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Rosohna has gardens. Growing mushrooms and edible lichen is, Essek understands, extremely popular in the lower classes. There are industrial scale farming operations, too, and some flowering plants that grow just fine on moonlight. In the upper echelons of society, gardens are rarer and tend to be quite underpopulated when it comes to plants. Essek's mother has a garden of sand and sculptures; the groundskeeper at the sprawling Den Thelyss rakes and smooths and shapes the sand near-daily in the more public areas. Other popular gardens involve bioluminescent plants, and rocks, and occasionally the judicious application of charms and spells.
One thing all the gardens in Rosohna have in common is that they're so carefully arranged that they almost seem sterile. They are formal, planned, stately places.
The Blooming Grove is different. All the plants are jumbled together, some of them quite literally tangled around each other. Even the clear paths for walking are full of delicate grass and tiny flowers. Moss creeps around stepping stones and onto benches. And the informal garden beds, which crowd around and somewhat drown out the headstones, are full of leaf litter and other debris.
Cleaning up the garden after the battle with Trent isn't a matter of shaping everything right back to where it was before, but instead assessing the damage and making something new. If Essek thinks about it for too long it feels like an overwrought metaphor.
The division of work has directed Essek to the back of the temple among the older headstones, some of them so old they're nothing but roughly engraved slabs of natural stone. The ground is a little drier here—less chance of accidentally stepping into a small bog—but it was directly in the path of the wind blowing off the temple, so some of the plants are still covered in a fine layer of ash from the fire.
Essek takes his mind off things by paying special attention to the way he waters them, tipping the watering can here and there to wash the leaves clean. A year ago, Essek wouldn't have done this. Not gardening, specifically (although, yes, gardening, too) but turning around after a battle and helping to repair things broken in the fray. Of course, a year ago he wouldn't have had a friend like Caduceus, either.
When Essek circles back to the front of the temple, Fjord is up on the roof with Calliope Clay, measuring for new rafters. Caleb is sitting under the generous shade of a tree, paper spread out around him. From a glance, Essek can see that at least one of the papers is a diagram of the temple grounds.
"Mapping the damage?" Essek asks, folding himself to the ground next to Caleb. He doesn't sit quite close enough to touch, but he sits closer than he would have sat next to anyone in Rosohna. He resisted as long as possible, but the informality of the Mighty Nein is infectious.
"Ja," Caleb says, finishing a final flourish of spikey cursive writing on a label on the west side of the property, where Caleb had been assigned earlier. "Easier than asking the others for descriptions of where they saw things."
A little smile forces its way onto Essek's face, just a slight and honest curve of his lips as he considers the chaos of the rest of the Mighty Nein trying to convey where they'd seen this or that problem in the twisted and rambling paths of Caduceus' home. "Good thinking."
"I thought so," Caleb says. He has that same pleased tone of voice he'd use when Essek praised his grasp of dunamancy, and it's enough to send a probably inappropriate thrill through Essek.
He and Caleb are past trying to impress each other, and Essek has heard Caleb speak the same way to the rest of the Nein. Still, when Essek judges the shade of the tree deep enough to remove his borrowed hat he catches himself ruffling a hand through his hair, as if Caleb might care what it looks like. Like a fool.
"I found extra fire damage here," Essek says, pointing the location out on the map. "The wind was blowing this way and some embers from the roof caught in some of the brush and trees." Most of the grove was too wet to catch easily, but some of the denser evergreens had thick tangles of dead branches below the healthy outer ones. Essek describes what they'd looked like and how many of them he'd found, as well as the names on the nearby grave stones.
Leaning over to indicate things on the map or show Caleb his notes draws them closer together. Essek's shoulder presses against Caleb's. Their hands brush, and some of Caleb's ink winds up on Essek's hands.
It's nice, being like this, but eventually the sun moves the shadow of the tree, at which point he and Caleb must also move.
After their midday meal, Essek once again faces the truth that he's useless inside the Clay's home because he can't shape stone and doesn't know the first thing about repairing potential structural damage. Granted, he also doesn't know anything about fixing damaged plants, but at least outside he won't be in the way.
His feet lead him to Caleb, who's crouched in a particularly bedraggled garden bed with a pile of sticks and a skein of yarn. Essek stands on the edge, parasol held at a careful angle. The sun on the rest of him isn't great, but at least with his head in the shade it's bearable.
Caleb looks at him. "I could set the tower up early."
"It won't kill me. Show me how to help."
"If you insist," says Caleb, and moves over to make room for Essek in the garden bed.
