~A Wild Heart~
Chapter Five
~~~ooooo~~~
Two mornings later, Aeris woke up to find a flower sitting on her bedroom windowsill. Nostalgia swamped her as she picked the lily up with trembling fingers, memories of happier times when she would gather bouquets of the flowers while watering the sheep and bring them home for her mother and then later Zack's mother.
When she saw him, she had the flower in her hand.
"You were the one who left this on my window." She looked uncertainly at him. "Weren't you?"
The slightest inclination of his head was her answer. In some forgotten corner of her heart, joy pierced through the pain she'd buried deep, easing the sorrow that had been entrenched there since the deaths of both her parents.
She cleared her throat and smiled at him. "It's beautiful." She tilted her head to one side, trying to read his expression. "This isn't the first time you've given me a flower."
"No."
"How did you know it's my favorite flower?"
"I didn't." His face was inscrutable. "I thought it suited you."
"Then…you were at the farm?"
"There are ways I can get a flower to you without having to be anywhere near your farm."
Aeris wondered about that but before she could say anything, he held his hand out, and she remembered there was something else she wanted to ask him.
"Do you… Would you mind if we stay out in the hills with the sheep today?" she said hesitantly, and blurted out the rest in a quick rush. "It is possible, right? The land out there doesn't belong to anyone."
He went so still, she didn't think he breathed. His eyes searched hers.
She held her own breath.
"I've been waiting for you to ask me that."
She was so giddy, she could have danced all the way back to where she'd left her flock. It took every ounce of self-control she had to restrain herself from doing so, and just barely managed to walk sedately beside him, but she was unable to prevent the huge grin on her face and she thought her feet didn't quite touch the ground as they made the trek back.
~~~ooooo~~~
Out in the fields the dogs circled and sniffed the fairy to their hearts' content, then perceiving that he wasn't there to eat their sheep, apparently arrived at the conclusion that he must have come to help watch them. Affronted at the idea that Aeris would think they needed any help in keeping their charges safe they became overzealous in nipping and yipping at the heels of the sheep and herding them so close together that the poor animals couldn't graze and baaed pathetically.
Only after she had Cloud feed the dogs a piece of jerky and scratched their heads did they understand that both she and the fairy knew they were doing a fine job and he wasn't there to take over their duties, and mollified, they let the sheep scatter to look for their favorite plants.
"They're different with you," Aeris mused, watching Lucy and Daisy settle down to their job. "At home they're very friendly when a neighbor comes to visit, but when we're out here with the sheep and someone happens by, they usually growl and bark and bare their fangs, and won't let up until they're gone."
"They know I'm not a human," he said simply. "The dogs can sense that I'm not a threat to the sheep. They just had to make sure and they wanted to prove to you that they can protect the sheep."
She grinned. "I see." He already knew the dogs' personalities as well as she did.
They sat together for a while and she took full advantage of the opportunity to satisfy her curiosity about his life and his people, asking him so many questions that he did most of the talking for once, but it wasn't long before he told her he had to go back.
She bit her lip. "Will I see you tomorrow?"
"I'll let you know."
Aeris mulled over his answer after he took his leave, but it wasn't until she found another flower in the morning that she comprehended his meaning; the flowers were his way of telling her when he could meet with her. She cherished the sight of the lilies on her window each morning all the more for the message they held.
~~~ooooo~~~
"Do you see that?" Zack nodded toward the window.
Tifa's eyes narrowed as she studied the girl sitting in the chair by the front window. A book lay open on her lap but Aeris seemed to have forgotten about it; she sat, arms folded across the windowsill and chin resting upon them, gazing out into the night.
"She doesn't even hear us," she said disbelievingly. Unlike Zack, she didn't bother to whisper. Their companion was clearly oblivious to everything else around her.
"She's been doing that a lot. Sometimes, she's smiling for no reason, like she's doing now. Other times, she looks like she wants to cry." He kept his voice low. "What do you suppose she's thinking about?"
Tifa glanced sharply at him. "I'm sure it's nothing to worry about," she smiled reassuringly.
She threw the rag she'd been shining the small table with onto the book Aeris was reading, causing her to jerk her head back from the window. The brunette glanced down at the towel over the book in her lap then over at the fireplace and finally seemed to notice she wasn't the only person in the room.
"What's with you tonight?" Tifa demanded.
Emerald green eyes widened. "What do you mean?"
"You're…distracted." Tifa's frown deepened. "You've been sitting there with a dreamy look on your face all evening."
"I was just thinking about…things."
"What things?" Zack wanted to know.
"Just…things." Aeris smiled brightly at them. "Nothing important."
Zack's face was skeptical. "What are you reading?"
To their surprise, their friend's face colored and she averted her gaze. "Fairy stories," she murmured. "I just began a new one…" She held the book up to show them the cover and Tifa saw that it was a recent purchase she'd made with the gil she'd received for some fleeces. As one of the few books they had in the house, Tifa and Aeris had taken to reading a story aloud from it after dinner as they sat around the table or in the living room. Like most of the other families, gathering together in the evenings for some storytelling or reading after the workday was over had been a pastime that they'd all enjoyed on the farm, Zack's mother in particular, and they'd chosen to continue the tradition in honor of her memory.
