around the smithy.
The forge occupies the centre of his attention so thoroughly that he has never given much thought to which parts of the room receive the best sun. Now, absurdly, he finds himself evaluating windows. The sill beside the eastern wall gets strong morning light but is too close to the storage shelves; Olric would knock the plant over within a week. The front window is better, though customers tend to lean there while waiting. There is another smaller ledge toward the back, safely away from the worst of the heat, where sunlight falls for several hours in the afternoon.
He realises Elowyn is watching him conduct this assessment.
March scowls.
“Don’t.”
Her smile breaks properly then, warm and helpless and unbearably pleased, though she has enough mercy not to say whatever has clearly occurred to her. She only raises both hands in surrender and pushes herself away from the bench.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were going to.”
“I absolutely was.”
March turns his attention pointedly toward the plant, because looking at her has become a problem again. One thick leaf has a tiny nick near its edge, hardly noticeable unless someone is examining it closely. Another curves slightly toward the light coming through the door. He reaches out without thinking and brushes a speck of loose soil from the rim.
When he looks up, Elowyn has seen that too.
Of course she has.
There is a softness in her face now that makes his chest ache.
March drops his hand.
“You have work to do, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“Then fuck off and go do it.”
The words lack enough force to qualify as dismissal, and they both know it. Elowyn merely nods, collecting her empty satchel from where she had left it beside the door. She pauses before stepping outside, glancing once over her shoulder toward the workbench—not at March, he tells himself, but at the little green plant sitting there like an accusation.
Her smile is small this time.
Then she is gone, the bell giving one final chime behind her.
March stands very still.
For several seconds, there is only the crackle of the forge, the distant scrape of metal somewhere behind him and the muted sounds of Mistria drifting through the open door. He can hear Balor calling across the square, the clatter of his cart over stone, birds making entirely too much noise in the eaves.
Then, Olric speaks from behind a stack of crates.
"Whoa, bro… she got you a plant."
March closes his eyes. He had forgotten about Olric.
The silence that follows is thick with everything his brother has enough self-preservation not to say aloud. March turns slowly, already preparing the glare that should end the conversation before it begins, and finds Olric leaning against a crate with the same expression he wears when he finds a cool new rock.
March points towards him.
"Not one fucking word."
Olric presses his lips together, his shoulders shake, and March decides that whatever love he admitted to for his brother is dwindling by the minute.
By closing time, March has moved the plant four times.
The first time is because leaving it on the workbench is obviously impossible. There are filings there, sparks, tools liable to be dropped without warning, and enough heat rolling from the forge that anything green left too close to it will probably be cooked by morning. It's not that he cares, obviously. It's just that if Elowyn has gone to the trouble of potting and presenting the stupid thing, letting it die through sheer negligence would be wasteful, and March is not wasteful. So he moves it to the shelf beside the front window, where it sits for perhaps twenty minutes before Balor comes in, props both elbows on the sill while discussing new spokes for his front wheels, and nearly knocks it onto the floor. March catches the pot before it tips, snaps at him with enough venom that he knows he'll owe him a drink, and relocates the plant as soon as the door shuts behind him. The next place is too close to the forge after all. The place after that gets hardly any light. By the fourth move, it has ended up on the narrow ledge towards the back of the smithy, safely removed from wandering elbows and flying sparks, where the late-afternoon sun reaches through the high-window and pools over its thick green leaves. March stands there with both hands braced on his hips, glaring at it as though it is the source of all his agony over the past year.
He ought to throw it away.
The thought comes to him several times over the course of the evening, increasingly less convincing with each repetition. He could leave it outside. Give it to Celine, who would undoubtedly know what it actually is and would probably react to receiving it with an enthusiasm March finds exhausting. Hayden might take it. Someone would. Plants are not difficult to re-home in Mistria; half the town seems compelled to put flowers on every available surface as soon as winter releases its grip, as though surviving several months without brightly coloured petals has left them all desperate to compensate. There is no reason whatsoever for March to keep this particular plant, except that every time he imagines carrying it out of the smithy and handing it to someone else, he remembers the faint red marks across Elowyn's palms where the rim of the pot had pressed into them. He remembers her saying she had seen it and thought he might like it. Worse, he remembers the way her face had fallen when he called it stupid, the brief wound he had put there before she covered it, and the shame of that sits badly enough in his stomach that he prowls around the smithy after Olric leaves and finds unnecessary things to straighten simply so he does not have to look toward the ledge.
