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The creature she was stalking turned out to be a sprite. The little blue menaces had discovered the Wildwood that week, and a scouting party of three was working the hedge line ahead of us, packing their arms with anything shiny the forest offered. Ginger had been at war with them since they took my ribbons. She’d taken two prisoners already. Both had escaped, though one had left behind its tiny hat as ransom, and she wore it now. It kept sliding down her brow and into her right eye.

We’d picked most of the hedge and reached the fence line.

Goran’s east pasture ran down to meet the Wildwood, his rails marching along the boundary in a tidy line. The area along his side of the fence grew more moonbell than the three of us had gathered all afternoon. Silver stems shoulder to shoulder. A carpet of it, ungrazed, in the one strip of his farm that had never been touched by a scythe.

He came down through the pasture with a post-maul over his shoulder, saw us, and stopped like a male who had not planned this and had also chosen this exact hour to inspect this particular stretch of fence.

“Afternoon,” Asha sang out. “Checking your posts?”

“Frost heaves them.”

“I’m sure it does.” She studied the maul, then the moonbell sea shifting in the breeze.

I walked over to the fence. He set the maul down and stood on his side of it. Up close, the moonbell stand was even thicker, crowding against the bottom rail, silver stems bowing with seed. My autumn’s worth of chai looked back at me from one strip of ogre pasture.

“Goran,” I said. “This is half the moonbell in the valley.”

“Grows well here.”

“Nothing grows like this on its own. This strip’s never been cut. You mow every bit of this farm. I’ve seen it. The lane’s trimmed like the parson’s beard. Except here.” I looked up at him. “Why not here?”

His ears went dark first, then the horn-bases. He frowned at the herb instead of me and worked his jaw.

“You buy extra moonbell from the Western Dales man,” he said. “At solstice. He prices it like he hauls it down from the moon.”

“So you—” Two years of solstice mornings with the dales man’s cart, me counting out silver while grumbling, and one ogre at the fourth stall from the fountain, hearing every word, did something to fix the problem. “You’ve been growing me moonbell. For years. On good pasture.”

“The strip’s yours,” he said to the herb. “Cut what you need. Every year.”

I settled my hand on the top rail. His hand crept down the rail toward it. Our smallest fingers were a straw’s width apart, and the gap between them was warm, heat coming off his skin like a sunned wall. Neither of us was breathing well, and the wind moved the moonbell, and⁠—

A sprite smacked into the side of my head at full speed.

It yanked my hair ribbon out of the plait and was airborne again before I’d finished yelping, streaking for the tree line with a fistful of yellow silk. Its war cry echoed around us.

My braid came down around my face.

Ginger raced across the grass, three feet of orange fury, and vanished into the Wildwood.

Goran’s hand had closed over mine on the rail. Fully over it.

“Sprite,” he said, and lifted his hand away.

“Sprite,” I said, in a voice that needed clearing.

Asha stared at us.

Aris snipped another stem. “Lodging arrangement, my ass.”

The mushrooms giggled in the woods.

Goran left, and we got back to work, collecting enough moonbell to last through the next season. My friends took our pickings into town. We’d start the drying process tomorrow, and I’d jar my share in the next week or two.

When I went inside, Goran was making dinner. Again.

“I want to help,” I said.

“No need. Got it.”