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The truth was simpler. I was sitting at my table, eating lunch, when the sky over the village turned the green of pond ice. My farm sat high enough east that I could see the Hollow’s rooftops from the yard, including the Moonbell tower above the village, the tavern chimney, and to the left, the crooked slate roof over one particular tea shop on Willow Lane. Wind like that read a village the same as I read a field. It found the weak rows first. Loose slate. Old beams. A crooked roof.

I left my lunch on the table.

Turnip stood in the yard with his face into the wind when I came out, which he did when the wind offended him. My plow-beast was the size of a shed, fanged, and he had one horn. One eye. And a soft heart.

“I’m going back to town,” I told him.

He stamped his front right hoof, telling me he would come with me.

“No.”

He stamped again, meaning he heard me and disagreed with my answer.

“Guard the barn.”

Grumbling, he pressed his horn against the barn door to show the barn he was on duty.

I went down the east road at a brisk pace, though the rain was starting to turn soft and warm-bodied. A cat shot past my ear, spread out like a dropped shawl, purring. It landed on the road ahead of me and continued to purr as it turned into a puddle. Steam swirled off the area.

A sprite flew past, shrieking, clutching a silver watch.

The weather witch was experimenting again.

I stepped over a puddle and kept going.

An honest male would stop and ask himself why a farmer would leave a warm meal to jog three miles through falling animals for a roof that is not his own, in a village where he buys and sells and goes home.

Everything I grow, I grow with her in my head.

Rain, and not the one happening now with cats and dogs and angry sprites.

I grow bitter greens because she said, one autumn, to somebody else, at the fountain, that nobody stocked them anymore. I heard it across the square, because my ears are good, and I planted a row that week.

The plums are because plums make her smile when she unpacks the crate. She thinks nobody sees that either.

The stones are a thing my people do, and I’ve gifted them for two years to a woman who puts them in a bowl. Every market day I tell myself I’ll say the words that go with the stones, and every market day she smiles at me across the counter with her dark hair loose around her shoulders, and my chest pulled tight.

I bought chamomile tea leaves instead.

I hated chamomile tea.

Willow Lane had turned into a river with a street underneath. Sprites came off the rooftops in volleys, little blue ones, squawking while stuffing their arms with anything that gleamed. One of them had stolen the brass plaque off the front of Widow Merrow’s building and was defending it from three others. Shutters everywhere had given up to the wind and fallen.

Rain’s shop stood at the corner with its awning half-torn off and its window shutters flapping in the wind.

Her front door fought me. I battled it out and thrust myself in sideways, shutting the weather out. Then I turned and stood in the warm, bright entryway of Bellflower & Brew, dripping on her floorboards.

Three women and a fluffy, striped orange cat stared at me with lifted eyebrows.

Rain’s shop smelled of her. I’d experienced two years of doorway-deliveries of that smell of dried herbs and honey. But standing inside it was another thing altogether, the difference between striding by a hearth and sitting down beside one.

“Was passing through,” I said.

The baker twin sucked in a breath. The healer twin frowned at me the same way her patients did at a splinter they intended to speak to later. The cat, riding Rain’s shoulders, blinked at me. I got the feeling I was being judged and maybe not coming up worthy.

Rain smiled while the wind rattled her shop. “Well, you’re rained on. Sit down before you drown standing up.”

There was no chair in her shop that would hold me. We both knew it. It was an old joke between us that neither of us had named out loud. She offered, I stood, the joke priming itself for another week. Today, she didn’t wait for my refusal. She went to the big oak bench near the back wall, the one built by her great-grandmother for waiting deliveries, and dragged it two-handed while the storm shook the shutters. I strode over and lifted it out of her grip.