At the behest of his boyfriend and his boyfriend’s brother, Aimé Deverell is whisked away to the magical land of South Kerry: it’s lambing season, and they’re mucking in to help.
Note: I’m currently out of the house, so I’m going to add a more in-depth description of this serial and more tags later today or tomorrow. For now, enjoy!
The little bell over Aimé’s entrance door jangled quietly just as he was tidying up his work station for the evening, and as he wiped off his hands, he called, “I’ll be with you in just a second!” over his shoulder.
It was a sunny day, and through the course of the afternoon, a lot of people walking by had stopped to look in through the window at the artist at work, a few more regularly filtering inside to have a look through his gallery of curing works and works for sale.
When Asmodeus had talked about having the window into his painting studio for passers-by to observe, he hadn’t been sure he would like the idea, but once he’d inlaid enchantments into the window to make sure he couldn’t hear any chatter or noise outside, it hadn’t bothered him at all. The speed at which he painted, the fact that people weren’t that familiar with oils or painting as a craft in general, it drew people’s eye, and it drew their money too – and it meant he didn’t have to faff about with social media shit beyond the posts he did already, because as far as little videos and reels and stuff, other people did those for him.
He glanced up at the clock on the wall – it was a little before six – and tossed his cloth aside, pulling up his shirt from where it was laid over the back of his stool and pulling it on but not buttoning it up just yet, although he could feel the January chill that had come in from the door opening and closing.
“Your enchantments are robust,” said the man waiting in his gallery when Aimé stepped through the curtain, stepping past him and switching the sign on the door to read CLOSED instead of OPEN. He wasn’t Irish, but Welsh, although Aimé didn’t know enough about Welsh accents to place where exactly he was from. The musicality of the accent was pleasant, and it reminded him of the rhythm of Gaeilgeorí from further north – Colm had once described Ulster accents in Irish as like the lilting rise and fall of water on the shore at low tide, and it applied here, too. “It’s really quite warm in here, but the enchantments are subtle, modestly written. There can sometimes be an overwhelming buzz to overly layered enchantments attempting to fight off the winter chill.”
“Thank you,” Aimé said, slowly beginning to button up his overshirt as he looked the other man over.
He was tall and thin, his black hair worn long in a ponytail gathered at the back of his neck, and he wore several ornate pins and clasps through his hair to keep it in place. He was white and pale, had high cheekbones, silvery-grey eyes, and a very regal bearing that didn’t quite match up with the worn dark purple cardigan worn over suit trousers and a collared shirt, a necklace bearing a fae crystal resting over his chest. Magic was woven through him, seemed to pump through him like the pulsing beat of his heart, and Aimé stood up straighter, holding out his hand.
“Aimé Deverell, I’m the artist here,” he said, and he was almost surprised not to receive an electric shock when the other man shook his hand, squeezing it slightly. He had long, delicate fingers, his nails longer and sharper than many men’s – not claw-like or inhuman, very delicately manicured in fact, but certainly longer than most men would keep theirs. “You looking for a commission?”
“Quite,” the stranger said, with an incline of his head. One strand of hair was loose from all the rest, the tip of it brushing against the hard side of his jaw. It drew more attention to his eyes, which were very large and had an intense focus to them. “You do some beautiful portraiture, Mr Deverell. I’ve been keeping an eye on your work here and there since you opened shop last year.”
“I’ve never seen you,” Aimé said evenly, and watched the faux-modest way the other man bowed his head, his lips flickering into a small smile.
“Through your website, primarily – I’ve looked in the window now and then, but I’m unfortunately a busy man, and had little time to drop in in-person. I noticed the update last week, that you’re working on traditional enchanted art?”
“Uh, yeah,” Aimé said, nodding his head. “I enrolled in some classes a year ago – you can see that these pieces here, the birds on the wire, this landscape with the flowers, they’re embedded with a living enchantment, just basic animation work. It would take me a while, a few months on the piece, and I’d need some video references or good photos to make it look right, but I’m able to animate expressions as well – smiles, laughs, that kinda thing.”
The older man smiled again, looking at Aimé in a considering, thoughtful way, making an estimate of him. It was a somewhat cold look, although Aimé wasn’t unfamiliar with it – a lot of people who bought and traded in art had a cynicism to them, whether looking at the art itself or looking at the artist. “You’re still studying, I take it?”
