"Both.". "I want to help stabilize the orchard boundary."
A beat. "You want to help."
"Reluctantly."
Something in her expression shifts — just slightly, almost a smile, caught and put away before it finishes forming. "Why reluctantly?"
"Because it means spending time in proximity to someone who doesn't know when to stay inside." I let that land. "But the land is weakening faster than I can manage from the forest side. The orchard needs warding posts along the northern and eastern lines. Your father placed them years ago. They've failed."
She climbs down from the ladder slowly, studying me the whole way. "And what do you want in return?"
She's quick. There's always a price in her world, and she's already looking for it. "You follow my rules about the forest boundary. No going past the tree line without telling me. No engaging corrupted animals alone."
"Those are very reasonable rules."
"You say that now."
She almost smiles again. "Fine. Where do we start?"
We work the eastern line first. I carry the posts — she made to argue about this and I ignored her — while she manages the satchel of rune supplies. Carved antler fragments packed in salt, dried fortisia wrapped in treated bark, the kind of wards my patron deity taught me in the first years of the bond when I still had the patience for formal instruction.
She watches me carve the activation marks into the first post with an attention that I feel against the side of my face like warmth.
"What language is that?" she asks.
"Old tongue. Pre-settlement."
"Who taught you?"
I drive the post into the earth. "Something that doesn't have a name you'd recognize."
She is quiet for a moment, which is unusual. "The deity," she says. Not a question.
"Yes."
"And it just — taught you? Like a tutor?"
"Like an obligation."
She takes that in with more thoughtfulness than I'd expected. Most people hear deity and either dismiss it or overcomplicate it with reverence. She does neither. She turns it over like something practical, like she's deciding how it fits into what she already knows.
We work in stretches of silence punctuated by her asking questions I answer in varying degrees of completeness, and hercommenting on the state of the orchard soil with a specificity that tells me she knows more about land management than I'd given her credit for. By early afternoon we've covered half the eastern line and I've learned that she spent three years at a vineyard in Pyrthos territory, two years doing harvest labor on the plains, and at least one winter she won't describe in any detail at all.
She catches me watching her hands wrap a charm post and doesn't look away. Most people look away.
"You keep doing that," she says.
"Doing what."
"Looking at me like you're trying to figure something out."
I return my attention to the post. "I'm not accustomed to people who work without complaining."
"That's a very backhanded compliment."
"It wasn't a compliment. It was an observation."
"Those can be the same thing," she says, and goes back to work.
