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Turnip blew out through his nostrils and started in that direction.

Goran swept me up into his arms and started for our front door.

Again? Ginger grumbled, trotting after Turnip, her sprite jar swinging from her mouth. Fish in the morning. Fish, I say!

Goran carried me past the door, the kitchen, and down the hall, while I laughed into his neck.

“I have two working legs,” I said.

“Know it,” he said. “Seen them.”

“Goran.”

“Betrothed now,” he said.

In the bedroom, he set me on my feet beside the bed. He undressed me one fastening at a time, and maybe he really had waited a lifetime for it.

He stopped once, partway, and kissed the stone that lay between us, and said something into it. Quiet, in a language I didn’t have.

“What was that?”

“The words that go with the stones.” His mouth stayed where it was. “You say them to the stone. The stone keeps them close.”

Two years of them in a bowl by my register, and he’d said that over every one, in a place where I couldn’t hear.

“You’ve never said them out loud,” I said.

“No.”

“What do they mean?”

“Asked you already,” he said, kissing along my collarbone. “This one’s only telling it.”

The stone stayed warm on its cord between us the entire time, keeping its words close.

And Goran’s not-purr ran on long after he fell asleep, saying what everyone in the county had been saying since the first crate of squash.

Home.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

GORAN

There is one custom left after the choosing, and it’s the one I’d been saving lumber for since spring.

You build for your mate. Not buy or barter. Build, with your own hands, on your own ground, a room that exists because she does. My father built my mother a loom-room with southern light and a floor that never once creaked.

When I was small and underfoot, he told me the rule. The room isn’t yours. You raise it, you roof it, and then it’s hers, and you knock before entering the rest of your life.

Rain’s room had been stacked in my barn for the better part of a year. Cedar for the shelf-wood, because it keeps moths off dried herbs. Oak for the counters. Three windows’ worth of good glass, bought off the dales man the same solstice she’d grumbled about moonbell prices. It was wrapped in straw and waiting, because I’d stood at my stall that morning listening to her wish for better light to work by, and a male who couldn’t find a way to talk to a woman could still buy glass.

I’d told her none of this. Sunday morning after the asking, I walked her out to the eastern wall of the kitchen, put her hand flat on the boards, and said, “Brewing room. Goes here. Yours.”

She frowned at the wall before turning to me. Her steam, if she’d had a kettle on, would’ve said the rest, but she didn’t, so her face did.

“When do we start?” she said.

“We don’t,” I said. “Custom says my hands.” I paused. “Custom says nothing about the village, though. And the village owes you a roof’s worth of labor at a good rate.”