Taking note of a man searching for additional value, he said, “Yeah, yeah, I’m working on security work, actually – enchanted safes, dimensional transitways and pocket dimensions built into landscapes and large-scale pieces.”
“Defensive structures?” the man prompted, his eyebrows raising, and Aimé looked closely at his polite expression, took it in, digested it. He couldn’t see any underlying motivations, hidden, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there – and frankly, the fact that he couldn’t see them with a guy like this, brimming the fuck over with magic, a centuries-old thrum of living rock hanging around his neck, and wrapping himself in a dowdy fucking cardigan? That meant they were definitely there. God only knew if he was looking to buy and sell a collectable or if it was something much weirder.
“I can do ice,” Aimé said. “Freeze someone’s hand or freeze the painting – put in a heavy gust of wind. Nothing fatal, and nothing too violent, either. If you want an enchantment that will knock a thief out or kill them dead, you can find an arms dealer for that – I’m just an artist.”
The stranger smiled, and on his thin lips, the crescent was like the knife edge of a ritual blade.
“I’m not actually looking for anything like that – I was more curious as to your ethics, going into this area of magical work. It’s centuries old, millennia old, in places – even in new adherents to the craft, that often comes with centuries-past morality, or lack thereof.”
“And what are you looking for, Mr…?”
“Wilde,” the stranger said. “Ambrose Wilde. I wanted to commission a painting of a shepherd, probably on a canvas of about this size,” he gestured to a large painting Aimé had made of the neighbours’ cat, Peadar, and one that was already earmarked for sale to a cat rescue on the far side of the city. “Traditionally clad, a flat cap, a crook, a dark grey waistcoat, a white shirt. I have some references here.”
He handed over a folder, and Aimé took it, paging through the reference images – a few vintage photographs of shepherds in the early 20th century, with dogs or with sheep, and then a few reference sketches that were done fresh on paper, was either by this guy himself or someone he’d paid.
“You want this to be of a particular person?” Aimé asked.
“No, nothing like that,” Wilde said. “Just a man, a shepherd – an older man, I would think, a father or grandfather, of average build, but I’ve no expectation as to his face or features beyond that.”
“You want it animated?”
“No, still would be perfect.”
“Is it a gift?”
“Only for myself.”
“You gonna take it home? Mynd adref gyda waith gorffenedig?” He stumbled a little on the words, couldn’t properly make his own sentences in Welsh, really, but could cram together some of the phrases he knew, and it was enough.
Wilde’s expression had a shadow flicker across it for a moment, and then he smiled faintly before speaking in a smooth and unexpected Irish, “By all means, Mr Deverell. If we’re to conduct this is anybody’s mother tongue, let it be yours.”
“French is my mother tongue,” Aimé replied in Irish, although he knew even having practised recently, even though his Irish was a lot better than it ever had been, it was still a bit clumsy compared to this man’s. He was grateful he’d been practising so much and that he’d been spending a lot more time among Irish-speakers too, because otherwise Wilde’s Ulster-flavoured dialect would have been too much for him to follow. “I never knew how right Gaelig Uladh might sound with a Welsh accent.”
“We share some of the same rhythms of speech, even as our two languages have diverged.”
“Okay,” Aimé said, in English this time. “My Irish is shit – I can kind of understand that, but not enough to keep going, if you’re gonna use words like eis… Eis?”
“Eisréimnigh,” Wilde supplied. “But yes, Mr Deverell, you have me well-pegged – I am a Welshman, and it’s a Welsh shepherd I seek to commission from you.”
“I’ll do some preliminary sketches,” Aimé said. “My rates will depend on a few factors – I’ll send them along to you in email form, or,” he amended as he saw the man’s expression change fractionally, his eyebrows furrowing, “by post, with the sketches attached, and you can then pay a deposit and let me know how you want to proceed going forward. This is a pretty slow process compared to photo editing or digital art, you can have the painting as soon as it’s done, but it’ll take a long while to cure, and then I’ll have to come and finish it, you’re aware of that?”
“Of course. When can you start work?”
“Mm, with my schedule as it is at the moment, probably start at the end of June, beginning of July, and then it’d take me a few weeks, maybe a month. I might start the sketches earlier than that, but I’m not going to be close to a post office for a little while.”
