Yield Under Great Persuasion

by Alexandra Rowland

“Shouldn’t Angarat handle matters like this herself?” “She’s very busy,” Mrs Hart said, still painfully earnest. “She has a lot of things to look after. And everybody likes getting a helping hand with their to-do list, don’t they!”

“This is so far beyond flirting. This is inappropriate and—and egregiously over the line.” “Have you told him to stop?” “...I can’t remember,” said Tam, who knew very fucking well that he hadn’t.

She patted his arm. “When I was a lass, what I always did was to say very firmly that I wasn’t interested in being courted that way. Then if they kept on, I threw bricks and flowerpots at them. Or cowpats. I ran off many a would-be suitor by threatening him with a cowpat to the face.”

“Fuck’s sake, Tam, work with me. Kittens and puppies and lambs and calves can be babies, if you can’t figure out how to source a human one or don’t want to. Plants can be babies. It was figurative.”

“Think about the things you want. Go home. Tell people what those things are. Flourish and prosper.”

Lyford brought him more tea and a book, and then, in one of the most alluring and arousing moves Tam had ever witnessed, left him alone for several hours to nap.

He knew, intellectually, that there was enough—that he had money to keep the shop going, that there was food in the pantry, that the roof wasn’t leaking, that he had good clothes on his back—but the fear was there, always, that he’d wake one morning and find all of that shattered on the floor too.

He could see the shape of the task he had been set—he understood what was being asked of him, and why. He could have wept with gratitude for it.

Tam had never been the sort of person who could face someone else’s topic-left-unspoken with any kind of grace or tact, for all that he could go decades without resolving the ruts of his own devising.

WOOF

“Then you’ll just have to keep me around where I can keep fucking up. And I will try my fucking best to figure out new, exciting ways of fucking up instead of—instead of the same old hateful, boring ones. Alright?” He loathed this. He felt shaky and fragile in his chest, as if he were about to shatter. Fuck it. He slogged forward through the muck. “You don’t need to give me another chance or any of that bullshit. Because that was the last bloody time that happens, ever.”

Nicolau laughed in his face about it, of course, because he was a complete prick, but at least he stopped kissing Tam. Instead, because he was the worst person that had ever lived, he propped his chin in his hand again and twined a curl of Tam’s hair around his finger and smiled at him. “Did you have any nice dreams?”

“No,” Tam said crisply. He had decided to ignore Nicolau playing with his hair, as it was beneath his dignity to acknowledge it. If Nicolau wanted to do something fucking embarrassing like that, it was none of Tam’s concern.

“I said not a fucking word. I’m embarrassed. I am humiliated. I do not want to be caught dead in Nicolau’s fucking brocade bullshit. Don’t tell anyone.”

“No, yeah, take your fucking time. Take thirty years to get dressed and get downstairs.” He jounced Angharad—Daisy, he supposed—on his shoulder and turned back to Isa. “This motherfucker tricked me into sleeping in,” he said. “After he got a prophetic fucking dream that he didn’t think was important to mention immediately. He made me kiss him for a while instead of telling me about his prophetic fucking dream the very instant he was conscious. Can you believe this shit?”

“You see what I mean?” Tam said to Daisy as Isa exclaimed and tried fiercely to decline the gift. “You see what I mean about the person on this team who is not pulling their weight? He’s over there talking to your mama about clothes instead of paying attention to you and that prophetic fucking dream he had. Can you believe this shit?” Daisy gurgled and—and fucking smiled at him. It took Tam out at the knees and he had to sit down immediately on the settle and clutch her to him and try not to add any more personal embarrassment to the brocade situation, such as by gasping and cooing and saying something to her that was beneath both her dignity and his.

Isa had a strong, steady heartbeat. Nicolau had one that was much the same, though it was faster, because he was a horrible man who insisted on being in love with Tam and forgiving him for his goblinish ways, and it was evidently doing something for him to have Tam trying to listen to his organs.

“Are you in love with me?” He seized up in horror. Fuck. Goblin, he was a goblin, he wasn’t fit for polite company— “Yes,” Nicolau said softly, immediately, as if it were as ordinary and unremarkable as a daisy by the side of the road.

“There you are, one very fixed baby,” he said nervously. “I’m sorry in advance about what has happened to her lung capacity, but on the upside, I’m not sure that it’s even possible for her to get colic now, or a cold, or—maybe anything else? Haha. Also, if she ends up growing to seven feet tall, that’s not our fault.”