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The words that go with the stones are old, and nobody in this village has ever heard me say them. A male says them to the stone, and the stone keeps them close.

My father brought my mother a stone every week for thirty years. He set them in a wooden bowl on the sill above her wash basin, and when the bowl filled she emptied it into a crock. When the crock filled he built her a second bowl. He wasn’t a talker. I’ve wondered since whether I learned the quiet off him or whether it just came to me the way the sandy hair did.

She was the one with the words. Her people cut stone in the eastern hills before the family walked west, and she’d learned them from her mother. For thirty years she said them over every stone he carried in and never told him what she was doing.

He thought she was tidying.

She taught him the year she died. I came in from the barn one evening and the two of them sat at the table with the crock between them and my father’s eyes wider than I’d seen in my life.

After we buried her, he walked me up to the cairn and said the words out loud, in the old tongue, badly, because he’d only known them a few months and his mouth wasn’t made for them. Then he told me what they meant.

We stood there a while, two big males crying in the rain. After, he gave me the only piece of advice he ever gave me that I’ve kept.

“Tell her sooner than I did.”

I held the stone to my mouth.

“From my ground to your keeping,” I told it in the old tongue. “What I have grown is yours. What I have mended is yours. The manner was wrong, but the wanting was not.”

That last line wasn’t part of the custom. I added it.

The stone didn’t object.

I set it on the fresh-oiled door handle, balanced where her palm would land, where she couldn’t miss it or mistake it for anything but something from me.

A soft sound came from inside the room. Ginger sat on the counter in the dark shop, awake, watching me with golden eyes. Her tail hung down, sweeping.

We looked at each other, the cat and I, her knowing what was going on and me…unsure. But I knew animals, and this one could make her thoughts clear when she chose.

She hopped down and sauntered across the room, stopping when her breath ghosted the inside of the glass beside the door. She lifted one paw and pressed it against the pane, the toes spread.

My knowing things wasn’t like the magic Rain could do or what Zeph did to the weather. My magic came from the earth and the nature around me. When a creature wasn’t feeling well, I knew it a day early. Turnip gave me the weather with one hoof.

Yet when this cat pressed her paw on the glass, I got very little off her. She was pleased. That much came through. I couldn’t have said about what.

I put my fingertip against the outside, opposite her paw, because it seemed to be what she wanted. She meowed and turned, sashaying back across the shop to her bed on the floor beneath the bench.

I left not knowing what I’d agreed to, though I was sure I’d agreed to something.

I walked home with the sun coming up over my fields, and my chest full of fence posts, and one day left to get through.

Late today, I’d hand Rain my house keys.

I wasn’t sure if I was excited or worried about what she’d do with them.

CHAPTER SIX

RAIN

My front door no longer scraped.

I’d braced for it, my shoulder already turning to shove, but the door swung away from my hand easily. I nearly fell into my shop.

That was when I spied the new hinge pins. Dark iron, hand-forged, and still smelling faintly of the fire. The frame stood true for the first time since the storm. Somebody had planed the swollen edge, oiled the wood, and rehung a door that weighed more than I did. Not a soul on Willow Lane had seen it happen, as far as I could tell. If someone had, they would’ve told me already.

A river stone sat on the handle, balanced exactly where my palm had landed. Flat gray. A band of white through the middle. Cold from the night, but it warmed in my hand while I stood on my stoop trying not to cry about it.

He was here before the frost lifted, Ginger said from the counter, when I finally stood inside. Worked for hours. Very quiet for someone of his size.