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“I’ve seen you, Goran Brack. I did my looking with both eyes open, as well as my tongue, and here I am, holding your heartbeat and negotiating. Next worry.”

“Hurting you.” The drum under my hand picked up.

A male who took doors off their hinges in the dark so the scrape wouldn’t trouble anybody was lying in his bed, afraid of his own body.

“We’ll go slow,” I said. “Slow as you manage a field. And we’ll talk the entire way through, out loud, both of us.”

“Agreed. There’s oil.”

“There’s what?”

“It’s practical,” he said gravely.

I laughed into his shoulder. “Practical. Two years of courting me with squash and stones, and underneath it all you were a logistics male.”

“Always have been,” he said.

“We need time with no scheduling conflicts,” I said. “No dressing changes due, no dawn plowing, no committee, no deliveries. A full night with nothing else on the agenda.”

“Full market’s tomorrow,” he said. “Twins take the feed run Friday. Saturday, then. Saturday there’s nothing.”

“Saturday it is.”

A letter came the next day.

Mama’s writing, all looping. Postmarked yesterday from Aunt Isador’s village. I read it at the kitchen table. Then I read it again, because the first reading could not possibly have said what it said.

My darling girl,

Isador is bored of me, and I am bored of her, and we part the best of friends. I’ll be home a week from Saturday, sooner than planned, and before some sparrow of a neighbor gets to you first, you’ll hear it from me. I am not traveling alone. I’ve taken up with a tinker named Mistral. He mends things that were never broken and charms things that were, and he has a wagon that unfolds into more rooms than it has. He laughs at my jokes before I’ve finished them, which at my age has got to be courtship.

I hear from three fellow villagers that the tower bell rang for you. We will discuss the ogre, at length, over tea, like civilized women. Tell him to stop being terrified of me; it wastes both our time. Kiss Ginger. Whatever she did, she was right.

Your loving Mama

I set the letter down, then picked it up and read it a third time. Ginger leaped up onto the table, set the sprite jar down beside the butter, and read it too.

“A friend called Mistral,” I said. “She’s taken up with a tinker. My mother. She was only gone a few months.”

Efficient woman, said Ginger. You come from a strong line. I’ll inspect the tinker myself.

I put the letter under the butter dish to keep it from blowing off the table.

“She sounds happy,” I said, leaning back in my chair. “Coming home claimed. Trevil women. We take our time, and then we don’t.”

The kettle steam drew a small wagon rolling home.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

RAIN

Saturday took a year to arrive. Or so it seemed.

Neither of us was worth anything all day. I burned a batch of chai base for the first time since my apprentice years and stood staring at the scorched pan while the steam over it drew things I had to smother with a lid.

I gave the morning up as lost.

In the village, it went no better for Goran. Thursday market had already been a spectacle, the pair of us being so normal at our stalls that Old Tom took notes, and Goran came home from the feed handoff yesterday, telling me he’d paid the Weatherby twins twice.