The noon luncheon cleared slowly, women stacking bowls and folding linen in the particular unhurried way of folk who knew the real work began at dusk. The children had eaten too much dried fruit and not enough bread and were paying for it in excess energy, careening between the tables like loosed arrows with nowhere to land.

Trinny had acquired an audience before Hjordis had finished stacking the last bowls.

She'd settled herself on the wide stone rim of the well with a stack of paper squares in her lap — and she was talkin'. Of course she was talkin'. The children pressed in from all sides, Iliidia and the twins and small Garrett with his serious face, and Trinny's hands moved through the paper while her mouth ran on about the world outside Arable.

"Myr had the finest theatres in all of Coranor — four stories high, chandeliers made of moonstone, audiences in their finest wigs drinking wine from crystal." Her fingers creased and turned, creased and turned. "The Magistracy built their first academy there. Scholars came from Esta, from Arb, from places so far they hadn't names in Coraneese." A fold, a tuck. "All gone now."

She held up what her nimble hands had made: a three-towered city in miniature, rising from a single sheet of paper, absurdly detailed for something that fit in a palm.

The children lost their minds entirely, fighting to get a closer look. Trinny chuckled, grabbed a new sheet of paper.

"Then came the wretched demons out of Zyrellia and burned it to the foundation. Nothing left now but char and bad memories." Garrett, who was the tallest, held the paper city out of reach, tongue sticking out, while the smaller kids jumped and whined. Trinny chuckled, unbothered by the commotion. "Draganor was worse. The royal family locked themselves in the keep and the demons burnt that too, with the family inside." She paused, looking at each child in turn with wide serious eyes. "They could hear the screaming from three miles off!"

The children were absolutely silent. Completely horrified. Completely delighted all the same.

Iliidia's hand shot up. "Did the demons eat them after?"

"Almost certainly," Trinny confirmed, now holding up what might've been a dragon or some strange kind of bird. A new scuffle erupted among the children. Trinny laughed, almost falling off the well rim.

Hjordis watched from the tables for a moment, bowls stacked in her arms, and shook her head. Half a dozen women had drifted toward the well, drawn by the voice carrying across the square. She went to find work elsewhere.

The chapel had emptied out in the afternoon heat. The maidens' garlands lay draped over the altar rail waiting — Dora had started them but her eyes gave her trouble with the fine work. Hjordis pulled a stool to the table beneath the stained glass and began working through the broken sections, threading stems back through loops, her fingers finding the rhythm automatically.

Twenty minutes later, Trinny came in with arms filled with what looked like large white flowers and settled at the other end of the table without asking. The flowers rustled over the table. Paper. Should've seen that coming.

"Ye were a nuisance at the luncheon," Hjordis said, not looking up.

"Facts," Trinny said. "I was filling them with facts." She pulled up a stool of her own, began sorting her flowers by size. "Facts do feel like ideas to folk who haven't been offered many."

Hjordis's hands tightened on the garland. "Have ye no decency in yer blood at all?"

Trinny considered this for a while, head cocked. "Some. It's quite diluted." She selected a paper lily, turned it. "I'll admit, I can be a nuisance to those who'd prefer to live in denial. That's a personal failing. I'm working on it."

The words landed and sat there. Hjordis didn't answer. She worked a broken stem back through its loop, focused on the small precise task of it.

She thought of the field behind Goria's church. The stick. The age she'd stopped going. Had never quite looked at the space between that age and this one directly.

Admitting it — that Trinny's point had a point — meant admitting her mother's wine-soaked ravings held truth. Meant admitting she'd traded something real for a life she'd never actually agreed to, only failed to refuse loudly enough.

She kept her hands moving.

"Knew you'd go through my bag," Trinny said pleasantly.

Hjordis said nothing.

"I want you to know — no weapons. No poisons. No wicked concoctions." Trinny pressed a paper stem flat with her thumb, ran a nail along the crease. "Nothing to hide."

"If ye've no weapons," Hjordis said, "how did ye kill the buck?"

A pause. "I got lucky."

Hjordis looked up for the first time. "Ye stole it."

Trinny made a face that wasn't quite a denial. "I may have acquired it through negotiation with a hunter who was having a very good morning and didn't miss one." She smoothed another stem. "Would it really be so hard to believe I bargained for it?"

