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Cicadas buzz, a charming little tune to welcome the warmth and easiness of summer.
Even as moonlight streams down, Balor wipes his forehead with the back of his hand, the heat drenching him in sweat. It was something he’d gotten used to, with his work, but it was still annoying nonetheless. Juniper probably made half her profits off of him during summer, with the amount of times he came in looking to clean off after a supply run drenched in sweat.
He slows his horse to a stop as he approaches Misty River Farm. She whinnies, and Balor smiles as he strokes her mane, guiding her towards Isabella’s house.
As he slides off the saddle, though, a dimly-lit lump on the ground catches Balor’s eye. It’s not one of the rocks or tree stumps the farmer was still in the process of clearing out, but something different.
Balor frowns, an uneasy feeling settling inside his chest. It was a shape he recognized, one he’d gotten used to ignoring in the capital.
Grabbing his lantern, he walks over to the lump—or, as he quickly comes to realize…
“Isabella?”
Mistria’s newest resident was lying on the grassy ground of her farm, arms tucked under her head, completely dead to the world. Balor feels his breath hitch for a moment, before he realizes she’s still breathing, her chest rising up and down with each breath.
Right. You’re not in the Capitol anymore. It’s safe here. He shakes his head, forces himself to take a breath.
What’s the farmer doing sleeping out here? Balor muses, kneeling down next to her. She wasn’t even wearing any pajamas.
For a moment, Balor considers leaving her be; it wasn’t his problem if the farmer decided to sleep outside. But then he glances back to his wagon, and winces thinking of all the times he’s had to sleep outside with no bedding. Not even a blanket, though he supposes the heat could be blamed for that.
Standing up, Balor nudges Isabella with his foot. He has to shake her a few times before she makes a snort sound, squinting awake in the glow of his lamp.
It takes her a minute to wake up, and another for her to notice Balor as she rubs the sleep from her face.
“Balor?” Isabella asks, pushing herself on her elbows and rubbing at her eyes. “What are you doing here?”
Balor kneels down next to her so he’s eye level with her. “I’m here doing my job,” he replies, resting his head in his hand. “I could ask the same thing of you. What are you doing out sleeping in the middle of your farm?”
“Sleeping…?” Isabella asks, a frown crossing her face, before she looks up. A beat later, she slaps her forehead with the palm of her hand. “Oh crap. What time is it?”
“Nearly two,” Balor replies, raising his eyebrows. “I take it, then, that you didn’t mean to fall asleep out here?”
Isabella shakes her head, pushing herself up into a sitting position. In the distance, he hears an owl hooting from the forest nearby. “No. I was actually stargazing.”
Well. Out of everything he was expecting, that wasn’t it. Balor blinks, and leans back on his haunches.
“Stargazing?”
Another nod. “Yeah. I’ve been meaning to for some time since I’ve moved here, but I’ve always been so tired at the end of the day I just haven’t.” As if to showcase it, Isabella lets out a jaw-cracking yawn. “I guess I still must be tired, if I fell asleep out here.”
Balor hums. “Well, you have been running around all of Mistria for the past six months,” he reminds her. “Seems like every time I’ve seen you, you’ve just been go go going.”
“Well, I can’t exactly afford to lay in bed every day when the entire reason I’m out here is to help with rebuilding.”
Maybe it was just Balor’s imagination, but… something about the tone in which she said that gave him pause. Before he could examine it closer, though, she plowed forward.
“Still, I can’t disagree with you.” She leans forward, pulling her knees up to her chest. “I guess I could visit the bathhouse sometime this week… I have the money for that.”
“Valen would probably tell you not to overwork yourself,” Balor agrees, leaning back. The grass is soft under his palms, and a flickering light draws his gaze to some fireflies dancing in the night.
“I could probably say the same thing about you, you know,” Isabella remarks, making Balor frown and look back at her.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you’re out here shipping stuff in the middle of the night, yet I feel like I see you at any hour of the day, whether I’m up at seven am or out late as nine at night.” She leans forward, brushing her fringe out of her eye and peering at Balor. “And I haven’t seen you drinking coffee outside the Saturday Market.”
“Well, unlike Adeline, I can actually work on little sleep without needing coffee,” Balor remarks, shuffling so he’s sitting next to her. “And when you’re a traveling merchant, you learn very quickly to make the most out of short powernaps.”
He doesn’t do it that often, admittedly, even when he’s exhausted. From an early age, he learned the hard way of sleeping at the wrong time and place. When he’s not sleeping somewhere with four walls and a door that can lock, Balor doesn’t ever sleep easily.
Not that Isabella needs to know that. Besides, he does his best work at night.
“Speaking of sleep, you should be getting to bed,” Balor continues before Isabella pushes the matter further, poking her shoulder. “Trust me, I have slept outside enough to know that sleeping on the ground is hell for your body.”
Isabella sighs, looking skyward again. “Yeah… I wish I hadn’t fallen asleep so early,” she sighs, leaning back on the grass. “It’s so beautiful out here in Mistria… I never got to see stars like this in the Capital.”
“Can’t disagree with you there,” Balor agrees. “I remember the first time I saw the stars in Mistria… I could’ve stayed out there all night.” He chuckles to himself. “What I wouldn’t have given to bottle them up and sell them. Imagine the price I could’ve gotten!”
