Page 34

“Ogre noses read more than roses.” His jaw worked. “Moods have smells. Fear. Anger. Even sadness has one. That comes on like wet ash. Joy’s more like bread. I don’t go looking. It arrives, same as hearing does. But I read whoever’s in the room, whether they’ve chosen it or not. You’re in my room now. You should know this.”

I leaned back and looked up at him. He kept his eyes on the wall.

“How long a range does your nose have?” I asked.

“Same room, everything. Across a square, the loud things.”

“The loud things.”

“Fear’s loud.” A muscle moved in his cheek. “So’s want.”

Twice a day for four days I’d had my hands on him. I’d thought about him. His skin. His muscles. His light, heady scent.

I did a fast inventory of everything he might’ve read off me, and my face caught fire.

His ears went dark at the same time, which proved his point.

“Well,” I said, when I could speak again. “Thank you for telling me.”

“Should’ve told you before you moved in. I’ll understand if⁠—”

“Terms,” I said. “We’re good at terms, you and me. Here are my new ones.” With him seated and me standing, we were closer to eye level. “You can’t help what you hear or smell. I won’t hold it against you. But you don’t act on what my body tells your nose unless my mouth has said it too. Out loud. The mouth is the authority here. Agreed?”

He looked at me, using the look that told me he was taking his time deciding, and his shoulders dropped a fraction.

“Agreed,” he said. “The mouth is the authority here.”

“Good.” I gathered the old dressings, my ears roaring. “For the record, you smell like warm stone, and it’s been a problem for me since long before I served you tea.”

I left him sitting there with that. It felt only fair. From the hall I heard something low and rolling and rusty.

“Are you laughing?” I asked.

“No.”

By two nights later, I’d settled into the idea that he could smell me. Good smells, I hoped.

I’d done all I could to hold back my wanting.

The villagers had been arriving all week, bringing things. Trying to drum up gossip. Mrs. Honeycake brought bread. Rufus delivered a pint of stout, labeled MEDICINAL. A stew from Mrs. Piddock came with a note wishing Goran a swift recovery and asking whether the betting book should be suspended during his convalescence.

The Weatherby twins came in person to do his barn chores and did them so badly that Goran stood at the window narrating the disaster. “Wrong feed. That’s the goat’s. Gate’s open now. There goes the goat.”

And Zeph came. She stood in the doorway wringing her hat, took one look at his bandages, and burst into an apology. The sprite was hers, the storm was hers, and the chain of it ran back to her spell.

“Zeph. Sit. Eat.” Goran pushed a slice of bread toward her with his good arm. “Weather’s nobody’s fault. You know that better than the rest of us.”

She cried into the bread and left lighter, and that was one of the things I liked most about him. The county called him gruff because he was quiet. Meanwhile, he’d absorbed an injury, a plague of casseroles, the twins’ barn work, and a weeping weather witch inside of a week, and he was gentle with every one of them.

Nobody had noticed because he did it in a handful of words instead of a speech.

So when he asked me about my father, I told him.

It was late. I’d finished his dressing, avoiding thinking about his glorious muscles. We’d turned the faelamp low and were sitting at the table with cups of tea.

“Has your mother always handled the shop alone?” he asked, glancing my way over the bowl of walnuts he’d been shelling.

“Alone with me underfoot, and the village.” I gazed down at the bits of tea leaves in the bottom of my cup. “My father was a charming man called Pell. He repaired clocks. He came through, wound Mama up like one of his clocks, and left before I was born. No letter since. She never married him, never chased him, and never once worried about it. When I was little, I thought that was just what fathers were. A story with no third chapter.”