7. Gardening

7

Gardening

Safira Chastain

G etting one's garden watered by a water-horse, as it turned out, merely involved walking up the hill to one's broken pump, unscrewing the hose from the pump, and handing it to the water-horse in question. Tsirisma Lake took the hose from me without so much as brushing my fingers, his grasp careful and precise, then wrapped his strong hand around it so that the opening sat flush against his hand. Moments later, the soil at the watering-hoses started darkening, lake water seeping out of the small holes in the hoses.

I stood there, jaw agape, then turned my wide eyes to the naked man holding my hose. A slight smile turned the corners of his mouth, his eyes half-closing in a smug expression.

With care for my suddenly wobbly legs, I lowered myself to the ground, yanking my eyes away from the lake-wet expanse of his bare skin to look at the garden again. I heard the sounds of him settling down next to me. My mouth went dry and I tried to call moisture back into it. He's just lonely , I told myself, trying to avoid the creeping panic of having a powerful, dangerous, magical male focusing his attention on me. And you better hold up your end of the bargain.

"So, um," I said, my voice rasping. I swallowed. I didn't want him to think me afraid, even though I was. "What would you like to talk about, lake?"

He didn't say anything, so I dared to look over at him. I found him regarding me with an expression of curiosity. "Would you like a name for me?" he asked at last, sounding surprised to be asking it.

I tucked my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around them, not really sure how to behave now that I was going to sit for an hour next to the water-horse. "Is Tsirisma Lake not your name?"

The elemental huffed a laugh, amusement showing on his striking features. "None but me know my name," he said, closing his eyes and tilting his face up to the sun. "I have been called many things. 'Tsirisma Lake' is one such thing, yet it is not a name for a person, in the way that men think of such things. It is a name for scratching onto maps, that one may say to another, 'go here,' and the other will find what is being sought."

He fell silent, still with his face tilted towards the spring sun. His skin was drying already, and his near-black hair separating into strands without water to bind them together. The sun would never burn him, and the wind would never chap his face. The cold would never make him shiver, even as ice grew like a protective shield over his waters. What must it be to live like that? To never need to eat, to never sleep, to be as immortal as the landscape?

I'd taken too long to reply, and he opened his eyes to look sidelong at me, his slot-pupiled gaze bluer than the sky. I flushed and glanced away. "I'm sorry," I said, an automatic reaction. "I know I'm supposed to be talking. I just didn't expect a conversation today."

"I am not offended," he said, sounding amused. Tsirisma Lake shifted, sprawling down on his side next to me with languid decadence. He had powerful legs, with dark hair curling down along his shins. His toenails were as black as hooves.

I did not follow his legs back up. That way dangers lay.

Instead I sighed and lay down on the young grass next to him, lacing my fingers over my chest and looking up at the blue, blue sky, with nary a cloud in sight. "If you'd like to be called something other than the name they give you on the maps, I'd be happy to call you whatever you prefer," I offered, closing my eyes and soaking in the sunlight with him. "My name's Safira."

"Safira," he said, sounding as if he tasted the word. "It has the sound of something whispered late at night, as if it might be found in the rustle of leaves as the wolf passes."

Surprised, I turned to look at him, and found him regarding me with that same look of quiet curiosity. It felt less dangerous than the first time I'd seen the intensity in his eyes. His attention worried me, yes, and I wouldn't forget what he was—but he was also lying here quietly, watering my garden for the sake of having another person exchange words with him. The poetry of his statement would have made me balk from a human man, but in the water-horse's beguiling voice, it didn't have the feel of flirtation. He simply talked like an old book might read, and the things he knew were the wild things around him.

"It means 'blue gem,' I said, flashing a smile at him before looking up at the sky. "My mother liked the way it sounded, I guess. I'm not very blue. Maybe she thought someone would like whispering it to me late at night."

"Names are for the hidden movement of the soul," he said, sounding arch. "The name of an elemental matches his soul entirely, but perhaps instead of claiming such power over one such as me, you might call me Celyn."

I cracked one eyelid and glanced back over at him. His expression didn't change.

"A name like a thundercrack," I offered. "Or perhaps to be cried out across the waters."

He smiled, a slow expression that spread across his entire face. "And yet, it is also the name for the holly that grows prickly and bright in the woods, red berries offering life to winged creatures and death to creeping ones."

I grinned at him, amused. "You're not very red. Maybe we should swap names."

"Did I not say that names speak not to the surface, but to the depths?" Celyn asked, the words amused despite his stoic expression. "I am far more like the holly than a stone."

"Prickly," I said, smirking at him despite myself.

"Deadly," he countered, with a dangerous smile of his own.

It made my heart beat faster, my palms breaking out in sweat, but still I raised one brow and said, "Only if I'm a creeping thing."

He looked puzzled at that, his lips parting and ears shifting. The water-horse pushed himself up, looking down at me with his brows pulled together. "You are the fawn to my wolf, and yet you do not fear me, Safira-who-is-not-blue," he said slowly. "What differs inside your soul? Why are you not like the rest?"

"I do fear you," I said out of surprise, blinking up at him.

Celyn shook his head, a sharp motion. "No," he said. "You are cautious, but you do not fear ." He said the word like it was an awesome force, something more powerful than mere anxiety. "The doe is ever-watchful. When she hears a rustle of wind through low leaves or the snap of a twig underfoot, she believes first that it is the breath and footfall of her predator, and only after may be convinced otherwise." He tilted his head, regarding me from half-lidded eyes, his dense black lashes sweeping low across his ice-blue gaze. "You believe first that I am like you, and only recall afterwards that I am a great power. Why?"