Caleb is using the sticks and string to hold up damaged but not quite broken branches on the nearby plants, in hopes that the plants will heal. The broken plants are pruned, and a sticky substance provided by Constance Clay is applied to the newly pruned end. Caleb repeats Constance's instructions verbatim, and repeats the demonstrations she'd given him with his usual enthusiasm for precision.
With Caleb Widogast as an instructor, even something so pedestrian as first aid for common garden plants can be almost inappropriately enjoyable, although without borrowing a hat from the Clays again Essek has only one hand free to assist Caleb.
The garden bed looks a little ridiculous when they're done, but the Blooming Grove isn't a place made for pure aesthetics like the gardens of the Firmaments. From what Caduceus has said, there are plants growing here that grow nowhere else — therefore, it's understandable that every garden bed might have dozens of bushes and small shrubs and so on that deserve this kind of careful repair.
They find more plants to prune and more branches to prop up as they wind their way around the Grove, and might have continued that way for the rest of the day and on into the evening, but Clarabelle Clay comes looking for them, "Because Fjord said you can both stick things in midair?"
Essek is therefore roped, along with Caleb, into casting Immovable Object on various pieces of the Clay's damaged roof. They watch the roof supports installed around the beams they've already put in place, prepared to refresh the spells at the hour mark. Caleb had made some motions towards going back to their garden work, but their string and other instruments had been instead handed off to Clarabelle, who isn't allowed to clamber around on top of the roof.
"It wouldn't have occurred to me to use this spell for construction," Essek admits to Caleb.
"It is perhaps a little wasteful," Caleb admits. "People raise roofs without knowing such a thing is even possible all the time."
Finding himself misunderstood, Essek looks away from Caleb and back at the house. "I only meant that you all have once again shown me a new way of looking at something," he explains. "I learn more around you in an hour than I would learn alone in a year."
There is a slight lull in their conversation. In the distance, Fjord hits himself with a hammer and Beau laughs so hard she slips on her next step across the roof. She has to maneuver quickly in the air to hang upside down from the beam instead, still laughing at Fjord. Yasha lingers under Beau, ready to catch her even though they've seen her fall from twice that height with no damage. Beau and Fjord yell back and forth at each other, like irresponsible children, until Caduceus breaks it up.
"It's the same for me," Caleb says. "Ah, I was barely a person when I met them. I certainly wasn't learning anything. But we were all assholes back then, anyway."
Essek looks back at Caleb. He knows they met in a backwater Empire village because of some circus mishap, but not the why of it. Essek is sure that he himself could be arrested in dozens of backwater Empire villages alongside an assortment of a hundred different people and never talk himself into Caleb's position with the Mighty Nein. He's wildly curious, but not sure he has the right to ask.
Small steps are important. He's already ruined this once, and still isn't sure if anything but friendship is salvageable. Even Caleb's friendship is, truly, more than he deserves.
Essek settles on, "You and Veth traveled together first, if I recall?" because clarifying the bare facts of the situation is, hopefully, not prying when Caleb brought the topic up first.
"For a good while," Caleb confirms. "It was, ah, easier to operate with two people, and we both benefitted. She from having a human companion, and myself from knowing she couldn't and wouldn't approach anyone with authority about me no matter how suspicious I might act during our time traveling together."
Essek's eyebrows lift. He hadn't considered how the Empire's prejudice against goblins could have factored in.
"Like I said, I was an asshole," Caleb says with a dry laugh in his voice. "You know, we had this great routine where she'd pretend to murder me in front of travellers on the road to scare them into dropping their valuables and running. But we got used to having company again—and then she saved my life, and then I kept almost dying because I am a squishy wizard, so we decided we might be safer in a larger group. I suppose we were right, since we're both still here."
For one wild moment, Essek almost says he can't imagine a place safer than among the Mighty Nein, but he swallows that sentiment before it can escape. First of all because Essek has never been so close to dying as he has been while following Lucien with the Mighty Nein, but also more importantly because he fears the sentiment might be inappropriate and unwelcome. It's true that he feels safe with the Nein, but he'll be parting ways with them again soon. He's grown used to their company, but it's not his to keep.
Essek Thelyss did not have the good fortune to be arrested alongside a circus in that backwater Empire town.
"You are giving me a look," Caleb says. He's handsome in the afternoon light, his red hair highlighted orange and his eyes bright and his face just a little dirty from their hard work in the garden. His eyes are studying Essek's face like Essek is the next great arcane mystery he intends to explore. "Tell me what you're thinking, Essek."