It does not work. He looks anyway, over and over, until the entire room seems to have reorganised itself around one absurd patch of green.
What bothers him is not the plant. March understands that almost immediately, which does nothing to improve his mood. The plant is merely a plant, and if it had appeared on the windowsill by some accident of Olric's or been left behind by a customer, March would have ignored it until it died or someone claimed it. What bothers him is the complete absence of a reason for Elowyn to have given it to him. Ore makes sense. Charcoal makes sense. Scrap metal makes sense. Even the weird clumps of mystery minerals made sense. Shit, even the hot chocolate had contained something he could hold onto if he looked at it from the correct angle: he had done her a favour, so she had given him one in return. Elowyn understood what making things meant to him. There had been sentiment in it, far too much sentiment, but there had also been transaction. He could justify it. The little green plant gives him nothing. It cannot be turned into anything better. It cannot repay him for work or the space it occupies. He cannot point to some task completed with it and say there, that is why it deserved to be kept. Its only purpose, if the word can even be used, is that Elowyn looked at it and thought of him.
March sits on the edge of the workbench long after the forge has begun to cool, forearms resting against his thighs, and discovers that this is a much worse thing to contemplate in an empty room.
He has always understood usefulness. Usefulness is simple, clean, measurable. A good blade holds an edge. A well-made hinge carries its weight without complaint. A repaired plough gets the field turned before the rain comes. Metal does not need praise or affection; it only needs to be strong enough for what is asked of it, and there has always been something reassuring in that certainty. March knows how to make himself necessary in much the same way. He works. He fixes what breaks. He remembers who needs which tools, who has been putting off replacing kit, whose kitchen knife is going blunt. People come through his doors because March can do something for them, and while he might complain about their timing or their requirements or the way they hover, he understands the exchange perfectly. They need a blacksmith. He is one. He is good at it. There is solidity in being good at something people cannot easily do without.
It has never occurred to him to resent that. If anything, he prefers it.
Worth should be earned. Care should have a reason behind it. That is simply how the world works, or at least how March has always found it safest to understand the world. Olric loves him because Olric is his brother, though even there March has spent most of his life making himself useful beside him, working shoulder to shoulder until the distinction between family and partnership has become impossible to separate. Mistria values him because the town needs a smith. Customers praise his work because it is worth praising. People tolerate his temper because he can put a broken tool back into their hands stronger than it was before. Even kindness, when it comes, usually arrives attached to something recognisable: gratitude, obligation, history, need. March has never thought this bleak. It is dependable. If he keeps producing something worthwhile, then there will always be a place for him. If he remains necessary, there will always be a reason for people to come back.
The thought underneath that one is older and uglier, and he refuses to look at it directly.
He does not need to. He knows its shape.
What happens when there is nothing useful left to offer?
March drags a hand over his face and stands abruptly, irritated by the direction his own mind has taken. This is ridiculous. He is assigning philosophy to a potted weed because a pretty farmer with more generosity than sense carried it into his smithy and smiled at him. That is all. Elowyn gives things to people. She helps people. She has been doing that since she arrived, throwing herself into Mistria's problems as if the whole town had personally entrusted itself to her care. March has watched her mend fences that are not hers, carry parcels for people perfectly capable of carrying their own, stop working because someone needs another pair of hands. Her kindness is not selective. It certainly does not mean—
He stops himself there.
It does not mean anything.
Except the plant.
The plant means she had no need of him whatsoever in that moment. That is the part his mind keeps circling back toward no matter how often he tries to drag it elsewhere. She had not been coming to have something repaired. She had not found material that would improve his work. She had not been repaying some favour or thanking him for a commission. She had been walking through the market, living an entire piece of her day in which March had no role at all, and somehow he had still occurred to her. She had seen something that could offer him nothing and decided that he might want it anyway. More bewildering still, she had apparently believed that wanting it would be enough.
