The Witch of Wren Hollow: Salve Selling And Snobbery

The market lanes of Mossgate wound through the heart of the conclave grounds like the threads of some vast, embroidered tapestry, and the morning sun caught every color in the canvas. Saffron banners bearing the Briarwell crest snapped from iron poles. Violet awnings shaded herb-sellers. Dust motes swirled above the cobblestones, golden and slow, catching the steam that rose from a dozen potion stalls where brewers ladled their wares into waiting vials.

Wren Applewhistle set down her wicker basket at the end of a narrow lane and exhaled a breath she had not realized she was holding. Her knees ached from the walk in from Wren Hollow. Her shoulders ached from the basket. Her pride, though, that ached most of all, because she had walked all this way with nothing but a folded cloth and a battered corked jar to sell, and the noble stalls ahead glittered with glass and silver and things she could not afford to even look at.

She spread the cloth on the cobblestones, smoothing it flat with the flat of her palm. Blue thread, faded to grey in places, with a single embroidered sprig of rosemary at one corner. Her mother's work. She set the jars of salve upon it in two careful rows: comfrey and yarrow for bruises, chamomile and honey for burns, a small clay pot of mustard poultice for chest colds. Beside them she placed the twist of paper-wrapped pastilles and the braided bundles of dried lavender tied with kitchen twine.

A hand-lettered sign, propped against the basket, read:

Wren Applewhistle, Hedge-Witch Tonics and Salves of the Hollow Made by Hand, Tried and True

She straightened it three times before she was satisfied.

A low, rumbling sound came from the basket, somewhere between a yawn and a growl.

"If you are about to complain about the walk, Butterball, you can do it quietly."

The cat's broad orange head emerged from beneath the cloth's fold. His amber eyes blinked once, slow and unimpressed.

"I do not complain," Butterball said. "I observe. There is a difference. Observe, for instance, that this lane smells of herring, and that the cobblestones are most unkindly cold beneath a gentleman's haunches."

"You will survive."

"I have survived worse. Though I recall, with some clarity, the morning we walked to Bumblebrook and the rain turned the path into a river and you left me in the basket for an hour."

"It was twenty minutes."

"An hour, in cat reckoning." He stepped daintily onto the cobblestones, sniffed once at the rosemary embroidery, and turned his back on her with the air of a magistrate dismissing a case.

Wren laughed despite herself, and was still laughing when a voice called from the neighboring stall.

"Well then. You must be the one Marigold Dewdrop told me about."

Wren turned. The woman approaching was round and rosy and wore a flour-dusted apron over a dress of cheerful yellow cotton. Her hair, the color of weak tea, was pinned up in a messy bun that seemed to defy gravity more than physics ought to allow. A tray of small glass vials hung from one hand, each stoppered with red wax and labelled in a tidy, slanting hand.

"Pim sent word you'd arrived," the woman said, and stuck out her free hand. "Marigold. Though most folks hereabouts call me Mari, or, when they're feeling formal, Miss Dewdrop, which is a daft thing to say to a woman who makes scones for a living. What's your poison, then?"

Wren shook the offered hand, felt the calluses of a working baker's palm. "Wren Applewhistle. Hedge-witch, by trade. Apprentice to the village scribe, by night."

"And humble with it." Marigold grinned, showing a small gap between her front teeth. "Good. The fancy stalls up by the fountain have been giving themselves airs all morning. One woman tried to charge me six silver for a thimble of willow-bark tea. Six silver! For tea I could brew in my own kitchen for tuppence."

"I saw her," Wren said. "She had a peacock feather in her hat."

"A whole bird, more like." Marigold set her tray down on the cobblestones beside Wren's cloth and began arranging her own wares. Each vial caught the light and threw it back in tiny colored coins: amber, rose, deep green. "Here, then. Breath-ease for asthma. Lemon-and-thyme for sore throats. And this one," she lifted a vial of dusky violet, "is my grandmother's recipe for courage, though I won't tell you what's in it or you'll steal my customers."

"Steal your customers?" Wren looked at her own modest spread, then at Marigold's glittering array, and raised an eyebrow. "With a mustard poultice and a twist of lavender?"

"I judge not the wares but the woman." Marigold winked. "And you, Wren Applewhistle, have the look of someone who knows the difference between a poultice that works and one that just smells nice."

Before Wren could answer, a shadow fell across the lane.

