Every spring, the Lord of the Wood is honoured with a bridal ceremony.
Rated M – raunchy but not explicit – and about 10k, M/M.
Fantasy, humour, and a little romance! A trans dressmaker is embroiled in the strange schemes of a local deity, and he lets himself be carried away with the tide.
This story is light-hearted throughout but the characters are dreadful: content warnings include a trans man being outed in a public situation (he doesn’t find it traumatic), and implied transphobia, fatphobia, racism in anti-Romani sentiment, and homophobia. Again, all is mildly taken and non-traumatic, but it’s present nonetheless.
“I don’t see why we couldn’t just drive,” muttered Rosalyn, and Pothos laughed under his breath, tipping her chin up so that he could get a better look at the skin under her eyes, examining it carefully before he put his brush through the powder in his palette, delicately brushing it underneath. She didn’t fidget as much as the other girls, which was a small mercy, and for all the carthorses towing their caravan were large, they moved smoothly.
She was a delicate thing, prim and built like a doll with short limbs and porcelain features, and her huge, ruffled skirt made her look even smaller.
Of the four girls in the caravan, she was the one that Pothos thought likely to rank last – not that his lordship actually produced a leaderboard, but he’d studied the notes Mrs Carpathian made each spring, and he rather thought he had a good understanding of his preferences by now.
“We would be able to drive about halfway in a car,” explained Pothos, noticing that while the others hadn’t said anything, they all looked to him keenly as they kept on going. “The Forest is a place replete and overflowing with ambient magic – even an enchantment-electric set-up would likely be overloaded with the charge, and I’m afraid a car without a battery wouldn’t be much use.”
“Have you been an attendant for an awfully long time, Pothos?” asked Roberta, a tall woman with strong cheekbones – he couldn’t decide if she’d rank second or third. He liked her dress, but not for the occasion: it was an a-line thing with a round neck and a tight skirt, and he knew just by looking at her that she was going to struggle when it came to the dance.
“I’m not an attendant I’m afraid, Miss – his lordship’s retinue call on me each spring to help you young ladies dress and make up your faces. I’m afraid I can’t claim any loyalty to his lordship particularly. I’m grateful for his regular employment of his services more than I am his godly virtues affecting my garden to bloom, as I own two cacti precisely, and my thumbs are more black than green, but I’ve been repairing the priestesses’ dresses for nine years, and assisting the spring dance for six.”
“Do the priestesses’ dresses need a lot of repair?” asked Cariad.
She was the one Pothos would bet his money on taking his lordship’s crown of snowdrops and catmint. A plump girl of above-average height, she filled out her dress very nicely, and through the lace finishing that came loose from the caps at her shoulders, one could see the heavy muscle in her arms – she was a baker by occupation, and his lordship well-loved in a woman to see the signs of how she spent her days. She struck Pothos as almost painfully innocent, so much so that he almost couldn’t believe she wasn’t putting on an act of being the naïf, but that would only work in her favour.
“I’m afraid they get torn on all sorts of things, Miss,” said Pothos with measured neutrality in his tone, and he rather enjoyed the primness of Cariad’s o-shaped lips, her head tilting to the side as the other girls laughed. It wasn’t tremendously obvious – she did have a measure of subtlety in her work – but it was artfully done, he felt.
The last of the four was at first glance a simple looking girl – she was beautiful in a simple way, beautiful like a statue – her plump lips had a neat curve to them, her cheeks were round, her eyes deep set and dark. She didn’t speak much, but when she spoke her voice had a beautiful ring to it, like a distantly pealing bell.
He was biased in her favour, being as he’d designed her dress – it was a peplos dyed in a deep purple, fresh flowers embroidered last night through the shoulder, and against the deep brown of her skin, they looked very fine. He wanted her to win, even though he didn’t think she would.
“I imagine they’re rather pleased to give you the work,” Penelope said. “Or at least, pleased to have had the satisfaction of making it.”
Pothos laughed, and dusted the last of the blush onto Rosalyn’s cheeks. Rosalyn was sitting up straight, her hands folded in her lap, and when Pothos turned the mirror toward her, she smiled.
“Why must you come with us?” asked Roberta.
“Sorry to have me here?” asked Pothos, and Roberta grinned at him, making him laugh. “I don’t wish to make you ladies nervous, but I’m here to attend in the case that anybody has a wardrobe malfunction or makes their makeup run.”
“Does his lordship make a lot of young ladies cry?” asked Rosalyn, somewhat nervously, and Pothos gently chucked her chin, his thumb pressing very slightly to keep from smudging his work.
“I shouldn’t worry about it,” he said goodnaturedly. “It doesn’t happen every year.”
Yes, it did.
“And there are three parts to it? To the contest?” asked Cariad, and Pothos chuckled.
“What has Mrs Carpathian told you?”
“That there are three rounds,” said Rosalyn. “A dance, first, and then a conversation. And then she said that the last of the rounds is when he makes his selection, and that it’s tailored to the mood of the evening.”
“In short, everything she told us has been very vague,” said Penelope dryly.
“And you think I might give you more precise advice?” asked Pothos.
“I think we were hoping so,” said Penelope, and Pothos leaned back in his seat, resting one hand over his belly.
He knew he looked good when they saw him – it was part of why they kept assuming he was more important than he was. He always dressed his best for the Lord of the Wood’s spring wedding, and today was no exception: he was dressed in one of his most finely tailored suits, the jacket cropped at the waist, the shirt worn open to show the shape of his neck and the pendants resting in the hollow of his collarbone. The waistcoat he was wearing was of a fae-woven gold thread, and when one stood under the sun in it, the vines and leaves embroidered in it moved and shifted as though still growing, and cinched to show how narrow his waist was.
It was very good business, when they saw him so well-dressed and collected – of the thirty spring brides he’d attended to these past years, twenty of them had been in contact for repairs or additions, and six of them had commissioned wholly new additions to their wardrobe.
He always liked to make his arse look good too – the Lord of the Wood’s weddings always led to a horny audience, and he liked to come out of it with a few dates.
“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” he said mildly, “but I’m afraid I’ll stay in the caravan while you four take part in the ceremonies. There should be five of you, of course, but I’m afraid Lavinia, your counterpart, was taken ill and couldn’t join us.”
“You’ll stay in here?” asked Cariad. “Won’t you even come and watch?”
Pothos gave her a small smile. “I hope I don’t hurt your feelings, Miss, when I tell you that young ladies cavorting through the flowers is rather the opposite of what I’m interested in. I’ll be in here if any of you need me, today and tomorrow. Wake me in the middle of the night if it pleases you – I’m here to serve.”
