Compromise

-And how, exactly, do I court him without looking like I'm doing it just because I want to move back into my old house?
Helena gave Emil the kind of answer he was expecting from her:
-I admit it's a tough one, if you're actually interested in him. On top of this, he's among the few people in town who can be considered a viable option for you. The only thing I can think of right now is that you should be able to give him a reason besides moving back into your old house to be courting him instead of any of the others who have been in town longer than he has.
As far as Emil was concerned, all the other viable options he had among the town's single men who wanted another man as a partner were problematic as arrangements that didn't include genuine feelings on at least one side. As things currently stood, he was reluctant to share his money with the three who were technically in a more precarious situation than he was, and the two (not including Lalli) who were technically better off than him had every reason to have similar reservations about him. That was before going into the fact that his idea of a proper courtship, even scaled down to match his current living standards, cost an amount of money he was reluctant to spend on something that had a non-negligeable chance of not getting to its end goal. One of the other remnants of his old life was a tendency to consider looks a must-have, but the honest truth was that the five others all had jobs that required them to take care of their appearance to an extent and none had inherent features that didn't fit his tastes. When it came to a selection via personality, Emil was pretty certain he was the most difficult of the bunch and had never been friends with any of the five others; his parents would have actually balked at him even talking to at least a couple of them if they had still been alive. Come to think of it, he didn't know Lalli anywhere near well enough to be able to claim he stood out to him on that level, either. He wasn't even the first person to whom he had brought food and sat a safe distance from in case they wanted to talk after noticing they were having a bad day. As he was trying to follow Helena's advice, he realized something he had missed up to that point: the five others were also potential partners for Lalli, and none of them were former inhabitants of his home.

For one hour and a half per day, around lunchtime, the Hunter's Lodge was much quieter than it was during the rest of the day so nobody missed a bit of the stories Stefan was telling. The food served there was neither too bland nor too fancy for Lalli, which had made it a good place in which to have lunch when he felt in the mood to go into town. One of the fairytales told upon Lalli's first visit had done a surprisingly good job of helping him make sense of Roni's behavior. It told of an old woman who liked eating children. Rather than abduct them, she would invite them in her home and give them sweets. From time to time, the children would be orphans or have parents who didn't feed them properly for various reasons. Those children she would take in permanently, feed many treats to fatten them up, and then eat them. The story told of a pair of siblings in which one was being fattened up, while the other was made a slave of sorts on account of the lady's old age and blindness. The blindness had enabled the sibling being fattened up to trick the woman into thinking they were remaining slim via presenting to her various hard objects that could be mistaken for part of an all-skin-and-bones body when touched. However, the woman lost patience, decided she had already given enough food to the siblings and one day decided to eat them both. The sibling working as a slave had then been able to trick her into entering her own hot stove. Roni hadn't given Lalli anywhere near enough sweets to make up for a job that required a lot of running around, but it did feel like he had in some way been fattened up with the intent of eventually being eaten all while not paying as much attention to the presence of a stove that could fit a person as he should have. Because telling stories alone wasn't a living, Stefan had a few side jobs, one of which Lalli had previously called upon a couple times. One of those times, Stefan had helped him come up with an image closer to what had actually happened: a wild tree nurtured into flowering by someone who was after its fruit and constantly had a woodcutter's axe hanging from their belt.

It just so happened that Stefan was among the handful of men living in town Lalli could make his partner with neither of them being perceived as taking significant financial or social advantage of the other according to the old man; Sigrun called it the "not good enough for the rich crowd, too good for the middle crowd" group. Stefan was in that group due to being the youngest son of the Hunters Lodges' owner, but willingly having several side jobs that were considered trades nobody got into unless they didn't have any other options to make a living. Lalli had long assumed that Stefan's lower desirability as an in-law in all but name came from at least one of his trades being against the law, but the old man had eventually explained that it was technically not the case; they just had an extremely poor reputation, in part because a couple had been illegal in the past. From what Lalli had overheard, Emil Västerström was technically of a status similar to Stefan's and his own due to his drop in status from only son of a rich household to servant having happened recently enough that everyone in town above a quite low age remembered it. However, Lalli couldn't let himself put his guard down because of a pretty face and a kind gesture, especially if it belonged to someone who had been forced out of the very house in which he was currently living; even he could see the selfish reasons Emil would have to court him. Meanwhile, Lalli didn't mind many of the things that allegedly brought Stefan's eligibility down. If anything, his other jobs would let him get the human contact – at least two different meanings of the term could apply here – that Lalli knew to only be able to provide and receive in small doses without feeling overwhelmed. Besides, Tuuri would probably like having a storyteller in the family. Lalli prepared a coin for having a talk with Stefan once he would be done with his storytelling. If things didn't work out, he didn't want the Stefan's time to have been entirely wasted.

Stefan gave the coin back, even after hearing the reason Lalli was insisting upon paying him:
-Look, thanks for thinking of this, but getting money for this is just going to make it harder for me to drop my "with a customer" mindset.
Lalli sighed and slid the coin back in his direction:
-I think you should get money even for real dates. Otherwise, someone can pretend they want to be your partner, spend time with you for free, and then say they changed their mind before the arrangement is made.
Stefan returned the coin:
-I've worked all those jobs long enough to be able to spot the sort of person who would do this. There are a few people who are no longer allowed to ask for my services precisely for that reason. Other than that, I'm technically taking no more of a risk in engaging in courtship than anyone else. And I remember those conversations you paid for. You already know quite a few things you're not supposed to do during courtship.
Lalli pushed the coin back towards Stefan:
-That doesn't mean I have any idea what to do instead. People were getting angry at me without me really understanding why long before I met Roni. I also want you to have this coin in case I end up doing something really bad without noticing until it's too late.
Just as Stefan was about to return the coin, the barmaid, who was also his older sister, grabbed it and stored it in a place from which neither of the two young men would dare try to retrieve it:
-If nobody wants that coin, I'll take it. What would you think of making it a safety deposit? I keep it while the two of you are actually on the date, Stefan can have it if it ends up being the disaster you're worried it will be, you get it back nice and clean if you both enjoy yourselves. And Stefan gives me one also so both of you have the same incentive to make the date work. Deal?
Lalli was relieved when both he and Stefan agreed that it was good alternative to the two of them insisting that the other to keep the coin.
-In that case, the two of you go outside and enjoy the sun before it gets too noisy in here for the two of you to hear each other speak.

