like a sharp bright piece broken from a star

There had been rain off and on for the last two days, not enough to stop Hild from gathering her herbs, but enough to make everything sticky and unpleasant. There were times that she liked the rain, when the weather had grown hot and the air pregnant with humidity, until it finally burst and fell. She liked the smell of newly wet cement, the patter of rain drops and the force of a torrent. There were times when she loved the rain, when the morning was crisp and cool and misting or when she could feel the mud between her toes but not yet fear slipping, when the world was green and beautiful and precious after the water had refreshed it. But there were of course times when mud clung to her dress and weighed it down, when water wilted what should be fresh growing flowers and made life feel somewhat impossible.

She was grateful for the sunshine and the lack of clouds on that day, knowing that the mud would dry out soon and the flowers would respond to the sun like children growing under praise. It was a day when everything felt fresh, the air cool and unsullied in the countryside morning. Hild had stopped at a walnut tree, it's broad spread boughs easily reached for a climb. Walking carefully along one of the branches, she reached for the nuts and threw them into the basket she had left down on the ground. Most of them hit the woven container, but many did not. She hissed out a curse as a squirrel bounded out to grab one and threw a nut at him.

"Bane of my life," she shouted down at him in Anglisc. Though a rueful grin tugged at her lips, she was only half joking.

A little more than a month had passed since they had all moved into their house in the countryside, and Hild had been concientious about building it into a home, a household like the one she knew back in Northumbria, a place she could be proud of. She carried her old purse, attached to her belt, more often these days, the similarity between this life and the other growing more each day. There were differences. There were so many differences. But this was the life of a normal young woman in a normal situation in a normal time, and Hild relished it.

There were no trees on the property yet, certainly no fruit trees the sort of which Krem wished to have. But not too far from the house, far enough that Hild could see it still, if only small and white, was a walnut tree. The boughs were all but made for climbing, low and spreading wide over the space, and the nuts themselves were just coming into season. Along with her woven basket, Hild had brought a metal nutcracker with her, tucked into her purse, so she could sit along one of the branches, legs dangling, and help herself to a snack before harvesting.

She saw Thomas coming near, on one of his long runs, and immediately flung a walnut straight at his head.

The weather had turned a little cool, bringing with it a little rain and a little reminder that fall was here and winter approached, bringing with that the aches and the pains and the colds of bad weather. So Hild's shop had been busy in the last few days as her patrons stocked up on remedies and preventatives to help them through the upcoming months.

Hild welcomed them of course and helped them however they needed, with advice and reassurance, but for her part she did not fear the upcoming autumn. The weather still was mild though Hild felt sure that as time passed the fall would prove to be quite cold and rainy, but neither were things she minded. And in the interim, she could stroll home from work at her leisure, enjoying the good weather while it lasted.

She let herself out early and left Ellie to close up shop behind her. She found herself approaching a woman with a familiar face, although it was hidden at times behind a sizable camera. Grinning warmly, Hild let her easy walk bring her closer to Therese.

"Good shots today?"

The few days that had passed since Valentine's Day had been horrendous for Hild. No one had made her to feel uncomfortable. Krem and Gannicus, of course, had laughed, but their fondness and love outweighed any embarrassment she might have felt from them. Things with Ellie were more complicated, but as Hild had no true intention of disturbing her relationship, and Ellie had no desire to do so either, they had tacitly agreed not to speak of the thing again. The rest had not been so terrible; overwrought though she had been, nothing said had been truly embarrassing, only wrapped up in overdramatic sensibility and phrasing.

All the same, it grated on her. Yes, the magic of the city did this to people, at times, but this had not been city magic. This had been the magic of one man, one man who decided his enjoyment ranked above others. She had escaped all the previous attempts by him and by Darrow magic to manipulate her personality and person. It felt no less unfair that she should be swept up in such a thing now.

Beneath all this, too, lurked the anger at herself for having drunk the wine in the first place. She had faltered; she had let her vigilance slip. She knew better than to drink freely at such a party, knew better than to dive in without observing its effects. She felt herself to blame as much as Magnus Bane, and that frustrated her to no end.

The only thing she could do, however, short of making her apologies and putting a knife somewhere in the vicinity of Magnus Bane's testicles, which she could not do, was carry on. And so she did, stopping by the same coffee shop that had now become her favorite, ordering her usual latte and going to her work. She tried to sidestep another man in the moderately crowded cafe, murmuring a pardon as she did. But when she lifted her gaze to look at him, she stopped still.

"Oh, no."

The deal was all but done. The unimpressive little shop with crystals and pointless little herbal concoctions had gone into something called bankruptcy. The man selling the shop -- a real estate broker -- had explained that meant the business had no money and so, to pay off some of the people owed, the shop had to be sold.

For cheap. Cheaper, at least, than any other shopfronts on the market, which were few.

Hild had thought handing over money would be enough. She had already gone to the bank and learned what a loan was, had applied, had done the math and been sure she could make the payments, provided the business did well.

But then there were things called escrow and deeds and taxes. There were rules for how to run a business, rules set by the city for what she could sell and how the building must be kept and how she must pay and treat her employees. They all came together in a vague pattern that Hild thought she could understand, but it was a painfully slow process to stop and look up the meaning of every phrase or concept she did not understand.

She could have gone to Luke. She had already asked questions of him, learned from watching and doing. But she hadn't realized the sheer number of laws that dictated his actions. All of his actions simply made sense.