“That’s a longer wait that I was expecting,” said Wilde, seeming disappointed. “You must be very busy.”
“I am, I’m actually going to be closing shop for a few months,” Aimé said. “The gallery is gonna be open a few days a week, a friend of mine is going to come in and open for me, but I’m not going to be here, and I won’t be painting with oils for the next little while.”
“Giving your hands a break?”
“Oh, I don’t really do resting them, I’ll still be sketching,” Aimé said with a slight laugh, and the other man laughed as well, setting his hands into his pockets. “No, uh, your commission here is pretty apropos, Mr Wilde – it’s about to be lambing season, I’ll be in Kerry helping out between a few farms.”
“Is that so? I had no idea you were a farmer.”
“I’m not,” Aimé said. “But my boyfriend and his brother are, and somewhere along the line I got roped into being involved.”
“Not looking forward to it?”
“I am, I think,” Aimé said, folding the band back over the edge of the folder and picking up a post-it note from the desk, writing down the date and Wilde’s name, then copying down the postal address from the card he handed over to him, some place called Medalton in England. “I was told from the get-go that I’d be getting a lot of different shit on my hands.”
“You will be,” Wilde agreed. “Some of it will be literal.”
“Wouldn’t claim to be excited about that,” Aimé said. “But I spent some of my summers working a vineyard growing up, and the past few years, I’ve gotten more and more into gardening, farming, I’ve helped out with a friend’s chickens here and there. And hey, if I don’t enjoy the actual work, at least I get to spend two months of early spring in a centuries-old cottage with my boyfriend’s culchie brother.”
Wilde laughed, and so did Aimé, putting the folder into his backpack to take on his bike.
“Nah, he’s grand,” he said, “I’ll get a lot of sketching done, and the men we’re helping, both of them are getting on in age and just don’t have it in them to take on the lambing alone, so it’ll be good to help. You done much of that kind of work?”
“Not for a long while,” Wilde admitted, “but in my youth, I did my fair share of handling livestock. Less so sheep, more rams and goats, and angel deer, they’re a fae species, only semi-domesticated, and one has to use a great amount of magic to keep them tamed.”
“Angel deer?” Aimé repeated, looking up from his bag as he zipped it shut, and Wilde seriously nodded his head.
“They have shining patches on their breasts, on the crowns of their heads, and horns and hooves of bright gold – they somewhat resemble the scales on some angels’ skin.”
“What are they for? They don’t have wool, right – do they pull loads, or…?”
“Every year, they shed their antlers, and they also go through a period of moult, where they lose a good deal of the hair on the pelts as they transition between winter and summer – their hair, their horns, their hooves, their saliva, even their droppings, these are all valuable apothecarial ingredients.”
“You an apothecary?”
“At times,” Wilde said. “It’s only a hobby, these days – making potions and performing certain acts of magic and enchantment used to be the bulk of my work, but I’m somewhat retired from that these days.”
“Retired from everything?”
“Not everything, but I’m no longer gambolling in the woods with deer who would soon as anything tear my guts open with a well-timed butt of his head, wrestling with angels. Now I mostly do administrative work, and my wrestling is purely with bureaucracy.”
There was something sad in Wilde’s voice, a quiet melancholy, and as Aimé shrugged on his coat, he watched him slowly ambling toward the door, readying himself to leave at the same time Aimé did. He had that air, as some older people did, of wanting to keep on talking, a sort of quiet loneliness clinging to his fancy jewellery and his drab, oversized cardigan and the long hems of his loosely tailored trousers.
“You hate it, huh,” Aimé said, and Wilde looked at him in slight surprise, his eyebrows raising. Aimé wondered how old he was, what sort of fae he was, if he was fae. When he talked about his youth, or times past, how long ago had that been, exactly?
“You’re somewhat insightful, aren’t you, Mr Deverell? A good judge of character?”
“Not really,” Aimé said. “I just pay a little attention, that’s all, look for the details any artist does – a lot of people don’t realise how much they’re telegraphing.”
“I’m telegraphing hate?”
“More sadness,” Aimé said, swinging his keys on his fingers as he pulled the door open, making the bell jingle, and Wilde stepped ahead of him, out into the cold sunshine. “What, family business, you don’t feel like you can go?”