My pulse thudded through my neck and belly, a sensation less like the fear he spoke of and more akin to excitement that bordered on terror. I knew the difference. I had become well-acquainted with fear under the wizard's tutelage.

The question was important. I could feel the way my answer might shape the future, and I stubbornly, stupidly wanted the elemental power looking down at me with his piercing gaze to keep watering my garden. So I thought about it, and gave him the answer as it bubbled up, saying each word with care.

"You haven't offered anyone here harm," I said, pulling out of my memory the few things people had told me about the water-horse of Tsirisma Lake. "You let the wolves and deer alike drink your water. You want someone to talk to you, but only willingly." I paused, my brow furrowing as I looked up at him, lifting a hand to shade my eyes from the sun so I could make out his face without squinting. "I may be a doe, but I know the sound of my wolf's footsteps, and you don't walk like him."

Confusion flickered across Celyn's face, but he lowered himself back down next to me, resettling the hose as he found a comfortable resting position. "You do not fear me, because I am not a wolf?" he asked, sounding uncertain.

"Yeah," I said, trying not to let my thoughts drift back to the wolf I knew so well. "Lots of things are dangerous that aren't wolves, and I've met great powers before." I rolled onto my side to regard him, the grass tickling my skin. "If you're holly, as long as I don't try to pluck your leaves or eat your berries, I'm safe, right? So I'll leave you, um, untouched, and then I don't need to fear what would happen if I, er, ate your berries?" I finished the sentence feeling very awkward indeed. The metaphor had grown somewhat strange the more tortured it became, and the juxtaposition of the idea of eating the water-horse and his very naked condition was making me think things I had no right to think.

Beginning and ending with what a lake in the form of a man might taste like, on a number of equally intriguing axes.

"There is no need to fear if you are a flying creature and I, the holly," he said, meeting my eyes with a strange look in his own. "The deer and the wolves drink at my shore without concern for what soothes their thirst."

"I'm neither wolf nor deer," I said, my skin warming as he took the conversation from metaphorical eating to literal drinking. This was... very strange.

"You named yourself a doe." Celyn watched me, his eyes vivid and mind alien.

"Names are about the soul," I replied, unable to look away.

His full lips curved into a smile, and his lashes swept down as he blinked, freeing me from his alpine gaze. "And so you are a precious gem, and a gentle creature who steps lightly through the woods, yet neither blue nor fearful," he said, leaning his head on his free hand. "And I am something that can be found on a map and a dangerous thing that does not hunt but will kill those that take what is not intended for them, and yet neither unliving nor red."

"Have you killed?" I asked, the words tumbling out before I could think to stop them.

Celyn regarded me with an even expression. "Yes."

I looked at him, then down at the spreading darkness of the wet soil of my garden. "And yet you're watering my garden."

"It is a gift of water, as your words are a gift of solace." When I looked back at him, he smiled, the expression looking easy on his handsome face. "You have taken nothing from me that I have not intended for you, Safira."

The words itched at me, as if he could have planned to keep the rain from falling, even though I knew that was nonsense. Celyn was dangerous and powerful, but he was also lonely and... gentle, I thought, coming slowly to the realization. He watered the creatures of the forest, even as he now watered my garden. Holly feeds the birds and defends itself from the deer, I thought, looking at him .

"Who did you kill?" I asked, though I thought I already knew the answer.

"Those that tried to bind me," he said in that same calm tone, as if we weren't speaking of the deaths of men through the ages. "I am not a tame creature, to bend my head for the bit. Those who sought to put me to plow learned such things to their sorrow, and their bones even now grow algae beneath my waves."

"Good," I said, rolling onto my back to look at the sky once more. "Slavers ought to die at the hands of those they enslave." My voice went hard and bitter as I said the words. I wished that I could have such fantasies about the wizard, but the thought of standing up to him made my blood turn to ice and my bones to water. He deserved to die—but I would never be the one to wield the knife.

"You are not unhappy to hear that I have killed your kind?" Celyn asked, curiosity in his voice again.

A harsh smile twitched at the corner of my mouth. "My kind can be very cruel sometimes." For one moment, the wizard's handsome face flickered into my memory, with his sharp features and alluring smile. Nausea roiled in my gut as I forced the image away, unwilling to face the pain I'd spent so long fleeing. "Sometimes the world is better off when someone dies."

He made a thoughtful sound, but didn't say anything more. After a while, I heard him sitting up; his shadow fell on me. "Your garden is watered, Safira," he said, his voice quiet. When I looked up at him, I saw him staring pensively across the expanse of soil and its clean rows of green plants. He set the hose down on the ground with care, settling it between the blades of grass. "Skip your stone across me when the earth again yearns for what I can grant, and I will answer your call."

Before I could say anything, he stood, shifting as he did into his stallion form. Celyn flicked his tail, the long dark strands hissing through the air, then leaped forward into a gallop, pounding cleanly between two rows of beans before vanishing into the lake without a trace.

I stared at him for a long moment, surprised at the alacrity with which he'd left, then reached down and picked up the end of the hose. The metal was warm from the touch of his skin, and I found myself curling my hand over it where his fingers had rested. A water-horse, watering my garden for the sake of conversation. Your words are a gift of solace.

"Celyn," I murmured to myself, looking down at the broad blue sweep of him. Perhaps it wouldn't be too terrible to be friendly with a great power again. None of the ones I'd known in my old home had stood up to the wizard—but they'd been his friends, first. The friends of a wolf are no more to be trusted than the wolf himself, and Celyn was no wolf. Deadly and dangerous? Oh, yes. I had no doubt that he would kill me if I offered him harm, and I had no intention of touching him and finding out if he could be trusted. A holly tree is only safe from a distance. But a holly tree will only savage those who touch it, and with no malice in its green claws. Perhaps I could trust that.