When they arrived, Pothos got out of the caravan first, pulling out the stepladder so that he could help each of the young women down, particularly Rosalyn, whose short legs were hardly made for coming out of a big cart like this one.
The wagon had come to rest under a canopy of rambling roses that grew around a frame for the horses, and as Pothos escorted the young ladies to the little morning tent erected for them before they walked the quarter of a mile down into the valley, where they could rest and eat something.
The dawn would still not break for another half an hour, and the wood was dark but not forebodingly so – lights were strung between each of the boughs, creating a well-lit little marketplace. Already, Pothos could see people milling about – there were the priests and priestesses of the nearby wood temples, of course, ones dedicated both to the Lord of the Wood and the minor nymphs and spirits that made their domain here and in the surrounding area; there were market hawkers ready to sell their wares to the spectators, spun sugar and edible flowers, popcorn, and all things of that nature; the people from the nearby villages hadn’t come out yet, but they would begin to come through in the next hour or so, accumulating in the stands around the clearing.
Pothos didn’t like to watch the ceremonies themselves – he’d watched the first year he’d come to offer his services, and he’d always found them strangely brutal.
The Lord of the Wood was a capricious thing – every spring he selected a bride from the surrounding area with whom he would usher in the new year, and through her his good will was spent. He’d seen the new brides, each of them: they all but glowed with the Lord’s spirit coursing through them, eyes shining like beacons, flowers blooming where they walked.
It was quite the honour, Pothos was informed, although he imagined one would have to invest a great deal of money in relaying one’s carpets if one had them, which he did, and he was very fond of them.
He chose from five women – four this year – and the choosing was a strange and cold-hearted thing, it seemed to him. Maybe he was biased, not being used to the English paganism himself. The dance seemed forthright enough, not complicated so much as long, but after that came what Mrs Carpathian called a conversation, and what Pothos thought might be called more accurately a steel of wills.
He’d had conversations with Hellenist priests in one temple or another, and when he’d reached his age of majority – twenty – and was old enough to vote, he’d met Lord Dionysus at a temple dinner. He’d been young and starry-eyed, but he’d still held his own quite well in the conversation, and Lord Dionysus had even given him a charm that he still kept hanging in his bedroom window at home, a wine purple droplet of gemstone that painted the walls a dappled red in bright sun.
One always had to conduct oneself carefully with any divinity, Pothos had been taught, but at least the ones he pledged himself to were straightforward enough – they played with you, but they didn’t outright lie or try to trap you unless you’d already done something wrong, and they certainly didn’t try to reduce you to tears, like the Lord of the Wood did his brides.
Each conversation Pothos had witnessed between Lord and would-be bride had been more upsetting than the last, and he’d only seen two of them in their entirety, given that he’d kept having to go and fix the last one’s makeup.
It was meant to be a back-and-forth, a dance for two instead of the group dance: they matched his every step around the circle, and for every barb or word he aimed at them, they were meant to reply. He’d say the most dreadful things Pothos had ever heard to the poor girls contesting for his favour – insult their appearances, their minds, their clothes, their families, and he always seemed to know exactly what would hurt them most.
There were different methods Mrs Carpathian had said she’d seen over the two decades or so she’d presided over the event – you could be extraordinarily humble, thank the Lord for every insult as though it were a compliment and curtsey for each of them, or reply that each of them was a compliment in truth; you could ignore them or pick out a small piece of each statement to misinterpret and discuss; if you were very brave, you could insult his lordship in kind.
Mrs Carpathian said she was under the impression that his lordship liked the women that did that best, but that you had to be of strong stuff to manage it.
The women selected were usually twenty or twenty-one, new debutantes for each year – there could easily be older women, but he was under the impression that the committee’s selection was a hotly political affair, and had as much to do with the popularity of each girl’s parents than it did their qualities – and most of them couldn’t stand to insult a spirit like him to his face.
She’d called it “a painfully English affair” once – Mrs Carpathian herself was a Breton – but she said there was no sense in tilting at windmills.
The final part was, depending on how you looked at it, the most or least mysterious: a wooden cabin papered with flowers and ivy, roofed with tree branches, was carried into the centre of the clearing, and into it stepped his lordship. One by one, the brides would step inside with him – sometimes for as little as a few minutes, sometimes for as long as half an hour – and emerge again.
Sometimes, they would emerge tearful and infuriated; other times, they would come out with their clothes ruffled and their lips bruised from kissing; sometimes, they came out with no marks on them at all.
These latter, according to Mrs Carpathian, were winners more often than not.
“Did they give you any trouble?” asked the lady in question as Pothos walked back toward the caravan, and he offered her his arm. She curled her hand around his elbow, leaning into him. She was a big-boned woman with strong muscle on her, tall – she was an archer and he’d seen her speed on horseback – and when she leaned into him the side of her jaw touched against the top of his head.
“Not at all, they were remarkably well-behaved, all four of them, although it did seem strange for me to be in with four instead of five. As I recall, young Miss Picard had the most complex dress, what with all the petals woven through the lace. I rather feel I’m missing out on attending to it.”
“I’ll tell her that,” said Mrs Carpathian. “It will add to her soreness.”
“Do I detect a level of sadism in your voice, Mrs Carpathian?”
“Being ill on the morning she’s to present herself to the Lord of the Wood,” Mrs Carpathian said scathingly, clucking her tongue. “It’s a disgrace.”
“I doubt she’s sick just to spite him.”
“More’s the pity,” she said. “If she’d done it to spite him I might respect it.”
Mrs Carpathian stood in the doorway of the caravan as he pushed the doors open wider, climbing the stepladder and unhooking the latter half of the roof, pushing it up so that when he sat in his armchair to sew he could work by the sun.
“At home in a caravan, aren’t you?” asked Mrs Carpathian.
“Want to toss in a racial epithet while you’re at it?” asked Pothos evenly.
“Did I say anything?” asked Mrs Carpathian with a sort of smug smile, and he rolled his eyes, hooking his foot around the armchair’s foot and pulled it into where the light would land. The driver had already tugged the horse away and the caravan was resting on bricks to keep it static.
“You remind me of a teacher I had at school,” said Pothos idly, pushing open the chest pinned in its place and taking out the dress he’d been working on earlier that morning, setting it on the chair ready for him to work on.
“Oh?” asked Mrs Carpathian.
