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Chamomile. The shop label. Her handwriting.

“One last matter of business, farmer.” She held it up between two fingers. “Two years. Every market day. A tin of this, into your coat, and coin on my counter. And in all this time, you didn’t tell me that you don’t like chamomile.”

Heat rolled through the room. The moonbell glowed overhead. Somewhere in the house the cat was asleep on my chair with a sprite in a jar beside her, and Turnip stood in his stall, still wearing his crown.

My wife-to-be stood in her own room in the middle of my land holding two years of evidence.

“Hate it,” I said. “Kept coming.”

She set the tin down and crossed her arms on her chest. A not-smile was fighting at the corner of her mouth. “I knew all along. I just wanted to see how long you’d keep buying it.”

“Two years,” I said. “Longer, if the cat hadn’t moved.”

She stepped inside my arms, in the room built because she exists, and we stayed there while her first kettle came to a full boil.

The kettle boiled over. Her steam went up. It drew a heart with legs on it, and the heart walked the ceiling all evening among the moonbell.

The first resident of the room.

The last word that season of my life had to say.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

GORAN

Igained a second shadow, and the shadow talked.

Mistral came out to the farm the morning after the brewing room was done, with a toolbox that jingled and a proposal.

“The shop needs new shelving behind the counter,” he said. “For the farm-blend tins. Cyrena wants it at her eye level, and the old shelves are a bit too high, hung forty years ago by a taller Trevil.” He dragged the toe of his shoe through the dirt, his earrings catching the sunlight. “I’ll need lumber, a second pair of hands, and, ideally, a pair the size of yours, so I can do the clever parts and point.”

I had a fence to mend and a wedding coming and no earthly need for a day of a tinker’s company.

I went, of course. He’d known I would. He was marrying Rain’s mother. That made him mine to help.

Mistral talked the entire time he worked. Roads, forty years of them, dales to coast, every village with a bell or a well between here and the sea. Wagons. The folding of space, which he wouldn’t explain.

Rain talked while she worked too. It had taken me two years across a counter to learn that her talk wasn’t asking anything of me. His was the same. By the second shelf, I’d stopped waiting for him to reach the point and started handing him nails before he asked.

“A man needs one mystery, Goran. I’ve shared the other ones,” he said as he handed me a hammer.

He talked about mending.

“Everything wants to work,” he said, planing a shelf edge, curls of pine coiling up. “That’s the secret of my living. The clock wants to tick. The hinge wants to swing. You don’t fix a thing, you take away what’s stopping it, and it fixes itself out of sheer relief.” He squinted along the board. “People too, mind. Same trade entirely.”

“Is that why you stopped here? Village full of stopped clocks?”

“I stopped because a woman who owned a tea shop laughed at my joke before I’d finished it. Finished it for me, in fact, better than I’d have done myself.” He set the plane down. “Forty years of roads, and a man tells himself he’s free, and then someone finishes his joke, and he finds out he was just unclaimed. There’s a difference. Freedom’s a road. Unclaimed is a ditch beside one.”

We put the shelves up in the shop after hours, level to Cyrena’s eye, and she came down in her dressing gown to inspect them, walked along the counter twice, and moved nothing.

“Well,” she said with a pert nod. “Both of you are hired for whatever needs tending next.”

From Cyrena Trevil, this was a parade with trumpets.

I was ambushed by a woman of sixty in an apron the day after, and I would let her do it again.

Cyrena arrived at the farm alone, in the shop cart, midafternoon, while Rain was in the village at her tea counter. She let me help her down, looked at the yard, the barn, and the beast, who came to his stall door and lowered his crowned head for her. And then she walked into my house and set her basket on my kitchen table.