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By closing time, the gossip had come back to me three times. Mrs. Piddock’s version had me brewing love potions for the fair. The fishmonger’s version had Goran breaking my counter in half with one fist, out of passion, and did I want a discount on cod while he was here. And the last version came in wearing Asha’s face, near dusk, with a bottle of currant wine and an expression like a lit fuse.

Asha locked my door behind her and turned the sign to CLOSED. She sat on the stool at my counter.

“So,” she said. “Start with the wall.”

I got two glasses down. Outside, the sprites on my gutter had rebuilt their nest into a structure with a turret, and the first frost of the season was starting to coat the window glass.

Three miles east, a male might be sitting in his farmhouse thinking every wrong thing about what he’d done. He wouldn’t be thinking about why I hadn’t wanted him to stop.

In two days, I’d be living inside his house.

I drank wine straight out of the bottle rather than pouring another glass.

“The wall,” I told Asha, “was the good part.”

CHAPTER FIVE

GORAN

In the barn, Turnip watched me mending a harness that didn’t need one bit of attention.

He put his big, fanged head over the stall rail and frowned at the awl. His horn caught the lantern light. After a while he blew out through his nostrils, which was what he did instead of asking questions.

“I understand,” I said.

He blew again, louder.

“I told you. I understand.”

I’d ridden home from the village that afternoon the long way, over the Old Bridge and up along my fence line. The tainted brew had burned out of my blood before I’d cleared the counter inside Rain’s shop. Ogre blood doesn’t hold a potion any better than a griddle holds snow. Whatever the tea was, and I had a fair guess what the tea might be, it came and went fast.

The problem was everything it showed me on the way through.

I set down the awl, because my hands weren’t being careful with the leather, and I made myself look at the whole thing straight. That was how my father taught me to handle a bad harvest. Pretty up nothing. Walk the rows and study them. See what went wrong and make sure you didn’t do it again.

So. The rows.

I drank from her hand, and heat went through me like a grass fire. My body stood up and walked around her counter before I realized it was happening. That part was the brew. I’d swear that part on my land. The heat had a wrongness to it. An outside push. Wind at your back on a still day.

But the brew burned off between one breath and the next, and I stayed at that wall. Kept Rain pinned to that wall.

Two years of want, banked and covered up every market morning, and the moment the tea kicked the gate open, it all went through at once. I bowed over her. I put my nose to her throat, and I breathed her in.

I’d growled.

And her scent…

There was no polite way to think about it. Fear has a smell. Every farmer knows it off every animal he’s ever handled. I’d know it off her in a crowded market with a horse gone wild and bolting. Her scent when I’d had her pinned to the wall had held no fear.

Need had come off her skin instead.

Her heart had fluttered. Her head had tipped sideways. She’d given me the throat I had no right to crave.

I’d taken my nose’s word on a thousand things. Rot in a beam. Frost coming. A ewe gone sour on her lamb. My nose had never once lied to me.

But my nose had also never wanted anything before. Not like this. And a male who wanted something this badly would hear yes in a creaky door. So I couldn’t trust it. That was the problem. I sat in my barn at midnight, turning it over while my supper went cold on my kitchen table.

Turnip reached down and latched onto the harness strap with his fangs.