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“The village never minded?”

“The village is the reason I didn’t grow up feeling odd about it. No one whispered. I was the tea witch’s daughter, nothing else.” I took a breath and released it. “The odd part came later, and it wasn’t about him. There was a merchant. I was twenty. He courted me the entire spring, and when I told him no at midsummer, he told the county my mother must’ve brewed him into wanting me, because why else would a man of his prospects look twice at—” I waved a hand at myself, the tea-dusted, abundance-sized entirety. “The wording escapes me now, though it was mean.”

He crushed the walnut in his hand to powder. He set the pieces down and brushed his palms, and his growl vibrated the floorboards beneath him.

“Nobody believed him. He was laughed out by the grannies. It was glorious. Mrs. Piddock’s mother threw a potato at him, hitting him in the head.” I stroked the handle of my cup. “But I heard it. And the thing I took from it is that my craft would always be questioned every time anyone wanted something from me. They’d ask, is it her, or is it something in the cup? So I keep the secret blend hidden, and I post my boards, and I never, ever brew something like that for anyone. And then my own familiar—” My voice dropped off to nothing. “One afternoon, Ginger switched the jars. That’s why I couldn’t look at you for two days. I was afraid you’d wonder if⁠—”

“Never.”

I looked up. He’d leaned forward over the table, his forearms pressed to the surface and all of him aimed at me.

“I drank your brews for two years, Rain Trevil. Nothing in a cup did this. Tea’s got no hands. It can’t build two years.”

“Two years,” I said.

His horn-bases flushed golden.

He sat back slowly and stared at the walnut bowl.

“Goran,” I asked. “What do the stones mean?”

I’d fetched the bowl from my crate days before, when I unpacked properly. It sat on his shelf now, my shelf, the one at my height, all those smooth gray stones with their white veins. Two years of them. I got up and brought the bowl to the table and set it down between us.

“Ogres don’t court fast,” he said. “We choose once. We go slow, and we do it with things, not talk. We bring what our ground grows. We mend what breaks. We feed. Seasons of it. And each time we bring a stone from our own land, the stone means—” He blinked at the walnut bowl. “It means, this is a piece of where I live. I’m asking if it can live where you are.”

The kitchen was so still I could hear the frost working on the window.

“This bowl is full of stones,” I said.

“Not all of them made the bowl,” he said. “One’s in your pocket. One’s on the sill at the shop.”

“Every stone is accounted for,” I said, my voice wobbling. “And the chamomile you⁠—”

“I kept buying it from you every week.” The gold had brightened, but he’d stopped looking away. “You get the best squashes. Mending your door is part of it all. The moonbell strip, planted because you need it. I’m not having you buy it from the dales. The bitter greens. It’s all one word, Rain. It’s been one word for two years. Every crate. Nobody told me your people couldn’t hear it.”

“I couldn’t.” I was laughing, or crying, some blend of the two a witch ought to bottle. “I couldn’t. I thought you had a packing custom. I thought you were tidy.”

“I suspected,” he said softly, and that finished me.

I laughed until I had to hold the table, and he watched me with his almost-smile giving way, the crooked thing arriving and staying the longest I’d ever seen it.

Rising, I went around the table and stood beside his chair. I put my hand on his sternum, over his heart.

“Word received,” I said. “All of it. Every stone. I’m answering slowly on purpose, farmer. This is a Trevil doing it properly.”

Under my hand, low in his chest, something started up. Rolling and rusty, spreading through my palm and along my arm, the purr of something the size of a landslide.

He went rigid.

“That’s new,” I said. “What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“Goran. Your chest is purring.”

“Ogres don’t purr.” The sound rolled louder.

Ginger lifted her head, blinking at us.