Chapter Text
The mornings belonged to Bramblewick, and he liked it that way.
Before the shutters went up on the bakery two streets over, before the milk cart rattled down the cobbles, before anyone else on Thistledown Lane had so much as cracked an eye open, Bramblewick was already awake, already dressed, already kneeling in the dirt behind his cottage with dew soaking through the knees of his trousers. It was the only part of the day that was entirely his. No one to flinch when he rounded a corner. No one to go quiet and careful the way people did around him, like he was a loose plank they didn't trust their weight to. Just the tomatoes, and the last of the season's marrow, and Nettle snuffling along the fence line after some smell only a Mazzew could love.
He was a big Skeith. He'd always been a big Skeith — there wasn't really any other kind, not the way people talked about it, not the way the other children at his old schoolyard used to talk about it, back before he'd learned it was easier to just not go where talking happened. Blue-scaled, heavy-shouldered, built like something meant to guard a door rather than open one gently. He had hands that could probably close around a whole loaf of bread and crush it to crumbs without meaning to, and so he had spent a great many years being extremely, deliberately careful with them instead. He built furniture. Small things, mostly — jewelry boxes, drawer pulls, the occasional cradle when someone in the lane was expecting and too polite to ask a Skeith to make it but too broke not to. His hands, it turned out, were good for that. Patient. Precise. Nobody flinched at a beautifully dovetailed drawer.
Nettle gave a short, huffing bark at something in the hedgerow and Bramblewick reached over without looking, resting one broad palm on the Mazzew's back until the bristling settled. "It's just a Mortog," he noted. "Leave him be."
Nettle did not agree, but subsided anyway, the way he always did when Bramblewick asked him to. That was the nice thing about Nettle. Nettle had never once looked at him like he was something to be managed.
The cottage next door had been empty for the better part of two years. Old Mrs. Fennimore had passed on quietly in her sleep — the kind of quiet, unremarkable ending that Bramblewick privately thought was the best a person could hope for — and her family, scattered across three different provinces, hadn't been in any hurry to sell. The garden had gone to seed. The shutters had faded from green to a kind of ghostly grey-green, and every so often a Whinny would wander over from the Meridell side of the lane and graze at the overgrown lawn until someone shooed it off. Bramblewick had gotten used to the quiet of it. Had gotten, if he was honest with himself, a little fond of the quiet of it — an empty house on one side meant one fewer set of eyes that might catch him doing something as mundane and mortifying as watering his marrow at dawn in his nightshirt.
So the cart outside Mrs. Fennimore's gate on a bright Tuesday morning was, to put it plainly, alarming.
It wasn't a small cart. It wasn't even a modest cart. It was a cart piled so improbably high with crates and trunks and what appeared to be an entire birdcage's worth of hanging chimes that Bramblewick, from his crouch in the tomatoes, genuinely could not tell how it had made it down the lane without shedding half its cargo. A pair of exhausted-looking Kau were still hitched to the front of it, blowing hard, clearly unimpressed with whatever journey had brought them here. And weaving between the crates, directing what could only be described as chaos with the breezy authority of someone who had done this many times before and expected to do it many times again, was a Shoyru.
She was small the way most Shoyru were small, and painted the deep, dizzy blue-black of a starry coat, with little points of pale color scattered across her wings like she'd flown straight through a rainstorm and come out the other side glittering. Her dress — and it was absolutely a dress, not the kind of practical traveling clothes a person wore when they expected to be hauling furniture all day — moved around her ankles in soft grey layers, and every time she lifted an arm to point at something, a truly staggering number of bracelets slid down and chimed against each other like she'd brought her own weather with her.
Bramblewick had been crouched in his garden for what he now realized was an unbecoming length of time, simply watching.
He stood up too fast. His knee caught the edge of the marrow trellis and knocked it sideways with a clatter loud enough that Nettle startled and the Shoyru's head whipped around, wings snapping half-open with a soft rattling shiver of bracelets, before she caught sight of him and —
Didn't flinch.
That was the thing he noticed first, before anything else, before her eyes or her wings or the little constellation of pale spots across her indigo hide: she looked directly at him, six feet and some odd inches of very obviously started blue Skeith standing in a garden with dirt on his knees, and she did not take a single step back.
