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Story: The Hazelwood Pact

The storm hit like a spell gone sour.

One moment, Rowan was sipping lemon balm tea, definitely not thinking about Linden’s forearms, or his mouth, or the fact that her journal now contained pressed lemon balm from his garden. The next, the sky cracked open with a sound like cosmic betrayal and tried, very sincerely, to kill her.

Thunder bellowed like a wrathful old god whose sacrificial goat had run off with a shepherd.

The window panes rattled in their frames.

The wind screamed through the eaves, uprooting hedgerows and flinging them at innocent gnomes.

Rain lashed the cobblestones sideways, and the very air thickened, dense with wild magic, the kind that made your teeth hum and your inner wards pucker like offended cats.

From his perch atop the apothecary counter, Mottle blinked up at the ceiling.

"Oh, good," he drawled. "A weather tantrum. Haven’t had one of those since the last full moon."

Rowan was already halfway to the hearth, robes flapping, hair frizzing with static, teeth clenched around a protective chant. Her palms lit with golden sigils just as the first bolt of ley-charged lightning struck the chimney.

The resulting boom knocked her flat on her arse. Several jars of dried nettles launched themselves suicidally from their shelves, smashing on the slate floor in a flurry of acrid dust, shards, and what was either smoke or her last good nerve fraying.

The second bolt of lightning fried the hearth sigil, her primary ward. The runes shrieked in protest and disintegrated in a puff of violet smoke and sullen judgment.

The third bolt hit her roof. With a sound like a particularly enthusiastic sponge being wrung out. The entire ceiling gave up.

It only took five minutes for her cottage to become a swamp.

Rowan stood ankle-deep in ice-cold rainwater, gripping her enchanted kettle as if it were a holy relic.

The kettle was shrieking like it had seen the end of days and wanted everyone to know it.

Her boots were soaked, her underthings clung in the most undignified way imaginable, and she was fairly certain her mattress had transformed into a floating bog spirit and was now haunting the pantry.

“Brilliant,” she muttered, wiping a strand of wet hair from her face. “Just absolutely… brilliant .”

Then came a knock at the door. A delicate , polite knock, as if someone had mistaken her for a reasonable person in a dry house.

The door swung open without waiting for permission.

Elder Thistle entered with the calm authority of a woman who had never once in her life been surprised by the apocalypse.

Her waxed cloak gleamed like fresh candlefat, rain sluicing off it in neat rivulets.

Her galoshes made soggy thumps across the flooded floor as she stepped over an unconscious garden sprite and what remained of Rowan’s herbal notebook.

She looked around the room as if cataloging a particularly unruly hedge. "Rowan," she said crisply, as though announcing the start of a trial. "Due to current magical instabilities and residential flooding, you are hereby reassigned to emergency lodging under the Hazelwood Pact Clause 9b."

Rowan squinted up at her through the steam rising off the ruined kettle. “Is that Council-speak for we’re making you bunk with your ex ?”

"Yes," said Elder Thistle with terrifying cheer. "Pack quickly. We’ll be moving you across the lane."

Rowan stared at her, rain dripping down the tip of her nose. “You do remember he’s left me ten years ago?”

“He also bakes, has excellent insulation, and isn’t currently floating toward the river in a cursed bedframe,” said Thistle. “Priorities.”

Mottle belched. “She’s going to cry. I can taste it.”

“I’m going to hex you,” Rowan snapped.

But she was already grabbing her satchel and stuffing it with what she could salvage.

Mottle leapt into her satchel like it was a life raft. “If we die, I want it known I never liked that boy.”

Rowan ignored him.

Outside, the storm whipped the path into a blur. Lightning cracked in the clouds. Her heart cracked a little harder in her chest.

***

Linden’s cottage was, of course, not flooded.

Because the ley lines loved him. Because he was born on a solstice and kissed by moss and probably whispered bedtime secrets to the weather.

Because of course Linden Thorne, with his stupid golden soul and his annoyingly competent carpentry, had a roof that held under ley-charged lightning and gale-force winds.

Rowan sloshed in behind Elder Thistle, each step a wet slap of humiliation against the pristine floorboards.

Her boots squelched. Her hair dripped. She smelled like panic, burnt sigils, and whatever terrible mistake had been bottled inside the jar labeled Definitely Not Cursed , which was currently wedged under one arm.

The contrast between her and the interior of Linden’s home was frankly offensive .