"Aye."

"Fair." Trinny shrugged one massive shoulder. "I needed an impressive entrance. Couldn't very well arrive with a sack of turnips." She glanced sidelong. "And you certainly won't be complaining tonight when it's on the table roasted with fresh rosemary."

"No," Hjordis admitted. She returned to the garland. "I still don't trust ye."

"I know."

They worked in the chapel's thick quiet. Trinny's hands moved through paper with that unsettling certainty, each fold landing clean. Hjordis reached up to hang the finished section of garland, turned back to collect the rest.

Trinny was looking around the empty chapel with a different face — older, quieter, the grin banked down to something she hadn't shown in public.

"About to head out?" she asked.

"Aye."

"Want to see a trick?" She held up a paper lily. "One your father taught me."

Hjordis went still.

The garland hung crushed in her fist. She looked at Trinny across the table. Trinny looked back, waiting.

Hjordis walked back. Set the garland down. Waited with arms crossed.

Trinny placed the lily flat on her palm and drew one slow breath. She blew across it softly, barely a current, the kind that wouldn't move a candle flame.

The lily rose.

Steadily, it rose, turning as it went, petals separating and spreading as if the paper remembered it had once been a living tree. It climbed in slow rotations toward the chapel's dome, white against the coloured light falling through the glass, and it kept going until it found the highest point of the vault, looking for all the world like something alive searching for a way out.

Hjordis's pulse kicked like a penned goat.

"That's magic." Her voice came out flat. "Forbidden magic. Only Magistrates are allowed to—"

"Blood magic." Trinny had her eyes on the lily, not Hjordis. "Not the Nexus sort. Nothing to do with wands or the Magistracy's very specific ideas about who gets to do what." She looked down with a smug grin. "It's in the blood. Your father had it. I have it." A pause, casual. "Could be you have it too, Poopsie."

"Don't call me that!"

Trinny opened her mouth.

"Don't." Hjordis's hands had gone wrong — the garland was ruined, stems bent at angles they wouldn't recover from. She set it on the table without looking. Her legs carried her to the door.

Outside, the afternoon hit her full in the face. She walked until she found Mads.

She found him before she'd decided where to look — crossing from the cluster of cottages, newly changed into his festive clothes. The ceremonial tunic sat perfectly arranged, dark teal linen embroidered with fertility symbols: acorns, oak leaves, bears. Everything their village stood for stitched into his clothing.

"I've somethin' to tell ye. Urgent like." Hjordis said, out of breath.

Mads's face was paler than usual despite the evening's warmth.

"Aye, so do I. I've made me decision."

Hjordis's pulse quickened. "About what?"

"Ye know what."

The proposal. She'd almost forgot. Her blunt question behind the workshop.

Hjordis and Mads walked in silence away from the lamplight and laughter, past gardens still heavy with summer's last harvest.

The water basins lay at the village edge, stone circles filled from the mountain spring. The setting sun painted everything warm and strange. Mads's face was cast in shadow, sun behind him. They sat down on the stone bench, elbows on knees.

They'd played here as children. Mads eleven, gangly and serious even then. Herself fifteen and burning with shameful feelings for a younger boy everyone said would leave on pilgrimage. Until he was chosen to stay.

Hjordis spoke first. "Trinny knows magic. Unlawful kind. Ye were right about her." She swallowed, her palm grew moist. "Said me father had the same gift. Said it might be in the blood an' all."

Mads stared at the sun reflecting in the spring, seeming to be elsewhere entirely. "That's grand, Jordie."

"Yer not listening. Trinny said 'twas blood magic, made paper come alive — Tomsun always warned us about—"

Mads's breathing came short and sharp through his nose. Suddenly words tumbled out in a rush.

"I cannae stand this anymore!"

Hjordis shut her mouth. Mads went on, hands clenched to fists on his lap. "Trinny got me thinkin' things I shouldnae. About what it would've been like. If I'd gone to Cora instead. Seen the world. Done what I wanted instead of what tradition demands."

Hjordis said nothing for a moment. Close enough to catch his scent: lavender soap and nervous sweat and musk. "She spreads poison. Makes us question what we ken."

"Does she?" Mads turned to face her, eyes reflecting gold sunshine. "Or does she just say what we're already thinkin'?"

