16. Briar
brIAR
For several days after the west wing, Rhys is ominously well-behaved.
He attends his sessions and files his paperwork without one grain of innuendo, carrying himself.
Twice I catch him crossing the lobby with a tape measure and zero explanation.
Once, memorably, I find him in the archives corridor consulting the oldest guest ledger with white cotton gloves on, which he doesn’t own.
He borrowed conservation gloves from somewhere for a project.
I’ve certified enough packs to know that when the charming one goes quiet, he is planning something, and I say as much to the private notes.
The plan surfaces at dinner, on a full-table night, between the soup and the roast.
Rhys excuses himself from the table and returns carrying the guest ledger and a ribboned basket lined in lodge wool.
“Ms. Calloway, on behalf of Halewood Lodge, please accept the winter courtesy extended to long-stay guests after first frost. The precedent is flagged in the ledger.”
The table’s gone very quiet. Soren keeps carving the roast with the studied neutrality of a border guard. Gideon has stopped moving entirely, fork suspended, gaze fixed on the basket.
“The winter courtesy,” I repeat.
“A cherished Halewood institution.”
“Which has been extended to how many guests, in your tenure?”
“The tradition,” Rhys says smoothly, “lapsed. We’re reviving it this winter. Certification has us revisiting all our best practices, and this practice is among our best.”
I look down the table at the pack alpha, because the fastest way through this pack’s fictions has always been the man constitutionally incapable of joining them.
Gideon sets down his fork. He holds the stillness he spends on confirming bad news, and then, with the weary precision I’ve come to bill by, the accuracy wins, same as it always wins.
“The courtesy is genuine,” he says. “My grandfather ran it every winter. Long-stay guests, first frost, a basket of lodge goods.” A pause, in which he loses an argument with himself about stopping there.
“It lapsed before the severance. The revival was not discussed at any operations meeting, and supplies has never carried merino.”
“Thank you, Mr. Hale.”
“The socks are merino,” he clarifies, to his plate, a man now committed to the whole truth as an act of war.
The socks come first, thick merino dyed the same lodge green as a cardigan I own. Rhys watches me hold them up. Soren keeps carving. Gideon looks at his plate. The basket contains something chosen by each man at this table, and none of them is willing to say that aloud.
The tea comes next, my blend, prepared for a short steep. Soren keeps carving the roast and does not look up.
“Soren.”
“Tea exists,” Soren says, to the roast. “People drink it.”
The honey’s from the hives on the lodge grounds, which I didn’t know the lodge possessed, and I say so.
The table performs one of its silences. The hives, it emerges under gentle questioning, are Gideon’s, inherited with the building and tended by him alone through every season, including the ones nobody names.
When I ask why beekeeping never made it into any operations interview, the pack alpha addresses his answer to the middle distance.
“Bees don’t care about gossip,” he says. “It’s restful.”
Gideon supplied the honey. I set it beside me and manage not to smile.
At the bottom of the basket, wrapped in cloth, there’s a preserve jar with a hand-lettered label in the block capitals I’ve seen on every stake in the greenhouse.
Rowanberry preserve, first frost pick.
No one moves. Rowanberry is bitter unless somebody stands over it with sugar and a reason, and everybody at this table now knows exactly what I smell like.
The man who named it out loud is beaming at the head of the basket, while the man who wrote the label carves with the focus of a surgeon.
The man who owns the hives stares at the jar with obvious desire but does not reach for it.
“All right,” I say when I trust my voice. “Is this a courting gift?”
“It’s a guest courtesy,” Rhys says, “with precedent.”
“Soren. Did you help assemble this courtesy?”
“I made preserves,” Soren says. “There were eleven jars in the pantry. Now there are ten.”
I get out my tablet and record the gift in the live file.
“Gift received, assessed as guest courtesy per documented lodge precedent, ledger reference attached. Irregularity noted, as follows. The courtesy appears calibrated to its recipient at a resolution inconsistent with the lodge’s supplies records.
” I look up. “That’s going to the panel, gentlemen. Along with the lamination.”
“Worth it,” Rhys says, for the second time this winter, and the table exhales into what’s almost, in this lodge’s dialect, a party.
Soren serves the roast and cuts me the crust end without being asked.
Rhys tells the mountain-relocation story with both voices, badly, and Gideon corrects the punchline’s vintage from the head of the table without looking up, which improves it.
For the length of one whole course, nobody in this room is broken.
Gideon retrieves his fork and doesn’t look at the preserve jar again, and I only know that because I watch him not do it for the rest of the meal.
The basket comes upstairs with me, because leaving it would be a statement and taking it is merely logistics, and I’ve learned my logistics from the master.
I mean to set the gifts in the corner with the county boxes.
Instead I watch my own hands, over the better part of an hour, make other choices.
The throw drapes over the desk chair, where the lamplight lands on it.
The tea goes on the shelf at reaching height, the honey beside it with its label facing out.
The socks migrate to the drawer I open first in the mornings.
Each object finds the warmest and most reachable place in the room.
I arrange and rearrange them until the room feels right, then stand in the middle of it with my heart racing because I know what this behavior is.
I have documented it in other omegas more times than I can count.
Oh, hell.
The empty basket ends up beside the armchair. I catch myself planning what else would fit in it. I am nesting.
“Circulation,” I tell the room.
The room, which now smells faintly of cut grass and beeswax with cedar underneath, declines to co-sign.
The preserve jar I leave for last, because I already know it’s the dangerous one.
Bitter fruit, first frost pick, sugared into keeping by a man who doesn’t say sentences when a jar will do.
I eat one spoonful standing at the dark window, thieving in my own room.
It tastes of sun gone down and sweetness applied on purpose, and of being, there’s no other clinical term available, courted.
I file the jar behind the chamomile where I can’t see it. The chamomile keeps no secrets, and it’s currently the only one in this room who doesn’t.
In the morning, my feet are cold on the floorboards, and the drawer I open first is right there. I wear the socks. They fit perfectly, of course. I drafted my rule for one suitor at a time, not three men courting me together.