She could have gone to Luke. She could have gone to Derek. But she wanted to go to Spencer. They saw each other often; at the very least, Hild could expect to see him whenever she had a shift at the bookstore. But they had not sat down and had a proper talk, with coffee, just by themselves, in some time.

So she placed her folder full of papers, two coffees (Spencer's favorite blend, made as he liked it), and a plate filled with pastry on the table of the coffee shop, and waited for Spencer to arrive.

It had been a long month for all. Days without, days spent missing, lingered longer, time dragging its feet though its steady progression of hours. The searching, the hoping, the praying, the worrying made the sun slower in the day and the stars dimmer at night.

And then, to lose. To lose was to make time stop. The world moved on, but one's own reckoning of it ceased.

It had been a few days since Hild had realized Bianca was gone. She texted her more often than most and Hild's messages sat unanswered. She had visited her home, knocking on the door to receive no invitation. She had come back, hoping that she had simply missed the other young woman, had timed her visit badly.

She had never lost someone like this before. Hereswith, Fursey, they had only left; great distance separated them, but nothing that letters following the threads of trade could not connect. Begu, Cian, both had left and come back to her. This wasn't even death. Was Bianca back in her home, back with her old friends who had missed her, her family who loved her, her life left abruptly? Or was it something else.

The nagging worry and confusion refused to budge. She yearned, not for the first time, for a loom to occupy her thoughts and fingers. Lacking that, she turned to her kitchen. Cooking had not been a duty expected of her back home, not given her rank, not as king's kin, but she knew it. She had spent hours watching bakers roll out dough, cooks choose spices, farmers pick their best crops. She had had to feed herself, had she not?

She wasn't a pie-maker like Bitty, but the so-called shepherd's pie was still warm in her arms, the buttery, savory scents drifting up to her nose as she made her way to Derek's. At his doorstep, she paused to knock and hope that she was not interrupting time with his lover.

That was still a thing she needed to adjust to.

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She was floating.

She should have taken Noah's warning more to heart. She should have left that party the second he said to. But curiosity, as always, got the best of her. Now, in addition to being a demon, she was a fool who ignored the omens of the dead.

Hild would have been troubled by this if she could feel troubled. If she could feel regret. Or guilt. She felt only at peace now, happy, pleased, content. She felt as though all her worries and troubles had lifted. No, Hild had been lifted up, on a cloud, leaving every heavy feeling, thought, emotion on the distant ground. They were still there, she knew that, just as she knew that she should find her way back to her own bed sometime before the sun rose. But they were distant and hard to reckon, just as her bed was.

She left the party humming to herself, vainly searching her mind for some song that was all happy, that didn't have a speck of death or war or sorrow in it. The ground wobbled slightly beneath her feet, so she gave up on trying to walk a straight line back to the city, instead spread her arms and weaved her way like a bird, turned this way and that by the wind currents, but roughly heading in the right direction of the sidewalk.

There were a multitude of things that Hild enjoyed about working at Graymark Books. The owner, of course, was the best boss that Hild could possibly have. But the store itself was still a marvel to her, crammed full of books, which were so precious in her time and place, so rare, none of them so neatly formed as these, sturdy and precise. She had quickly learned how it was that a book smelled, and just as quickly learned to love it. The customers were usually polite, relaxed, unperturbed by Hild's still lingering accent or the way she had to pause at times before answering a question. She learned in leaps and bounds from these interactions and, on those afternoons when the store was empty, peaceably silent and still, all activity shut outside the broad front window, she read.

It was not very fast reading. English was more of a mongrel language on paper than on the tongue, Hild felt. The alphabet was familiar to her, thankfully, but whenever she sounded out words, their meanings eluded her. Luke would read things for her at times, when he was also in the shop on slow days, but sometimes that hindered more than helped. (How "receipt" could be spelled with a p was beyond her.)

One such slow afternoon had Hild behind the counter, bent over a more simply written book called The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Her finger dragged slowly along the lines and her lips mouthed the words, but the moment she heard the front door open, she promptly greeted the new guest with a well practiced "Hello. Can I help you find something?"

Back home, the court moved. Breguswith had explained it to Hild once, when she was a child and adamantly against such constant travel. She wanted to stay in a place long enough to learn its habits, to discover its secret places, to feel it with her whole skin. But as her mother pointed out, a king could not remain in one area for so long, not if he wished to keep his thegns in line with his powerful presence and keep his court from eating those thegns out of house and home. And so they had drifted from castle to castle, following the shifting seasons, keeping time with the different vills. Bebbanburg, Yeavering, Tinamutha, once, Brough, Sancton, Goodmanham, York.

But time did not need a changing landscape to move on. Hild found herself on the cusp of fall, without York, for the first time in more than a decade. Darrow did not have York's sweet apples or pears, nor its wars. It did have something called a pumpkin spice latte, however, which was almost as delicious as the overexcited barista had told Hild it would be. She had ordered two if only to calm the woman, but she had reasoned that anything that garnered such praise, mostly earnest, had to be passing good.

Balancing a tray of coffees and a few scones in one hand, Hild texted a few of her friends with the other, inviting them each to join her in the park, if they had the time. The first to arrive could have the spare latte. So she said. Hild had every intention of ensuring that each of her friends could share in the pumpkin spiced goodness.

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