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Traitor.

A click of my tongue cued Turnip, and we went down the east road with the lantern swinging and the beast’s breath misting the air. Ours too.

I drove my urns to the fair and didn’t say one word about his wound the entire three miles.

It was the kindest fight I’d ever lost.

The meadow at dawn was a different animal. Frost on everything, lamps still lit, everybody moving fast and quiet. I had the first urn ready to go before the sun cleared the dales.

“For you,” Goran said in a gruff voice, thrusting out a small wrapped package. “One of Asha’s best.”

“You bought me a cake?”

“Said I would.” He took in my stall. “Lots of tea to go with it.”

“Let me fix you a mug.” I smiled. “Not chamomile.”

His eyes sparkled. “Anything but.”

“Do you have something to eat yourself?” I asked as I poured him an ogre-sized mug.

“I do.”

“Good.”

“Yes, good.”

I handed over his tea, and I didn’t look away as he strode back over to the kissing booth and settled in the chair behind the window.

Asha stopped by midmorning, while I was updating my board and the village was still waking up around us. Locals would arrive soon.

“Weatherproof tins here, chai in the middle, cider at the end,” she said, forming a pyramid of them on the counter. “Booths open at noon, especially the kissing one. Grannies get to take their shot first. He’ll do them beautifully. He does everything beautifully. It’s infuriating.” She shuffled a tin from one hand to the other. “You need to be in that line, Rain.”

“I’m not a granny.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I’ll be pouring tea. That’ll keep me busy.”

“You should be in it. At the front. With a copper. In front of the county.” She set the tin down and turned her attention on me, no joke anywhere on her face for once. “You’ve been leaning toward that male across the market square for two years. Everyone’s watched you do it. The two of you would stand there being polite until the tower fell down. Say it first. Out loud. Where it counts. Right here, in front of everyone.”

The counter was my world. I poured, I listened, and I handed over tea that helped. The counter stayed between us, and I went home unspent. Two years I’d loved that male, in bitter greens and river stones. And the counter had let me do it without once standing up in front of this village to admit something needed to change. Asha was suggesting I climb over the counter. In daylight and on purpose.

“He’d die,” I said. “He built the booth, Asha. He’d as good as told me that the being-looked-at is the part he can’t⁠—”

“So give him something to look at that isn’t the county.” She had me there, and she knew it. “You. Right in front of him. So that whatever else this day does to him, the best face in it is yours.”

Damn her. She’d found the one argument that sounded too much like the truth.

Aris drifted over and took one look at my face.

“Oh good, we’re doing it,” she said, as though it had been on a list somewhere, which, knowing those two, it had been. Between them, they’d built the plan as sturdy as Goran built a frame. Now it had closed around me in a warm trap. They’d been building it since the bakery, since the night they conscripted my ogre for the booth, and I was the last brick.

“I’ll hold the copper in my fist,” Aris said. “It’ll be warm when it reaches your hand.”

Asha nodded. “A cold coin is a nervous coin, and a warm one has already made up its mind. We’ll handle your shop while you do the deed.”

“And we’ll walk you there together,” Aris said. “At the appointed hour. Past the point of retreat.”