“Something like that,” said Wilde.
“Go anyway,” Aimé said. “Someone’ll do the work if you don’t.”
“And people I love? People who couldn’t follow me?”
“If they love you back, they’ll follow you anyway,” said Aimé – and yeah, what he saw on Wilde’s face now, that was real fucking sadness, that was grief.
“Would that things were so simple,” Wilde said softly, and pushed that stray strand of hair back from his face, behind his ear. “Do write to me at your earliest convenience, Mr Deverell – enjoy your adventure as best you can.”
“Will do, Mr Wilde,” said Aimé, and nodded to the old man as he locked up.
* * *
When Aimé cycled out to Heidi’s house, he was lucky to avoid the rain – the heavens opened just as he got onto what they’d used to refer to Colm’s allotment plot. The bulk of the land was still crops of growing vegetables underneath protective plastic to keep them from freezing over, but now at one end of the big field was a cottage built of wood and stone, and they’d shingled the roof instead of thatching it.
“What, I’m fucking Hansel and Gretel?” Heidi had asked dryly over a tall glass of Jean’s poitín when Colm had brought it up. “You’re going to build me a fucking fairy tale house?”
Heidi, an elderly German woman in her eighties, was Colm’s adoptive daughter – where she’d aged with the years, Colm and Jean-Pierre, Aimé’s boyfriend, had remained unageing, unchanging with the time that passed. They’d brought her over to live in Ireland from Berlin last spring, and nine months of actual medical care from Jean-Pierre rather than whatever bullshit her kids had given her had done a lot for her health.
She was still a mean old bitch, but you could see just from how she walked, how she held herself, that she was in a lot less pain than she used to be – case in point, when Aimé got to the house and nudged his bike under the eaves of the woodshed to keep it from getting too wet, Heidi came to the door herself and stood in the doorway, leaning on her cane and watching him.
When she’d first come over from Germany she’d hobbled whenever she moved, relying heavily on a Zimmer frame to keep herself upright, and she’d had to take constant breaks. Most of the time she just sat in a chair or in bed and tried to keep as still as possible.
The first few weeks in Ireland, Jean-Pierre had administered her pain meds, had given her massages, brought in an acupuncturist, and had gotten her started using more magic – as Aimé had started picking up more enchantment, he’d teach some of it to Heidi, but most of what she actually found useful was more active magic, little spells, bursts of elemental fire or ice, that kind of thing.
It wasn’t as simple as magic making immortality, but the more magic a person was exposed to, the more it was invited to flow through and inside them, the more it attached itself to parts of their body, infused itself through their bones, their blood vessels, their organs, their tissues.
Heidemarie still looked eighty years old, still had liver-spotted skin and wrinkles and a slight hunch to her shoulders, but she was no longer bent double. She was a tall woman, kind of wiry still but putting on a bit more muscle now that she was going swimming twice a week with Asmodeus.
“There a reason you still ride a bicycle like a faggot instead of learning to drive a car?”
“I am a faggot, Heidi,” Aimé said pleasantly. “And besides, where would I park a car? It wouldn’t fit in your woodshed.”
“Maybe you could drive it somewhere else,” she said dryly, but there was a slight smirk on her face as she stepped back to let him inside. “You ready to go and stick your hand up to your elbow in sheep pussy for the next two months?”
“That’s not how we actually have to do it, right?”
“Ja.”
“The fuck would you know about it? Weren’t you a mechanic?”
“I was a transmissions engineer, mostly,” Heidi said, and she took the paper bag of pastries from the bakery when he handed it over to her, moving slowly into the kitchen, supporting herself partly on her cane and partly on the rail on the wall, then on the counter.
Colm had built the living room and kitchen kind of open plan, a big square with small windows to keep the heat in – down the corridor were two bedrooms and a bathroom, as well as the stairwell that led down into the basement grow room, where Colm mostly kept a significant cannabis grow alongside a few cactus plants and Aimé’s grapes.
“No one else here?”
“Papa’s downstairs with the dog.”
“I don’t know why she keeps going down there with him,” Aimé said. “She gets so upset that it’s hot down there. Doesn’t she know she’s made for the mountains?”
“She doesn’t know anything, Aimé, she’s a fucking dog. These are the wrong ones.”
