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“Show me this room, then,” she said.

I showed her the brewing room. She studied her daughter’s tins, touched the moonbell hanging overhead, stood a while at the south window like a sergeant watching from the sill, fists at her sides for once.

“My mother would have wanted this to be seen,” she said. “The stone in the bowl, the room built for the craft. She took the easier road and kept the stone for forty years. I watched her hold it sometimes. I’d have given a great deal to show her one Karst who circled back.” She turned around, and her eyes were her daughter’s eyes, and they were not dry. “Right. To business. Put a kettle on and get down two cups and do exactly as I say. Today you learn to brew.”

“Rain brews,” I said. “I farm. The kitchen’s mine, but the leaves⁠—”

“The leaves are hers, and they’ll stay hers. You’re not learning the craft. You couldn’t. No offense meant. My mother couldn’t either. It skips who it skips.”

She unpacked the basket. A small scale. A tin without a label. A worn measuring spoon made of brass and probably older than me.

“You’re learning one brew,” she said. “The morning one. Black leaf, the way Rain likes it, water nearly at a boil, four minutes and not one second past. A woman who spends her entire day steeping things for the county deserves one cup a day that somebody steeped for her. Her grandmother had it from her grandfather every morning for fifty years. Rain’s father, on the other hand, never learned. There’s the gap you’re filling, Goran Brack. Kettle.”

I’d raised barns. I’d plowed forty acres in two days. None of it had made me sweat like one afternoon at my stove with Cyrena Trevil at my elbow. My hands were the size of the tea tray. Her brass spoon vanished in my fingers. Every time I lifted the kettle early, she said, “Again.”

We did it nine times before the cup I poured made her stop, and sip, and stand a moment with her eyes shut.

“There,” she said. “That one. What did you do differently?”

“Stopped being afraid of it.”

She nodded once and rinsed her spoon.

She packed her basket, and at the door, with the cart waiting, she looked up at me. “Every morning, mind. Especially in the mornings you’ve quarreled. And if you ever leave that girl standing anywhere, my mother’s stone comes back out of that bowl and goes through your best window.”

“It’d be the window’s honor, ma’am.”

She laughed like her daughter while she climbed into the cart.

The next morning, I stood in the gray before dawn with the kettle near a boil, and did as I’d been drilled, four minutes and not one second past, and carried the cup through the sleeping house. Rain lay under the quilts, hair everywhere, one hand flung out across my side of the bed. I set the cup down where the steam would reach her.

She surfaced slowly. Nose first. Frowned at the cup. Propped herself on one elbow and looked at it and me, fully awake all at once.

“That’s Mama’s morning steep.” Her voice still held early-morning gravel. “Four minutes. Nearly a boil. That’s… Nobody’s made me that since I was young. She came out here? She taught you?”

“Yesterday. Drilled me. Took nine tries.”

“You let my mother drill you at a kettle for an afternoon.”

“The gap,” I said. “Wanted filling.”

She looked at me over the rim, steam curling up between us drawing a shape with horns on it. She drank the cup without taking her eyes off me, and set it down, then pulled me back into the warm dark by one suspender.

Wedding plans were waiting. Chores were waiting. And the not-purr filled the room and didn’t stop until well after the chores should’ve started.

Later, inside the barn, I told Turnip how it had all turned out. He got his plums and the entire account. He listened, chewing.

“Her mother threatened my window,” I told him. “Second best day of the season.”

First was when Rain answered my stone.

He blew a big, sweet-scented breath down my collar.

Across the yard, the sprite stood on the porch rail with his fists on his hips. Ginger lay on the boards below him with her tail going.

The tower on the hill stood quiet.

I forked hay in the cold. Her mother had threatened my window and drilled me at a kettle, and I’d carried a cup through my house to a woman asleep in my bed.