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“It was your grandmother’s,” Mama said. “Given to her by a quarry-ogre out of the eastern hills, the year before she met your grandfather. She turned him down. She was young, and the county was smaller-minded in those days. She chose the easier road. She kept the stone her entire life, and on the last morning, she put it in my hand and told me what it meant, and said, ‘If a patient one ever asks one of ours again, tell her what the stone is asking. Let her answer knowing that.’”

My mother turned around, and her gaze went from my face to the cord around my neck.

“You knew,” I said. My voice came out broken. “Two years, Mama. Two years of stones going into that bowl, and you knew what they meant, and you didn’t tell me.”

“You don’t finish another woman’s brew,” she said gently. “The stones weren’t asking me. If I’d told you, you’d have decided in a hurry, out of shock or sweetness. Hurried answers are how a woman ends up with the wrong life.” She set her mother’s stone in the bowl with the others, where it belonged. It had always belonged there. “So I let you steep, my darling. And look how you came out.”

The sun came through the window. The repaired clock kept ticking. Three generations of Trevil women in one bowl on the counter, and an ogre on the bench looking at us like a man who’d walked into a story his grandmother told him.

“Ma’am,” Goran said, his voice low. “The quarry-ogre. Is his line known?”

“Karst, of the eastern hills.”

“My mother’s people were Karst, before the westward walking.”

Nobody said anything for a while.

“Well,” Mistral finally said, from the corner, wiping his eyes on his sleeve, “I’ll be mending that cracked counter joint, then.”

We kept talking, even after we’d gone upstairs and made supper. The four of us sat at the table, Goran perched on the bench he’d brought upstairs from the shop.

“This apartment suits a mother and a tinker,” Mama said, buttering bread, not even looking up. “You don’t live here anymore, Rain. You haven’t lived here since the storm. Pass the salt.”

Goran did.

He was quiet even for him the whole ride home, and his hands weren’t easy on the reins. I let him be. He was working something out in his mind. I could hear it in his not-purr, which kept stopping and starting up again.

When we reached the yard, he didn’t turn toward the barn. He drove past the house, up the track along the east pasture, and stopped the cart at the fence line, at the moonbell strip, silver under the first stars. Planted by this patient male, unasked.

He came around and helped me down, and then he didn’t let go of my hand.

I looked up, finding his horn-bases dark gold in the starlight and his heart going loud enough that I could nearly hear it without touching.

That’s when I knew what all the quiet had been about. He’d been building a sentence all evening.

“Rain.”

“I’m here.”

“Ogres den alone until they choose. I chose you two years ago. Tonight, your mother put a third generation in that bowl, so I’m through waiting on ceremony.” He went down on his heels in the frosted grass, which brought his eyes level with mine. Both my hands disappeared into his. “My land, my hearth, my always. Winter and every winter. Stay.”

I’d said yes in my chest before he was halfway done, and out loud before he finished. “Yes, Goran, yes.”

He stood up and gathered me in his arms.

The moonbell strip bore witness in a long silver row while he spun me around under the stars like a man who had brought in the entire harvest before a big rain.

In the west, faintly over the fields, a bell rang. One note. A deep one. Just once.

“The tower agrees,” I shouted.

He laughed and kissed me.

We didn’t hurry back down the track. Goran drove one-handed the entire way because I’d claimed his other arm and had no intention of returning it.

At the yard, he handed me down and quickly released Turnip from his hitch, tapping the beast’s rump.

“Into the barn with you,” he said. “You can handle it, yes?”