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Another shake of the head. Thank God. Briar did not think she had it in her to carry a tray up the stairs.

Bramble lay next to Petal, curling protectively around her. The shadows of the room grew deeper, everything else grew blurrier. Rabbit-girl magic.

Briar found her own bed and collapsed into it, exhausted down to her teeth but wide awake until the dawn birds began to sing in the hedgerows. She gave up and limped back down to the kitchen to boil water for tea. A pot of strong black tea made with moonwater left out under a summer full moon might help.

She let the tea steep until it was dark and rich, and then she added a slice of lemon for yet more clarity. She stirred three times sunwise with a spoon made of carved willow wood. She drank it until there were wet dregs left, then added rose petals for her sister and powdered moonstone for the moon. She turned the cup upside down on the saucer, spinning it three more times.

And then she searched for patterns and shapes that might tell her more than she knew. She was rubbish with tarot cards, passable with a pendulum. Village girls might not go to Mayfair to attend the Rowanstone Academy for Young Ladies, but they learned all the same. They gathered their spells from family grimoires and recipes, from the visitors that came to Lyonesse. From the sea. And tea leaf reading had always been in her blood. Not for nothing had her mother run a tearoom from blends mostly grown by Briar’s magic.

The leaves clumped together and she searched for patterns, symbols. Anything that might help her navigate the current situation.

A hare and a crescent moon. A dragon. But also a rose, a tower, a scatter of stars.

As far as the truth went, it was…unclear.

And she had a feeling there weren’t lemon trees enough from Dover to Orkney to make a thousand lemon drops to clear things up. And she could not exactly take it to Ollamh, the village soothsayer, for an explanation. He saw more than he ought to and blurted it out for all to hear. She would avoid him at all costs. As he tended to sing his premonitions—loudly—while he went about his day, it would not be a difficult feat.

When Briar caught a flash of movement through the window, she shot to her feet. She was not sure what she was expecting: more Keepers, the French army, redcap goblins on the hunt for human blood to wash their caps.

Not a rabbit.

She was used to rabbits, even without Bramble. If you had a garden, you had rabbits. And if you had cabbages, you had rabbits and no cabbages. Briar had gotten creative with wire cages over her vegetables, strung with crystals. Because if you lived on Lyonesse, rabbits were protected by magical law. They might be a witch, after all.

But this rabbit was not after the cabbages.

For one thing, it was entirely white.

Moon-white.

And outside the other windows, more white rabbits gathered until they sat in a perfect circle around the cottage, staring in.

A shiver worked its way up her spine.

“Shoo,” she whispered through the crack in the glass. “You can eat all of the cabbages if you just go away.”

They did not move for a very long time.