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The sun is about as far across the sky as the year has progressed along its wheel; midsummer and midday both loom close, but neither have arrived. Arthur finds Merlin in one of the furthest plots from the cottage, bordered on two sides by the low, heaped stone wall that marks the edge of their land.
"Come on, Merlin. Time to go inside for a few hours, or at least find some shade. It's much too hot."
Merlin's on his knees, shuffling between slim-leafed, willowy plants—vaguely, Arthur recalls a time last fall, around when the nights started to get very cold, when they planted cloves of garlic here before the ground froze—and cutting off the middle of each of them. "Just let me finish this."
Arthur does not even know what this is, but collapses into the grass under the shade of a nearby tree to watch. He has himself a palmful of the very earliest blueberries, still sun-warm and dusted with bloom; just one of their bushes seems different than the others: shorter, with sparser leaves and bigger fruit. It's always the first to flower and the first to stop bearing fruit, and he has come to regard it as their harbinger of summer.
It's as good a way of tracking time as any, especially on a farm. He used to think that there was only one harvest time, in the fall. Instead he had had to adjust to the reality that there are endless small harvests, this vegetable or that bursting into ripeness at a different time to its neighbor, a calendar for which Merlin keeps in his brain somehow.
Shocking, too, had been how much of their existence was given over to keeping themselves alive; that food not only needs to be grown and harvested but then also prepared for storage, prepared to eat, prepared to be planted again, an endless cycle.
Today, Merlin is harvesting… something. Some bizarre, light green something growing out of the top of a perfectly normal plant in strange corkscrews. They remind him of Morgana's hair ribbons when she was a child and still learning how to curl them properly; they have the same slightly lopsided, awkward look to them. But surely it can't be garlic; besides being the wrong shape and color and everything else on top of it, that grows under the ground. He's certain of it.
Without looking back, Merlin says, "You could make yourself useful and help, you know."
There's all of five plants left. At this point it'll take Merlin longer to explain the technique to Arthur than it will to finish. "I'm fine right here."
Merlin snorts, muttering something under his breath—no doubt it's insulting; no doubt Arthur does not care. Merlin hitches his shoulder up and ducks his head down to wipe sweat from his brow and Arthur's eyes trail over the cling of his trousers and the way his tunic sticks, sweat-damp, to the muscle beneath.
Arthur unsticks his own tunic and wafts it, praying for a cool breeze that does not come. "Merlin," he says, realizing, "if you're going to be stubborn, at least take your shirt off."
Merlin spares him a glance over his shoulder; it's only a brief look, but Arthur can read his knowing amusement all too easily. And perhaps he does have ulterior motives, but his primary and most sincere of them is as he stated.
"I'm serious," he presses. "You'll overheat."
"I'll burn if I do," Merlin counters. "I'm still sweating, aren't I? I'm alright."
"Merlin."
With an annoyed noise and one fluid movement Merlin strips off his tunic, balls it up and lobs it toward Arthur—and, from the faint flash of gold Arthur sees before his sightline becomes much bluer and sweatier, he uses his magic to make sure it hits Arthur directly in the face.
Arthur folds it neatly and uses it to cushion his head as he settles more firmly against the tree. He does not mean to close his eyes—the whole point had been to make the view more enticing for him—but even through the branches of the trees the heat of the sun still reaches him, making him lazy and contented. One moment Merlin is puttering away and the next he is setting his basket to one side of Arthur and himself to the other.
"So what are those called, then?" Arthur asks without opening his eyes. The hand with his blueberries rests on his chest with them trapped beneath it, but he does not think they are crushed.
"Scapes," Merlin says, and then as if anticipating Arthur's next question, clever man that he is, "Taking them off when they start to curl lets the bulb underground grow larger."
Arthur wonders who first discovered that, and how. "Are they for eating?"
Some of the things they grow are not—who knew? Not Arthur, certainly. He was not trained for farming; his hands and his mind were cultivated toward something else entirely, but he is no longer a prince or a warrior, and so he tries.
"They are. Want a taste?"
He must have been eating them for years in various dishes without ever knowing what they were called, he realizes as he bites into the tip of one. The flavor, mildly onionlike, is familiar to him, and so is the texture.
Merlin stretches out beside him, and as he does so glances back toward the plot. "Ah, missed one." He waves one hand and Arthur watches in bemusement as the scape detaches from its parent plant and floats over into the bucket.
"You mean you could have done that from the beginning?"
"You wanted to look," Merlin says in those low, confident tones that never fail to command Arthur's full attention—and, oh, do they command it now. He's already thinking of their cool, dark cottage and the bed there.
"True," he admits, years beyond feeling any embarrassment about it. He is not a prince any longer, but he retains the generosity of one, so he feeds Merlin a blueberry. "Can you put them in butter?"
Merlin squints one eye open to give Arthur a very odd look indeed. "What, blueberries?"
"Scapes, you idiot," Arthur says, feeding him another. Merlin gently bites the tip of his finger, letting his tongue flick over it.
"And who's going to be churning that?"
Arthur scrunches his nose. "Don't we have any?"
"You don't ever listen. We traded the last batch to Tilly for soap."
"Well, we should keep our own goats," he decides. "Make our own soap, and not be forever giving out our butter."
Merlin snorts. "We absolutely should not. Have you ever met a goat? They're harder work than you are."
"So half as difficult as you, then." He smiles over at Merlin, who purses his lips and looks away as though Arthur is not the most delightful creature he has ever encountered. "Tell you what," Arthur adds, the picture of magnanimity, "if you make the bread, I'll churn the butter."
Merlin's head turns back so that he might stare at him, openmouthed. Arthur idly wonders what he would do if he reached out and yanked on his tongue. Probably bite him again.
Arthur is not sure he'd mind it.
"Whoever said anything about bread?" Merlin scoffs, while Arthur's mind becomes quite divertingly occupied by an image of Merlin standing over their table, sleeves rolled up, kneading dough… and then, if Arthur is very lucky, occupying those strong workman's hands in other ways while they wait for it to rise. "God, Arthur, you don't half want anything."
"You're such a whiner, Merlin."
"And you're a layabout. And a slugabed. And a scapegrace."
Arthur raises an eyebrow. Merlin cracks after only the briefest of silences. "Get it? A scape—"
"Yes, Merlin; you're very funny," Arthur says in his most dour tones, the better to hide how charmed he is by Merlin's very terrible sense of humor.
"Well, one of us has to be," Merlin says, and of course the only thing left to do is carefully set aside the last few blueberries and then tackle him.
Merlin's ridiculous yelp of surprise is well worth the immediate retaliation he doles out, rolling Arthur onto his back as if it is not a privilege and pleasure to be trapped beneath him—especially when he is so delightfully sweaty and has already done Arthur the courtesy of removing his tunic, the better for Arthur to slide his hands up his torso and pull him down for a kiss as lazy and luxuriant as the summer sun beating down upon them.
Warrior, prince, farmer—out of everything, Arthur is certain, his hands were made for this, and his heart, too; Merlin seems to agree, for midday comes and goes without them ever seeing the inside of their cool, dark cottage.