A young man in a coat of dove-grey wool stood at the entrance to the lane, one hand resting lightly on the silver tip of a cane that was surely more ornament than necessity. His boots were polished to a mirror shine. His hair was the precise shade of dark honey, swept back from a high forehead, and his face had the kind of beauty that suggested long hours of careful cultivation rather than any accident of birth. A small gold pin in the shape of a bramble leaf glinted at his throat.

He surveyed the stalls the way a man surveys a row of inferior horses at auction.

"You there," he said, and his voice was the colour of cold cream. "Is this the lane for the salve-sellers, or have I wandered into the village's own rag-and-bone row?"

Marigold's cheerful expression did not falter, but her voice dropped a register.

"You have wandered exactly where you meant to, sir. The lane for salves is three to your left, past the glassblower. We humble herb-folk occupy the rear, where the breeze from the river keeps us from overcooking in our own dignity."

The man did not smile. "How refreshing. A wit."

"I do try, sir."

He turned, and his gaze swept over Wren's cloth and its small jars. He paused. His eyes, the pale green of new leaves, narrowed by a fraction.

"And you are?"

"Wren Applewhistle." She surprised herself by not looking away. "Hedge-witch of Wren Hollow. Those are my salves."

"Applewhistle." He rolled the name around his mouth as though testing it for poison. "I am not familiar with the house."

"It's not a house, sir. It's a village."

"Evidently." He inclined his head, the smallest possible acknowledgment, and turned to go. At the last moment, he paused. "A word of advice, given freely. The conclave is not Bumblebrook, or wherever else it is you have come from. Buyers here do not care for modesty. They care for pedigree. A tasteful label and a pretty jar will serve you better than whatever rustic charm you believe yourself to possess."

He walked on. The scent of cedar and something faintly metallic hung in the air behind him, and then the crowd swallowed him.

Marigold let out a long, low whistle.

"Well then. That was Lord Saffron Briarwell, in the flesh. Heir to the great and noble house of thorns and headaches."

"I gathered."

"He came down from the capital six months back. Rumor says his father, Aldous, is a spirit bound to the family tower, and the son has come to set things to rights. Or to set them more wrong, depending on who you ask." Marigold picked up a rag and began polishing one of her vials, more to occupy her hands than to clean the glass. "He means to be made High-Warden of the conclave at the autumn moot. He means a great many things, Lord Saffron does."

"You don't sound as though you admire him."

"I sound as though I keep my own counsel, which is different." Marigold glanced toward the lane's entrance. "But I'll say this. He has no friends, and yet every handshake he offers seems to win a friend. That is either cleverness or witchcraft, and I'm not sure I want to know which."

Wren watched the spot where the man had stood, and felt the hairs on her arms rise, though the morning was warm.

A child ran past, chasing a chicken. The chicken darted between Wren's jars, knocked the mustard poultice sideways, and continued without apology. Butterball, from his perch on the basket, watched the chaos with the resigned calm of a man who had seen empires rise and fall and found them all equally unimpressive.

"We will sell our salves," Wren said, more to the cat than to Marigold. "We did not come all this way to be told we have no pedigree."

"No," said Butterball. "We came because your sister left a note in a teapot and the note said 'Mossgate' and you are constitutionally incapable of leaving a mystery alone."

"That is not why we came."

"That is precisely why we came."

Marigold snorted, then laughed, and the sound broke the strange tension that had settled over the lane.

"Right then," Marigold said, and clapped her hands. "First lesson of Mossgate market, Applewhistle. You sell what you have, and you sell it well, and you let the lords in their fine coats go whistle. The common folk of this conclave have coughs and chilblains same as anyone. They don't care a fig for pedigree. They care for a salve that works."

"And if it doesn't work?"

"Then you refund their penny and apologize with a scone." She thrust a small paper bag at Wren. "I brought samples. For courage, as I said, though you look as though you have a sufficiency of that already. Now. Stand up. Tidy your hair. Smile at the next person who walks past, and tell them the mustard poultice will cure anything from a head-cold to a broken heart, because in my experience, both respond equally well to a bit of warmth."

Wren took the bag. The vial inside was warm from Marigold's hand, and the wax stopper was pressed with a tiny flower.

"Marigold Dewdrop," Wren said. "Are you always this kind to strangers?"

"To strangers, no. To the friend of Pim Snapdragon, who writes me letters every fortnight and never once forgets my birthday, yes. Pim is a treasure, and any friend of Pim's is a friend of mine, and that is the end of it."

"Pim speaks of you often."