It's good that they're still in full view of the others, because it helps Essek keep his head. It prevents him from falling face first into the treacherous depths of being seen, and known, and accepted. That kiss to his forehead in Nicodranas is seared into Essek's mind like a third degree burn, bone deep, but Essek must not get carried away.
"I'm glad you and the others found each other," Essek says, because he cannot bear to say he's glad that the Nein found him.
Caleb might hear what he wanted to say anyway, though. He puts a hand on Essek's shoulder, the warmth of which seeps through Essek's shirt immediately. They sit like that until it's time to renew their spells, and continue to do so until they're both low on spell components.
"You and Caleb were getting kind of cozy," Jester says to him that evening. Essek is standing next to the Clay's kitchen sink, drying dishes as Jester washes them.
A year ago, he might have felt this sort of task was beneath him. Certainly he still wouldn't be caught doing it in Rosohna. But among the Nein it's different, and it's an easier task in the Blooming Grove than it would be, say, under the Umavi's roof. Den Thelyss dines on plates so thin they're translucent, but the table settings that pass under Essek's hands in the Clay kitchen are sturdy pottery, friendly and durable.
Also, doing the task here graces him with Jester's company, and that can only be considered a bonus even if she is pausing their work to waggle her eyebrows dramatically at him.
"We were just sitting together," Essek points out.
Jester scoffs. "Yeah, a cozy sitting." She does go back to scrubbing, though. She says, "But yeah, yeah, I won't pry, you know, I'm a very good friend like that, I know things take time, I mean look at me and Fjord!"
Essek says nothing, well aware that protesting too much would open an obvious weakness. It isn't that Essek is under the impression he's not obvious. He simply doesn't want to talk about it, because he doesn't know what to say. Half the time he's not even sure what he thinks about it, and he doesn't want to give Jester any ideas. Or worse, encouragement.
The silence lingers, awkwardly. Conversation filters in from the next room and Jester makes a cacophony of dishwashing-related noise in the sink. When she hands him the next clean dish to be wiped dry and put away, Jester lingers over the moment of handing it over. "I forgot you're not so okay with us being up in your business," she tells him. "Sorry, Essek."
"You don't have to apologize to me," Essek says. That doesn't go over well, though, so he follows up, more gently, by saying: "I'm just not used to it."
"Well, you will be," Jester declares, imperious and unassailable.
The emotion that wells up in Essek is such that a lesser Drow might be moved to tears, or an equally embarrassing display. Essek grew up in Den Thelyess and then moved on to working in the Lucid Bastion, however. He swallows the lump in his throat and when he's sure he can speak evenly he redirects the conversation to be about Fjord.
Essek lingers in the salon that night.
His lower back aches a little from work in the garden, and more than once he thinks a little longingly of the hot bath waiting for him in the guest room upstairs, but the Mighty Nein are settled around him in various states of contentment and chaos. Essek is loathe to slink away from an enjoyable situation he might never again have the opportunity to experience. Perhaps the next night will be the same, and the one after that, but soon it will be time for them all to leave and Essek will need to return to Eiselcross.
More than once he's been tempted to resign from his post, effective immediately, or even suggest to the Mighty Nein that now might be a convenient time to fake his death and disappear, but Essek knows that he can't. Essek has a duty to those he left behind at the Foren outpost.
It was undeniably more convenient for duty to be a convenient political tool which could be picked up and put back down, so Essek doesn't particularly enjoy that his responsibility to those under his command is now affixed to him so completely that it's inextricable. But Essek can't deny that the change is probably for the better. He still has no love for his country or most of the people in it, but those staffing the Foren outpost are, like Essek, individuals who are either driven by their curiosity or their fear to live on the edge of things.
On this night, Essek's curiosity has finally pushed him to make a careful study of the books about transmutation magic available to him in Caleb's library. It isn't an area of magic he's spent much time on, except for of course the very basics, but Caleb had used it to devastating effect at every turn in Aeor and the Cognouza Ward.
Perhaps it feels like he might hold on to some part of Caleb by learning something of his school of magic.
"Should I be offended you're learning from books instead of entrusting your tutelage to me?" Caleb asks eventually. He's stretched out on a couch opposite Essek, some lurid romance provided by one of the Clays in hand.
The salon has emptied out: most of the Clays have retired to bed in the Great Hall, Yeza and Veth left with Luc early in the evening, and Beau had disappeared with Yasha moments ago. Fjord and Jester are across the Salon looking at the large map of Wildemont, looking for ports and islands with funny names to visit.