“Yes,” said Pothos. “My sister and I, she used to make us open our bookbags before we went home every evening, make sure we hadn’t stolen anything.”
“And had you?” asked Mrs Carpathian.
“You’ve been in his lordship’s service too long,” said Pothos.
“Who is it you’re pledged to?” asked Mrs Carpathian.
“I’m not pledged to anybody,” said Pothos. “But I wear symbols of Hestia, Hecaterus, and the Charities. There are other icons in the house, of course, and the shop.”
“Not Hermaphroditus?” asked Mrs Carpathian, not as archly as he knew she was capable of, and he leaned on the fenced balcony at the end of the caravan, looking down at her. Perhaps he’d be upset, if he wasn’t used to the occasional little barb, or indeed if this was still the start of their relationship, but he’d known her for nearly fifteen years, now.
“First you start on my blood and my family,” said Pothos, resting his chin on his hands, “and now you start at my gender. One begins to wonder, Mrs Carpathian, if the insults are really about me at all.”
She crossed her arms over her chest, looking away from him and to the growing market. Her lips thinned.
“He’s going to be angry,” she said. “Worse than angry – he’s going to fuss.”
“What does fuss mean?”
“You are English?” she demanded, which with her thick, Breton accent was funny more than insulting.
He gave her a flat look. “Yes, I know what the wordmeans – I’m asking what you mean by saying it in this context. Say what you like about the pantheon to which I’m “pledged” to, Mrs Carpathian, but no divinity enshrined in my household fusses.”
“I don’t believe that,” she said snootily, and he huffed out a laugh. “He likes to have five,” she said. “It should be five – it’s always been five.”
“You haven’t another volunteer to draft in?”
“I’ve tried,” she muttered. “There aren’t as many applicants as there used to be, you know, and the others from this year are quite unsuitable. We struggled to pick five of them.”
“Will the sky fall if you pick one of last year’s rejects?”
“Probably,” she muttered coolly, and amusedly, he shook his head.
“Seems you’re in a pickle, then,” he said. “I can’t say I envy you.”
“Will you fix up one if we find her?”
“I can do her make-up,” said Pothos. “If you get back to me in the next twenty minutes with a girl and the right dress I might tailor it to her before the proceedings start. I’m afraid I can’t do much more than that. Are you frightened?”
“Frightened?” she asked, seeming surprised by the question, and she considered it a moment. “No,” she decided. “No, he doesn’t harm anybody – he doesn’t have it in him.”
He didn’t have it in him to hold back a snort of derision. “I think he rather does.”
“Oh, tears and hurt feelings aren’t harm,” she said dismissively. “You don’t get to admire a rose and complain of the thorns it pricks you with. But he might refuse to go ahead with it.”
Fascinated, he leaned forward, resting his hands on the posts. “Refuse? What, and not have a bride at all? Won’t all the farms and flowers wither away in the vicinity?”
“Not entirely,” she said. “But they certainly won’t be abundant, and we’ll all suffer for the loss – it’s more than just that, anyway. There’s a community pride in attending to him, a shared benefit, a shared reward.”
“I wish you luck, then,” he said.
Mrs Carpathian looked at him suspiciously, which he didn’t take personally – Mrs Carpathian was suspicious by nature, and he supposed it served her well. “Do you mean it?”
“Of course. His lordship is no patron of mine, but I live on his land and I pay him the tithe he’s owed, when the collectors come. I might not worship him, but that isn’t to say I don’t respect him or your worship of him.”
She gave him a funny look. “I don’t think I’ll ever understand you, Mr Hearn.”
“I don’t think I want you to, Mrs Carpathian,” he said pleasantly. “I’ll bring the girls their slippers in a moment – get them to take their shoes off, would you? Especially that Cariad. She’s in her wellies, and they don’t exactly match her white lace dress.”
Snorting and shaking her head, Mrs Carpathian bustled along the walkway, and he heard her barking orders as she moved amongst the crowd.
* * *
Two hours later, each of his lordship’s spring brides had had their shoes replaced with ribboned slippers not dissimilar to ballet shoes, and had been carried in procession in litters carried by some of the local farmers, each of them burly men and women, down into the clearing proper.
Pothos was leaning back in his armchair, which normally sat in the office of his storefront in Yeovil proper, and was hand sewing pearls into a bridal skirt. He didn’t do wedding dresses very often – he was generally more interested in making pieces that would be used for multiple occasions and outings, and he only did wedding addresses for families interested in a proper heirloom – but this one was a pleasant challenge, and he didn’t mind that it was dull, fiddly work. He found this sort of thing meditative.
It was a nice day, his jacket set aside so that he was only sat with his waistcoat over his sleeves, and the sun trickled warm over his arms and down his chest, made him feel like a snake basking on a rock without sweating.
He was distantly, vaguely aware that a century or so ago, most of his ancestors would have used caravans like this, with wood-fronted things and inset furniture. The caravan was beautiful to look at it, theatrical, and was two or three hundred years old – the paint on it was green and pink instead of what he would think was a more traditional red and gold, but it was certainly beautiful, and he appreciated that every spring the temple took some of his own furniture to put in it, so that he’d feel at home for the two days.
This caravan might not compare to his Aunt Mercy’s still impeccably appointed vardo, which took his breath away whenever he saw it drawn up by her horse, Cabbage, but it was beautiful.
Most of his cousins’ caravans were nice in their own right – for one, they had electricity, which he sometimes missed sitting in the wagon like this. Certainly, every year he didn’t miss faffing about with the oil lamps if he wanted to keep sewing once the sun had gone down, or comfort any of the crying girls worried it would hurt their chances if they went to the priestesses, but it was only two days a year.
He was smiling to himself as he sewed, remembering how he used to get excited whenever they were coming through and would settle on the orchard for a few weeks, as much as it always led to arguments – about religion, about space, about cleanliness, about rules, about clothes, about everything but apples, and sometimes, those too.
It was funny, how remembering his mother and aunts shouting at one another made him feel strangely homesick, but it did – he remembered how any of them could say the coldest, cruellest things while smiling sweetly at one another, and how any of them would cool over as soon as one of them walked over, cupping any child’s cheeks and telling them to go play or to go eat.
It served a man very well in tailoring, to learn to wield one’s tongue and one’s temper like that.
“There’s going to be trouble,” said Sam. He had come to stand at the foot of the wagon’s steps, and he was holding a newspaper under his arm, scowling out at the marketplace. More and more spectators were arriving, filtering down the path and into the Forest, and Pothos raised an eyebrow.
