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“Your game is too easy.”

“I’m stuck with what the store had,” Nate explained.

“Then crush two at once.”

Nate considered, then he relented. “Fine.” Glass clinked against glass.

Two smells this time, tangled together. Leo had to work a bit to pull them apart. One was lemony and rough. The other was dust and pillows and someone’s linen closet.

“Thyme,” he said. “And lavender, which is not a cooking herb, but it smells nice.”

Silence.

Leo opened one eye.

Nate was looking down at the jars.

“You’re checking the labels.”

“I’m confirming your results.”

“You don’t know what any of these are, do you? You couldn’t tell weed from foxglove either.”

“I have other talents.”

“Sure you do.”

Nate put the two jars he was holding aside. “Are you going to keep playing or not?”

Leo closed his eyes. He was not done gloating, but he could gloat and play at the same time. He heard Nate mutter something at the crate, and the scrape of another lid.

Then came the smell of sage.

And with it, inexplicably, a memory.

A brightly-lit kitchen, warm with steam. Sage green walls. A long worktable, its edge worn pale. Someone stood at the stove with their back to him, stirring, and the smell of herbs was coming off the pot in waves. There was bread somewhere, and it was raining outside, and whoever stood at the stove was about to say something over their shoulder⁠—

The memory faded out before the words could arrive.

“Leo?”

Leo opened his eyes. The yard. The lanterns. Nate, hand still open over the table, a pinch of crushed gray-green in his palm, watching him.

“Sage,” Leo said. His voice came out from somewhere further away than usual.

“...Correct.”

“I know it’s correct.” He looked at his wine glass. The smell of the kitchen was gone and the wine was back. The evening air was cool and had no rain in it at all. “We had it in a soup once.”

He hadn’t planned to say that.

Nate smiled gently. “Was it good soup?”

“I don’t know,” Leo said. “Yes.”

“Sounds like a nice memory.”

Nate tipped the sage out into the grass and wiped his palm on his jeans, and he let it be. He didn’t ask who’d made the soup or when. Instead, he picked up the crate and set it back down in the grass, closing that chapter of the evening.