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“What’s that one?” she asked.

“That one will help you say it out loud.” I poured water into the pot. “It won’t make him want you. Nothing on these shelves will make him want you, and if anyone around here tells you different, they’re selling you a lie in a pretty tin. All this does is make your mouth work when your nerve quits. The rest is yours.”

She frowned at the pot. “That’s worse.”

I poured her tea into a cup and nudged it toward her.

A quick spell cooled it and she drank it in deep gulps, the way you’d take medicine. She set the cup down, thanked me, and went out my front door at a march.

I watched her stomp up Willow Lane until she turned at the fountain toward the Puddlefoot place with the back of her neck flashing red.

I poured the rest of the herb mix into a tin and wrote COURAGE on the lid, and set it on the shelf behind the register where I’d see it every day.

You should take your own medicine, Ginger said from the windowsill.

“I don’t need it.”

Ginger said nothing, which from Ginger was a speech.

“Committee meeting tonight,” I told Goran when he stopped by to take me home.

“We’ll go.”

“Yes, that would be nice.”

We went home, and he insisted on cooking dinner again. We ate at the table. I chattered. He said nothing while consuming an enormous plate of food.

Returning to town in his wagon, we went directly to the Silver Bell.

Mrs. Honeycake ran the room with a tight spine and a tray of snacks moving under magical steam. Nobody argued with a mouth full of jam-filled croissant. Melissant kept her lists. Rufus kept the tankards coming. And the village, packed in shoulder to shoulder, went through the agenda as if the fair was in a few days instead of a few weeks out.

“And the kissing booth,” Melissant finally said.

Everyone leaned forward.

Asha stood up and strode to the front of the room, lifting drawings with decorations on them. The booth she’d designed was less a booth than a small festive building, with a counter, a queue rail, a cashbox stand for one of the Weatherby twins to manage, and a painted sign reading, COPPERS FOR THE ROOF, PUCKER FOR THE HOLLOW. Bram stood next to the drawings looking like a man watching his gallows go up.

“Cheek or mouth was put to a village vote,” Asha announced.

“When?” I called out because I’d missed it.

“Last night. Only in town.”

“I see.”

“Mouth won,” she said. “Overwhelmingly.”

“The grannies swung it,” Rufus said from the bar.

“The grannies were decisive,” Asha said with a nod.

Bram cleared his throat and pink settled in his cheeks. “I’d like to read what Odile wrote back to my letter.” He unfolded a much-folded page. “If the Hollow requires your mouth for its roof, the Hollow may rent it. Cheek only.” He cleared his throat. “She underlined cheek twice.”

Odile Fern was apprenticed to a mapmaker a county over and wasn’t due back until the spring thaw.

“Well, that won’t do,” Asha said.

Bram’s face darkened. “There will be no other way.”