Sam was a good lad, big and rippling with muscle – he was more at home mucking out the horses than driving them, and just to look at him Pothos could see how uncomfortable he was in the ridiculous uniform the priestesses forced him into every year, picking and plucking at the braces keeping the trousers up to his waist. He and Pothos had had a roll in the hay more than once over the years, and Pothos half thought Sam’s favourite part of it was taking off his clothes.
“Something awful in the paper?”
Sam glanced down at the paper in his hand, then shook his head. “Nay, not in’t paper. With his lordship, I mean. There’s going to be trouble, don’t you doubt it.”
“How could I?”
“He won’t stand for four ‘stead of five.”
“They haven’t found a fifth, then?”
Sam shook his head, clucking his tongue disapprovingly. “There’ll be trouble,” he said again.
As he was finishing the last word, the whole caravan shook as the ground rumbled, and Pothos cursed as he shoved his needle through his finger: immediately, he wrenched his hand away from the cloth in his lap – a bit of torn thread could be replaced, but there was nothing so awful as getting blood out of white fabric.
“You alright?” asked Sam.
“Put this skirt in that chest for me, would you?” asked Pothos, and as Sam hauled himself up to do as he said, Pothos put his hand in the basin to one side. He’d shoved the needle right into the flesh of his middle finger, luckily at such an angle that it went through the soft flesh instead of going down toward the nerve and bone, and he wrinkled his nose as he pulled the needle out, washing it under the flow of the tap.
“Is it very bad?” asked Sam.
“No, it’s only a needle. Could have been worse with the stitch unpicker.” Sam wrinkled his nose, and Pothos grinned to himself, rubbing his thumb over his bleeding finger as it stayed under the water, waiting for the tiny wound to scab. “The first aid kit’s on that shelf there, would you just get me a plaster?”
“You need one?” Sam asked, but didn’t hesitate in obeying.
“It’s going to be an awkward scab and I’ll keep ripping it off. I hate to wear a thimble.”
With the plaster in place, Pothos pulled the caravan’s roof down, closing the backdoors.
The ground had stopped quaking, but there was an impossible, rageful noise coming from further down the valley, and Pothos and Sam shared a look.
“Trouble,” said Sam, with more caution than triumph.
“Trouble is right,” said Pothos, picking up his emergency case – it contained another first aid kit, some sewing supplies, and a great deal of make-up – and stepping onto the path. “Come on.”
They walked under archways of rambling roses down into the valley, where a wide ring of well-trodden grass and flowers had been marked around with little round stones, and tall wooden stands had been erected that went into the treeline, with more balconies and viewing platforms in the trees themselves, which were very tall. The clearing was appointed in such a way that above them the canopy was round, and only a perfectly round disc in the centre let in the summer light – tomorrow afternoon, when the sun was directly overhead, the winning bride would be bathed in golden light, and the Lord of the Wood would come to embrace her.
If it went ahead, that was.
The Lord of the Wood did not ordinarily, to Pothos, look like a deity – he looked no different to most forest nymphs and some fae he’d ever seen – but today, Pothos rather saw what everyone meant.
He was unusually tall for a man, but not so much so that it seemed inhuman – he was six five or six, with strong, heavy muscles but a strangely lean, straight figure, like an oak. His skin was the same brown as an oak too, with grey undertones to it, but it was smooth and free of markings – his long, dark waves of hair hung loose around his shoulders, and through it grew pieces of ivy and sprouted a natural crown of oak leaves, and the tunic was made of woven moss and twine rope, his bare feet stained from the grass.
He was raging in a way Pothos had never seen. The Lord of the Wood’s glassy eyes, normally as brown as the rest of him, were glowing a dangerous gold that looked more at home in a blacksmith’s forge than a forest, and when he shouted it made every tree in the vicinity quake and shift, the stands stuttering.
“… only four!” he roared. As he paced, Pothos noted the singed marks his feet left in the grass.
Mrs Carpathian, to her credit, was not even flinching as he shouted at her, but Pothos could see that he was as tense as a bowstring, her shoulders stiff.
“Do you do this to insult me?” demanded the Lord of the Wood.
“No, lord—”
“That’s worse, then!” he immediately interrupted her, eyes ablaze. “I might respect an insult!”
Pothos suppressed the slight smile that threatened to pull at his lips, and he moved smoothly over to the four maidens waiting for the ceremony, the fifth seat between Rosalyn and Cariad looking devastatingly empty. They were each sat on stools much like the ones you saw at the bar in pubs, with a little back and set of arms for them to lean on.
Rosalyn was already teary-eyed, trying her best not to let them fall, and Cariad was watching his lordship pace and shout with her eyes wide and her lips pressed together in a distantly fearful expression that Pothos was quite certain, in this case, was not manufactured at all. Roberta and Penelope were faring better, Penelope sitting straight with her expression calculatedly neutral, Roberta with a slight frown on her lips, but Pothos could see that they were ill-at-ease, too.
“Not to worry, ladies,” he said gently, taking a handkerchief from his pocket and delicately wiping at the base of Rosalyn’s eyes. “I’m sure Mrs Carpathian will sort it all out for you.”
He noticed that a tiny piece of Cariad’s skirt had come unloosed from its place on her waistband, and he knelt to unbuckle his case, taking out a white spool of thread and a needle.
“I’ve never seen him shout before,” whispered Rosalyn, and then flinched when his lordship shouted a few choice words that vibrated with magical power, sending them thrumming through each of their chests.
“Nor have I,” said Pothos evenly. “Has a tremendous set of pipes on him, doesn’t he?”
Rosalyn stared at him in baffled shock, but it at least got a weak smile out of Roberta and a slight uplifting of Penelope’s lips; Cariad, focused entirely on the Lord of the Wood, didn’t seem to have heard.
He touched her arm. “Lean the other way, would you? I’m going to repair this little tear for you.”
“Do I need to take it off?”
“No, just stay still so I don’t poke you,” said Pothos with a comforting smile, and Cariad nodded, leaning the other way. Pothos leaned in to work – it only took two or three neat little stitches, but it should keep the skirt in place for the rest of the day’s proceedings, and he checked the waistband for more.
Fucking horrid dress that it was, he supposed he shouldn’t be surprised it was poorly made as well.
“Lean forward, Cariad,” he said, and as she did, he sat on the empty stool so that he could get behind her, putting three more stitches through the other miniscule tear. He had tuned out the shouting quite naturally, for all its supernatural volume, and he didn’t realise it had stopped until he tore the end of the stitch up and sat up.