"Oh — good, a neighbor," she chirped, like he'd arrived precisely on schedule. "Would you believe those two absolute cowards" — she jerked a thumb at the Kau, who did not look remotely offended by this — "refuse to go one more step, and I have got a trunk in there that I genuinely cannot lift on my own, and if it sits in that cart overnight in the damp it's going to ruin four months of drying work. Please tell me you're stronger than you look, because you already look extremely strong, so really I just need you to be at least that strong."
Bramblewick opened his mouth. Nothing came out of it for a moment.
"I'm — " he started, and stopped, because his voice came out rustier than he meant it to, the way it always did on mornings when he hadn't yet had reason to use it. He cleared his throat. Tried again. "I can help. If you want."
"I want," she said immediately, and was already climbing back up onto the cart before he'd finished getting the gate of his own fence open, wings flaring slightly for balance in a way that suggested she did this constantly and had simply never broken the habit of flying short distances instead of walking them, town propriety be damned. "It's the one with the brass corners, there — mind the latch, it sticks, and if you shake it the bottles inside will absolutely let you know about it."
He hadn't asked what was in it. He got the distinct impression that if he had, the answer would only have raised further questions.
The trunk was heavy — genuinely heavy, packed dense with glass and wood and things wrapped carefully enough in linen that he could feel their shapes shift and click as he shifted his grip, careful, so careful, the way he was careful with everything he touched that could break — but not so heavy that it was any real trouble for him, and he found, once he'd hefted it down off the cart and settled it against his chest, that some old and stubborn part of him relaxed just slightly at having something to actually do with his hands and his size besides stand there feeling like too much of both.
"You're a treasure," the Shoyru said, hopping down after him with far less caution than the situation probably warranted, wings catching her the last few feet so she landed light as anything on the cobbles. "Truly. I was fully prepared to drag that thing an inch at a time across the lawn like an idiot. Kitchen, if you don't mind — through the front, second door on the left, and for the love of Fyora do not set it down near the hearth, it needs to stay cool."
He carried it where she pointed. The inside of Mrs. Fennimore's old cottage was a wreck of half-unpacked crates and drifting motes of dust kicked up from two years of stillness, sunlight cutting through gaps in the shutters in thin gold blades, and he set the trunk down exactly where she'd told him, gently, the way he'd set down a sleeping infant if anyone had ever trusted him to hold one.
"There's more," she said, following him back out, and it wasn't a question, not really, but there was something almost testing in the way she said it, like she was watching to see whether the offer of help had an edge to it, a limit, a moment where his patience or his goodwill would run dry and she'd see the version of him that matched what a Skeith was supposed to be.
"There's more," he agreed, and went back for the next crate.
It took the better part of two hours, in the end. Crates of jars and dried bundles of things he didn't recognize, herbs he half-knew the names of and some he was fairly sure he didn't want to. A standing mirror wrapped so thick in quilts that it must have survived a dozen moves already. A stack of books bound in leather gone soft and dark with age, tied with twine because the covers had long since lost whatever clasps once held them shut. Three separate boxes that chimed softly when he lifted them, full — he presumed — of more of the little glass ornaments that hung from her wrists and throat, catching the morning light and scattering it in small, restless sparks across the walls of the front room every time she moved.
She talked the entire time. Not at him, exactly, though he supposed technically it was at him, since he was the only other person there — more like she was simply thinking aloud and he happened to be present for it, filling the empty cottage with an easy, tumbling stream of commentary about the state of Mrs. Fennimore's garden "I'm going to need to redo that entire bed, whatever was growing there clearly gave up somewhere around spring", the trouble she'd had finding a cart driver willing to make the trip out from Neopia Central on short notice, the way the light came through the kitchen window at an angle that was, she declared with real satisfaction, "criminally good for pressing herbs, honestly I couldn't have designed it better myself."
Bramblewick, for his part, said very little. It wasn't that he didn't want to — there was something almost soothing about the noise of her, the way it filled up all the awkward silences he usually had to sit inside of when he was around new people, the silences where he could feel someone deciding, behind their eyes, how much space to give him — but every time he opened his mouth to offer something back, some small piece of himself to match what she was giving so freely, it lodged somewhere in his throat and stayed there.
It was easier, this once, to just carry the crates.
"You've barely said six words to me," she stated finally, when the cart was empty and the Kau had wandered off toward whatever pasture the driver kept them in, and she was sitting on the low garden wall between their two properties with her wings drooping slightly the way they did, he was learning already, when she finally slowed down enough to be tired. "Should I be worried? Do I talk too much? My mother always said I talk too much."
