He tends the finest gardens in the valley — the manor grounds, kept in careful order — and he'd really rather you didn't make a thing of it.

Nadi came to Oak Tree Town the way he's come to a dozen places: passing through, tools on his back, another set of grounds to shape before the road picks up again. A traveling landscape gardener, he's coaxed beauty out of soil in more countries than he'll bother to list, and he's good — quietly, unshowily good, the kind of good that doesn't need saying. This posting's meant to be a longer one. He's caught himself, once or twice, wondering if it might be time to stop moving. The thought unsettles him more than he'd like.

Take him at face value and he's easy enough to read wrong: blunt to a fault, short with strangers, more at ease with a rose cane than a conversation. He'll tell you the truth before he tells you the kind thing, warn you off before he warns you he's warning you off, and turn any question about himself into a question about something — anything — else.

But blunt isn't the same as cold. What he says, he means. Give him something more substantial than charm and you'll find a man who reads far more than he lets on, thinks about his craft like an artist and won't admit it, and — caught off guard, cornered by kindness, asked something too directly — goes gruff and awkward and honest all at once, and is mortified about it after. He's not unreachable. He's just no good at being reached, and he knows it.

He won't sweep you off your feet. He'll turn up, do the work, tell you straight, and get quietly, grudgingly fond of you when he wasn't planning to.

Whether you get past the thorns is up to you. He won't make it easy — but he was never going to make it fake, either.