"Good. Pim should. I am a delight." Marigold grinned again, and this time the grin reached all the way to her eyes. "Now. The market will fill in an hour. We have time for one cup of tea before the rush. There is a woman three stalls down who sells a brew so strong it could wake the dead, and I, for one, intend to test that claim before the morning is out."

She hooked her arm through Wren's and steered her down the lane, with Butterball trotting behind at a dignified pace.

The tea Marigold had promised turned out to be less a beverage than a small industrial event. The vendor, a wiry woman with arms like dock rope, poured from a kettle that hissed and complained, the steam rising in a column that smelled of peat smoke and something resinous beneath. Wren accepted the cup with both hands. The liquid was the colour of a winter pond, and it tasted, quite distinctly, of ambition and poor decisions.

"Drink it all," Marigold advised cheerfully, watching Wren over the rim of her own cup. "It steadies the hands. Pim swears by it before every binding ceremony."

"Your Pim," Wren managed, because the brew had stripped the feeling from her tongue, "has nerves of iron."

"My Pim has nerves of absolutely anything she chooses, thank you. Now finish it, and let us go and sell your salves before the market men arrive and take all the best positions."

The square filled in stages, as markets do. First the butchers, laying out their boards with the solemnity of priests. Then the cloth merchants, unrolling bolts of wool and linen like small colourful prayers. Then the spice traders, whose arrival brought the first real crowd, because word had travelled that a trader from the eastern coast had brought salt that was not, technically, salt at all, but some grey crystalline substance that allegedly prevented scurvy and attracted lightning in equal measure. By the time the spice trader had drawn his first curious knot of onlookers, Marigold was already elbow-deep in flour sacks at her father's stall, calling out prices in a voice that could have woken the aforementioned dead.

Wren took her place beside the Scarecrow of Lower Bumble. The Scarecrow gave a slow, courteous nod that made its straw hat tilt dangerously, and offered her one of its turnips on the grounds that they were bracingly cold and good for the constitution. Wren declined as graciously as she could, arranged her salves upon a small wooden tray that Pim had lent her, and tried very hard to look like someone who knew what she was about.

The first hour was quiet. She sold a pot of comfrey ointment to a dairyman with a cracked knuckle, and a sachet of dried yarrow to a woman who said she did not know what yarrow was but liked the smell. The Scarecrow watched these transactions with grave attention, and whenever a customer left, it offered a thoughtful observation about turnips. Wren began to suspect, uneasily, that the Scarecrow believed it was being helpful.

The second hour brought trouble.

He arrived not on foot but in a carriage the colour of bruised plums, drawn by two grey horses whose hooves had been polished to a dull mirror-shine. The carriage stopped at the edge of the square, and a footman in mustard livery unfolded himself from the box and set down a step. A gloved hand emerged. A boot, immaculate, descended. Then Lord Saffron Briarwell, heir to the Briarwell estate, eldest surviving son of Aldous, wearer of a velvet coat the precise green of new ferns, stepped into the morning light as though he had been expecting it to arrange itself around him.

Wren had heard of him. Everyone in the lower districts had heard of him. He had been away for years, in the capital, pursuing what the broadsheets delicately called his studies. He had returned three weeks ago, and in that time he had purchased the old mill, dismissed three tenants, and been seen in conversation with a figure made entirely of briars at the crossroads after midnight. The village had opinions. None of them were kind.

He did not, at first, notice her. He moved through the market like a slow knife, pausing at the cloth merchant's, at the spice tradier's, at a stall selling dried flowers where he stood for an uncomfortably long time, sniffing. His gloved hand brushed a bundle of dried lavender, and the merchant nearly wept with gratitude.

Then he turned, and his gaze travelled down the row of stalls, and it landed on Wren, and it stayed there.

"Ah," he said, from a distance of perhaps fifteen feet, in a voice that carried without effort, like smoke finding a chimney. "The hedge-witch."

He approached. His smile was the kind of smile that gave nothing away.

"I had heard there was a poultice-monger in the square today. I confess I came down on purpose. One does so enjoy a local curiosity."

Wren felt her ears go hot. The Scarecrow inclined its head toward her, as if to ask whether turnips were still on the table.

"My remedies are for common ailments," Wren said, keeping her voice level through sheer obstinacy. "Coughs. Chilblains. The usual."

"The usual. How reassuring." He picked up one of her small jars, turned it in his gloved fingers, and read the label with an expression of faint, exquisite horror. "Comfrey and marigold. One assumes the marigold is for the colour, since it can hardly be for the efficacy."