Lalli and Stefan ended up sitting – or rather crouching, in Lalli's case – side by side on the riverbank, near the town's main bridge. Stefan was the first to speak:
-Sorry to be asking you this, but the thought just crossed my mind. How can I be sure you're not the one who's trying to get my services for free – or at least much less money than what you would be paying otherwise – under the cover of courtship?
Lalli thought a little, but had to resign himself to the truth:
-I have no way to prove that.
-Just to reassure you from the get-go, there is no shame in that. Besides, the second hard and fast rules are made about what a sheepdog looks like and what a wolf looks like, all the wolves have to do to enter in the sheep pen is don sufficiently convincing sheepdog disguises.
Lalli associated sheepdogs, who were meant to represent good people in the story Stefan was alluding to, with a person he found annoying. A thought crossed his mind, as he remembered something from one of the sheep farms in which he had worked:
-Wouldn't that also mean that dogs who look too much like wolves would be kept out?
-True. Especially since dogs are essentially very tame wolves for whom certain physical and behavioral features were favored during breeding. Mostly so they would look as little like most wolves as possible. But from a sheep herder's point of view, accepting dogs that look a little too much like wolves into the pen comes with the risk of letting actual wolves in.
Just a month ago, Lalli hadn't been very good at that whole analogy thing. But once he had spent most of his first paid conversation with Stefan getting a loose grasp on it, it had turned out to work surprisingly well to talk about things he usually never talked about due to trouble finding proper words for what he was thinking. Figuring out what to say on the spot was still a challenge, however. A question came to his mind faster than he expected:
-Am I a wolf who's bad at pretending to be a sheepdog or a sheepdog that looks too much like a wolf?
Stefan let on a barely audible sound that Lalli had come to assume to mean that he liked something about the question he was being asked:
-Honestly, I don't know you anywhere near well enough to give you an answer. Yet. For that reason, I hope you don't mind if I ask you what your plans for an eventual arrangement are from the get-go. You're not the first person to have shown interest, but I'm still available for reasons I'll share when I feel the right time has come.
This was fortunately a question Lalli had prepared for:
-I'm on vacation from my usual work right now. When I start working again, I'm going to be away a lot. You would do all the jobs you're doing now and would still want to do. Or come with us if you want. I wanted to know you better before talking about anything else.
He heard a sigh of relief from Stefan:
-Do you really mean it? All my jobs? Even the one that would happen in the bedroom on the first floor?
-I don't like doing that too often and don't care if you do it with other people. You might as well continue doing it for work if you want to.
-This is a really tempting offer, but be aware that keeping you from being at higher risk than average for certain diseases will entail me seeing a specialized medical mage beforehand each time the two of us would do anything past a certain level of intimacy. All the other precautions I take can only do so much when not all customers are making the same effort. I'm already seeing the mage as often as both of us can make the time as it is, but I'm going to want to be even more cautious when it comes to you.
Lalli remembered some mention of those diseases from the deluge of talks he'd gotten near the beginning of his relationship with Roni, and promptly felt bad for not thinking of them earlier. The second he took time to think about it, it seemed obvious that this would be something to take into consideration in a partnership with Stefan.
-Where does that mage live?
-In town, she usually hangs out in the place that offers women because this is where she's usually needed. She'd rather have me drop by when it's not too busy there.
Once again, the news were good as far as Lalli was concerned:
-So she's not far away. I like it better when I know it's going to happen in advance, so it should be okay.
-If you're not bothered by the idea alone, the next step would be to see how well this works for us in practice. I happen to know that the extent to which such arrangements work can change widely from pairing to pairing. Unless, of course you'd rather wait until something is signed.
Roni's demands in that particular area had taught Lalli that it was definitely a good idea to include bedroom activities in the list of things getting a trial run during the courtship if the other person was fine with it.
-I'm okay with trying before we decide. Can I ask you what your plans are yet?
Stefan let out a chuckle:
-A little sudden, but good point. I kind of expected whoever I ended up with to want me to give up at least one of my jobs, so my plan was to negotiate on the subject first. Not needing to do that is a pleasant surprise for me. I may need to think about it a little, if you don't mind.
Lalli knew just how much thinking it could take to answer an unexpected question without blurting out a promptly-regretted answer. He realized it might be a good idea to voice his approval:
-Go ahead. Wait, I have something else you could think about: if you're not going to travel with us, would you want to stay with your family or move in with mine?
-That one's easy. There's no way our house would be able to hold the entire family if half of each generation didn't move out as soon as they found a partner. Chances to stay in the house for life tend to be biased in favor of older siblings who have already gotten the next generation started.
Lalli remembered a quip from Sigrun about "the Hunter's Lodge people and the Madsen farm people" trying to infiltrate every single household in town and the nearby villages between them. It looked like he would need to revise his idea of the extent to which she had been exaggerating. Lalli had become wary of statements that seemed too grand to be true after spending so much time around Roni. As he was letting Stefan figure out what he would like his life as his partner to be like, Lalli started thinking of what it would mean to have Stefan in the house while he was away. The first that came to his mind was that Stefan and the children could keep each other company. Maybe he could tell them stories.