Morrigan Vex had spent six weeks preparing this binding, and now a stray fairy was trying to eat it. She sat cross-legged at her work table inside the cottage, six weeks of patience laid out in front of her. A candle burned steady. The cauldron gave off pale green light. Between the potted herbs and the jars of tincture lay the pendant she had built for him — two sigils curled together, one hers, one his. He did not know she existed yet. The chaos thread that would fix that was due to surface tonight. She had counted three convergences pointing to him. She would not miscount again. The last time she rushed a working, she had paid a cost she still would not say out loud. The wisp hovered above the cauldron. Small. Grey-skinned. Wings like stained glass. It had drifted in through an open shutter an hour ago and refused to leave. Every time Morrigan reached for the binding thread, the wisp leaned closer, and her intent slipped sideways. She meant to think of him. She thought of wanting instead. The pendant's sigils blurred at the edges, trying to rewrite themselves around the wisp's shape. She understood what was happening. Desire wisps latched onto spellwork and fed. If she cast now, the binding would find the wisp instead of the man. She would be tied to this thing for the rest of her life. She set the thread down. On the floor beside the table sat a half-built cage, iron ribs and unfinished locks. She had been assembling it for another project. It was not ready. The top hoop was loose. Two of the sigil plates were missing. She stood and walked to the fountain in the corner, where mist rose off the basin and lanterns burned low among the vines. She cupped water in both hands and carried it back. She poured it into the cauldron. The green light went white. The wisp dropped a hand's width, drawn to the change. Morrigan lifted the unfinished cage and brought it down over the cauldron in one movement. The wisp hit the inside of the top hoop. The hoop was loose. It held anyway. She pressed her palm against the frame until the metal warmed under her hand. The wisp beat its wings against the bars and made a sound like a wet bell. She looked at the pendant on the table. The sigils had settled. Her intent was hers again. Outside the cottage window, the dark cracked once — a hairline fracture in the air, wrong-colored, gone before she could count it. The thread had surfaced. Right on time. She had caught the wisp. She had not bound it. The cage would not hold past morning, and the man whose face she had never seen was, somewhere, about to feel a pull he could not explain.

The wisp beat against the cage bars while Morrigan stood in the middle of her cottage and looked at it the way a stranger would. The binding had taken. Somewhere, a man she had never met was turning toward her without knowing why. He would come. That was what the spell did. And when he arrived, he would step through her door and see this: a cauldron cooling on the work table, a trapped fairy screaming under scrap iron, dried roots hanging from every beam, and no chair that wasn't hers. A soulmate expects a home. She had built a workshop. She had until morning, maybe less. The pull worked on distance she couldn't measure. She started with the work table. She swept the pendant scraps into a drawer. She carried the cauldron to the hearth and set it out of sight. The cage she left where it stood; the wisp was still her problem, but it was tonight's problem, not his. She dragged the pantry cupboard out from the wall behind the herb rack. It was heavy black wood, carved with the same knots she used for warding, and the doors still hung true. She wiped the shelves and set the jars back in rows a guest could read: tea, salt, honey, dried apple. She pulled two stools from under the stairs and set them at the side table beside it. She put the mortar in the center where it looked like a thing people used for cooking. Then the bed. It stood in the alcove, black posts, moon carvings, curtains she had never bothered to close. She had slept in it alone for years and treated it like furniture. She shook out the pillows. She smoothed the green coverlet. She drew the purple curtains back and tied them so the bed looked open, not hidden. She stood at the foot of it and tried to see it through his eyes and could not. She left a lantern burning low on the post. She walked the single room once. Pantry. Table. Bed. Cage. The cottage itself hummed under her feet the way it always did before travel, wild magic pooling in the hull, the runes along the door frame warm to the touch. She had not asked it to move. It knew anyway. Wherever the man was, the cottage was already choosing a course. Morrigan sat down on one of the new stools and put her hands flat on the side table. Her palms left prints in the dust she had missed. She had made the room fit for a stranger. She had not made herself fit for one. She did not know his name. She did not know his face. She had bound him to a woman who kept a caged wisp three steps from the bed, and the cottage was already carrying her toward him.