The silence in the clearing was thick and oppressive, and he froze like a rabbit in headlights, his needle still in hand, as he glanced at the girls looking at him, all four of them, before looking forward.
The Lord of the Wood was stood stock still, lips pressed together, and his fiery eyes were so fiery now that he was fairly certain he could see smoke, actual smoke, coming out of his ears.
Pothos swallowed.
“I do beg your pardon, lord,” he said, hurriedly stepping down from the stool and crouching to put his needle and thread away, hoping it might be read as genuflection. “I was only—”
“Get up,” said the Lord of the Wood, striding rapidly forward, and Pothos got to his feet, stepping closer to him even though every one of his instincts was politely and urgently advising that it would be better to run away. He grabbed hold of Pothos by the side of his neck to haul him forward, and Pothos shuddered at the impossible heat of his hand, at the heat that radiated from his body as Pothos was dragged closer. “Who are you?”
“My name is Pothos Hearn, lord,” he said. “I take care of their wardrobes.”
“Wardrobes?” repeated the Lord of the Wood, and Pothos found he couldn’t look right into his eyes, because they blazed too brightly to be looked at directly. He stared instead at the Lord’s mouth, at his sharp teeth, his red, red tongue.
“Mr Hearn dresses the brides each year and does their makeup, lord,” said Mrs Carpathian. “He— He isn’t in service to the temple, he—”
“He pays his tithe,” snapped the Lord of the Wood, and gripped Pothos by the hair pushing his head back as if to look at him more closely. His fingers didn’t feel quite so hot as they trailed down the side of his jaw, touching his chin and tilting his head to the other side. “Don’t you?”
“Yes, lord,” said Pothos. “I live on the road to Mudford Sock.”
“How long have you painted my brides’ faces for?”
“Six years, lord.”
“You painted the ones with ivy and flowers?”
Pothos blinked, lips parting, closing. They got brides like that, ones who insisted on having real face paint or simply having complex designs, and a few years ago, a girl with a tattoo on her cheek of hearts had made the committee furious when she’d refused to have it covered up with makeup. Pothos had liked her, Gerry – she’d won that year, too.
“I do whatever the brides ask me, lord,” said Pothos. “The temple hires me, but I style the brides as they wish to be styled, whatever that might entail.”
“This one,” said the Lord of the Wood to Mrs Carpathian.
Mrs Carpathian stared at the Lord with her lips pressed together and her eyes very wide, an expression of strained, stressed shock that Pothos expected found its mirror in his own face right about now.
“My lord?” she asked.
“This one,” said the Lord of the Wood. “My fifth bride.”
Pothos stared at Mrs Carpathian, whose lips moved silently for a few moments, and Pothos could see her glance back to the other members of the committee, some locals from different village halls, a mix of magical ones and mixed ones.
“My lord,” said Mrs Carpathian delicately, “Mr Hearn is… rather older than the others, and he isn’t one of our temple. And…”
“And he’s a man,” said one of the committee members, a bespectacled woman with badly dyed hair.
The Lord of the Wood looked back to Pothos, and Pothos saw his eyes had faded to their usual colour, the same smooth, creamy brown as an acorn’s skin. “You have a cunt, don’t you?” he demanded loudly, and never had Pothos been more aware of the hundreds of people currently staring at him.
Slightly thinly, trying his best not to show too much anger, he said, “I don’t ordinarily like to shout it out at parties, lord, but as it happens, I do.”
“Your womb is in good working order?”
Pothos felt his eyes narrow, and he said, “I couldn’t say. I don’t recall when I last had it serviced.”
“You’re not so old – you’re of breeding age.”
“How kind,” Pothos said through gritted teeth.
“Him,” said the Lord of the Wood again, turning to Mrs Carpathian and her committee, several of whom were looking at Pothos in an apparently new light, which he detested on every level. “I want him.”
It was difficult to focus on flattery at a time like this, but Pothos did try his best. None of the women he’d dressed in the past six years had been older than twenty-five, most of them twenty-two at the eldest. He liked to think he was handsome, and men certainly liked to tell him he was – testosterone had been even better to him than his own genes had been as far as his face went, improving drastically on what he’d already felt was pretty good.
Even the phrasing of his second question was a clue to his suitability – the Lord of the Wood didn’t need someone who was fertile, per se, just someone with a womb that could carry something.
“Will you refuse?” asked the Lord of the Wood, looking curious as to the answer, and Pothos raised his eyebrows.
“You think I’m going to refuse?” asked Pothos very quietly, so that no one else could hear him. “You just outed me in front of half the county’s magical population, and even if I didn’t want someform of compensation for that, if I refused now, everyone would blame me for the result if the event didn’t go ahead.”
The Lord of the Wood smiled. It was a mischievous smile, and his brown eyes glittered – it was handsome, hot, in a dangerous, frightening way, and Pothos cursed the way it made his heart skip a beat.
“I suppose they would,” he said, sounding pleased with himself. “You simply must accept, then.”
“It doesn’t bother you that I’m a Hellenist?”
The Lord of the Wood’s hand dipped down, curling a finger around the necklaces hanging around Pothos’ neck, folding them in his hand to examine them: he slid his thumb first over the pendant he wore engraved with a hearth, and then over the three women on the other chain, each of them painted in colourful peploi.
“You are a weaver,” he said, sounding pleased. “You wear more symbols than these of your gods?”
“I have tattoos.”
“I look forward to seeing them,” said the Lord of the Wood, and set Pothos’ pendants back against his neck, returning them gently before turning back to the committee. “Why are the preparations not complete?” he demanded. “You have five brides before me and yet nothing is finished!”
Mrs Carpathian took Pothos firmly by the arm and pushed him back to sit.
She handed him his own slippers.
“This is your fault,” he told her as he undid his boots.
“No, it’s not,” she said.
“Well, it’s not mine.”
“It’s Lavinia Picard’s.”
Pothos snorted, and pulled off his socks. “Do you think I should lace them over my anklets or should I take them off and put them on again on top?”
“Oh, you wear anklets,” said Mrs Carpathian in dismay. “As if the committee didn’t hate you enough.”
“I rather get the impression I was chosen to spite someone,” muttered Pothos, and handed the silver chains to her as he laced up each shoe.
“Do you know the dance, Mr Hearn?” asked Rosalyn beside him.
“No,” said Pothos.
“This is all very strange,” said Cariad.
