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“And if I balk?” I asked. Because I would. I know myself. I make brave plans at midmorning and lose my nerve by midafternoon. It was very Trevil.

Asha’s smile could have lit the fair without Zeph’s help.

“Then I’ll march you there myself,” she said. “You’ve given me permission, in front of Aris, who’ll witness.”

“I have not.”

“Sure you have. You know this is something you want to do. If you plant your feet at the front of that line, Rain Trevil, I’ll put myself at your back and walk you up to that ogre if it takes both hands and a running start.”

“Witnessed,” Aris said with a grin.

Ginger stretched out fully on my countertop, her fluffy tail swishing. Finally. For two years, I’ve watched you steep every blend but the one that matters. Spend the copper, witch. It’s past time.

It was a strange thing to be blessed by your own cat. It was stranger to feel blessed that she’d do it.

I looked across the green, past the pumpkin pavilion and Rufus’s barrels, at the kissing booth. Square and true in the low morning light, decorations stiff with frost, the words, PUCKER FOR THE HOLLOW, dry now. He’d built it on day eleven of fourteen with a wound in his side, and it wouldn’t wobble under a decade of grandmothers.

He stood at the far end of the meadow with Turnip, doing something to a tether that didn’t need doing.

He didn’t know I was watching. For once in two years he wasn’t watching me back.

He’d built the gallows carefully. The least a witch could do was climb them to stand beside him.

“Alright,” I said, lifting my chin. “I’ll do it.”

Asha and Aris shared a grin.

“Make the bell ring,” Aris said.

“The bell hasn’t rung in a generation.” Every child in this valley was told about it at bedtime. “It rings for fated things. I don’t want to be fated. I want to be brave.”

“Don’t worry about the bell then,” Aris said. “Worry about the kiss.”

Asha nodded. “It’s only one copper wide.”

I had a tin in my apron pocket. I’d packed it that morning without letting myself think about why. It said COURAGE on the lid.

I took it out and stared at it a while.

Then I put it back, unopened.

Tansy had needed it. I was going to cross this meadow on nothing but my own nerve, or I wasn’t going to cross it at all.

The morning went on around me, the area filling up, and I started worrying about the plan despite Asha striding by periodically to shake her finger at me.

Soon, I’d place a warm coin in big hands across a booth counter, and I’d do it in front of the entire county, with my own nerve, before any bell had a chance to say a thing.

Let the tower agree afterward or keep its peace.

I was going to say it first.

Aris came by with an hour to go and showed me the copper in her fist before closing her hand around it again.

Ladies were starting to gather, tittering as they gazed at the booth.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

RAIN