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Ginger’s purr grew, and that was the entire cabinet assembled. The witch, the ogre, and the cat who’d dosed him. Two of us knew what the third had done, and neither of us was talking.

When we reached the cottage, he came around to lift me down before I’d finished gathering my skirts. Term one, already in force.

“Pact, then.” I put my hand out, businesslike.

His hand closed around mine, swallowing me to the wrist. We shook once, sealing it.

Neither of us let go.

The frost crept across the fields. Turnip stamped once, meaning something only Turnip knew.

Ginger flowed down my arm and walked across our joined hands, her tail high.

We sprang apart.

Quartermaster’s first ruling, she said. Enough of that. For now.

CHAPTER EIGHT

GORAN

The Healing House got its first new beams on a morning cold enough to make the timber ring, and the Weatherby twins delivered half of them to the wrong side of the millpond.

I stood with Aris Woods at the building site and looked across the water at my oak, stacked neatly on the far bank, a ten-minute walk and a full pond away from the only building in the village that needed it at the moment. I’d delivered Rain’s beams already, but we were waiting on other supplies.

“The delivery slip said north side,” Struan called across the pond, through cupped hands.

“The Healing House,” Aris shouted back, “has stood in the same place for three hundred and eighty years.”

“North side of the pond is what the slip⁠—”

“Who wrote the slip?”

A pause traveled across the water.

“Nastru wrote the slip,” Struan yelled, at the exact moment Nastru yelled, “Struan wrote the slip.”

Aris turned to me. “Can we move it?”

I could. That was usually why the village asked me to help.

I took my wagon around the pond, loaded it twice, and hauled years of future roof to where the roof would be, while the twins trotted along making apologies. They were good boys. They worked hard and they were gentle with old folks. But something had gone wrong with every third delivery over the past week, and I hadn’t bothered to think about why yet.

The pond crossing took the morning’s energy out of everyone but me. I didn’t have much of a temper to start with. A quiet comes over me when the work is only heavy. Just oak and distance and the same trip twice.

The twins filled the quiet for me, like always. Nastru chatted about whose fault the slip was until Struan told him to hush. By the second load they’d argued their way around to it being, somehow, the pond’s fault. I let them have it. Young males needed a verdict more than I needed to be right. The pond didn’t care one bit.

Beam work was good work. You took a thing too heavy for ten men, and you set it exactly where it needed to be, and a building started existing again. Aris ran the site with a chalk line and no wasted words. By midmorning, the east ward had ribs. By noon, the frame stood true. Aris looked up at it with her hands on her hips and let out a long breath.

“Five years,” she said.

“It’ll stand fifty more,” I said.

“It had better. I’m never going to that tea shop again. Every time I step out for an hour, the sky spits something.” She snapped her satchel shut. “The market’s starting. Go. I know your stall won’t mind itself.”

My stall was the fourth from the fountain, west side, with full morning shade. I’d held that patch for nine years. From it, a male with good ears could follow everything that happened at a certain tea shop across the square without once turning his head.

Rain’s laugh echoed around me. Most of the Hollow got her shopkeeper’s laugh, given away with every purchase. Underneath it lived her keeping laugh, for when someone said something actually funny. It dropped lower and came with a little hum at the end. And rarest, the whole-body laugh, the one that doubled her over her counter. She fought it and flushed, with her hair swirling around her shoulders.