He set the jar down precisely where it had been, as though returning it to its cage.

"Pim Snapdragon," he said, and the name in his mouth sounded like a curio, "has always had a weakness for strays. I had not realised the weakness extended to the village's amateur pharmacists."

A small crowd was forming. Marigold, at her father's stall, had stopped mid-transaction and was watching with the particular stillness of a woman deciding whether to throw a scone or hold it in reserve.

"I do not pretend to be a physician, my lord," Wren said. "I make simple remedies for simple needs. The people of this village have been kind enough to buy them."

"The people of this village," he replied, "will buy anything that is offered with sufficient confidence. It is the great advantage of a rural customer. They have no standards to disappoint."

He turned, slowly, to address the gathering crowd. His voice shifted into something almost intimate, as though he were confiding a secret to each listener in turn.

"You will notice, my friends, that these little pots bear no seal. No guild mark. No signature from any institution that might be held accountable if the contents turned out to be, let us say, imaginative. We have here a young woman of, I am sure, the very best intentions. But intentions, as my father used to say, are the first refuge of the incompetent."

Wren's hands had gone cold. The Scarecrow, beside her, was looking from Wren to the lord and back again with an expression of deep, strawy concern.

"My remedies work," Wren said. Her voice came out thinner than she wanted. "I have never sold a salve that did not."

"And yet. You see. No seal." He picked up the jar again, held it to the light, and smiled at it the way a cat smiles at a mouse it has decided to release. "A poultice-monger. A purveyor of peasant remedies. One wonders what Pim sees in such a venture. Perhaps the novelty. Pim has always been susceptible to novelty."

It was at this precise moment that the scream occurred.

It came from the direction of the cloth merchant's stall. A man, broad-shouldered, bearded, clutching the side of his face, was making a sound that could fairly be described as operatic. His free hand was waving in the air. His eyes were streaming. He was, quite unmistakably, in the grip of a toothache so ferocious that it had apparently chosen this exact public moment to declare war.

"Sir," the cloth merchant said helplessly. "Sir, please, the velvet."

"Devil take the velvet," the man roared, in a voice that set the turnips rattling. "My tooth is trying to leave my head through my ear."

Lord Saffron's smile thinned by a fraction. He had been, Wren realised, in the middle of something, and this interruption was not in his plan.

The man, still clutching his face, lurched across the square. He stopped in front of Wren's stall. He stared at her with the wild, desperate hope of the truly afflicted.

"Girl," he said, through his fingers. "You. You sell cures. Do you have anything. Anything at all. I will pay. I will pay anything. Name your price."

Wren stared back. Her mind, which had been a wilderness of humiliation a second before, now performed one of its occasional, startling feats of clarity. She reached, without looking, to the small wooden tray beside her, and her fingers closed around a jar she had made only the previous week.

"Clove oil," she said, surprised at the steadiness of her own voice. "Mixed with a little willow-bark tincture. Rub it on the gum. It will not cure the tooth. But it will give you perhaps half an hour's peace, and it will not poison you."

The man took the jar. He fumbled off the lid. He dipped a finger in and applied it with the graceless urgency of a man who has stopped caring about dignity.

Silence, of the most absolute kind, settled over the square. Even the spice trader stopped hawking. Even Marigold, halfway across the square, was perfectly still.

The man breathed out, long and slow. His hand lowered from his face. His eyes widened.

"God and his angels," he breathed. "Girl. What is in this."

"Clove," Wren said. "And willow-bark."

"Clove. Willow-bark." He shook his head slowly, as though trying to clear water from his ears. "I have spent six silver on a physician in the capital. Six silver, and he gave me a powder that did nothing. This. This little jar. This is worth more than six silver."

He turned, then, to the crowd. And Wren saw, with a small distant shock, that the man was not some random villager. He was Emer Thistlecrack, who had sat on the Conclave of Elders for thirty years and was known throughout three counties for his absolute refusal to endorse any remedy he had not personally vetted.

"My friends," he said, in a voice that had found its volume again, "I have had this tooth for nine days. Nine days. I have not slept. I have not eaten. I have prayed, which I do not do lightly. This child has just given me the first relief I have felt since the thing began. I do not know who she is. I do not care. If she has made this, she can make anything. I will buy every jar she has."

The square erupted. Not into chaos. Into something worse, from Lord Saffron's point of view: commerce. Three people reached for the small wooden tray at once. A fourth shouted that she had been there first. A fifth produced a purse and began counting coins with trembling, hopeful fingers.