“You’re telling me. But if anyone, I suppose one can spin it as a sort of radical trans inclusion.”
Mrs Carpathian sniggered, and put his anklets on for him as he laced up the other shoe.
“Do you think you’ll win?” asked Cariad.
“I hope not,” said Pothos, thinking despairingly of his carpets, and began to roll up his sleeves.
* * *
“Maybe you should drink something, Mr Hearn,” said Cariad, not unkindly, pouring him some of the fresh lemonade, and Pothos leaned back in the seat at the lunch table, breathing heavily. Each of the young ladies was quite physically fit – all of them did a sport or a martial art or something like it.
Pothos did not exercise.
He enjoyed his life far too much for all that unpleasant business – he ate well, he did pleasant, stationary work and pleasant, stationary hobbies, and when he went to gay bars he liked to sit back and let other men sit in his lap, not join them on the dancefloor.
The dance had been nearly two hours long, and having observed it before, he had never realised exactly how much effort it expected of its participants – he fancied it was far more fast-paced than it ever had been when he’d observed it before either, and the whole of the time the Lord of the Wood was watching, smiling, eyes sparkling, clapping on every second beat when he wasn’t dancing into the ring with them.
His thighs and his calves ached, not to mention his chest, and he looked doubly – or perhaps quadruply – ridiculous sitting at the end of the table sweating his organs out through his skin when the actual brides were carrying, at worst, a healthy glow in their cheeks. Roberta hadn’t even broken a sweat, and while all four of them were being kind enough not to laugh at him, they were each smiling with varying degrees of amusement except for Cariad, who was looking at him with sufficient consternation Pothos worried he looked like he was about to drop dead, which he probably did.
“Thank you, Cariad,” said Pothos, trying to ignore the way that his sleeves were sticking fast to arms with sweat, his heart beating fast in his chest. He was breathing heavily, raggedly, and when he drank he drank greedily, tasting the carbonated sweetness rush over his tongue and soothe his parched throat.
“Just because you do poorly in the dance doesn’t mean you can’t win, Mr Hearn,” said Rosalyn, and Pothos laughed, although it made his chest hurt even worse.
“You are very sweet,” he said, “but I’m afraid unlike you ladies I haven’t made preparations for the next three months to walk around making the ground sprout with flowers underneath my feet or encouraging people to pregnancy. I should be happier losing than winning.”
“He’s picked you out,” said Rosalyn, looking quietly upset. “There must be something about you that appeals more than us.”
“Perhaps it’s the hair on my chest,” said Pothos dryly, and Roberta and Penelope laughed.
Rosalyn seemed distantly upset by that, and poor Cariad looked baffled.
Pothos smiled, and ate a little more.
He didn’t know it was for better or for worse that he wasn’t able to watch the other conversations. He was last in the running when Mrs Carpathian picked their names out of a hat, and sitting inside the tent they’d lunched in, which was enchanted to keep out the noise from outside, all they could do was look out of the windows at the conversations as they unfolded.
The film of the transparent cloth was too thick for them to read either of their lips, according to Penelope, although Pothos had never tried to read lips in his life, and wouldn’t know where to start. Even if they could, with the Lord of the Wood circling around and matching steps with the bride in the ring with him, you could rarely see both of their mouths at once.
What you could see, Pothos found out, was when the Lord of the Wood made them cry – Rosalyn, to his surprise, remained calm and cool throughout, and while he thought he saw Cariad’s mask slip once or twice, anger showing through over innocence, she didn’t cry either.
It was Roberta that surprised him – she left the ring before the Lord of the Wood told her to, sobbing into her hands.
Penelope, of course, left the Lord of the Wood stock still in the ring himself, unable to move his feet and staring at her – she’d obviously said something to stop him short, although what, it would be impossible to know until after.
He was once again aware of everyone staring at him when he went outside, although he knew from experience that most people were too far away to actually hear what passed between the lord and his—
Pothos supposed it was wrong to call them opponents, but nonetheless it was the word that applied.
Most of what actually transpired passed between whomever was in the ring was spread about by the people who were standing closest to it, but he still felt a sort of desperate dread as he stepped into the ring.
“You needn’t look so frightened,” intoned the Lord of the Wood, standing still as Pothos came to mirror him.
“You know what they say, lord,” said Pothos. “Once bitten, twice shy.”
“I don’t know that there’s any need for all that,” said the Lord, smiling rather brightly, and looking almost as innocent as Cariad did for a moment. “I haven’t bitten you yet, after all.”
“I don’t know that I like the sound of that yet, lord,” said Pothos, and as the lord took the first step to the left, Pothos carefully took a step to the right, and wondered if he was planning to make it anything like the dance. Judging by the lord’s smirking features, he was wondering the same thing. “I might not let you bite me at all, seeing as you’re so keen on it.”
“You would deny me my tithe?” asked his lordship.
“I’ve paid you my tithe in full, lord,” said Pothos, and when the Lord made three criss-crossing steps in succession, Pothos copied him, taking care not to stumble. It was on purpose, he knew, with the point being that the complicated matched steps meant to distract you from the conversation and vice versa, and with an error made in one aspect or the other, you were meant to become nervous, meant to lose your place. “I don’t see why I should pay you a second.”
“I’m your lord, aren’t I?”
“You’re a lord, certainly,” said Pothos. “No lord particularly governs my household, I’m afraid, no matter that you might govern the land it is built on.”
“I’d like to govern rather a lot more than the house,” said the Lord of the Wood. “Or do you think its occupants might prove ungovernable?”
“I am myself with three cats and a tarantula, lord,” said Pothos. “I’m afraid you’ll find each of us more ungovernable than the last.”
“Perhaps I like a challenge.”
“Perhaps you like to make a scene,” said Pothos pleasantly, and then, just for the risk of seeing if he could, he added, “I expect it pleases you to feel as though you have some relevance in people’s lives, given that you don’t for the most part. It must be quite the pleasure to spread a little misery each spring, reduce a few girls to tears so at least they’ll think about you even if no one else will.”
The Lord of the Wood’s sleekly mischievous expression dropped abruptly into a scowl, and Pothos felt himself smile before he could hold it back.
“Greek or Egyptian, lad,” said the Lord of the Wood, “I don’t know what to make of you.”
“The Greek is by the by,” said Pothos, “but I’m afraid no one has called us Egyptians for some four hundred years, and you’re only proving my point about your being out of date.”
“Aren’t your people from Egypt?”
“From India, as it happens, having left nearly two millennia ago.”