March looks toward the ledge.
The plant sits in a patch of dying sunlight, one blunt leaf casting a soft shadow against the wall.
Things can be useless, March.
He can still hear the way she said it, easy and certain, as though uselessness were not a failing. As though something did not have to justify the trouble of being kept.
His chest tightens so sharply that he becomes angry all over again.
“Stupid,” he mutters, though there is no one left to hear him.
The plant remains unmoved.
March waters it before locking up for the night.
Only a little. He is not an idiot.
The next morning he tells himself he checks it because too much heat might have dried the soil overnight. By the third day, he has learned that the top layer should be allowed to dry before he gives it anything else, a piece of information acquired from Celine through a conversation conducted with such deliberate casualness that he is reasonably certain he fooled no one. He never tells her whose plant it is. He merely describes it in increasingly irritated detail until she tells him it sounds hardy and asks, with suspicious brightness, whether he has taken up gardening. March tells her to forget he asked. Two days later, when he notices one of the outer leaves beginning to angle strangely toward the window, he rotates the pot so the plant grows more evenly. This too is not care. It is maintenance, and maintenance is different. Maintenance is sensible. Maintenance prevents unnecessary loss. Maintenance has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that every new leaf feels, inexplicably, like evidence that he has not ruined something Elowyn trusted him with.
Olric, to his credit, survives almost a full week before commenting.
March is cleaning a set of tongs when his brother pauses beside the back ledge and remarks that the plant is looking good. His tone is innocent enough, its usual bright and uncomplicated cadence, but March isn't fooled. He keeps polishing without looking up and says that it would look considerably worse if Olric knocked it over, which he will if he keeps standing that close. Silence follows, warm and dangerous with withheld amusement, but Olric remains blissfully quiet and contents himself with moving away. March waits until he is certain his brother's attention has returned elsewhere before glancing over to make sure the pot has not actually shifted.
The first time Elowyn notices, she says nothing.
That bothers him more than if she had teased him.
Nearly ten days have passed when she comes into the smithy one warm afternoon, carrying nothing this time except the dust of the road on her boots and a loose braid beginning to unravel over one shoulder. March feels the familiar, traitorous lift in his chest at the sight of her and immediately bends lower over the buckle he is repairing as if concentration might conceal it. She greets Olric first because he is nearer the door, asks March whether the new hoe blade he had promised her is ready, and only halfway across the room does her gaze drift past him toward the rear window. March sees the moment she finds the plant. Her stride slows almost imperceptibly, and a softness moves across her face so quickly that he might have missed it if he had not become catastrophically good at watching her.
She does not say a word.
That is the worst of it.
Her eyes linger on the plant for perhaps two seconds, taking in the clean pot, the healthy green of the leaves, the place March has chosen where the afternoon light reaches without letting the heat of the forge scorch it. Then she looks at him. There is no triumph in her expression, no smug little smile to tell him she knew he would keep it, no teasing question about whether he has been watering his useless gift. There is simply warmth. Quiet, bright warmth, so unguarded that March feels it like a hand pressed gently against something inside him he has spent years making sure no one can touch.
He scowls before she can say anything.
Elowyn's mouth twitches.
March hates that too.
She collects her hoe blade and leaves after a few minutes, mercifully without mentioning the plant, and somehow that restraint becomes another thing he cannot stop thinking about. She has seen. She knows. She has allowed him to keep the knowledge without dragging it into the open and forcing him to name what it means. March should be grateful for this and instead finds himself irritated that she understands him well enough to know silence is kinder.
Summer begins edging closer. The evenings lengthen. The town smells of warm earth and cut grass, and the forge grows hotter with each passing week, doors thrown open whenever March can tolerate the foot traffic drifting too close. The plant remains on its ledge. It survives sparks, heat, Olric, two overly curious customers and one catastrophic afternoon when March nearly leaves the smithy without checking whether it has been watered before catching himself halfway through locking the door. New growth appears at its centre, small and tightly furled at first, then gradually opening into the same sturdy green as the older leaves. March pretends not to notice. Elowyn notices everything.
