The Groundsman's Choice

*This one came from the image of a glass office above a golden tree and the ache of knowing something perfect has an expiration date. Thanks for reading I hope the autumn leaves land right for you.*

The leaves in Emberwash park fall wrong, and I want that noted somewhere official. Real leaves go brown, curl up, and die like honest vegetation. Ours turn a soft copper, hang on for a day longer than they should, and then drift down in slow spirals like they are showing off on the way. They are charm-leaves, grown off the season-gears under the fountain, and every one of them that lands is my problem.

I sweep them into the big wicker bin at ten past nine in the morning, three days a week, three autumns into this job, and I am cursing under my breath the way I always do around the second hour. Not at the leaves, exactly. At the arithmetic of it. I rake, the gears turn, more leaves fall, and the park stays pretty forever while I stay twenty-three and go nowhere. Juanita Hicks, keeper of a garden that keeps itself, sweeping up the scraps of magic I am not allowed to touch.

The bin fills. I stamp the leaves down, which is pointless because they weigh nothing, and lean on the rake handle for a minute to look at the fountain. It runs warm, fed by the artesian spring the whole town is built on, and the steam comes off it in thin white curls even in October. Tourists love it. I love it too, in the way you love a coworker who never causes trouble and never says anything interesting.

"Dee's at the window again," Rich says, coming up the path with two paper cups and the particular walk of a man delivering gossip he has rehearsed.

I do not look up at the glass-domed office on the hill side of the park, because I already know what is up there. Dee Sutherland, forty-two, master clockworker, owner of every gear in this ground, standing behind glass with a mug of something and his hands behind his back, watching the park the way a man watches a fire he lit and cannot leave.

"He's always at the window," I say. "It's his window."

"It's you he's watching, though." Rich hands me a cup. Tea, no sugar, because he has paid attention to exactly one thing about me in two years and this is it. "Third time this week I've clocked him when you're on the east lawn. He doesn't do it when I'm on the east lawn. I'd notice. I'd be flattered."

"You're not his type, Rich. His type is brass and grief."

Rich laughs at that, too loud, and sits down on the bin's edge like it is a bench, which it has become over the years. He is twenty-six, three years older than me, a good hand with a spade and a terrible hand with anything that has feelings. He dated the baker's daughter for a year back when he was twenty-two, and they parted so politely that the baker still waves at him. That is the whole of his romantic history, and he tells it like a war story where nothing happened.

"He asked about you yesterday," Rich says. "Casual, like. Asked if you'd been at the park long."

"Everyone asks that. It's small talk."

"It's not small talk when it's him. He doesn't do small talk. The man once answered my question about lunch with a fifteen-minute explanation of gear lubricant."

That is true, and I had forgotten it, and it sits oddly in my chest for a second before I put it down. Dee Sutherland does not chat. He signs my wages through the guild office, he inspects the gear housings every second Thursday, and he says good morning with a nod so precise you could set a watch by it. If he has been watching me specifically, I file it under things that are not my business, which is a fat folder.

We drink our tea and Rich tells me about a delivery that went wrong at the chandler's, and I nod along, and the leaves keep falling, and I think, as I think most mornings, that this is what my life is now. It is ten in the morning and I have already done the interesting part.

Later, in the shed, it gets worse, because in the shed I talk.

The maintenance shed is the warmest building in Emberwash in winter and the sweatiest in summer, and it smells of oil and cut grass and the faint mineral stink of the spring water we use for mixing growth charm. Rich is mending a rake. I am supposed to be sorting seed packets but the packets have defeated me emotionally, and I sit on the workbench and tell him about Tuesday.

"So the merchant," I say. "The ledger one."

"Oh no!"

"Oh yes. Forty minutes. I counted, Rich, because I have nothing else going on, and it was forty minutes on his ledger system. He has a new one. It has columns."

"Columns are good in a ledger."

"It wasn't about the columns. It was about how he felt about the columns. He told me the columns had changed his life, and then he showed me, on his actual person, the little book he carries so he can note down expenses at any hour. I thought he was going to cry about it."

Rich snorts into the rake tines. "And you said?"

"What was I meant to say? He was paying for the pie. I said it sounded efficient. He asked if I found efficiency attractive and I panicked and said yes, and now I believe he thinks we have a future built on columns, and I am going to have to walk a different route to the market for a month."

"You could just tell him it's over."

"It was never on, that's the thing. Nothing is ever on. It's all just... shrugging." I look at my hands, which are good hands, hands that can graft a cutting and fix a jammed sluice and none of that helps me here. "Three years, Rich. Since I started here at twenty. Townies, merchants, that surveyor who explained bridges at me for six weeks. Every one of them fine. Every one of them a shrug at the end. I don't even dislike them, that's the sad part. I just feel nothing and then I go home to the flat above the soap shop and I can smell lavender through the floor."

"Could be worse smells from a soap shop."

"Rich."

"I know. I'm stalling because I have nothing useful."

He mends the rake. I swing my feet against the bench like a person with nowhere better to be, which is exactly what I am, and I say the thing I have been not saying for a while, because the shed is the only place it fits.

