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Asha baked rolls, and they kept bursting into song from where they nestled in baskets.

Melissant recorded every detail in the library ledger.

Rufus brought a barrel and sat down with us instead of behind something. Zeph took a seat at the exact center of the table, the point farthest from every window.

“Seasonal positioning,” she said, passing the rolls. “I’d seat me here too.”

Mistral played the fiddle like he mends. Midway through the evening, he tuned up, and my mother, who hadn’t danced in my memory of her, stood up and danced in the kitchen of the Brack farm, laughing, with her skirts clutched in one hand. Our guests clapped in time.

Bram and Odile came, and we talked about their spring wedding.

“I surveyed Bram’s delivery route the summer I apprenticed,” she said while Bram went scarlet beside her. “Every road in the district, and his came out the longest. But it wasn’t the longest. He’d been adding a loop past my mother’s gate for two years and lying to the guild about the mileage.”

“Fraud,” Struan and Nastru said together, pounding the table.

“Courtship,” Odile said, and kissed Bram’s blush.

The table roared, and I caught Goran’s eye down the length. There were more of us in this village than anyone counted. The patient ones, playing the long game, adding a loop past a gate, buying chamomile, or planting a fence line. An entire county quietly farming its way toward its own weddings.

Mrs. Honeycake brought out the cake after we’d stuffed ourselves full of the meal.

She’d been building it in secret at the bakery for a week, and it took both twins to carry it in. Three tiers, dark gingerbread, frosted and ringed with candied moonbell. When she set it down in front of us, it began to sing in three voices. The tiers had parts, a low one, a middle one, and a high one.

Our group went still and listened until the last tier hummed itself out.

Nobody applauded. Everybody was busy wiping their eyes.

“It’s a wedding cake,” Mrs. Honeycake said, wiping her hands on her apron. “It sings once. That was for the pair of you. Right. Who’s got the knife?”

The evening went on past midnight. The children fell asleep in a heap on the bench under Goran’s coat. The grannies argued over the betting book’s new page, which I’ve confirmed concerns Aris and an ogre stonemason, with odds I was not allowed to see. Aris was on shift at the Healing House, though Asha swore her absence had less to do with patients than with the light burning in the mason’s workroom window across the lane.

Turnip stood in the yard with his crown on, his big face filling the entire kitchen window, and everyone who passed fed him morsels through the gap.

Rufus stood. He lifted his cup and said, “To the roof.”

Everyone at the table said it back.

The roof that got rebuilt.

The fund that raised it.

The storm that started all of it.

At the very end of the evening, in the burned-down lamplight, the last guests’ wagons rattled down the track. Mistral’s fiddle had gone quiet, and my mother yawned, her head on his shoulder as they rode away.

Ginger climbed onto the table, sat down in the center, curled her tail around her feet, and cleared her throat in my head.

The closing argument, she said.

“Ginger. It’s past midnight.”

Then I’ll be brief. She was never brief. One label, moved by night, at great personal risk, while both of you were mooning at separate windows. One rumor, allowed to ripen at precisely the correct speed, which drove two cowards into a pact of public togetherness that neither had the spine to arrange for themselves. One sprite, cultivated as an asset. One beast, brought into the conspiracy via the strategic sharing of a barn. The sprite, in one field, at one exactly chosen moment⁠—

“What sprite?”

The one that spooked Turnip.

“I thought you spooked Turnip.”