She begins glancing toward it whenever she comes in, though she rarely comments. Sometimes March catches the flicker of satisfaction in her eyes before she hides it. Once she reaches toward a leaf as she passes and stops herself before touching it, looking instead toward him for permission she never asks aloud. March, occupied with filing the edge of a sickle, says nothing. After a moment her fingertip brushes very gently over the new growth.
Something in his chest turns over.
It would be easier if she made fun of him. Easier if she demanded acknowledgement, if she crowed about being right, if she made the plant into a joke they could both hide behind. Instead she treats his keeping it with exactly the same lack of ceremony with which she gave it to him. She does not make him explain. She does not turn the small act of care into a debt. She simply seems pleased that it is alive.
March begins, against every instinct of self-preservation he possesses, to understand why that frightens him.
Elowyn does not seem particularly interested in what March can do for her.
She appreciates it, certainly. She brings him broken tools and trusts his work. She listens when he explains why something failed and, unlike half the town, actually follows his advice the next time. She pays him fairly even when he tells her a job is simple enough not to warrant much, and she has an annoying habit of finding ways to repay favours he never considered favours in the first place. But none of that appears to be why she seeks him out. She comes into the smithy when she has nothing to repair. She sits nearby when he works even though silence is all he offers for stretches at a time. She brings him things without needing anything back. She remembers what he dislikes as carefully as what he likes. She laughs at him when he is being unbearable and stays anyway.
March has spent more than a year waiting, somewhere beneath all his irritation and suspicion, for the terms of that affection to reveal themselves.
They never do.
The idea that there might not be terms at all is almost impossible to bear.
He knows what to do with being needed. Being wanted is another matter entirely.
One evening, after Elowyn has left and Olric has gone to his room, March remains alone in the smithy with the last of the daylight slanting gold through the rear window. The plant catches it beautifully, each thick leaf rimmed with light, and March stands beside it while the forge cools behind him. He reaches down to test the soil with one finger and finds it dry enough that it will need water in the morning. There is something absurdly gentle about the motion, especially from hands accustomed to hammer and heat, hands built around force measured carefully enough to shape metal without ruining it. He withdraws his finger and looks at the plant for a long time.
It has no use.
That fact has not changed.
It will never earn its place on the ledge. It will never make his work easier, never repay the water he gives it, never become anything other than the small green thing Elowyn carried into his smithy because she had looked at it and thought of him. Yet its uselessness no longer feels like an accusation. Somewhere in the weeks since she gave it to him, March has stopped waiting for it to justify itself.
He keeps it because she gave it to him.
The simplicity of that thought is almost unbearable.
Perhaps that is why another follows before he can stop it, quiet enough that he cannot immediately shove it away.
Elowyn has no practical reason to occupy so much space in his life either.
She does not make him a better blacksmith. She does not make the forge run more efficiently or the orders arrive faster or the work any easier. If anything, she distracts him. She unsettles him. She makes him look toward doors and roads and clocks, makes him remember the sound of her laugh when he is trying to sleep, makes him worry when storms roll over the hills and he knows she is somewhere beyond town. She complicates things simply by existing close enough for him to care what happens to her.
And still, somehow, March has made room.
Not deliberately. Never deliberately. The space has appeared slowly, almost invisibly, the same way the plant acquired its ledge. An adjustment here. A habit there. A little consideration he could explain away until there were too many of them to ignore. He had shifted the shape of his days around her without noticing. Kept track of when she came and went. Saved scraps of information because they mattered to her. Looked up when the door opened because sometimes she was on the other side.
Useful or not, wanted or not, Elowyn has rooted herself into his life with the same stubborn persistence as the little green thing on his windowsill.
The comparison is ridiculous. March despises it immediately.
He also cannot unthink it.
His hand settles around the clay pot and turns it a fraction toward the remaining light, correcting the angle he noticed earlier. The motion is careful, practiced now. He stands there for another moment, staring at the healthy new leaves before a reluctant warmth spreads beneath his ribs, too soft to be irritation and too dangerous to name as anything else.
Tomorrow Elowyn will probably come by.
March will complain about something. She will smile at him in that knowing way he hates. He will pretend not to notice when she checks the plant.
And before she arrives, he will water it.