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“It’s a settling,” he finally said.

I kept my hand where it was until the lamp burned low.

CHAPTER TWELVE

RAIN

Since the ladder ban, Goran had been sleeping on the oak bench by the kitchen hearth. It was the stupidest sight in the county, and nobody but me got to see it.

The bench was a good piece of furniture. His grandmother’s, or somebody’s grandmother’s, dark old oak, built to seat four my size. Two or so ogres.

As a bed for an ogre, it was short by the length of an ogre’s legs. He slept on it anyway, every night, folded like a pocketknife, his feet propped on a kitchen chair he’d placed at the end, one arm trailing on the floorboards. He said it was fine. He said the hayloft was worse in the cold anyway.

He said, and I quote the entire speech, “Slept rougher.”

Every morning, he unfolded himself in stages, and every morning he moved worse than the evening before, because the wound knitted poorly on a rack built for four seated grandmothers.

On the seventh night, I decided to fix it.

He won’t take the bed while you’re in it, Ginger said, from the foot of said bed. He’d sleep in the creek first. It’s a den thing. The den goes to the, she yawned, curling tighter, to the guest. Ask him yourself, I’m off duty.

“Then I’ll take the bench and he can have his bed back.”

You. On the bench. Her tail thumped. You couldn’t sleep on a bench if I charmed you unconscious. You sleep like a compass needle. You’d be on that floor by midnight, and he’d give up the bed anyway and then both of you would be huddled on separate pieces of furniture to keep things polite. Witches and ogres. How did either species breed?

The cold snap settled the argument for us. Weather settled most arguments in the Hollow.

It came down from the dales just as fair week began, sharpening the stars to needle points and freezing the creek along the sides.

Zeph swore up and down at the tavern she hadn’t done it.

I went to bed under every quilt in the house. Goran kept shifting on the bench.

At midnight I got up, wrapped the top quilt around me, and went out to the front room.

The stove had been banked and generated enough heat to keep the place from freezing but not enough to reach the bedroom. He lay folded on the bench in the dim light, his open eyes fixed on the ceiling, with no blanket. Cold didn’t do a thing for Goran. He was a hearth that walked.

I, however, was not, and my breath was fogging indoors.

He sat up when he saw me. Winced. Covered the wince with an awkward stretch.

“Cold got in,” he said.

“The cold didn’t get in. The cold owns the deed. My window has frost on the inside. I live above a shop with two chimneys and three stoves. I wasn’t built for farm winters.”

We stared each other down, me wrapped in a quilt, him folded on furniture, the fire ticking between us.

The quartermaster was the one who settled it.

For the love of every fish in the river. The bed is enormous. Put the furnace in it, put the compass needle next to the furnace, and leave the door open for propriety. I will hear no appeals. Court’s done. I’m tired and would like to go back to sleep.

I relayed the ruling. Most of it. I edited out the furnace.

Goran frowned.

“I’ll lie in the bed for warmth,” he said, standing carefully.

“And your wound. Aris would call it sensible nursing⁠—”