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CHAPTER ONE

RAIN

The hummingbird got into the honey jars again an hour before the ogre was due, which tells you everything about how market days go at Bellflower & Brew.

“Shoo.” I flapped my apron at it. “That’s stock, you menace. There are hundreds of flowers outside. Go buzz around one of them.”

It ignored me. Hummingbirds in Moonbell Hollow were stubborn, and this one wanted my clover honey more than anything else the meadow was offering.

Across my shoulders, draped like the world’s smuggest scarf, Ginger opened one eye.

Let it drown, she said, into my head, where only I could hear her. Nature is a wheel.

“You’re not helping.”

I’m a realist. Also, Goran is coming. He just turned past the fountain. Her tail flicked against my collarbone. He’s walking slower than usual. Possibly injured. Possibly dying. You should ignore him either way. Males respect indifference.

My hands flew to my hair, which was the opposite of indifference, and Ginger’s purr took on a note I chose not to examine.

Goran Brack delivered on market mornings, the same as he had every market morning for the past two years. Vegetables in autumn. Berries and stone fruit in summer. Mutton wrapped in waxed cloth when the weather turned. He farmed a piece of land three miles east of the village, out past the Old Bridge. He was much taller than me, and I was not small. Shoulders as wide as a root cellar. Golden skin, two little blunt horns half-lost in his sandy hair, and forearms that had ruined me for every human man in the surrounding counties.

If only he’d look at me longer than it took to hand over a crate.

The bell over the door rang as he swept the door open.

He came in sideways, because my doorway had been built for witches not much bigger than me, and set the crate on my counter. Squash, carrots still wearing their dirt, late-season plums, plus a bundle of the bitter greens I loved and nobody else in the Hollow would eat. And on top, centered, one absolutely flawless winter squash, turned so its best side faced upward.

“Morning,” I said. “That’s a gorgeous squash.”

“Best one.”

He portioned out words the way the butcher did the meat, with no waste.

“That’s high praise from you,” I said. “Should I be nervous while cooking it? This feels like the sort of vegetable that deserves an occasion.”

He frowned. His jaw worked. I braced for him to actually speak a string of sentences to me. Maybe something about us doing something tog⁠—

“Chamomile,” he said.

Ah. Yes. His usual order.

My shoulders drooping, I weighed his tin while he filled my shop the way a wardrobe did a hallway. When I passed the tin over, our fingers didn’t touch, because he was careful about things like that. He paid and tucked it into his coat. I paid him for the vegetables, and he added that to his pocket.

When I peeked into the crate again, I found it.

I held up the small polished river stone, smooth as an egg, this one gray with a vein of white through it and only the size of my thumbnail.

“You’ve got a stowaway again,” I said.

“Hm,” he said, and strode back across the room and out the door, the bell clanging behind him.

I put the stone in the bowl by the register with the others. There were a lot of others, and he’d given me each one. It must be an ogre packing custom. I’d decided that a year ago. Straw for humans, stones for ogres, who was to say. And if the bowl had gotten heavy enough that customers sometimes asked if they were for sale, that was between me and the bowl.

I hurried to the front of the tea shop and watched him cross the square. The sun caught his horns. He stopped once, at the fountain, to let the imp Weatherby twins, Nastru and Struan, wrestle a parcel out of the back of his wagon and gallop off with it.

I gripped the trim of my front windowsill to keep from swooning, with my heart doing undignified flips.

Ginger bit my ear. Gently. Mostly.