“Always the merchant, Balor. Though I suppose I can’t blame you for that one.”
Humming, Balor lays down on the grass, arms under his head the way he had found Isabella. “Yeah. You certainly can’t see the stars like this from the Capital, that’s for sure.”
“Nope,” Isabella agrees, popping the P. “I remember stargazing a bit when I was a kid. I had a friend who liked to sneak up to the rooftop of his house and watch them, though they certainly can’t compare to these.”
The words strike a memory in the back of his mind, one long lost to time.
The stars in Mistria were nothing like they were in the Capital. They were clearer, brighter, more—dozens upon dozens of stars, clustered together as far as the eye could see. In the Capital, you could only see a few of them, faint pinpricks of light that could barely be seen through the haze of light pollution.
As such, Balor hadn’t spent that much time stargazing the way he read about in stories. But he does have scant, scattered memories of doing just that as a child.
“Funny—I remember doing the same thing,” Balor muses, glancing at Isabella. “Guess that must be a pretty popular past time for kids in the Capital.”
Isabella lays down next to him, crossing one leg over the other and nudging his knee. “I suppose you can see them better from the rooftops than here on the ground.”
“You know, you haven’t see anything until you’ve seen them from the summit,” Balor remarks, glancing over at her.
“Oh yeah—that shooting star festival Elsie mentioned, right?” She asks, turning her head to face him. A few strands of hair fall over her face, and Balor is caught with the sudden, momentary impulse to brush it away.
She beats him to it. Balor swallows the lump that’s suddenly formed in his throat, instead nodding his confirmation.
“Yup. People from all over Aldaria come here to see the stars on the summit. It’s a pretty popular date spot for couples, too.”
“Have you seen them, then?” Isabella asks, pulling her hair up and letting it spread out on the grass. “You’ve been in Mistria for a few years, right?”
“Four years,” Balor confirms. “I did my first year, but stargazing isn’t exactly my thing.”
“So what is it you’re doing now?”
Balor smiles, winks. “Chatting with a friend, of course.”
And although Balor knows he should get on with his delivery—time is money, after all—he finds himself rooted to the ground. Listening to the cicadas buzzing, the wind whistling through the trees. The quiet, steady breathing of Isabella next to him.
It was… nice. For all the time he spent out on the road, he didn’t often sleep outside unless his wagon was too cramped to do so. And even when he did, he spent hardly anytime allowing himself to get distracted by something as childish as stargazing.
But Mistria was… comfortable, for lack of a better word. Just enough that Balor allowed his shoulders to relax, to lay there on the grassy farmland next to Isabella without worrying of danger lurking in the trees.
Silence elapses between them—quiet and nice. He watches the way the stars twinkle above, eyes tracing the sky for constellations he remembers learning about ages ago.
Eventually, when Balor feels his eyes starting to droop, he shakes his head and pushes himself back up.
“Well, I should probably get back on the job,” he says, peering at Isabella to make sure she hasn’t fallen asleep on him. “Can’t exactly leave you without your payment for today’s shipment.”
In the lamplight, he can see her frown, lips pinching together, before she sighs and sits up as well.
“Yeah… dawn’s gonna be here soon, and I really want to crawl in my bed before then.” Isabella runs a hand through her hair, shaking out a few stray bits of leaves and grass. “Thanks for watching the stars me for a bit, Balor. You really didn’t have to.”
No, he didn’t. But, for a reason he couldn’t quite explain, he wanted to.
“It was nice to take a moment and do that,” he replies, before he blinks. “Ah- hang on.”
Reaching forward, Balor goes to pull a leaf out of Isabella’s hair that she had missed. He was surprised at her silky her hair felt as he did so, much more so than someone he would expect from her job.
“There you go,” he muses, pulling the errant lead out of her hair and rubbing it between his fingers. “You missed one.”
“Ah-“ Balor watches out of the corner of her eye as Isabella reaches a hand up, resting it where the leaf had been a moment ago. “T-thanks.”
Before he could reply, Isabella stands up, brushing off her clothes, and extends a hand to him. Balor lets the leaf fall to the ground and takes it.
Her hand was cold, despite the summer heat that had sweats rolling down his neck and behind his shirt, but her grip was strong.
A good merchant always introduces themself with a firm grip, Balor thinks idly. It was one of the first things he was taught.
“Well, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow, Balor,” Isabella says, and there’s just enough light from his lamp to see her smiling. And… blushing, her cheeks red with the summer heat.
“Same here, Isabella,” he replies with a wink. “Get some rest, okay? Preferably in your bed and not on the ground.”
“Right, right. Don’t push yourself too hard, okay? Even at night this heat is a monster.”
“Ugh, tell me about it.” Again, he wipes his forehead off with his sleeve. “I swear I single-handedly pay to keep the bathhouse running in summer.”
“And I’m sure Juniper appreciates it.”
They exchange meaningless pleasantries after that, and within a minute Balor’s watching as she goes back to her house. He stares after her for a minute, watching her figure disappear into the doorway, before shaking himself out of it.
This isn’t the Capital. Mistria is safe. And the farmhouse is literally twenty feet away. The heat must be getting to him more than he thought.
Shaking his head again, Balor makes his way towards the shipping bin. The break was nice, but he did still have a job to do.
Though, if he spent the rest of the night with his gaze trailing upwards to the stars… only his horse saw that.