Page 23

I knew her counter as well as my fields. Which blend she reached for without looking. The stool she never sat on. How she came around to the front to hand a cup to old Mrs. Willworth rather than make her reach.

A child entered her shop and handed Rain a chipped piece of copper. Rain took the money as if it was a gold sovereign and gave the child a tin of the sweet red tisane without charging what it was worth. The boy ran off believing he’d struck a bargain.

I’d watched her do a hundred small things like that from my place at my stall, and told no one.

By late afternoon, I’d sold most of the squash and all the plums, and I’d heard her shopkeeper’s laugh all morning and her keeping laugh twice.

I was having a fine market day until the peddler set up.

He’d rolled in the night before, one of the road-men who worked the circuit ahead of the fairs, and he’d taken the empty patch beside Rain’s tea shop with a spread of charm-trinkets. Luck knots and love knots. Little tin weather-wards, the kind that rusted by solstice. Zephyrine walked past his table, looked at the weather-wards, and laughed for the first time since the storm.

He watched Rain’s shop all morning. The queue at her shop and the tins going out. By late afternoon, he must’ve decided she was the reason he wasn’t making sales.

“Oi. Tea girl,” he called out when she paused to stand in her open doorway, soaking in the last of the sun.

Her chin came up.

I set down the crate I was holding.

“This square’s got rules about hexwork, hasn’t it?” He spoke loudly for the crowd, walking over to stand in front of her. “What I’m watching all day looks like trade-luring to me. Moods in cups and charms in tins. Where I’m from, witches post what’s in the brew, so the honest folk can⁠—”

He stopped talking because the light around him had changed.

I loomed over him, blocking the sun. I didn’t touch him or speak. I let him work it out for himself.

I’d never had to learn how to do this. My father was the same. He’d put his body between trouble and whoever it was aimed at, and mostly the trouble backed off.

The pie cart stopped hissing.

Old Tom rose half out of his chair.

Even the fishmonger’s goat turned her head our way.

“Her blends are posted on the board,” I said. “To the right of her door.”

He turned. Whatever he’d meant to say, he read it off me first and swallowed it. He slunk around me and returned to his cart.

The crowd went back to its shopping, and Old Tom left for the tavern fast enough that the story would be around the village by supper. The peddler packed his cart within an hour. The twins, who materialized to help him load, told me afterward that he’d asked whether the ogre was always like that.

“Struan said only about her,” Nastru said with a laugh.

“You said what?”

Struan grunted. “You’re welcome.”

Rain came out of her shop and marched up on me while I was still working out whether to be angry. She planted herself in front of me with her fists on her hips and her chin tipped all the way back.

“You cannot run every rude man out of this county,” she said.

“Can.”

She jabbed a finger at my chest, which meant reaching up past her eyeline, and that undid some of her majesty. “What happened to the pact? Casual. At ease and unbothered.”

“I was casual. I didn’t growl.”

“You didn’t gr—” She pressed her hands to her face, making a sound I’d never gotten before. “Alright. Thank you. He shouldn’t have been spouting nonsense.”

“He learned his lesson.”