"I'm bored of being the reliable one. You know that's my whole personality now? Good, reliable groundsman. Turns up early. Never complains, except constantly, at you. I do my job, the park looks lovely, the gears do their magic trick, and nobody, including me, ever feels anything about any of it. I came here to feel something real. That was the whole point of taking a trade job in a magic town instead of staying home and marrying someone with a ledger."

"You'd have hated him either way."

"I'd have hated him with feeling, though."

Rich points the mended rake at me, which is his version of a serious face. "You want my actual advice?"

"God, no!"

"Dee's been watching you for months, is my actual advice. Since spring, maybe. I only noticed recently, but once I noticed I went back through my memory and it's months." He says it lightly, the way he says everything, and then ruins it by adding, "And he looked kind of sad about it, if sad is a thing a clockworker does."

I do not answer that, mostly because the answer would be interesting, and interesting is what I am allegedly starving for, so instead I hop off the bench, take the rake off him, and test the mend myself, because if I am going to be reliable I may as well be reliable on purpose.

Outside, the fountain steams. The office window glints. I keep sweeping three days a week, and I am not proud to say I start checking the glass, and I am not proud to say I catch him every time.

The summons comes on a Thursday, which is fitting, because Thursday is when he inspects the gear housings and Thursday is apparently also when he inspects me. It comes in the form of Rich, who appears at the shed door with the face of a man delivering news he does not want to be blamed for.

"He wants you up at the office," he says. "The boss. Dee. Just you, he said. I assume it's about the leaf bin."

The leaf bin. Of course. Two days ago I left the big wicker bin unlatched overnight and a fox or possibly a gust of wind got in and scattered half a bin of copper charm-leaves across the top lawn, and I have been waiting for the sky to fall about it ever since. That is the thing about being reliable. You are not punished when you slip. You are summoned. Summoned is worse.

I walk up the hill path with my stomach doing a slow professional churn, past the fountain, which steams as always, thin white curls off the warm water even though it is October and everyone in Emberwash is walking around with their collars up. The spring under the town never cools. It is the one generous thing this place was built on.

The office is a glass dome on the hill side of the park, and I have never been inside it. Three years, three autumns, and I have delivered tool requisitions to the slot in the door like a cat posting a mouse. The door opens before I knock, which tells me he has been watching me come up the path, which tells me nothing new.

"Miss Hicks," Dee Sutherland says. "Come in. Sit down. Would you like tea? I have tea. I don't know if it's good tea, I've had it a while."

He is forty-two and appears to have spent most of that time indoors. Pale, precise, sleeves rolled to the elbow with the rolledness of habit rather than fashion. His hands are stained faintly brass at the fingertips, which I have seen on gardeners who work with growth charm and always assumed was a different stain. On him it looks like a job. On me it would look like a confession.

The office is not what I expect. I expect paperwork and guild certificates. Instead there are trays of small bottles, each stoppered, each labeled in handwriting so tiny it looks like it was done with a needle, and in the center of the main desk, under a bell jar, a single charm-leaf, mounted on a little brass stand like a museum piece. It is autumn gold. It is aggressively autumn gold. It is the color of something that has been told very firmly to be autumn.

"That," he says, before I can ask, "is the problem."

I sit. He pours the tea, which he warns me about again, and I drink it, and it is not good tea, and neither of us mentions it. Then he lifts the bell jar and holds the leaf out to me on its stand, and asks, and this is the part I was not ready for, not the scolding, not the ledger of my failures with the wicker bin, he asks what I think of it.

"The color," he says. "Honestly. You're outside in it every day. I'm in here."

I look at the leaf. It is too yellow. It has been too yellow since I first saw the display version of this charm go in along the west border last week, and I said nothing about it, because who am I to critique a master clockworker's gold. But he is asking. He is asking me, the keeper of the garden, the woman who left a bin unlatched, and the question in his face is not a test. He actually does not know.

"It's too yellow," I say. "It's beautiful, but it's wrong. Real autumn is more copper. More brown in it. It should look like the leaves are tired, not like they've been polished. The copper ones that fall in spirals, the ones the park already makes, those look true. This looks like a painting of them."

I brace for the flicker of offense. It does not come. What comes instead is a smile, a small one, quick, like it surprised him on the way out, and he turns the leaf on its stand and studies it with new attention, and says, quietly, mostly to himself, "Tired, not polished," and writes something on a label the size of a thumbnail.

The leaf bin never comes up. I sit in a glass dome with a clockworker and talk about the correct emotional temperature of dying leaves for the better part of an hour, and when I leave, my ears are warm, and I still do not know what happened.

The invitation comes the following Tuesday. By then he has replaced the gold charm along the west border, and the new leaves come out copper, tired-looking, exactly true, and I stand there in the wind feeling like I've signed something without reading it. He is waiting at the fountain when I finish my sweep, and he says, with the carefulness of a man reading from notes he wrote himself and hates, that there is a place under the park he would like to show me. That no employee has seen it. That I can say no.

I think about Rich. I think about months of watching from a glass office, and sad, if sad is a thing a clockworker does. I think about three years of shrugs, and how this is at minimum not a shrug.

"Yes," I say. "Obviously yes. Don't build it up, though. I'm a very easy person to disappoint."

He laughs at that, one short note, and it sounds like it startled him too.

The way down is a door in the fountain housing I have walked past a thousand times and never once registered as a door, because it is a door that does not wish to be one, which is apparently a thing