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“I know what it is.”

“It rings for⁠—”

“I know what it rings for.”

The bells rolled on, filling the valley, and the villagers stood around us in silence, waiting to see what we’d do.

I started to laugh, my forehead against his neck, right above the place where the not-purr lives.

One copper poorer.

The tower rang.

And the sun went down over the roof fund’s best day in the history of the Hollow.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

GORAN

The bells stopped at dusk. The village did not.

By full dark, the place had turned itself into a festival inside a festival. Rufus rolled two barrels out of the Silver Bell and announced the first round was free. Somebody got the fiddles out. The roof strongbox had to be carried by two men. Melissant came through, parting the crowd, carrying a book the size of a paving stone with hundreds of years of dust inside the binding.

She set it on a table, opened it to a marked page, and read to the gathering by faelight.

“The bells were hung when the tower was raised,” she said. “Bronze from the old country, blessed by whoever did the blessing in those days. The deep peal rings on its own judgment, no rope attached. Never has been.” She glanced up before looking back down. “The book lists those it has rang for. Farmers and bakers, a smith and a librarian, one pair of shepherds. Every pairing on the list stays paired for life.”

“Guess I was wrong about the bell,” Old Tom said, which surprised nobody. “But I was right that it rings for true mates.”

That didn’t surprise anyone either.

“The tower has never once been wrong,” Melissant said, closing the book on its own dust.

Everyone cheered. Rain stood beside me with her hand in mine, laughing, glowing, and I stood in the middle of the best day the village had ever given me with a stone going down through my chest like a plumb line.

No book in the meadow knew this part.

Ogres choose once. I chose two years ago, at a market stall, before any tower said a word. My choosing was done and settled. Nothing that rang today could add to it.

But Rain isn’t an ogre. Humans choose in seasons and are able to change. That wasn’t a flaw in them. It was their freedom, and I wanted her free or not at all. And now, her village, her book, and her three hundred years of tower had stood up in front of the entire county and told her it was already decided. Fated. Entered on a list after shepherds.

A cage was a cage, even if it was made of bells.

I lasted another hour. I danced with her once, if you could call it that, her hands in mine and my attention spent on not stepping anywhere near her feet. The villagers cheered that too, and Rain’s face stayed bright and her scent full of joy. No edge in it anywhere. Maybe I’d have believed the joy if I were a wiser male. Instead, the plumb line kept dropping.

Twice that evening she reached for my hand, and twice I gave her my hand and nothing else. She noticed the second time. Her fingers went still inside mine for a breath, and then she laughed at something Rufus said and went back to being bright.

That was the worst thing that happened all night, and I did it myself.

A male can stand in the middle of a wonderful day and build a wall out of nothing but care, and the woman on the other side of it doesn’t get told what it is. She just sees the wall. I’d built her a stool, a shelf, a hook, and a bed. Now I’d built her a wall, on the one evening she’d earned better. But I couldn’t take it down in front of all these people.

She could read me the same as I smelled weather.

She stood on a bench and put her mouth to my ear, speaking low. “Take me home. Stop on the Old Bridge.”

Turnip pulled us out of the fair and into the dark, and neither of us said anything until his hooves hit the bridge planks.

The bridge at night is the quietest place in the county, with the river flowing beneath it and the willows clinging to the bank, their leaves rustling in the breeze.