Marigold arrived at Wren's elbow like a small, flour-dusted whirlwind.

"Price them properly, you fool," she hissed, her eyes bright with fierce, unholy joy. "Double. Triple. They will pay it. They have just watched a Conclave elder weep over a jar of clove oil. Triple, at least."

"I cannot," Wren whispered. "It is the same salve. It has not changed."

"Then the salve was always worth triple, and you have simply been too modest to charge it. Now. Sell. I will make change."

And while Lord Saffron Briarwell stood at the edge of the square, his smile fixed, his velvet coat suddenly looking a little less like armour and a little more like costume, Wren Applewhistle sold every jar, every sachet, every tin of ointment she had brought, and then, to her own faint surprise, took orders for more.

The Scarecrow of Lower Bumble, throughout this entire performance, had held out its turnip in a steady, philosophical hand. When the last customer had gone, it offered the turnip to Wren once more, on the grounds that she had earned it.

Wren accepted. It was, she discovered, bracingly cold.

Pim's flesh prickled, the goose bumps of disquiet.

"To tea," she repeated, and her voice sounded, to her own ears, as if it had been dug out of a cold cellar. "At your cottage."

"At mine," Marigold said. She was already gathering the remnants of her satchel, coiling ribbons with the swift precision of a woman who had spent her life tying up parcels. "Mother is at her sister's. The oven will be warm. There is a wedge of fruit cake left, and I have been saving the currants in it like a dragon hoards coin. Tonight, Wren, you will have every single one of them."

There was something about the way Marigold said tonight . A quiet imperative. A thing that was not, in the end, a request.

Pim glanced toward the square. The lamplighters had begun their rounds, tapping glass with their long tapers, and the soft hiss of flame catching wick followed them down the lane. The market stalls were being dismantled. The bronze salamander had closed one eye and was peering, slyly, at a pile of discarded orange peel.

"I cannot," Wren began. "Lord Saffron is still here, and the Conclave, and the Antechamber, and my sister is gone, and I am not the woman for this. I cannot go to tea and eat fruit cake while Cordelia is, "

"Wren."

Marigold's hand, soft and smelling of yeast, closed around Wren's wrist.

"Your sister is gone. She has been gone. And you have spent a year breaking yourself against that fact like a wave against a cliff. Tonight, for one hour, you are going to sit in my kitchen and drink tea. That is not a request. That is the first true thing I have said all day."

Pim wanted to protest on Wren's behalf. To insist that there were things more urgent, more pressing, more worthy of a woman who had just been accused of high brier-magic in front of a Conclave elder. But Marigold's face, under its cheerful bloom, was drawn with a kind of stern, exhausted love, and Pim understood, suddenly, that this was not an interruption of Wren's work. This was the work. This was the thread that held the rest.

"Very well," Wren said, in a small voice.

Marigold squeezed her wrist once and released it.

"Good. Bring the cat. He will expect a saucer of milk."

And so, with Butterball riding her shoulders like a furry, disapproving judge, and Pim tucked into the pocket of her cloak, Wren walked through the lamplit streets of Wren Hollow, past the shuttered windows of the chandler, past the dim bulk of the Antechamber where a single brazier still glowed behind the door, past the pale, watchful statue of Saint Bramble that stood at the corner of Applewhistle Lane, and turned, at last, into the lane that smelled of yeast and wood smoke.

Marigold's cottage was small, and warm, and so thick with the scent of baking that it felt less like entering a house and more like being swallowed, gently, by a loaf of bread. The kitchen was dominated by a blackened hearth, a scarred oak table, and a dresser crowded with blue-and-white pottery. A kettle sat on the hob, already singing.

"Sit," Marigold said, and pointed to a chair by the fire. "I will be mother."

Wren sat. Butterball leapt, with the resignation of a man who has accepted his fate, onto her lap and began, at once, to knead her stomach with his paws.

Pim watched from the folds of Wren's cloak, her small green eyes catching the firelight. She felt the warmth seep into her, and felt, too, a corresponding small unwinding of something that had been clenched, very tightly, in her middle, since the Antechamber.

Marigold poured the tea. It was strong, and brown, and tasted of tannin and of something else, a faint mineral note that Pim suspected was a leaf from the southern fens. Marigold set a saucer of milk on the floor for Butterball. She set a wedge of fruit cake, dense with dark currants, between Wren and herself. She pulled her own chair close to Wren's, so their knees almost touched.