“What’s the difference between Egypt and India?” asked the Lord of the Wood.
“Oh, only a continent, lord,” said Pothos sarcastically, made to cross his steps one over the other in quick succession – they were moving rhythmically but not fast, and the Lord kept taking steps forward and back and forcing him to zigzag. “About three thousand miles.”
“Can’t dance, but you know all this fanciful geography,” said the Lord of the Wood. “Is that all you do all day, sit on your arse eating cakes and studying maps?”
“That’s the long and short of it, I suppose – I fit sewing dresses in between. I don’t care tremendously for cakes, though, I admit: I haven’t the greatest sweet tooth.”
“Pies, is it?” asked the Lord of the Wood, and Pothos laughed.
“Come on, then, what’s next?” he asked. “The moles on my face? The hair about my cunt? Are you going to imply I gain weight from gobbling cock?”
The Lord of the Wood smiled at him, and for a few moments, they did their two-step in silence. “I rather like those moles, as it happens,” said the Lord of the Wood. “It’s rather a relief, looking at someone who’s not covered up all the personality in their face with paint and powder.”
“Is that why you’ve drafted me in for this mummer’s farce?” asked Pothos. “Because you like that I have moles?”
“Mummer’s farce,” repeated the Lord of the Wood, and performed six steps in quick succession that Pothos had to hop to to mimic. “Now who’s being old-fashioned?”
“Perhaps you’re rubbing off on me, lord.”
“Perhaps I’d like to,” said the Lord.
“Perhaps I’d let you,” said Pothos, and he stepped before the Lord could, taking three zigzagging steps backward.
The Lord of the Wood, stunned and delighted, copied him. “Is there anything I’ve missed?” he asked, taking the lead again.
“What, to insult about me?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, I expect so, lord, but I’m not about to do your work for you.”
“Did you agree because you’re a slattern?” asked the Lord of the Wood pleasantly. “To join in the ceremonies, I mean?”
“No, my being a slattern is more a coincidence than anything else,” said Pothos. “I agreed because I want all these nice people to keep commissioning dresses from me, and if I’d said no, I might well have dashed my chances of that. But if you want to talk about reasons, why don’t we? You’ve picked, of all people, a thirty-year-old fat gay Roma dressmaker to make sport of – aren’t you worried that makes you look particularly savage as a relic of a bygone era? Even more so than usual?”
“You’ve missed one out,” said the Lord of the Wood. “Aren’t you a gender something or other, or a sex change?”
Pothos couldn’t help but laugh at that, tipping his head back with his hand resting on his belly, taking a pause in the dance. When he looked back, the Lord of the Wood was watching him raptly, fascinated with him as though he’d just done a somersault.
“Well,” he said. “I know you call it something, that’s all.”
“Transgender, lord,” said Pothos. “The word is transgender.”
“You kept your womb, though.”
“It’s in a jar on my mantel,” said Pothos.
The Lord of the Wood’s face fell. “Is it?” he asked, horrified.
“No,” said Pothos patiently. “It’s where it’s always been, somewhere in my guts. I had top surgery – that’s what we call a mastectomy – but I don’t much want to go two months without sex for the sake of whipping my uterus out. And thanks to the grace of the gods, I’ve not been pregnant yet.”
“What’s a mastectomy?” asked the Lord of the Wood.
“Strip my clothes off, and you’ll find out,” said Pothos. “Lord.”
“Do be careful,” said the Lord of the Wood, and bowed at the waist, signalling the end of their conversation, and Pothos bowed in kind. “I might take you up on that.”
As he left the ring, Pothos’ face hurt from smiling, but he couldn’t actually pull the smile off of his face, and as he came to pour himself more lemonade, Mrs Carpathian met him with a horrified expression on her face. To Pothos’ surprise, she touched his arm, squeezing the upper part of his shoulder.
“Are you alright?” she asked in concern, and he laughed.
“Yes, I think so,” he said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I’ve seen a lot of him in twenty years,” she said. “I’ve never seen him quite like that.”
“Well, have you ever seen him have that conversation with a man before? A fat man, a trans man, a gay man, a Rom?”
“Well, no,” she said.
“What does he say to fat girls?”
“Well, we don’t usually give him fat girls,” said Mrs Carpathian, and Pothos arched an eyebrow. “Well, we don’t go to great pains to exclude them, they just… don’t come up.”
“Well, I’m sorry if it upsets you to point it out, Mrs Carpathian,” said Pothos, “but I rather had his lordship eating out of my hand. Perhaps he wants a bit more variety in his diet.”
“Is that what you are, Mr Hearn?” asked Mrs Carpathian, her sweet concern replaced immediately by the usual dour nastiness. “Vegetables as a source of iron and vitamins?”
“Perhaps it’s the case that I am,” said Pothos, and sipped at his drink.
* * *
That evening, Pothos laid in the comfortable bed in the caravan, playing with a wooden puzzle toy as Sam sat beside him.
“I’d usually suck your cock,” he said idly, turning a dial on the toy and listening for the click. “But it seems improper given the circumstances.”
“You think it’d ruin your chances of victory?” asked Sam.
“If I thought that, I’d suck it twice, and ride it for good measure,” he replied, and Sam gave him a disapproving look. He’d come in so that Pothos could fix a tear in the cuff of his trousers, which Pothos had done in short order, but he’d stayed so that they could share a bottle of summer ale between them.
“I dunno know how you can be so little afeared of him,” said Sam, clucking his tongue in disapproval.
“Do you want me to tell you a secret about wrangling divinity, Sam?” asked Pothos.
“I don’t know that them secrets is for the likes of me,” said Sam. “Or you, for that matter.”
“The thing is, Sam, so long as you’re not too arrogant about it, they rather like someone not to be afraid of them, from time to time. When you have that much power, it can be pleasing to be made sport of for some of them.”
“I’ve never known you not to be arrogant about anything,” said Sam, and Pothos grinned at him.
“I shan’t touch you,” he said, “but I’ll put on a performance if you like.”
Sam shifted in his seat, and Pothos watched the look on his face, the twist of his lips, the way he pressed his knees together.
“S’that right?” he asked.
“It certainly is,” said Pothos pleasantly. “You tell me where to put my hands, my fingers, darling, and I’ll let you puppet me through.”
“Alright,” said Sam, thoughts of loyalty to his lordship apparently abandoned with the rise of his libido, and Pothos grinned, and unbuttoned his shirt.