"No," he answered. Then, because that alone felt insufficient, inadequate to the size of the question: "I don't — usually talk much. It's not you."
She studied him for a moment. Up close, in the flat gold light of midmorning, he could see the pale spots scattered across her starry coat weren't random at all but drifted in loose constellations, like someone had painted the sky itself directly onto her, and her eyes were a bright, assessing green that didn't match anything about her coloring and made him wonder, distantly, what color she was underneath the paint.
"Well," she said at last, apparently satisfied with whatever conclusion she'd drawn, "I'm Sable. And you've just spent two hours hauling my entire life across a garden without once asking what any of it was for, which either means you're remarkably incurious or remarkably polite, and I don't actually think you're incurious."
"Bramblewick," he offered, and then, because the silence stretched and it felt rude to let it, "I wasn't sure it was my business. What it was for."
"It's not," Sable agreed cheerfully, "but I'd have told you anyway if you'd asked. Most people ask. Usually right before they decide they don't like the answer." Something flickered behind the easy brightness of that, there and gone so fast he almost missed it — a small, practiced kind of bracing, the look of someone who'd delivered that line enough times to have smoothed all the hurt out of the delivery. "Witchcraft," she added, watching him for the reaction. "In case the trunk full of bottles that rattled ominously the whole way here didn't give it away."
"I gathered," Bramblewick said.
"And?"
He considered the question seriously, the way he considered most things, turning it over before he answered. "And I think Nettle's been eyeing your garden wall as adjacent to his territory for the better part of two years, and he's not going to give it up just because you're doing something with more sparks in it than Mrs. Fennimore's tea roses were."
Something in Sable's face changed — opened, a little, surprise cracking through the polished cheer like she'd braced for a different response and gotten this one instead. And then she laughed, bright and startled and entirely unguarded, wings flaring slightly with it, bracelets sliding and chiming down her wrists, and Bramblewick felt something in his own chest loosen that he hadn't quite realized had been pulled tight.
"I'll allow it," she said. "Contingent on him not eating anything that's actively glowing. Some of what I grow bites back."
"I'll tell him," Bramblewick said, and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that the corner of his mouth had pulled itself into something like a smile, small and a little rusty from disuse but real all the same.
Nettle, when consulted on the matter that evening, showed no interest whatsoever in respecting the terms of the agreement, and was discovered not two days later attempting to dig up something faintly luminous from the freshly turned bed along the garden wall, at which point Sable came storming out in her nightclothes with her hair — actual hair, dark and loose and entirely unbothered by paint, since apparently whatever she'd been doing indoors hadn't required her to be presentable — sticking up wildly, brandishing a wooden spoon like a weapon and shouting something about "four months of careful cultivation, Bramblewick, four months," while Nettle looked on with the profound, guiltless satisfaction of a creature who has never once regretted a single decision in his life.
Bramblewick, standing in his own doorway in his nightshirt, holding a lantern and trying very hard not to laugh, found himself thinking that the quiet of the empty house next door had been, on reflection, considerably overrated.
* * *
It became, over the following weeks, something like a rhythm.
He hadn't expected that. Hadn't expected the noise of her — not unwelcome noise, he was surprised to find, but noise all the same, the kind that filled up corners of the day he hadn't realized were so empty until something started filling them — to settle so quickly into the shape of his life. She kept strange hours, the way he supposed witches probably did; some mornings her kitchen light was already burning gold through the shutters before he'd even gotten out to the garden, and some nights it burned long past when any sensible person should have been awake, and more than once he woke past midnight to the faint, sharp smell of something herbal and vaguely singed drifting over the garden wall, followed shortly by a muffled, thoroughly unimpressed curse.
She had a habit of appearing at his fence with questions that weren't really questions so much as opening moves in a conversation she'd already half-decided to have. Did he know anything about grafting fruit trees — not that she doubted her own competence, she was simply curious whether Skeith hands were good for that sort of delicate work the way they apparently were for furniture, and wasn't it strange, when you thought about it, how much people assumed about what a body was or wasn't suited for based on nothing but its shape. Did he mind if she strung a line of drying herbs along the shared fence, since her own yard didn't get quite enough sun in the afternoon and his did, and she'd share whatever came of it, obviously, that wasn't charity, that was just good sense. Had he ever noticed that the Mortogs in the hedgerow sang differently just before rain, and did he think that was worth investigating, or was she simply developing an unhealthy fixation on amphibian behavior out of boredom.
