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You’re leaking longing into the shop, she said. It’ll get in the tea.

“It will not get into the tea.”

The mood blends take on ambient emotion. You’ve said so yourself.

“I said grief, if I brew angry. There’s a difference between craft and leaking.”

The word for what you’re doing, Ginger said, resettling her bulk across my shoulders, is marinating.

“I’m not doing that either, and I don’t wish to discuss it.”

Ginger snickered.

The morning continued. I sold lemon balm tea to Mrs. Piddock for her nerves and a bright-blend to a miner who’d gone three weeks without sun. I fixed the spout of my copper kettle twice because the steam kept curling into unwanted shapes.

That was my tell. Mama’s steam did it too.

When a Trevil woman brewed with her mind elsewhere, the steam drew pictures. Some revealed what we’d rather they didn’t. I wiped the fog off the windows twice before I let myself see what it was sketching. Horns. Little blunt ones. Tiny ogre-witch children running across a meadow.

I threw the window open and let the steam out into the square, where it could embarrass somebody else.

Above the rooftops, the sun shone on the face of the Moonbell. There are two bells up there. The small one clanked the hours and had never had anything interesting to say. The deep one hung below it in the dark, and it hadn’t made a sound in a generation, because it didn’t ring for fire or weather or the turn of the year. It rang for fated pairs. No rope. No ringer. It decided.

Every child in this valley was told about it at bedtime.

“Not a word out of you,” I whispered to the bell.

Mama would’ve laughed herself silly. But Mama was a county away at Aunt Isador’s until the deep frost, which meant the shop, the brewing, the ledger, and the hummingbird were all mine. So was the upstairs apartment where her whistling usually lived. This was the fourth autumn I’d run the business alone. I was doing fine. The steam was just trying to irk me.

The bell rang again, and the Woods twins stormed in. Asha first, flour to her elbows, talking before the door was fully open, and Aris with her healer’s satchel looped over her arm and the expression of a woman conserving her words for patients who’d earn them.

“Settle a dispute,” Asha said. “Kissing booth. Cheek or mouth?”

“Good morning to you too,” I said, going around the counter and leaning against it.

“Morning. Cheek or mouth?”

“For the fair?” The harvest festival was a month away, and the Hollow had decided how it should be run. My stall had been planned down to the tin: spiced moonbell chai, everleaf medicinal, frog’s breath body enhancer, and mulled cider with a mood-warming note. I’d pack everything in little sealed travel tins to keep them from getting wet if it rained. “I wasn’t aware the kissing booth was settled at all.”

“It’s for the Healing House roof fund. A copper for a kiss,” Asha said. “Bram Weatherby has agreed to stand in the booth. We asked him yesterday. He blushed all the way down his hairline and said he’d have to write to Odile first. But then he said yes before the ink was dry.”

“The entire county knows how he blushes,” I said.

“The only question left is cheek or mouth,” Asha said. “And Aris says cheek, because she’s a coward.”

“Because I’m a healer.”

Asha pulled a singing honey bun out of the basket hooked over her arm and set it on my counter, where it launched into a decent contralto operetta. “Payment for the kissing booth consultation.”

Her baking was a work of art. Two bites of the bun and I’d forgive my worst enemy their greatest sin or at least stop shouting at everyone about them.

Aris set her satchel down and settled on a stool, swinging her feet. “We’ll be putting half the village through one man’s mouth in an afternoon. I’ll be dosing the entire county for sore throats by the following week. I say it must be the cheek.”

“Mouth,” Asha said, “could be double the coppers, and the roof fund needs coppers. One for a cheek or forehead. Two for the mouth.”

I got down the brown pot I kept for the twins and set water on. “Is the Healing House roof that bad?”

“It groans when it rains,” Aris said. “Like a man who wants attention.”