Fjord still has some kind of evil, unknowable leviathan sea god out to get him, Essek is fairly certain, but neither of them seem concerned about it.
"I have often cursed myself for not asking for lessons in trade when we were in Rosohna," Essek admits. It wasn't a main pillar of his regrets concerning the Mighty Nein in general and Caleb in specific, but it still crosses his mind with some frequency. He had, of course, learned some things from Caleb without specifically requesting knowledge of transmutation, but nothing like what would have come from dedicated instruction from a specialist with Caleb's expertise and intelligence.
Caleb sets his book aside. "I have been meaning to ask about that," he says. "Do you trade favors with everyone, or just with outsiders like us?"
Essek blinks at him. "Everyone," Essek says slowly. "I was more explicit with you because you couldn't be expected to know the culture of favors, trades, and debts that entangles the Firmaments. Kryn nobility track what they're owed across lifetimes and down generational trees. But," Essek adds hastily, "I'm obviously in your debt."
And Essek hopes that the Nein will continue to call that debt in. He hopes they show up on his proverbial doorstep like clockwork requesting things, although preferably not anything so taxing as the events of the past few days.
"You're not in our debt," Caleb says firmly.
"I most certainly am—"
Caleb doesn't let him finish, sitting up to look at him. "Essek, you're our friend. We're not keeping a ledger of your mistakes or a tally of favors. You're one of us."
His voice raises, just a little on this last sentence, and.Essek stares at him. Across the salon, he can see Jester and Fjord look at each other, share a short conversation, and then fling themselves into the center of the tower, rising up quickly with their hands clasped tightly.
Leaving Essek and Caleb alone.
"I don't deserve that," Essek admits, his voice weak and his heart unstable. Like being told you were not born with venom in your veins, Essek is certain that this conversation will be carved into his heart for the rest of his life.
"It's not about what you deserve, it's just how things are." Caleb stands, and crosses the sitting area, and takes a knee by Essek's side. "Do you think I deserved a loyal friend like Veth before I had her? Do you think I earned any of these people? I didn't become a better person, Essek, they remade me."
Essek doesn't want to say it, but the words practically leap from his tongue: "I might not become a better person. I should have been your enemy. I was. And I am still...selfish. And prideful, and heretical, and dispassionate. I'm still everything I ever was."
"You're one of us," Caleb repeats, and before Essek can come up with anything to say in response to that, Caleb is rising up and forward, relentlessly, to kiss him.
Over the last few months, Essek has felt like an iron pulled hot from the fire and hammered into a new shape by every interaction with the Mighty Nein. This moment—Caleb's lips against his mouth and Caleb's hand at his neck and Caleb's knee coming to rest on the edge of the chair between Essek's legs—this feels like finally being quenched. It's cool, sweet relief and a shockingly sudden settling in of Essek's new state of being.
Essek's hands find Caleb's hips. He lets Caleb kiss his mouth open and can't hold back a short, needly noise when Caleb's tongue brushes against his as Caleb settles his weight onto Essek's lap.
The book on transmutation theory that Essek had been reading has long since tumbled to the ground, forgotten.
They break for air. Essek feels dizzy even after a few breaths. His hands, pressed against Caleb's sides, can feel the chainmail under Caleb's shirt.
"This was a little forward of me, I think," Caleb says, though he doesn't move.
"No complaints," Essek manages to say.
"Good." Caleb presses his forehead to Essek's forehead, and closes his eyes. His hand is still cradling the back of Essek's head, which feels just as intimate as having Caleb's tongue half way down his throat had felt.
They sit there for awhile. Essek realizes eventually that he's trembling slightly. He doesn't know why.
"I know some things can't be rushed," Caleb tells him, "but I don't want you to doubt your place with us. With me. It doesn't have to be like this, but...you shouldn't hold yourself back, is what I mean to say. It isn't possible for there to be a debt between us, Essek, we're not transactional. I'll teach you anything you want to know."
Essek's eyes burn. For once he's overwhelmed not with academic greed but something else, something sweet and open and aching. Essek has learned so much from him already; it seems unfathomable that Caleb would have more yet to give.
"It feels too good to be true," Essek admits.
"I'll just have to convince you." Caleb pulls away from him, just slightly, so he can look Essek in the eyes. "I expect I'll have a lot of time to do so."
Essek nods slowly. "I expect you will."
A pleased little smile steals its way onto Caleb's face, like Essek has promised something enticing instead of admitted to the obvious truth of Caleb Widogast's personal gravity.