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“Sensible,” he said gravely, and neither of us looked at the other as we walked down the hall.

His bed was the size of a small nation. He lay flat on his back, his arms crossed over his chest like a stone king on a tomb. I lay on my side, mummified with quilts, breathing fog. Ginger worked her way between us at the foot, a border of fur, grumbling while she did it.

The mattress had another idea. It sloped toward him all night. He put out heat like a banked stove, and the bed warmed from his side inward.

I woke at dawn on his side of the bed, my forehead near his shoulder, my knees aimed at his ribs.

And he was purring.

It stopped the moment he woke, cut off mid-roll.

“Morning,” he said to the ceiling.

“Morning.” I didn’t move back to my side of the bed. I was finally warm, and I was no fool. “Your chest was doing the settling again. The not-purr.”

“It was not.”

“It was. It’s better than a lullaby. I slept like a housecat.”

Confirmed, Ginger muttered. All night.

Goran said nothing.

“You’re warm,” I said. “I’m keeping you for the duration of the cold snap. It’s medicinal.”

“Right,” he said.

That sealed the new treaty, and the not-purr started up again. He didn’t try to stop it. I lay close to him, and it rolled while the birds chirped outside.

Eventually we got up. I used the bathing chamber first, washing and putting on fresh clothing, with him following.

While I tidied the bed, he snuck past and beat me to the kitchen, starting the porridge. I made him sit at the table and finished, adding some walnuts, honey, and dried fruit, which I hadn’t done so far.

I brought two bowls over to the table, sitting and taking the smaller one.

He glared at the porridge. “Don’t like it this way.”

I dug my spoon in, scooping up a big bite. “Try it before you say no.”

“Hm.”

He ate four bowls, and the not-purr rumbled twice at the table.

We didn’t talk about the fair now only days away, or the booth that would go up in the meadow with its decorations and its painted sign, or the fact that the cold snap would break eventually. We’d need to soon.

“I’ll go to my shop today,” I said as we finished. “I need to pick up some more tea, if nothing else.”

“Turnip might not agree.”

The beast had kept to his stall corner for days, coming out to be fed by Goran and no one else. Every time I’d approached with the feed bucket, he’d turned his face to the wall. Plums left on the stall rail went uneaten until I walked away.

“I’ll try to talk him into it.”

Goran snorted. “He might like your porridge.”

I gave him a smile that made his pointy-tipped ears darken.

After I’d washed the breakfast dishes, I carried the feed out, without the careful sideways shuffle I’d been doing. I was warm and out of patience with penance in all species. I walked straight up the barn aisle, stepped inside his stall with the bucket, and looked up at the ton of him, fangs, horn, one yellow eye rolling to the wall.