He found himself, somewhat against his own long habits, answering.
Not easily, not at first — every conversation still cost him something, some small effort of will to push words out past the part of him that had spent a lifetime learning it was safer to take up less space, say less, want less — but Sable had a way of asking things that didn't seem to require him to perform anything in particular. She didn't wait, the way some people did, with a held breath and a careful, over-bright smile, for him to say something reassuring, something to prove he wasn't what he looked like. She just asked, and waited for whatever answer came, and moved on to the next thing, as though it had never once occurred to her that his size or his scales or the low, rumbling register of his voice might mean anything at all about what was underneath them.
It was, he was slowly coming to understand, an entirely novel experience.
"You do that thing," she stated to him one evening, a little over three weeks after the cart had first appeared outside Mrs. Fennimore's gate — no, outside her gate, he was trying to get used to thinking of it that way — when they were sitting on the low garden wall between their two yards with a pot of tea going cold between them and Nettle sprawled in the grass at their feet, thoroughly pleased with the arrangement.
"What thing?"
"You get out of the way." She said it lightly, but her eyes were sharp on him, green and assessing, the way they'd been that very first morning when she'd looked him over and drawn whatever conclusion had made her decide to hand him a trunk full of glass. "In town. When we walked to the market together on wednesday — you stepped off the path twice for people who weren't even close to needing the room. You do it without thinking about it. I don't think you even notice you're doing it."
Bramblewick was quiet for a moment, turning his teacup slowly between two fingers that could have crushed it without meaning to. "It's easier," he admitted finally. "Than the alternative."
"What's the alternative?"
"Someone deciding I didn't get out of the way fast enough." He kept his eyes on the tea, on the small chip in the rim of the cup, on anything that wasn't her face. "It's not — it's not usually anything dramatic. Nobody's ever actually done anything. It's just easier to not find out what would happen if I didn't move."
Sable didn't say anything for a long moment, and when he finally made himself look up, there was none of the soft, careful pity in her face that he'd half-braced for, the kind of look that always made him feel smaller and larger at once, more conspicuous for having said anything at all. There was just something quiet and considering, and underneath it, something that looked almost like anger, banked low and controlled, not aimed at him.
"That's a stupid thing for the world to have taught you," she said at last.
"Probably," he agreed, half hearted.
"I mean it. You built me a shelf last week that I could balance a teacup on the very edge of during an earthquake, Bramblewick. You carried my entire life across a garden without breaking a single bottle. You're not — " She stopped, seemed to reconsider, started again, more careful. "You're the most careful person I've ever met. And everyone just looks at you and decides that's not what they're seeing."
He didn't have an answer for that. He wasn't sure there was one that wouldn't come out sounding either falsely humble or embarrassingly grateful, and he'd rather have said nothing at all than risk either.
"I like it here," he said instead, which wasn't quite an answer but felt, somehow, like the truer thing. "Next door to you. It's — " He searched for the word, turning it over the way he turned over a good piece of wood before he cut it, looking for the grain. "Loud," he settled on finally, and saw her wings twitch in mock offense. "But good loud."
"High praise," Sable cooed, but she was smiling when she said it, small and real, and the evening light was catching the pale constellation of spots across her coat and turning them faintly gold, and Bramblewick thought, not for the first time and with a kind of quiet, careful dread that he wasn't ready to look at too closely, that he could get very used to sitting on this wall in the evenings, listening to her talk.
Nettle, sensing nothing of the moment beyond the general contentment of two large warm bodies nearby and a cooling pot of tea he had every intention of investigating, sighed happily in the grass and went back to sleep.
* * *
The market fell on wednesday, same as it always had, a modest sprawl of stalls set up along the square where the lane met the main road into town — cheese and bread and bolts of cloth, a fishmonger who came up from the coast twice a month, an old Grarrl who sold Petpet toys carved from driftwood and complained, every single week, about the price of good wood.