“No, they’re not, the strawberry ones are Jean’s, your shitty apple things are in the box.”
“You’re buying him cake? He’s a fucking bird, he can’t eat it.”
“He’ll eat bites of it,” Aimé said, and pulled open the trap.
With a loud “boof!” of sound Brigid, Jean and Colm’s great white beast of a Pyrenees, leapt up the stairs toward him, and Aimé grabbed her in his arms when she got to the top of the trap and lifted her off the ground, spinning her around as she wriggled and barked loudly.
He would not be able to do this for much longer – she was very nearly fully grown, and as much as her fur had damn near exploded outward in a thick, white mane, she’d also grown into her big paws, put on muscle and fat. She probably weighed more than Jean did, was maybe even heavier than fucking Aimé.
He dropped her on the wood-boarded floor a little harder than he meant to, but she didn’t care. Brigid barked and jumped around, play bowing and lunging at him, and he laughed and grabbed her by the meat around her neck and shoulders, wrestling with her. Her claws, which Jean-Pierre was going to trim before they set off tonight, made skittering noises on the floors, and Aimé laughed as he shoved her and let her shove him back before he fell back on his arse and let Brigid leap on top of him. She dropped her weight fully on top of his belly and pressed her forehead against his neck, and Aimé laughed, sprawled underneath her and scratching under her big, floppy ears.
“You’re stupid, Brigid,” Heidi told her in a warm voice. “Do you know that? Do you know that you are stupid?”
Brigid looked up at her dolefully.
“Aw, Bridge,” Aimé said. “Don’t you listen to that mean old lady. You’re not stupid, are you?”
“If you’re stupid, Brigid, eat a bit of Apfelkuchen.”
Brigid immediately took the piece of cake that Heidi offered her, licking it from her thumb and forefinger, and Aimé rolled her eyes at the old lady’s amused and triumphant expression.
“That was under duress,” he told Colm as he came up the stairs, and Colm huffed out a laugh, pulling the hatch closed behind him. “Do I have to put my hand inside a sheep’s vagina?”
“No,” said Colm. “I can do it.”
Aimé made a face, and Colm laughed, kicking him in the boot before taking Brigid by the collar and tugging her off of him, knuckling the top of her head.
“Most of the time the ewes won’t need that kind of help,” Colm said dryly. “But yeah, Aimé, there’ll be lambs coming out of the ewes – and they come out of the vagina, and we’ll have to touch their vaginas from time to time, and even reach inside some of ‘em.”
“Say vagina one more time.”
“Vagina,” said Colm, a word that sounded even less sexy than usual with his thick Kerry accent, and Aimé dropped his head down onto the floor, looking up at the beams, from which were hanging some drying herbs and onions and garlic. “How was work?”
“Grand, that portrait of Mr Burlac’s boyfriend is done, I’ve said to Bedelia when she and George are dropping in that she can just leave it where it is, but I texted him and told him it’s finished. He might pick it up while I’m gone, but he’ll probably come get it after we’re back. It’s a smaller canvas, so ideally it’ll be cured through by the time he picks it up, and I can just varnish it straight away rather than having to meet him again later.”
“You can’t varnish it straight away?” Heidi asked, holding out a glass of wine to him without bending too far over, and Aimé shook his head as he sat up and took it.
“No, so, when you paint with oils, they take a long time to dry because of the texture of them. For a painting to fully, properly dry out – for the oils to cure and kind of go leathery with no more moisture in them – it literally takes months, even if the painting feels dry to the touch. I can control the environment with magic, to make sure that it’s as efficient as possible, but I can’t actually magically dry it out without potentially altering the composition of the paint – to do that and not risk damaging the work, I’d need to work with time-altering magic, and that’s way beyond me. Anyway, if you varnish over while there’s still moisture in there, it can fuck up the painting, because then that moisture can’t escape.”
“And what does it… do? The varnish?”
“It’s aesthetic, partly,” Aimé said. “It puts a gloss on the painting to make the oils keep their visual texture, but it’s also a protective coating – dust, dirt, shit like that, they don’t get into the painting themselves, and then later on you can clean off the varnish and reapply it, which is way harder if the painting’s unprotected. I enchant my canvases, so there is dust and dirt protection built into the frame the canvas is on as well as in the back corner of the actual cloth, but varnish is good practice, anyway, because it makes such a big difference to the visual impact of the piece.”