* * *
It was a sort of Wendy House, made of woven flowers around a wooden frame, with a thickly leaved roof. He’d never seen the inside of any of them before, and when he closed the door behind him, he was surprised to find the ceiling higher than he expected. It was simply appointed with real furniture – a double bed to one side, a basin to the other, and at the fore, a round table with two chairs, in which one, the Lord of the Wood was sitting.
It was a little past eleven. Roberta had barely lasted five minutes in the house with him before she’d run out crying; Penelope had left with her cheeks slightly dark from blushing, her lips quirked in a little smile after forty minutes; Cariad had left laughing after nearly an hour. Rosalyn had cried this time, but it hadn’t been for very long.
The Lord of the Wood was leaning back in his seat, one elbow leaned against the back of the chair, one ankle rested on the back of his knee.
“Tea?” he asked.
“Please,” said Pothos, sitting across from him, and the Lord didn’t pick up the teapot but gestured with two fingers, making it levitate to pour for him. “I know it’s not my right to demand an explanation,” he said mildly, “but I certainly would like to ask. This has all been rather unorthodox, even for a god in his domain.”
The Lord of the Wood sighed as Pothos picked up his cup of tea, taking a sip. It was a fresh tea brewed with local nettles and honeysuckle, and Pothos smiled slightly at the taste of it, unexpected, not too sweet.
“You can call me Jack, if you like,” he said.
“Why would I like to do that?” asked Pothos.
“Well, it’s my name,” said Jack.
“Oh,” said Pothos. “Well, in that case, Jack it is.”
“You’re a very queer thing,” said Jack, swilling the tea in his mug. “I’ve been watching you since the first year you came here. You were different, then – or, not different, but you didn’t see it as important. Wore that tweed suit, and I liked it very much on you, but it was drab, compared to what you wear now. I always look forward to seeing you, in those nicely tailored suits, all your assets on display.”
Pothos took this in, staring into his teacup for a few moments. He was smiling again, he was aware.
“You pretended not to know who I was,” said Pothos. “And now you tell me that for half a decade you’ve been watching me and admiring my outfits.”
“Not just that,” said Jack. “I like it when you fuck the stable hands. You keep them well in hand, and they go to such lengths to fuck you stupid.”
“So they do,” said Pothos. “I like to have them well-trained.”
“Like that one last night,” said Jack.
“Do you watch all the fucking that goes on in your wood?” asked Pothos. “Ought I think of you as Lord of Perversion?”
“I like your tattoos,” said Jack. “All those gods you worship – how do you remember their names?”
“Tattooing them on me helps to remember,” said Pothos. “Better than a mnemonic.”
This earned him a grin and a thoughtful expression. “I only the fucking I’m interested in, you know – and you were putting on such a showlast night.” The Lord of the Wood was rocking back in his seat, only two of its legs on the ground, and he was playing one wave of brown hair around his fingers. “Do you know why I picked you as my fifth, Pothos?”
“To make some statement or other, I suppose,” said Pothos. “One gets the impression you were trying to make some ripples in the committee, or perhaps just put their noses out of joint.”
“Their noses could do with disjointing,” said Jack coolly, and Pothos managed to suppress his smile at that. “Truth be told, young man, I’ve been terribly bored.”
“Bored?”
“They send me the same girls every year,” he said despairingly. “These fine little things with no life under their belt, half of them virgins – I mean, a virgin. What am I supposed to do with a virgin? They’re all very well and good if you like that sort of thing, I suppose, but the point of my picking a bride isn’t for the purposes of collecting innocence. The rituals of which I am apart are meant to be all in good fun – there isn’t much of that when every girl they’ve sent for me is likely to be terrified of my cock.”
“You do put it so romantically,” said Pothos wryly, and Jack laughed to himself, playing once more with his hair. His eyes glittered in the sun that filtered in through the many gaps in the leafy ceiling and flowered walls, and his lips shone. “Is that why, then, because I’m not liable to be frightened of whatever you’ve got in your trousers?”
“You’re everything the committee shy away from,” said Jack. “I don’t care for all this nonsense they have, all this drama. I want some variety, like you were saying to Coralie. The point is to meet five different young ladies selected almost at random. There’s no point in it at all if they send me three of one girl and two of another each year, all of them the same shape, the same colour, same girl.”
“Ah,” said Pothos. “I’m a diversity choice, then.”
“I don’t know what that means,” said Jack, “but I didn’t poison that Picker girl just for theatre. I wanted to put a little fire under their arses, but once the rituals are through with, I’d very much like to fuck you ‘til you can’t walk, if you’d be amenable.”
“Oh, I would be, of course,” said Pothos. “Say that bit about poisoning Lavinia Picard again?”
The Lord of the Wood pouted out his lips. “Well, it won’t last forever,” he said. “Only a day or two – and she was the most boring of the five, dull as a post, and a virgin besides.”
“I expect you could fuck me now, if you liked,” said Pothos.
The Lord of the Wood smiled a wolfish smile. “I suppose I could,” he agreed, “but sometimes the fun is in the waiting. Don’t you agree?”
“No,” said Pothos. “I believe in instant gratification.”
“Well,” said Jack, shrugging delicately. “You’ll have to wait a few instants more.”
* * *
When the shine of sun came down from the gap in the canopy above their heads, it crowned the head of young Penelope, and Pothos slumped in relief, laughing to himself as everyone came to dance around her and crown her head.
“What do you look so pleased about?” asked Mrs Carpathian as he came to sit with her and Sam, and Pothos dropped himself heavily onto Sam’s knees, curling a hand in his hair and pulling him to kiss his neck, which Sam obediently did, and then nipped behind his ear, just as Pothos liked.
“Oh, I’m pleased for my carpets, that’s all,” said Pothos happily.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” she asked, and he laughed, pulling Sam’s hand to wrap around his middle and squeeze him tighter.
“Oh, nothing,” said Pothos, watching as Penelope took her crown of flowers and came to kiss her spring husband. “Nothing at all.”
Later that spring, no doubt as Penelope herself walked down the streets making flowers bloom under her heels and spurring all the nearby livestock to birth healthy animals and making the wives and husbands fertile and whatever else, Pothos took time off his work to go for, of all things, a hike.
He had never been for a hike before, but in fairness, he spent much of this one on his back, except for when he was on his front or his side.
Pothos returned home a week later still with twigs and leaves sticking out of his mussed and messy hair, walking bow-legged and with a cheerful limp, and thought to himself that he just might like to get a new tattoo.
An oak tree, he thought, would be nice.
FIN.
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