Bramblewick had gone alone for years. It was easier that way — one set of eyes to avoid instead of two, one path through the crowd to plan instead of navigating someone else's pace alongside his own. He'd learned the market's rhythms the way he learned most things, quietly and by long observation: which stalls were busiest at which hours, which gaps in the crowd he could slip through without drawing notice, which vendors had long since stopped startling at the sight of him and simply nodded a greeting like he was any other customer.
Going with Sable turned out to be an entirely different exercise.
She did not slip through gaps in crowds. She did not, as far as he could tell, possess any instinct whatsoever for making herself smaller or quieter or less noticeable, and watching her move through the market was a bit like watching a small, determined storm pick its own course through weather that had assumed it was in charge. She stopped at every stall that so much as glanced like it might sell something useful to her — dried lavender, a chipped blue bowl she declared perfect for scrying despite what looked to Bramblewick like a fairly ordinary crack running through the glaze, a fistful of iron nails from the smith that she paid for without explanation and tucked into a pouch at her hip with evident satisfaction.
"You don't have to hover," she told him, the third time he found himself half a step behind her shoulder, angled slightly to block the press of the crowd from jostling her. "I'm not going to break."
"I know," he said, and didn't stop hovering, and she didn't actually ask him to again.
It was the Grarrl's stall that did it, in the end. Bramblewick had paused there out of old habit, admiring a small carved Whinny with more genuine craft in it than the price tag suggested, and hadn't noticed Sable had drifted a few stalls further until he heard the particular pitch of voice that meant someone was being careful in a way that wasn't kindness.
"— don't mean anything by it," a woman was saying, to Sable, in the too-bright, too-patient tone people used when they'd already decided a conversation needed managing, "only, you're new to the lane, and you might not know, that's all. He's perfectly fine to nod to in passing, everyone says so, but I wouldn't go inviting him round for tea, is all I'm saying. Skeiths are Skeiths."
Bramblewick went very still.
He knew this conversation. He'd been the shape of this conversation more times than he could easily count, standing three feet away while someone explained him to someone else, patient and reasonable and utterly certain, the way you'd warn a new tenant about a loose stair or a dog that bit. He knew, too, exactly what came next, the part where he was supposed to not have heard, was supposed to keep his eyes on the driftwood Whinny and let it pass over him like weather, because making it visible that he'd heard only ever made things worse, made him the one who'd overreacted, made him, somehow, the problem in a conversation about how much of a problem he might be.
He did not, this time, get the chance to decide what to do with any of that, because Sable got there first.
"Skeiths are Skeiths," she repeated, and her voice hadn't changed pitch at all, still light, still easy, and that was somehow worse, somehow far sharper than shouting would have been. "Funny. I've been having tea with him for three weeks. Lovely company. Builds a beautiful shelf. Do you know what he did on my second night in that house, when a bracket I'd hung wrong nearly came down on my head at two in the morning? Walked over in his nightshirt with a lantern because he heard the crash and wanted to make sure I was all right. Didn't even come inside. Just wanted to know I was safe, and then went back to bed." A small pause, deliberate, letting that sit. "What was it you were about to warn me about, exactly?"
The woman had the good grace to look uncomfortable, at least, mumbling something about not meaning any harm before finding urgent business at the next stall over. Sable watched her go with an expression Bramblewick couldn't quite read — something colder than her usual brightness, banked and controlled the way it had been on the garden wall, that quiet anger that wasn't for him even when it was, in some sense, about him.
She came back to where he was still standing by the Grarrl's stall, and didn't apologize, and didn't ask if he was all right in the careful, hovering way that would have made the whole thing worse, made him have to manage her feelings about it on top of his own. She just held up the little carved Whinny he'd been looking at, turning it over once in her fingers.
"You should buy this," she said. "It's good work. Better than anything else on this stall, and he's charging you the same as the rest because he thinks you won't argue the price." A beat. "You should argue the price."
Bramblewick looked at her for a long moment — small and green-eyed and starry-painted and entirely unbothered, or performing unbothered well enough that he couldn't tell the difference, bracelets settling quiet around her wrists now that she'd stopped moving — and felt something shift in his chest, some old and carefully reinforced wall settling half an inch, not gone, not undone, but different than it had been an hour ago.
"I'll argue the price," he relented.
He did, and won five neopoints off it, mostly out of principle, and Sable declared it the single greatest triumph of the day and insisted on buying him a meat pie to celebrate, and if his voice was a little rough when he thanked her for it, neither of them mentioned it, and that, too, felt like its own small kindness.