Chapter 4 #2
"We're the lowest scorers," she says. "Both of us. He's going to take our homes."
I fold the letter precisely in thirds and slide it into my right cargo pocket.
"Not mine."
The letter sits in my cargo pocket like a live grenade. I pace the perimeter of my property three times, cataloging every blade of grass, every edge, every angle. The damage report is worse than I thought.
Seventeen flamingo peck marks across the front lawn.
Each one a divot approximately two inches deep and three inches wide.
The sidewalk has four stress fractures from the gargoyle incident.
My boxwood hedge wall—which I have maintained at exactly forty-two inches for six consecutive years—has a gap where Junia shoved that vine pot through just yesterday.
I crouch at the hedge line and run my thumb along the damaged branch. Clean break. Recoverable. But the growing season is wrong for aggressive pruning, and three weeks is barely enough time to coax new growth.
One week.
I stand up and look across the street.
Valerius's property occupies the corner lot.
Double-wide. The lawn is not grass. It's a living carpet of enchanted moss that shifts color with the time of day—emerald at dawn, deep forest at noon, silver-tinged at dusk.
His hedges don't grow. They were sculpted from a single piece of living topiary magic, and they reshape themselves every morning into whatever geometric pattern he's selected from his rotating design catalog.
Last month they were spiraling obelisks. This morning they're interlocking Celtic knots.
His flower beds bloom year-round. Not because he planted seasonal rotations—I PLANT seasonal rotations—but because each flower is enchanted to exist in a permanent state of peak bloom. No wilting. No browning. No natural decay of any kind. His roses have been open for fourteen months. I counted.
His lawn has never been mowed. It doesn't need to be. The enchanted moss maintains itself at a uniform height of exactly one and three-quarter inches. I measured it once at 2 AM with a laser level.
One and three-quarter inches.
My fists clench.
I keep my lawn at two inches. Two inches is the optimal height for Kentucky bluegrass in a temperate climate. It promotes root depth, drought resistance, and natural pest deterrence. Two inches is CORRECT. Two inches is earned through weekly mowing, biweekly feeding, and daily attention.
His one and three-quarter inches is a lie. A magical shortcut. A cheat.
And I'm supposed to compete against it with steel and sweat and eleven years of honest labor.
I walk to the garage. The concrete floor is painted and sealed.
My tools hang on a pegboard system I built from reclaimed oak, each outline traced in black marker so every tool returns to its exact position.
The mower sits in the bay, cleaned and oiled after every use.
The edger beside it. The aerator in the corner, tines sharp enough to puncture boot leather.
Not sharp enough.
I pull the whetstone from the top shelf. It's an old one—Kragmoor granite, dark gray with veins of quartz that catch the overhead fluorescent light. I bought it at an estate sale seven years ago from a retired dwarven blacksmith. It can put an edge on anything.
I start with the hedge shears. Both blades. Long, slow strokes along the stone, steel singing against granite. The sound fills the garage, rhythmic, meditative. Metal filings curl away like tiny silver ribbons.
Next, the edger blade. I remove it from the housing, lay it flat on the workbench, and work the stone along its curve until the edge gleams.
The aerator tines. All thirty-six of them. One at a time. My fingers are bleeding by the twelfth tine—small cuts from handling bare steel—but I don't stop. Green blood smears the whetstone. Makes it grip better.
The pruning saw. The loppers. The hand cultivator. I sharpen things that don't need sharpening. I sharpen the flat head of a garden rake, which is absurd, and I do it anyway because the motion keeps my hands busy and my mind locked on the only thing that matters.
Winning.
I can't match his magic. Can't grow enchanted moss or conjure self-sculpting topiary. What I can do is execute. Precise cuts. Clean lines. Perfect geometry achieved through physical labor and orcish stubbornness.
The sun crawls overhead. I lose track of time inside the garage. The fluorescent lights hum. The whetstone sings.
By late afternoon, every tool on the pegboard has been sharpened, oiled, and returned to its outline. The garage is all steel and linseed oil and the iron-copper tang of my own blood.
I reach for the axe off the wall last.
It's a splitting maul. Eight pounds. Hickory handle, thirty-six inches, with a head I forged myself in a weekend metalworking class at the community college. The instructor—a dwarf named Gerta—said my technique was "adequate." Highest compliment I've ever received.
The cedar logs I ordered last fall are stacked along the back fence. I was saving them for a raised bed project. That project just became urgent.
I strip my shirt off because the afternoon heat is suffocating and I refuse to ruin another piece of clothing today. The cargo shorts stay. Standards exist.
The first log goes on the chopping block. I settle my grip. Shoulder-width apart. The axe goes up. Comes down.
CRACK.
The log splits clean. Two halves fall away from each other like pages of an opened book.
Second log. Up. Down. CRACK.
The rhythm takes over. Axe up. Axe down.
Split, stack, reset. The pile grows. My shoulders burn.
Sweat rolls down my body and traces the lines of the runic tattoos that cover my torso over old markings, green-black ink infused with bioluminescent pigment from the Kragmoor deep caves.
They glow faintly when my blood runs hot.
Warband tradition. Every orc in my unit had them.
Battle prayers etched into skin so the ancestors could find you in the dark.
They're glowing now.
CRACK. Another log.
CRACK. Another.
The axe bites. The wood yields. My breathing evens out into something steady, mechanical, and the anger transmutes into focus and the focus transmutes into a plan.
Raised beds along the south fence. Terraced, maybe.
Cedar frames, hand-joined, no screws. Gravel pathways with uniform aggregate.
A specimen tree—Japanese maple, the good kind, hand-grafted—as a centerpiece.
I can win this with craft.
CRACK.
The back of my neck prickles.
Not danger. Something else. A vibration, like a string being plucked in the hollow space beneath my sternum.
I lower the axe. Sweat drips from my jaw onto the chopping block.
I turn my head.
Junia is leaning against the cedar fence that sadly only partially separates our properties.
Both arms folded on top of the rail, chin resting on her wrists.
Her coffee mug sits forgotten on the fence post beside her.
The potting soil on her cheeks has been joined by what appears to be dried comfrey paste—she made the salve anyway—and her eyes are not on my face.
They're tracing the runes.
Slow. Deliberate. Following the lines across my body, down my ribs, along the curve of my obliques where the war prayers spiral into older symbols. Protective wards. Names of the dead. My mother's clan sigil, right over my heart, pulsing with soft green light.
Her lips are parted.
Her pupils are wide.
I'm holding an axe and I've forgotten how arms work.
"Those glow," she says.
"Yes."
"All the time?"
"When I'm—" I stop. The answer is "when my blood runs hot" and absolutely no version of that sentence leaves my mouth while she's looking at me like that.
"When you're what?"
I set the axe down on the chopping block. Pick up my shirt from where I draped it over the fence.
"Exerting myself."
Her mouth twitches. That same twitch from this morning. The one that does unauthorized things to my stomach.
"Must be a lot of exertion."
"I'm chopping wood."
"I can see that."
She hasn't looked at my face once.