Then she did not, immediately, speak.

She sat, and drank her tea, and looked at the fire.

Pim felt the silence as a physical thing. It pressed against the windows. It pooled in the corners of the room. Butterball's purr was a small, warm engine in Wren's lap.

Then Marigold said, quietly:

"I knew your grandmother, Wren."

Wren's teacup stopped halfway to her mouth.

"Cordelia," Marigold said. "Your grandmother Cordelia. Not your sister."

"I know who my grandmother is," Wren said, faintly.

"Yes. But you do not know what she was."

Marigold set her cup down. She folded her hands in her lap. The firelight played across her face, and for a moment, the cheerful baker's daughter was gone, and in her place sat someone older, and graver, and more tired.

"I was nineteen," Marigold said. "It was the summer I broke off my engagement to Tom Thistledown. I had come home to my mother's house, and I was moping about the garden like a wet cat. And your grandmother came down the lane."

Wren did not move.

"She was a small woman. Smaller than you. She wore a green coat that had been mended so many times the patches had patches. She had a basket on her arm. And she smelled, my goodness, how she smelled. Of lavender and of something darker. Of something like the air before a storm."

Marigold's eyes were on the fire, but Pim had the sense that she was seeing, in it, a different scene, a different year.

"I was sitting on the wall. She stopped. She looked at me. And she said, in a voice like a bell, 'You have been crying. Here. Eat this.' And she took from her basket a small twist of paper, and inside it was a single dried berry, dark as ink. 'Eat,' she said. 'It will not fix what ails you. But it will make the morning easier to bear.'"

Pim's breath caught.

"I ate it," Marigold said. "And the next morning I woke, and the grief was still there, but it was not, somehow, the only thing in the room. There was room, around it, for breakfast."

She turned, and looked at Wren.

"Your grandmother was the most powerful brier-mage in three counties, Wren. Not the most famous. Not the most admired. The most powerful. She could grow a rose from a single thorn. She could knit a bone. She could, I am told, walk into a fever and walk out again with the fever under her arm like a scolded child."

Wren's face was very still.

"Why did no one tell me this?" she whispered.

"Because she withdrew," Marigold said. "After your grandfather died. After your mother married and moved to the city. She shut the door of her cottage and she did not open it for anyone except the postman, and not always for him. She let the briars grow over the windows. She let the path to her door become a thicket. And the world, which is a careless beast, forgot her."

Pim felt Wren's hand, beneath the cloak, press against the pocket where she sat. A small, unconscious gesture. A reaching.

"But I did not forget," Marigold said. "And when your sister was born, your grandmother sent down to the bakery a letter, and in it was a sprig of rosemary, and a single line: The child has the hands. Mind she is taught gently. And when Cordelia vanished, your grandmother sent no letter at all. She sent something else. But that is a story for another evening."

Wren's lips parted. "What, "

"Another evening," Marigold repeated, firmly. "Tonight you drink your tea, and you eat your fruit cake, and you let your cat purr, and you do not think about the Conclave, or Lord Saffron, or what you are or are not. Tonight you are a woman in a kitchen, with a friend, and that is enough."

Pim felt, in Wren's pocket, the small, slow shifting of grief. Not the grief of Cordelia. The older grief. The grief of a granddaughter who had not known, had not been told, had lived her whole life in the dim, salt-stained shadow of a grandmother who had once been, quietly and without fanfare, the most powerful thing for miles.

Butterball purred. The kettle sang. The fire spat.

And outside, in the lane, a soft footfall paused at the gate, and then, with great care, moved on.

Lord Saffron Briarwell, his velvet coat buttoned to the throat against the chill, stood in the dark for a long moment, looking at the warm square of Marigold's window. He could hear, faintly, the sound of a woman's laughter, and the deeper, steadier sound of a cat.

He lifted his hand, as if to knock. He let it fall.

He turned, and walked back toward the Briarwell gates, and the briars, which had grown another foot since morning, closed, gently, behind him.

Pim, in Wren's pocket, felt the night settle, like a quilt, over the village. She felt the warmth of the kitchen, and the warmth of Wren's body, and the small, fierce warmth of Marigold's friendship. She felt, most of all, the small, steady pulse of Wren's thumb against the pocket's edge.

Somewhere, in a cottage grown over with briars, an old woman sat in a dark room, and listened.

She had heard, at last, the sound she had been waiting, for a year, to hear.

A granddaughter, laughing.

She smiled, in the dark.

And the briars at her window bloomed.