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Watching her haul furniture made me want to growl.

Her ears went pink.

I set the bench down near the other witches with a thud.

We sat out the worst of it, in faelight, with the square full of squeaks and barks and purrs and smashing. The kettle stayed on, and I forced myself to drink three cups of chamomile tea.

“Quite a storm,” Rain kept saying, the twins nodding along with her.

The orange cat kept staring my way.

Sprites raided the fountain coins, shrieking as they flew past with coppers and silvers clutched in their tiny hands.

A palm-sized dog came down the chimney, yipped, and turned into a puddle on the hearth.

The weather witch sprinted through the square, casting one spell after another that failed, apologizing to anyone who’d listen.

Rain kept the four of us laughing through the worst of it. I’m not good at that. I grow crops better than well. I maintain my farm as it should be. But I don’t know how to make someone laugh. That bothered me, because I wanted to say something that would make Rain laugh rather than leave her to be the one who always had to tell the joke.

I’d spent many storms alone on the farm, banking the stove, waiting them out with Turnip huffing inside his stall in the barn, eager to get out. Now I sat out one in Rain’s shop, dripping on her floor, and realized that I’d been handling storms wrong.

“Zeph will be doing penance until spring,” Rain said. “She’ll be charming frost off doorsteps until midsummer. Goran, you’re a farming male. Tell me the sky’s not meant to do something like this.”

“It isn’t.”

“See, that’s confirmation from an expert, that’s what it is. Aris, write it down.”

“I’m not writing it down.”

I said little. I always said little, and next to Rain, the little sounded like nothing. But she built around my silence. I’d watched her do it for two years. She asked, I answered in only a few words, and she took the short answer and expanded on it. No one else in the Hollow did that. They took my quiet for what it was on the surface. She took it for a wall worth poking her head over.

The wind changed key. The shutters bowed. The faelamps guttered and stood back up. And the front of the shop groaned along the sill as if the building was taking a deep breath.

I leaped over to Rain and lifted her into my arms.

The gust passed. The building held. The shutters banged twice and settled.

And Rain rested in my arms with her heart pounding against my chest, warm through her dress. So warm I could barely think of what I should say. She tipped her head back and looked up at me.

“It’s quite kind of you to protect me through the…”

“Wind,” I said.

“Yes, wind. There’s been some this evening.”

Her hands rested on my shoulders. The faelight was doing amazing things to her upturned face, and my blood was rushing around in my throat. Her cat familiar sat on the counter, her tail wrapped around the teapot, watching me with golden eyes.

I released Rain, and she slid down my front, her feet landing square on the floor. Letting her go was the hardest work I’d done all season. I stepped back and got my arms folded on my chest, where they could do no more volunteering.

Rain smoothed her apron down. “Well. If the wind comes back, you know where I am.”

The baker twin choked on her tea.

What was left of the storm swept out west, grumbling, dropping a last few cats on the street. We left the shop, stepping into a square that glittered. Every cobblestone wet, every puddle steaming, and sprites in the gutters squawking as they haggled over their loot. The air held the sweetness that follows even a bad storm.

Rain laughed at the wreckage of her awning, but when she looked up, her eyes widened.

The roof over the part of the shop where she shared living quarters with her mother had left with the storm, peeled back to the beams, clean as a lifted lid. Her yellow flower curtains hung over the outer wall, soaked and dripping. The first stars of the evening shone down into rooms where stars have no business being.