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Ginger’s aide-de-camp, the honey-jar prisoner, went to the millpond ceremony, inspected the territory, and came back up the east road at dusk riding in the jar in Ginger’s mouth. He’d chosen the farm. His name was Lapis. He lived inside his jar near the brewing room’s southern window, kept the moonbell rows free of moths, and took his wage in crumbs.

The war, Ginger said, ended in the only honorable outcome possible. Total victory, one defection, and an army she could inspect daily.

Aris came to the shop late one afternoon. She stirred her chai with a fork so vigorously, it spilled over the sides.

The Healing House roof had been finished for weeks, the last of the fair fund spent. The work had been done by a stonemason down from the high dales for the winter. An ogre as well, named Korr.

The Hollow had seen almost nothing of him in three weeks of work, because he kept hours even Goran called early, spoke even less than Goran, and had done the finest roofing work seen in the county in a generation. Slate laid so tight you couldn’t slip a knife between. He’d rebuilt the chimney nobody asked him to rebuild, because, he said, “It was wrong.”

“He’s still here,” Aris snarled to her chai. “The roof’s done. Paid. Finished. Does he leave? He does not. He’s taken a room at the Silver Bell. He sits in my ward, uninvited, and applies caulking to my hearth. My windows. Refinishes my floors. I made him a tonic Tuesday for his cold, and he looked at it, and looked at me, and do you know what he said?”

“What did he say?”

“‘I don’t take remedies.’” She stabbed the chai. “From a healer. In her own house. That male is made of gravel and rudeness, and this morning, I found my woodpile restacked. Two cords, drier side out, without a word, like my woodpile was wrong too. I want it noted that I have never once been so insulted in my life.”

She frowned. Everyone in the shop went quiet.

Asha had come out of the back room and had not said anything, only stopped next to me. Mama had paused mid-pour with her eyebrows high. Even Mistral had stopped working on the doorbell.

Aris looked around the room at all of us. She studied me the longest, me with the stone at my throat and the farm-blend tins on the shelf. I suspected she was thinking about the two years of restacked woodpiles behind my home.

“No,” she said.

Nobody said anything.

“No.” Aris Woods, healing witch of the Healing House, snatched up her satchel, upsetting her chai when she banged the corner of the table, and raced toward the door. “It is not that. He’s a rude rock who does excellent slate-work. You’re all steeped past drinking, and I have patients to attend to.”

The door banged. The bell rang after her. Through the window, we watched her stride up Willow Lane, her satchel swinging, her breath creating furious clouds.

The shop exhaled all at once. Asha turned to the room, wiping her hands on her apron.

“Right,” she said. “I’ll open to a new page in the book. Mrs. Piddock, you’ll want to make your bet early.”

The rest of the day was uneventful. My mother poured tea. My ogre was due at closing with the wagon to take me home. I stood at my counter in the warm steam with one ear on the Moonbell tower, which had remained silent.

Silent, but not empty.

The tower wasn’t sleeping this time.

It was holding its breath.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

RAIN

We held our wedding at the farm on solstice eve. By dark, the kitchen I’d once tiptoed around held every soul I love in the world, seated at one enormous table, at two heights of chairs.

Goran had spent two days on the seating. The wedding-sized table finally had its wedding-sized use, and benches and chairs in every scale the county owned ran down both sides of its length. Grandmother-height for Mrs. Piddock’s mother, who arrived in her formal black gown, her funeral brooch pinned at her throat.

“It’s my party brooch,” she said, touching it. “The funerals just borrow it.”

A raised bench held the Puddlefoot children. The big oak bench, no longer the worst bed in the Hollow. And at the foot, opposite my ogre, we’d placed a chair for my mother, because there are two heads to any proper table and nobody in that room was fool enough to think the other belonged to anyone but her.

Goran cooked for two days. The last of the handsome squash went into a soup with cream and sage.

He’d smoked a roast in the building behind the barn.

My bitter greens, dressed the way I liked them, rested in a bowl the size of a wagon wheel. Every person at that table took some to be polite, and Old Tom, three helpings in, said they’d grown on him.