The stool grew hard under her. Morrigan stood and faced the truth she had been circling since the spell took hold. The binding ran one way. He was being pulled toward her by a tether hooked deep in his chest. Her end of it was still tied to nothing. When he stepped through her door, the spell would look for her half and find a stranger. It would snap back and burn her out from the inside. She had until he arrived to fix it. She pulled the pendant from under her collar. Two sigils, interlocked, one for him and one for her. His side glowed faint orange. Her side was cold silver, unlit. She had built the working to catch him. She had never built her own half to catch anything back. She crossed to the work table she had spent the evening disguising and stripped it back down. Jars of tea went to the floor. The mortar went with them. She set the cauldron in the center again, lit the single candle, and laid the tangled thyme and rue where her hands would find them without looking. The rune plates along the table legs warmed under her palm. She cut her thumb on the pendant's edge and pressed the blood into the silver half. Then she sat. Chaos would not be chased. She knew this. She closed her eyes and made herself the still thing in the room. She thought about a man she had never seen. She thought about the shape of a shoulder next to hers at this table. She thought about handing him a cup. She did not push. She waited for the crack in the glass. It came slow. A wrong-angled seam opened in the air above the candle, green where it should have been clear. She did not grab it. She let it settle into her chest, into the cold half of the pendant, into the place where her side of the tether was supposed to live. It hurt. She had expected it to hurt. What she had not expected was the wanting that came with it — not for a soulmate, but for the person she had invented in the waiting. She let that in too. The silver half of the pendant warmed and began to glow, blue against the orange. The seam closed. The candle steadied. Morrigan opened her eyes. The tether held on both sides now. She could feel him at the far end of it, moving, closer than he had been an hour ago. She could also feel, for the first time, what she had done to herself. She had bound her wanting to a face she did not know. If he turned out to be cruel, or married, or already dead when the cottage reached him, she would not be able to unwant him. Under her feet, the floor tilted. The cottage had picked up speed.

The floor tilted again and Morrigan grabbed the edge of the work table. A jar of dried rue slid past her hand and cracked on the boards. The candle guttered. Under the cauldron, the pendant lay warm against the wood, both halves lit, orange and blue. She had finished her side of the binding minutes ago. The spell was still settling into her ribs when she heard the sound she had been dreading — a thin, glassy ping from the corner of the room. She turned. The half-built cage stood where she had left it, iron ribs bolted to a base plate, the top ring still open. Inside, the desire wisp pressed both small gray hands against the bars. Its wings shivered pink and gold. Its eyes were fixed on the pendant. Morrigan understood at once. The wisp had felt her fresh want the moment it took hold. Her binding was raw, still cooling. If the wisp got out now, it would sink into that wanting and twist it. She would not want a man. She would want whatever the wisp fed her instead. She had two choices. Finish the cage, or kill the wisp. She could not kill it. A dead wisp bled its hunger into the nearest working. That was worse. She crossed the room. The top ring lay on the floor with four bolts beside it. She had planned three more evenings of careful assembly. She had minutes now, maybe less. The wisp shoved its shoulder against a bar and the whole frame rang. Morrigan knelt. She set the ring on top and lined up the first bolt. Her hands were shaking from the ritual. She steadied them against the base plate and drove the bolt through. One. The wisp climbed. It got a hand over the unfinished lip and pulled. Its face came level with hers, close enough that she saw the flecks of light moving under its skin. It smiled at her. It knew her name for the man she had never met, and it opened its mouth to say it. She drove the second bolt. Two. The ring pinched down on the wisp's wrist. It shrieked and yanked the hand back inside. Third bolt. Her thumb slipped and the bolt fell. She caught it against her knee. Set it. Drove it. Three. The wisp threw itself at the ceiling of the cage. The frame lifted an inch off the floor. Morrigan pressed her whole weight on the ring and set the last bolt by feel. Four. The cage locked. The wisp dropped to the floor of it and folded its wings tight. Morrigan sat back on the boards. The pendant against her chest was still blue and orange, unwarped. The floor tilted under her again. The cottage was still moving. Whoever he was, he was closer now, and her wanting was still her own.