The living plant tattoos on Briar’s hands and forearms were an especially riotous palette of colour today, thanks to the recent arrival of his shakkan, or miniature tree. He had lots of them back home, all carefully shaped and pruned to store magic or encourage fertility or safety or wealth to a household. People would pay a fortune for them, but his little pine was the only one that was never for sale. He’d stolen it at the age of about ten, and over the years drawn so much power from it (and it from him) that doing so was now practically effortless; the tree was a part of him. He hadn’t realised how low he’d felt without it until it was here, and while its wide, shallow bowl was too cumbersome to carry around with him wherever he went, he could feel his magical connection to it even now, where it sat on a table he’d dragged over to the window of his morningside apartment. He could feel its pleasure as it soaked up the sunlight through the glass. The city was not the best place for it, he knew, but at least it wouldn’t suffer while he worked out where he ought to go next.
In the meanwhile, he was getting to know the green life of Vallo while trying to make at least at least a handful of human connections, which was probably more important. Since he didn’t need much, he was still living off the stipend he’d received (generously, in a former thief's opinion) on arrival, but he’d have to start making a living eventually. Today he was going to some place called Sutton Cottage, the name of which brought to mind a tidy little thatched roof house similar to the place where he’d been allowed to grow into his own power. At the moment, however, he was having trouble getting to it.
He could tell it was magic, and not the nice kind either, but that was about as much as he could tell. All the magic here was so foreign and strange to someone who could usually see it and identify it as easily as one might identify a frying pan or an oak tree or a ten foot wall. All he knew was, once coming through the waypoint (his stomach doing a little flip as it always did when travelling this way) and approaching the treeline, he had the strongest urge to be anywhere else. Once he turned around and backed off far enough, the feeling dissipated just enough to get a grip on himself. After the second attempt he gave up; there was no point trying to fight against a kind of power he had no knowledge of, so instead he moved far enough away that the strange spell no longer had an effect, sent the cottage’s owner a swift message via his electronic device, and settled down against a tree to meditate.
If nothing else, being in Vallo had done nothing but improve his meditation practice; he’d gotten a little lax at home, but a few minutes a day here did wonders to keep his magic at least still and calm when he wasn’t using it, and calmed his mind as well. And out here in the forest there was no need to shield his mind from all the varied and healthy plant life around him; as he sat cross-legged on the ground, the grass grew up towards him until it tickled his knees, and the trees in the circle around his head leaned their branches down to brush against his shoulders.
Edwin wondered, sometimes, if it might not be a good idea to take down the wards of Sutton Cottage, especially if he intended to open the gardens to the public. They had served a purpose in England, where the magical population was small enough that they’d hardly been noticed at all, and where there’d been the Contract to protect. But here, they served no such useful purpose, and the magical population of Vallo was substantial enough that he imagined he’d be spending more time than not taking down the wards, making them more inconvenient than not.
For now, however, the wards would stay up, if only to cut back on the amount of unexpected guests Edwin might receive; the gardens weren’t yet open to the public, Edwin not yet having hired anyone to maintain the gardens yet, the flowerbeds and the maze slowly becoming unkempt.
When he received the text, he made his way to the outskirts of the property, and asked Briar for his full name. Then, standing just passed the warding, he announced, “This is Briar Moss, he is my guest and he is welcome,” to the land, and then turned to Briar. “You should be good to enter now,” he said.
“Thanks ever so,” Briar said, getting up. As he did so, the trees above him retreated back up towards the sky, and the grasses flattened reluctantly in his wake. “That’s some strong go-away spells you’ve set up about the place,” he added, by way of making conversation. “You got a big vault of treasure or something that needs guarding?” Not that he was in the least interested in treasure. Any more. Mostly.
“If I had a big vault of treasure, you can be assured I wouldn’t just go telling anyone who asked,” Edwin said dryly, making his way back onto the property, assuming that Briar would follow. “But no, that’s not it. The previous owner was wary of visitors, and she put the wards in place. I’ve been debating whether or not I should drop them or not. I’ve not been able to determine whether or not I’ll be able to put them back up again, once I let them down.”
The spells themselves had been placed on the seeds of the trees, and had grown in strength as the trees had grown. If he didn’t remove the spells in a way that kept them in tact, he didn’t think he’d be able to rebuild them should they prove necessary.
The rose gardens came into view now, beautiful even in the state of wildness they’d been permitted to fall into since Sutton Cottage had appeared in Vallo. “Why don’t you tell me a little of your magic?”
