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Old Tom came by with his mug to inspect the setup and stood a while.

“Built it yourself,” he said.

“Hm.”

“A wiser male would’ve built it flimsy. Given himself an out. A collapse, say, around the third granny.” He drank from his mug. “But you went and made it last.” He wandered off toward the barrels.

By full dark everyone was talking about how I’d lovingly hand-crafted my own doom, which was true.

I didn’t feel dread about the kissing. I could kiss a hundred grandmothers on the forehead and mean each one. A forehead was easy. A forehead was a blessing, and my people blessed freely. My mother’s did, anyway. Hill stock were free with their hands.

The dread came from being looked at. A county, gathered on purpose, turning its full attention on me at once, and me standing in a box with nowhere to put my hands and nothing to build.

I’d spent my life fourth from the fountain, off to the side, useful and unwatched. Tomorrow they’d place me in the green under a painted sign, and the only thing that made the thought bearable was that in the crowd, at a tea counter, one set of eyes would be turning my way.

The cold drove us home not long after that. Turnip hauled us out the east road under a sky absent of anything but a white-ringed moon, the fair behind us half-built and glowing. Neither of us said much.

Getting down off the wagon took me two tries. She didn’t say one word about that, which was worse.

She made me watch while she unhitched Turnip and took him to his stall, then fed him. And she made me watch again while she made tea neither of us drank. I banked the stove, though she put the wood in. Then she pointed at the kitchen chair, and I sat in it, because there were two of us in the house and only one of us was ever going to win. For some time, I’d suspected it wouldn’t be me.

She had the dressing off before I’d got my shirt clear of my arms. Then she stopped breathing.

My wound had opened along the bottom. Not much. A finger’s length, weeping pink onto the bandage.

“Right,” she said, much too calmly. I’d have preferred shouting.

She cleaned it, put on salve, and wrapped it, never once saying what she had every right to say.

I sat with my hands on my knees and took it.

“Will it hold?” I asked.

“It’ll hold. You’ll hurt.” She tied the bandage off. “Look at me.”

I did as she asked.

“Tomorrow you’ll stand in a box for four hours while this county queues up to put its hands on you.” She moved her thumb over the wrap. “You did that to yourself today. I want you to know that I know it.”

“I do.”

“Good.”

After dinner and cleaning up, we ended up in the big bed with the frost coating the glass and my not-purr going before I’d even settled. She lay with her head on my chest.

“You built the booth,” she said into the dark.

“The frame was crooked. Bram was fighting it.”

“So you fixed it for the grannies to kiss you over. Tomorrow. At length.” Her smile rose against my sternum. “Goran Brack, you are the only male alive who’d volunteer to build his own scaffold and then true the boards so it wouldn’t creak.”

“Creaking’s dangerous,” I said.

The laugh came up out of her and into me, and my not-purr answered it.

I lay in the dark, laughing at a booth, a sign, and two years of standing across a square.

“I’ll be at my own booth the entire time,” she said when the laughing had faded. “If it gets to be too much, you find me. That’s all. Find me, and it’ll just be us again, county or no county.”