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“Unclaimed’s a ditch,” I told Turnip. “The tinker said so.”

He chewed.

“I’ve been out of it two years. Took me until this winter to know it.”

I went back to the hay.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

RAIN

I’d flipped the sign to OPEN at Bellflower & Brew, and the lane smelled of my mother’s bergamot before I’d even settled on my stool to wait for my first customer. She’d been in the shop a week by then, she and Mistral, and the quarters above had already stopped being the rooms I grew up in and become something better.

Theirs.

His wagon stood in the yard behind, and two of its rooms had come inside with him. I didn’t ask how. There was a parlor upstairs now where the linen closet had been, with a round window nobody built. The round window looked out on the Moonbell tower no matter which wall you viewed it from, and Mistral said, “The window knows what’s worth watching.”

Mama had rearranged nothing in the shop itself, which from Cyrena Trevil was a love letter. Though she’d added one thing. The stone bowl had taken up its old spot by the register, and above it she’d hung a small shelf for her mother’s blue tin, empty at last, lid open. Customers asked about the arrangement. Depending on the day, Mama told the story short or long, or with the Ferndale additions.

The morning went like a fair. Grannies at dawn, the betting book with a new page already open, though no one would tell me its subject, only that Nastru Weatherby had been walked backward out of the shop by his brother.

Mrs. Honeycake brought a cake. Rufus came at midmorning, drank one cup of tea like it was ale, and left a tip that could shingle a small roof.

And on the shelf behind the counter, in the place of honor at my mother’s eye level, stood the first dozen tins of the farm line. Winter blends. Moonbell and black currant, a warming one with the mood-charm folded in gently, plus the label Mistral had lettered for us in dark green and gold.

BELLFLOWER & BREW BY TREVIL. FARM BLENDS BY BRACK.

Mama sold the first tin to Mrs. Piddock before the kettle had started whistling, though Mrs. Piddock did not necessarily want tea. She wanted it for the tin with its shiny label. She clutched it to her chest. “It’s going on my mantel.”

That was the morning I knew the farm line would work. Not because of the tea, though the tea was good. It worked because every tin had a part of us in it. Mrs. Willworth bought one for her sister two counties over and made me write BRACK on the lid twice so it wouldn’t rub off. A traveling drover bought four for the label alone and asked if the farmer was the big one. Mama said he was, and the drover said he’d take a fifth. My ogre, who was mucking a barn and would sooner eat the tin than hear any of this, sold his sixth blend of the morning without knowing it.

I stood behind my grandmother’s counter selling the male I loved by the ounce and couldn’t stop smiling.

The sprites left the village that week. The Hollow may never get their teaspoons back.

Zeph had spent a month on the problem, constructing a treaty.

She’d worked out early that the little terrors had come through with her storm but had nowhere to go. The cats and dogs dissolved, but sprites didn’t. Homeless sprites steal shiny things to have something that’s theirs.

She’d gone up and down the gutters all month, apologizing, learning their squeaks, and on the last afternoon of autumn, she called everyone in the village to the millpond bank to watch her sign the peace treaty.

I closed the shop for it. The mill’s been gone thirty years. The pond sits below the Healing House, ringed in cattails. That afternoon, its reeds held the entire sprite population of Moonbell Hollow.

Zeph stood beside the water’s edge dressed in her best blue robes.

“You came here by my working,” she said, her voice carrying. “You couldn’t go back, and nobody asked what you’d do instead. I’m sorry. I have been sorry all season.”

She said it again in sprite, a squeaking paragraph of it.

The reeds rustled.

“The pond is yours,” she said in both languages. “All winter.”

Cheers rang out. For hail-sprites, ice is a treasury, and Zeph had handed them the bank.

They moved out of the gutters that afternoon, a line of them down Willow Lane with their loot in tiny bundles. Half the village turned out to wave back. The teaspoons lined the pond bottom now, planted handles-down in the mud in rows, visible on still days. Melissant recorded the site in the library ledger as “the Spoon Garden,” and children skated over it all winter.

One sprite did not go.