Briar couldn’t help but be a little distracted by the view, both physical and magical. He’d seen hundreds of wonderful gardens, from the most humble local vegetable patches to the cultivated rose garden of the Yanjing Emperor himself, but there was something about an overgrown garden that made his heart flutter. His fingers itched to work on it. His magic sank into rich damp earth and the roots of rose bushes and raced in loops around an untidy hedge maze, all the plants emanating a magic that was not just their own. It was fascinating. He drew his magical vision back just in time to catch the tail end of the question. “Ah - yes, right.” He brought his focus back to the human world. “I’m an ambient mage. It means… I can’t do spells, or things out of books. My power only works with green things.” He hesitated over this simplified explanation. “Or things that were green; dried herbs, stuff made out of wood. Cotton.” He patted his new mage kit which he had ordered specially, made of pure cotton fibres; it was not the same as something woven by his foster sister Sandry, but he was more confident in it keeping his things safely contained than any of the premade bags he had seen in shops, made with materials he didn’t even recognise. “It’s more useful than it sounds,” he added, uncharacteristically clumsy with words with the temptation of such an enticing project so near. Even without magic, it was a gardeners dream. “Is it only you here?” he asked, glancing around. “It’s a big place.” Not much like Discipline cottage at all, in fact.
“I think it sounds very useful,” Edwin said, already intrigued; magic without study sounded dangerous, in the wrong hands, but it also sounded fascinating. The magic of his own world required quite a lot of study; no one would describe it as ‘intuitive,’ he thought. “My own magic – the magic from my world, rather – binds better with plantlife. For instance, if I wanted to cast a sleep spell, I might place the spell on tea leaves and then drink the tea that was brewed from it, or if someone were to cast a warding spell, they might cast it on the seeds of trees.” As was evident. “It isn’t limited to plant life by any means, though, if your magic works on stuff such as cotton or wood,” presumably paper, certain types of ink…countless other things. He wondered how, exactly, Briar’s magic could manipulate such things, “then I suspect you likely get more use out of your magic than most people might expect.
“I am the only one here though,” Edwin answered, the corners of his lips tugging slightly downward. “At least, if you don’t count Sir Robin and Addie. Back home, the staff had mostly lived here as well.” And he’d hoped that eventually Robin, and perhaps his sister, might have moved in as well; Robin had recently begun the work of selling his family’s London home with the intention of downgrading, and Edwin had hoped… “But here and now, it’s only me.”
Briar was about to say that it must be a lonely sort of situation, the only one in a big house like this, but he sensed it might be rather a sore subject, so he changed tack. “Better than in the city, any road,” he said. “Too much noise, too much light in the middle of the night. I don’t know how people sleep.” He stretched on his toes to try and see the maze; the Empress of Namorn had a fine hedge maze and he couldn’t help but wonder how it would compare. “So that’s what the magic on the plants here is?” he asked, furiously curious. “Warding magic? I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Oh, I think you’ll find the country can be just as loud as the city, especially with the birds screaming outside your window at the crack of dawn,” Edwin said, dryly. Though, Vallo was much louder than the London he remembered: cars were still new, and something that still only the relatively rich owned, loud music didn’t spill from the clubs at all hours of the night, sirens didn’t pierce the air, screaming as first responders made their way to their respective emergencies. And he imagined the streetlights and bright billboards kept anyone without proper blinds up at all hours.
“I don’t know all the details,” he admitted. “I’d been working my way through the previous owner's journals when I was brought here, and her journals haven’t followed me. I know that they used magic to have them grow faster, and the wards were placed on the seeds of the trees and the hedges and encouraged to grow as they did.” He hadn’t missed Edwin trying to catch a glimpse of the hedges over the low hill. “Would you like to see it? The hedge maze, I mean.”
Briar winced to himself. “Birds are normal noises,” he clarified. He’d take screeching birds any day over the unnatural sounds of the city. “And my sister once raised a starling from a baby, those things are loud, trust me.” He listened intently to the explanation. “Perhaps I could help you figure it out,” he said, with boundless optimism. “I can usually tell when magic’s in things, especially plants - even if it’s kinds I’m not used to.” He grinned. “I’d love to see the maze, as a matter of fact.”
“I don’t doubt it. We’ve starlings back home as well, though luckily, my sister isn’t the type to ever try to take care of one.” His sister wasn’t exactly the type to ever take care of anything living; if she ever had children, Edwin could say with absolute confidence that she was likely to hire a nanny instead of taking care of the unpleasant aspects of child-rearing herself.