“Huh,” said Heidi, sipping at her own drink as she sank onto the sofa. “You ever paint nudes?”
“Sure. Want to pose?”
“You couldn’t handle me, boy,” Heidi said dryly when Aimé waggled his eyebrows at her. “I’d snap your little manhood like a twig.”
“I would love it if this conversation could stop,” said Colm exhaustedly as Aimé opened his mouth to respond, and as a personal favour to the man, he closed his mouth.
Heidi took a long draw of her drink, and Aimé roughly scrubbed under the side of Brigid’s chin with his hand, smiling at the way she smiled and collapsed bodily into his fingers, absolutely blissed out at the sensation. It was a pleasant enough red, although he didn’t think he’d pick this one up again – it was a Douro, but it wasn’t as thick as he’d anticipated from its colour or its bouquet, and there was a strange freshness to its taste, a very light sweetness, that went against what should have been a richer flavour.
It was something that Heidi was genuinely quite interested in, and often joined in conversations about, when Aimé did the monthly wine order for their household and hers – Asmodeus often brought home or otherwise produced mysteriously old and expensive bottles of wine and invited Aimé and Heidi to partake of them with him, but for their drinking in the course of a week, Aimé bought a variety of bottles for them to try with meals or just drink in the evening.
She’d been pleased that Aimé’s grocery order for her house always included a variety of alcohol as well as the expected foodstuffs, and had assumed he bought different bottles of wine – and cider or beer – based on pricing or availability. The first she’d seen him sitting with his tablet open on his spreadsheet, she’d been immediately fascinated, although she’d done her best to disguise it, it seemed to Aimé, as fascination with Aimé’s obvious and blatant mental illness rather than interest in the process itself.
Heidi had said herself that she didn’t have an especially refined palate and couldn’t necessarily taste the difference between grapes or note the particulars of a wine’s flavour like Aimé or especially Asmodeus could, but she liked the process he went through of noting down names and vintages, noting down wines and vineyards and regions, and she got a real buzz off of Aimé’s comparative tables, where he made notes of stuff like soil acidity or climate – what the average temperatures had been in a given vineyard’s region, how much rainfall they’d gotten that year, what their humidity had been like, how far above sea level they were.
He wasn’t as particular when it came to studying beers or ciders or other alcohols he picked up, but he was genuinely interested in the whole brewing process, and he was surprised, sometimes, at how alive it made him feel when he was able to get right into the growing process and compare the crops to their result, to what came of the brew.
Heidi didn’t feel what Aimé felt, didn’t feel connected to the world because she had a greater understanding of the universe’s processes that led to the glass of wine in her hand, but she was interested in his understanding of it, and she even read his winemaking and brewing magazines and they talked about certain articles.
It wasn’t just that, he knew.
What her family had done to her, the medical neglect, that was obviously pretty fucked up, but mostly, what she’d been for the past few decades as she’d gotten more sick and more disabled had been fucking bored. She watched TV and read books, but she didn’t really knit or do sudoku or stuff like that – when she was still working, she’d been a telecommunications engineer, and she was always happier up a fucking radio tower than she was sitting at a desk.
As much as she was a horrible woman – mean and cold and not just bitchy but very severe and very stark in her opinions, not in the stereotypically emotionless German way but in a very emotionally awful way – her whole life as a working woman had been in connecting people, even if they came away not particularly wanting to connect with her particularly again.
To go from that to being basically housebound, with no connection to anything or anybody but a family who saw her as a chore, let alone any power to connect other people or to observe the way things connected to each other, was torturous, and had been torturous.
Aimé didn’t believe much in big punishments, he was increasingly sure, and no matter how mean of an old woman she was, no matter how shitty she’d been to her kids, and he had no difficulty believing she’d been awful, he didn’t think she deserved that.
Nobody did.
“Ow, Bridge,” Aimé grunted as Brigid suddenly jumped up, her paws landing heavily between his legs. “Stand on my cock, why don’t you!”
Brigid was ignoring him – with utter joy, she was shoving her large body between Jean-Pierre’s red denim clad legs as he attempted to enter through the doorway, and l’ange was laughing as he tripped right over her.
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