His leg pressed against hers. Warm and solid through fabric. She didn't pull away.

"What are ye sayin'?"

Mads rubbed black hair from his eyes with shaking fingers. Swallowed hard. "I want it too. What ye asked for." His voice cracked like a boy's despite his full nineteen years. "It's no' about kindness. No' about duty. I just want—"

He couldn't finish. Didn't need to. The hunger in his voice told enough.

Hjordis's lips twitched into an almost smile. Her pulse hammered against her throat. "Aye." All she managed to say to that.

Without warning, Mads grabbed her wrist. Before she could react, he pressed her palm flat against the front of his tunic. Against the unmistakable evidence of his need, hard and warm and urgent beneath leather and linen.

"Feel that," he whispered desperately. "That's what ye do to me, Jordie. What I cannae stop thinkin' about."

"Mads!" The word escaped as half-scandalized gasp, half-breathless laugh.

He jerked back as if stung, face flushing scarlet. "Sorry. I dinnae — I've never—"

Footsteps crunched on gravel. Three village boys appeared at the basin's edge chasing an escaped hen. Garrett, barely eleven. The twins, Tam and Jon, a year younger. They froze as they saw the figures on the bench. Mads and Hjordis sprang apart. Too late. The boys stared with wide confused eyes. Old enough to sense the wrongness, too young to understand its nature.

"Evening lads," Mads managed, voice strangled. He stood quickly, tunic mercifully concealing the evidence.

The boys said nothing, just stared. The hen squawked and flapped between their feet, forgotten.

"Best get that bird home," Hjordis said sharply. "Before it gets into the grain stores."

They scattered like startled mice, dragging their captive hen with them. Not before she caught Garrett glancing back with a curious look.

Silence stretched between bench and basin. Mads wouldn't meet her eyes. His breathing had gone ragged, hands trembling as he smoothed nonexistent wrinkles from his tunic.

"Garrett will talk," he said finally.

"Garrett always talks. Question is whether anyone listens."

"That was wrong, Jordie. What we almost—"

"Almost what?" Hjordis tried to meet his darting eyes.

He looked at her then. Really looked. Saw the hunger in her that matched his own, burning in her dark eyes. The desperation that wasn't tender in any way.

"After the ceremony," he whispered. "When the moon bleeds full and proper."

She nodded. Once. Sharp as a blade.

Then he was gone, fleeing toward the church and duty and the safety of sacred ritual.

She stayed on the bench with her hands in her lap and her face still hot and the ghost of that heat sitting in her palm whether she wanted it there or not.

The sky was deepening above the western ridge, orange bleeding into violet, disappearing beneath dark forests on the distant horizon. In an hour or so the moon would rise. Red as blood, then darker than red — dark as nothing — before the eclipse turned the whole night strange. Stranger than anyone older than two centuries would've anticipated.

The bell marking the start of the fruition rite hadn't rung yet.

Hjordis sat there until it did.

Back in the village, Trinny had now bathed twice in two days. A personal record since winter. She was all dressed up in traditional garments — a modest bodice tied too snugly, squeezing the life out of her, a scarf that didn't quite sit right, designed to hide her ample chest, and below it a wide green skirt traded for her practical slacks. It hung around rather than squeezed, which she welcomed. Trinny — who wasn't really named that, but something similar — had always preferred skirts over things that clung. Tight cravats, too. She'd always tie those loose.

Trinny was also a borrower of many things. At the moment, the latest was the body itself — bulky, capable, could knock out a hunter with bare fists, could take an arrow to the chest and barely register it. Rakatullian blood, she suspected. Part beast. The former merchant had plenty of gold too, hidden in places she'd rather not mention aloud.

Right now she stood outside the Helmbane cottage and peered in. Dark. No Hjordis. Mother Helmbane was among the other crones, drunk as a dandy of Myr. The door was locked. Smart girls.

She assessed the lock, drew a piece of paper from her bodice and began folding. Each crease placed, each angle considered. Her hands shook on the third fold. She stopped. Looked at them.

Nerves. Now. Brilliant timing.

"Come on, Tryggve," he said quietly, alone on the mound, the sun finally dropping behind the ridge. "Grow some balls."

He heard the bell ring. Registered his own plan. Laughed once, sharp and private, at the joke that was quite literally true.