Warm light gilded every exposed beam. The hearth crackled in smug contentment, casting golden shadows across shelves lined with orderly jars and carefully labeled apothecary bottles.

The air smelled of rosemary and fresh bread and fig jam , because the universe really wanted her to feel unmoored and underfed.

And then Linden appeared from the kitchen, sleeves rolled to the elbows, his linen shirt soft and slightly wrinkled, collar open just enough to suggest temptation.

His hair was damp, curling at the edges like he’d just finished wrestling the storm into submission, and he was holding a tea towel like some kind of domestic demigod.

Rowan hated how good he looked. She hated how safe this place felt. How clean . How soft . How utterly unacceptable .

He took one long look at her, sopping, wild-haired, disheveled as a thunder-blasted banshee, and his brows knit in that gentle, maddening way that made her want to throw the soap dish at his head.

“Your roof?” he asked softly.

She glared at him. “Don’t want to talk about it.”

“Understood,” he murmured, already moving to clear space near the hearth. No hesitation. No questions. Just... making room for her . Like he hadn’t walked away and left her to stitch her own heart back together with sour moonlight and tea.

Rowan adjusted her grip on her jar of Possibly Contained Regret and tried not to scream.

Elder Thistle, meanwhile, had finished summoning what looked suspiciously like an official checklist from the pocket dimension concealed inside her waxed coat. It unrolled with a thwap, covered in tiny Council handwriting and a few cryptic blood sigils.

She handed it to Linden with bureaucratic solemnity. “You are now officially cohabitating. Congratulations. Keep each other alive. Try not to set anything on fire.”

Rowan opened her mouth to protest…

Thistle vanished in a puff of eucalyptus and judgement.

There was a beat of silence. Rain pattered softly against the windows, as if even the storm were waiting to see what happened next.

Rowan stood there dripping, feral with indignation, arms full of magical chaos and grief-knitted scarves. Linden, maddeningly calm, scanned the checklist.

“Do I have to sign in blood?” he asked, deadpan.

“Only if we consummate the housing arrangement,” Rowan muttered, too tired to filter.

His gaze flicked up, eyes unreadable, heat flickering behind them like banked fire.

“Tempting,” he teased.

Rowan made a strangled noise that might have been a hex or a sob or both. Mottle burped in agreement.

And then, without ceremony, Linden crossed the room. “I’ll make tea,” he said, turning toward the stove.

Rowan swallowed the lump in her throat, unspooled one damp scarf from her arm, and muttered to the hearth rug, “This is going to be a disaster.”

She had every intention of maintaining the high ground, the cold, windblown, emotionally fortified high ground where wounded witches took shelter behind pride and sarcasm.

Even now, marooned in her ex’s maddeningly intact cottage, she clung to her principles like a lifeline: do not yield, do not soften, and under no circumstances let Linden see that she was at all affected .

Rowan turned her back on the man in the kitchen, already plotting how best to make this entire arrangement emotionally sterile and logistically tolerable.

But of course, Linden had always been at his most dangerous when she wasn’t looking. She should have remembered that. Should have remembered how easily he wielded gentleness like a knife.

Because when she turned again, it wasn’t to a smug grin or a barbed remark. It was to the unmistakable sound of a teapot humming to life, and Linden moving with infuriating ease through the kitchen.

And then came the scent. Not just rosemary and bread, but the scent — her tea, the one she used to make in the aftermath of too much magic, when her fingers trembled from channeling moonlight too greedily, when the weight of the world pressed too heavily on her ribs.

Verbena, fennel, yarrow, and a ghost of honey, steeping gently like a spell whispered just for her.

She froze. The kind of freeze that ran bone-deep, the kind that came not from cold but from the unbearable intimacy of being known. Slowly, reluctantly, she turned toward him, already dreading the look on his face and hating that she wasn’t wrong.

“I don’t need…” she started, voice brittle with the need to pretend she was still unshaken.

“You look like a drowned cat in the aftermath of an exorcism,” Linden said, without mockery, without pity. Just quiet, maddening warmth. “Have the tea, Rowan.”

She opened her mouth to retort, to summon some clever rejoinder that would put a safe distance between them, but no words came. Just silence. Just the thunderous quiet of recognition.

Because this… this was how it started, always. With a cup of tea, with the tiny softnesses he offered without thinking. With comfort disguised as convenience. With honey and hearthlight and the kind of gaze that said I still remember how you take it, even after all this time .