Hardly anything worth blushing about, Tifa thought. She gave her a hard look. "Well, come over here. We need your input on what to do about the garden. Zack and I have been racking our brains the last half hour but have no solution to speak of. I'll finish reading your story for you tomorrow night."
"Oh." Aeris looked guiltily at them.
Their neighbors relied on the few farms that had a well pump to help provide them with some good vegetables for their tables but with Zack out in the field with the men most days, that meant one less person to help till, water, and weed the garden. They lacked the physical labor necessary to keep up a good-sized garden. The answer to their problem was obvious. It was just that none of them wanted to say it out loud as it was practically akin to admitting defeat as far as they were concerned.
Aeris said what they were all thinking, what they knew had to be done. "We'll have to switch out one of the crops." She meant a fruit or a vegetable that would require less attention and work but even that was debatable. The other farms weren't going to be very happy, but it was better than the alternative of doing away with a crop entirely instead of replacing it.
She moved the chair over to the table in front of the fireplace and sat back down with Zack and Tifa.
~~~ooooo~~~
"These are beautiful." She reached out to touch the white petal of a flower that grew all along the stream out in the hills. "Tifa always laughs when I say that this is my favorite flower because they're everywhere. I used to pick them all the time when we were children."
Hooded blue eyes that had been watching her from under thick, golden eyelashes swept up to her face. "Everywhere?" His lashes lowered again. "We think otherwise." Aeris listened closely as he spoke, noting with interest how the soft timbre of his voice seemed to be in perfect accord with the melodic drone of the tiny waterfalls around them where they sat on a giant boulder at the edge of the stream with the cold water running over their bare feet.
"I… I have noticed they become quite sparse the deeper we go and don't seem to grow very far inside the woods."
His eyes shifted back up to hers. "This is the only part of the world where they're found anymore."
The thought saddened her. "Then I hope they continue to grow and thrive here for a long time."
"They're a favorite at the court and are seen everywhere during celebrations and feasts."
"The fairy king and queen's court?"
He gave a nod. "They're water lilies."
"We just call them wild lilies." She glanced at him in surprise. "I thought water lilies were the ones that are found in ponds and still waters."
Cloud shook his head. "These are true water lilies. Notice how they grow on land, near the stream but not close enough to actually be in the water. They're indicators," he explained. "They let you know water is nearby, sometimes just a few feet under the surface, sometimes over a hundred feet away. They grow in clusters with their stalks extending downward to become a single bigger root so that they oftentimes look like great masses of ropes nearer the surface. The main root lies submerged in an underground pool or water of some sort, allowing it to absorb what moisture the flowers need and retain it for long periods of time when in drought. Even after they're plucked, they can live for months if their stems are in water."
She watched his face, looking for some indication of his feelings. "Yes, I always thought it was fascinating how they could live so long without their roots."
"Once, they used to grow all over the hills." His voice sounded almost wistful as he looked out into the woods. "My mother tells me that come springtime and all throughout summer and into early autumn, you could look out and see a sea of white and green that was as vast as the ocean. The grass, too, covered the hills and was really long and green in those days, all year long."
"Until humans came," she finished softly for him. "And the flowers stopped growing."
"There is water here but the ground underneath isn't level either, and it can be a lot harder to reach water in one spot than it is just a few yards away. The water was also being drawn up too quickly and couldn't be replenished fast enough." He turned his face back to her. "After most of the humans left, we prevented the flowers from growing back on the hillsides anymore."
"Because of us?"
"It is true that unsettled land attracts humans. Rich, fertile, unsettled land even more so." He broke off the stalk of a bulb that was just beginning to open, and her eyes went round as he touched a finger to a petal, and the flower blossomed in his hand. "But a lot of the water was used up. If water lilies remain buried underground and don't sprout, they hardly use any water at all."
He held the flower out to her.
"What a sight it must have been," Aeris said sadly, taking it from him and tracing her finger over the delicate pink and yellow inner petal of the young flower. She could almost see the hills, not fields of rock and dirt and grass as they were now, but covered entirely with leafy white flowers waving whichever way the wind blew. "How beautiful the hills must have looked."
He nodded again. "You say that about a lot of things. The flowers, the hills, the forests, the stream. Is there anything not beautiful to you?"
She gave a small laugh. "No, I don't think so." She turned her gaze upon him, he who was more beautiful than any of those things. What would he say if she told him that? she wondered, and her lips twitched at the thought. "Tifa and Zack say that about me, too. For them, our farm, our land, the hills, they're all inside of them. They're in their blood, and nothing can compare to them. But for me, it's everything the world has to offer. Show me the leaf of a tree I haven't seen before, and I would probably be just as taken by it as I would be by a desert flower. As long as I'm surrounded by nature, I feel at home."
The fairy's eyes went to the lily in her hand. "It is beautiful," he said, lifting his head and their eyes met. "It's your flower. Aeris."
A hot flush crept up her neck and face. With anyone else, she'd say that was warmth and admiration she saw on his face. But she was likely attributing human emotions to a fairy. There were things about him that seemed so human sometimes that she kept forgetting he wasn't one and therefore did not possess the ability to feel as humans did.
"Thank you."