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“I’ll do it,” she offered.

“Thank you. I’ll start setting things up for the ritual, if you’ll meet me in the spell-room, after?” He canted his head, eyes soft, and her heart twitched in an alarming fashion.

She nodded to cover her reaction.

Out in the garden, she gave her heart a stern talking to.

Don’t get any romantic ideas , she told it.

All you agreed between you was that you both found the other physically attractive.

But the self-knowledge that she’d repressed so effectively stubbornly refused to stay repressed, like rhubarb sprouting in the dark.

You want him more than just physically. You have… hopes .

She kicked at a stick that had fallen onto the path. One would think, after a lifetime of never quite mattering enough to people, that she would have learned to temper her expectations. Particularly in the instance of this man, to whom she had not mattered enough for forty years .

That was different, she argued with herself.

In any case, it was irrelevant what hopes she might or might not have, not until they were clear and free of each other.

She’d already wasted half her life living under magical constraint; she wouldn’t look back and regret the rest of it by doing the same thing again.

She would just enjoy the simple pleasure of this friendship with fringe benefits without tying herself into knots about it.

“Apfela!” she called as she reached the orchard, hoping to be taken out of her uneasy ruminations.

There was no sign of her. Last night’s rain had cleansed the last remnants of the solshant’s smell from the orchard, and the space where its corpse had been felt easier.

Her magic stirred, even though she was wearing the dismae, and she remembered the euphoria of that perfect, uncurling seedling.

It warred with all the other memories, of things going horribly wrong every time her magic manifested.

The boundary between the orchard and Apfela’s tree felt less definite than it had. Was that because Apfela had joined the household? Did that make her tree part of Skymallow now too? She made a note to ask Mal about it.

Knocking on Apfela’s tree also failed to summon her. Maybe she’d gone out? Gisele stood shifting from foot to foot, disappointed. Eventually, she shrugged and went back to the orchard. Apfela would no doubt turn up when she pleased.

She took the long way back, needing more time to settle her nerves, forcing her way through the overgrown path that led past the tower towards the line of ornamental shrubs.

Coming to a stop, she narrowed her eyes at the garden shed that had appeared behind the tower.

Had the house always had a garden shed and she just hadn’t noticed it earlier?

Tilting her head this way and that, she tried to recall when she’d last seen the tower from this angle.

The shed roof was thickly covered in jasmine.

Hmmm. She remembered the jasmine, except that before, it had overgrown this space so completely that she’d assumed beneath it were simply more shrubs.

Had the shed been hidden under it this entire time? Who had cleared it?

“Is this Mal’s?” she asked the morning air. She had trouble believing Mal had ever seen the inside of a garden shed.

The door swung open. Was that a yes or a no?

She stepped into the space, neatly arranged between a workbench, racks, and a line of hooks.

It was filled with more gardening implements than she’d expected Mal to possess, though she supposed he must have had some back when he’d first planted everything, before the garden had gotten quite so out of control.

It didn’t look like a space no one had been into for decades. Every tool gleamed as if it had been recently cleaned, sharpened, and polished. There wasn’t a speck of dirt or rust in sight.

Faerie houses tried to be useful to their people. Could Skymallow have done this for her? But where would it have gotten the energy from, still lacking magic enough to repair its interior? Maybe it had done this before the solshant attack? When had she last walked this way?

A pair of gardening gloves flopped suggestively off a nail. She retrieved them, turning the buttery leather over thoughtfully. They were in her size, not Mal’s.

“Thank you,” she whispered to the house. “You shouldn’t have spent your energy on me , not with all those cracks to heal, but thank you.”

A basket rustled on the rack. It felt rude to refuse the offering, so she picked it up along with a trowel and set forth.

What the garden really needed was enough gardeners to invade a small kingdom, but she could make a token gesture as thanks for Skymallow’s effort.

She chose a small bed next to the shed and began weeding.

There was a simple satisfaction in it, not just in finally taking action against the overgrown mess that had been itching at her for so long but also in achieving something measurable, even if that achievement was a growing pile of weeds.

It was early enough that the morning still held a touch of the night’s chill, but it didn’t take long for her to warm up. She stood and stretched, twinging in muscle groups that polite ladies weren’t supposed to know the names for.

Her thoughts drifted towards the house. If Skymallow had set up the shed for her, what might it be growing behind that still-locked door inside?

If only it could grow us a name-finding device , she thought, getting a grip on a stubborn taproot. Like the Golden Hall grew a magic mirror for whatever it was King Tāwhiri’s ancestors needed one for. Revealing truths, whatever that means.

She pulled out the weed in one satisfying piece and paused with the taproot dangling in midair.

That actually… didn’t seem like a totally impossible proposition, in light of what she knew about fae houses?

Could it be possible for Skymallow to help them somehow, if they could find a way to give it sufficient energy?

Her mind turned on a phrase Mal had used yesterday: a labour of love for a siden generates the most power of all .

“Is that what this is about?” she asked aloud. “You need us to lovingly labour for you?” There was no response. She looked at her basket. “Do you want to eat these, or should I take them to the compost heap?”

No response. She tipped the basket over anyway. It wouldn’t take long to re-gather the spilled weeds if Skymallow didn’t want them. The ground wriggled, burying them. Well, that answered that question at least, if not the more important one.

Still, the idea had her footsteps lifting with excitement as she put her tools away and proceeded towards the faint metal-and-paper flicker of Mal’s insignia. Curiously, it led her not to the spell-room but instead to his workroom. It was immediately clear that something was very wrong.