“I would be interested in hearing your opinion though,” Edwin said, cresting the small hill; the maze came into view, still spectacular despite its recent neglect, the yew overgrown but still holding its shape. There was a deeply unpleasant feeling on seeing it, nestled in his stomach – the last time he’d entered the hedge maze, it had nearly killed him, and while he knew that that wouldn’t happen again now that Sutton Cottage was his, he hadn’t entered it again. “It’s holly the deeper into the maze you get,” Edwin said. “Don’t ask me why. Perhaps because holly hurts a great deal more when it’s out to kill you.”
“I like that.” Briar grinned rather nastily. “I have these seed balls we use as weapons - it’s mostly briars -” he made a self-congratulatory sort of hand gesture - “cos they’re brutal when they grow right through you, but maybe I should look into adding holly too.” It’d be harder to get it to grow upright, he thought, but that was a thought experiment for another time. His magic raced through the network of roots underground to inspect the maze both physically and magically. He could feel the curses on it; once again it was hardly magic he was familiar with, but he could at least tell what it was designed to do based on how the plants in them and around them felt. “It’s mean,” he said, still grinning; this sort of thing was right up his street.
"You'd like it less if you were on the receiving end, I'm sure," Edwin said dryly. Honestly, the young man seemed only too eager about the whole thing, which made Edwin hesitate, but then, he hardly wanted someone squeamish about it tending to them. He didn't think Mrs. Sutton had had any magicians on her gardening staff, but she'd also had a garden famous country-wide to bring in revenue and a respectful inheritance to go along with it, and could afford to hire an entire pack of gardeners to tend her flower beds and hedges. Edwin wasn't nearly so well-off here in Vallo that he could afford an entire team of people, and an affinity for the plants, and for what they could accomplish, seemed necessary.
"This is a very old magical property; the lands will protect me and mine, and will do their best to prevent the death of any guests on the property, and in return they ask to be cared for to the best of my ability. The best of my ability is turning their care over to someone with more experience in the matter, but I cannot promise that they will be kind to you if you do not extend the same courtesy. Does this sound like something you would be interested in and capable of?"
“Yes to both,” Briar said, his fingers already itching. “I think I’d better do it the long way though - no magic - in case I mess up the spells that are already there. It might take a while.” Not that he would have any objection to that himself by any means - the air smelled gloriously clean out here, and the plant life all around him was soothing even with the death curses lurking under the earth.
Edwin frowned, taking a look at the grounds again, this time through the lens of having a single gardener who would tend all of it without the use of magic. It seemed a Herculean task. “It seems an awful lot of work,” he said, hesitant. “But you might be right. I believe the only magicians the previous owner had were in her household staff; it may be safer to do it the regular way. Do you think I’ll need to take on more help, or can you handle it?”
“I can handle it,” Briar said, with confidence. “So long as you aren’t on a tight deadline. It’d be my pleasure, actually.” The gardens were like a tangled ball of thread, itching to be unwoven and set to rights. “I know I look like a kid, but I’ve been knee deep in dirt for the last eight years or so, and I reckon I can handle myself if any of those spells go wild for whatever reason, too. You wouldn’t want to hire the best gardener in the world if he was just gonna get holly-fied the first time he trips a wire.” He shrugged. “Metaphorically.”
“No, there’s no deadline,” Edwin said. “I’m sure there’s little risk of the spells ‘going wild,’ I would hope. Generally, magical properties do not like it when a visitor dies on the grounds, despite whatever impression the spells might give.” They were, in fact, an anomaly, and Flora would have had to have been a powerful magician indeed to have put them in place despite the ground’s natural objection to them. “But that is a comfort nevertheless; it’s hard to know exactly how magic might react to a place like Vallo, which is so saturated in so many different types of magic.”
He frowned. “I will not be able to pay you much before we start getting visitors, I’m afraid, but if you would like, I’d be more than willing to offer you a room. The place is large enough that we need not encroach on one another’s privacy; the servant’s wing is far from the master bedroom.”
It wasn’t much of an offer, especially when Vallo offered free housing as a matter of course, but Briar had mentioned that he didn’t particularly enjoy the city, so perhaps that might appeal even if the promise of low initial pay wouldn’t.
Briar looked over at him, surprised but pleased. He might have done the garden for free, living expenses be damned, not that he would ever say so out loud - he was enthusiastic, not an idiot. The prospect of getting out of the city was more than he might have hoped for. “I’d be happy to accept,” he said, and offered his hand to seal the deal. If he was going to have to stay here indefinitely - which seemed more and more likely to be the case - he may as well live somewhere he could actually breathe.