Rhys Downing had watched the mushroom woman from across the market for three weeks, and he still did not know how to say hello. He knelt in the moss behind his cabin, whittling a wooden owl the size of his thumb. The mask covered the lower half of his face, as it always did. His hunting years had ended. His hands wanted quieter work now. He wanted a wife. He wanted a child on his knee. He did not know how to want those things out loud. Her name was Trema Starlight. She tended the elders near the fountain and made the children laugh by glowing faint blue when they tugged her sleeves. Rhys knew no one who knew her. He could not walk up as a stranger in a mask and ask for her time. That would frighten her, or worse, it would frighten him into silence. Wings hummed above the fence. "You've been carving the same owl for an hour, hunter." Lorelei Sweetwhimsy hovered at his shoulder, purple hair loose, gold on her wings catching the afternoon light. She was the fairy who ran the tearoom at the edge of the swamp and knew everyone worth knowing. Rhys had spoken to her twice. Both times she had left him feeling read. "I'm busy," he said. "You're stalling." She landed on the fence rail. "I know where you look, Rhys. I see the mushroom girl look back. Neither of you will move first. I find that unbearable." His knife stopped. "She looks back?" "Every market day." Lorelei smiled. "I've asked her to tea tomorrow. I've asked you to tea tomorrow. Same table. I won't stay long." "You didn't ask me." "I'm asking now." He set the owl down. His hands were steady, which surprised him. "She'll think I arranged it." "She'll think a friend arranged it. That's the difference." Lorelei's voice softened. "You don't need to be anyone but the man who carves owls. Bring one." He came the next afternoon. Lorelei's table sat beside the tall pillared shrine, the blue light inside it pulsing slow behind moss and vine. Trema was already there, small hands folded, blue eyes wide above the rim of her cup. Lorelei made the introduction like she was passing a candle between them. "Trema, this is Rhys. He carves. Rhys, Trema keeps our elders alive past their time. I've told you both enough. I'm late for a delivery." She kissed the top of Trema's cap and was gone before Rhys could sit fully. He placed the wooden owl on the table between them. "For the children you watch," he said. "If one of them likes owls." Trema touched the carving with one finger. When she looked up her voice was quiet and warm. "Would you sit a while? I've wanted to ask what's under the mask, but I'll start with your name." He sat.

Rhys walked home from the tearoom with Trema's invitation still warm in his chest. She had asked him to come again. He had said yes without thinking. Now he had no place to bring her, and no time to find one. If he waited too long, she would decide the owl had been a polite ending. He stood at his wardrobe that night and pulled every shirt he owned onto the bed. Most were dark. Most smelled of pine sap and old smoke. He picked a green linen shirt his sister had sent two winters back. Still folded. Still stiff. He set it beside brown trousers and worn boots. Not a suit. Not a hunting coat. A man going for a walk with a friend. He sat down at his bench and picked up a fresh block of cedar. He worked past midnight. The blade found horns first, then a broad snout, then claws that curled inward. He carved the cryptid the way children in the market drew her stories in the dirt. Fierce on the outside. Watching with tired eyes. When he finished, the figure stood the height of his palm. He wrapped it in cloth and did not let himself decide if it was too much. He walked to the fountain at midmorning and found her already waiting. She wore a pale dress and no shoes. Her cap glowed soft in the sun. She smiled at him the way she smiled at the elders. "I don't know where to take you," he said. "I thought I'd walk you somewhere quiet. If you'll pick." "There's a tree by the old chapel," she said. "Pink leaves. A pool under it. The elders sit there when their knees hurt. No one talks loud." She led him. The chapel rose from the moss with glass walls that caught the light and threw it in soft colors on the path. Beside it stood the tree she meant, its leaves hanging like wet silk over a stone pool. They sat on the rim. He gave her the carving. Her small hands closed around it. She laughed once, quiet. "He looks angry," she said. "He's tired," Rhys said. "People misread him." She looked up at him. He looked away. They talked until the light shifted. She told him about the elder who sang lullabies in a language no one else knew. He told her about carving, and about the quiet years, and about his sister's farm. She asked once what he had done before the carving. He said he had traveled. She let the answer sit and did not reach for it. When he walked her back to the fountain she stopped him with a hand on his sleeve. "Next week," she said. "My cottage. I'll cook. Bring nothing." He nodded. He walked home lighter, and afraid. She had asked him inside. He had never been asked inside.

The dinner was three days out. Rhys sat in his workshop at dawn, staring at the green shirt still folded on the chair. It looked wrong now. A cottage meal was not a walk by a pool. He needed help, and he only trusted one person to give it. He found Victor at his butcher block, wiping a cleaver on his apron. The bunny man's red eyes flicked up. Blood streaked one white ear. He did not stop working. "I need to buy clothes," Rhys said. "For a woman's table." Victor set the cleaver down. "A hide is a hide until you skin it clean. Then it's a coat." He untied his apron. "You want Silus." They walked to the fish merchant's pavilion together. Its roof curled like a great golden fish above the reeds, orange silks draping the doorway. Silus Wavecrest stood inside among bolts of cloth, a fat blue fishman in red and gold, rings on every finger. "Ah," Silus said, spreading his arms. "The hermit and the butcher. A rare tide indeed. What does the swamp bring me today?" "Something for supper at a woman's home," Victor said. "Not a funeral." Silus laughed and pulled Rhys under the light. He held bolts against Rhys's chest, muttering, discarding, muttering again. He settled on a deep charcoal shirt with a thin bone-white stitch at the collar, and dark trousers cut close. "Understated," Silus declared. "A man who does not shout. Yet the stitching says he was chosen with care." Rhys paid without arguing. Victor watched him fold the clothes into his pack. "The mask," Victor said, outside. "You bringing the work one?" Rhys stopped on the path. He had not let himself think about it. His work mask was leather and iron, scarred from nights he did not talk about. It was the face the village knew. "No," he said. "I have another. For weddings. My father's." Victor nodded once. "A clean blade for a clean cut." Rhys went home. He knelt by the chest at the foot of his bed and took out a mask of pale carved wood, smooth, unmarked, with narrow eyes and a soft jaw. He had not worn it in nine years. He tied it on. It sat lighter than the other. He walked to her cottage as the light turned amber. She opened the door before he knocked. Her blue cap glowed against the dark inside. Her eyes went to the new mask and stayed there. "You changed your face," she said, gentle. "Only the cover of it," Rhys said. "The one I wear at market is for the work I left. This one is for the table." She stepped aside. "Come in." He crossed her threshold for the first time. She did not ask him to take the mask off. He did not offer. But she had seen him choose it, and that was a door she had opened, and he had walked through.

Trema closed the door behind him and laughed at herself. Her kitchen smelled of thyme and empty air. She lifted the lid of a clay pot and showed him the bottom. "I forgot," she said. "I meant to buy flour and eggs this morning and I sat by the window instead. There is nothing here to feed you." Rhys looked at the empty pot. His shoulders eased a little. "Then we walk." "The bakery stays open late," Trema said. "We can eat there. If you don't mind sweet for supper." "I don't mind," Rhys said. She took a shawl. They walked the path together in the last light. The bakery rose out of the flowers like a hive made of glass, moss webbed across every pane, a huge broad-leafed plant crowning the roof. Warm yellow light spilled through the honeycomb walls. Inside, trays glinted behind the counter. The queen of the hive met them at the door. She was small and gold, wings folded, a crown low on her brow. She took Trema's hands like a grandmother. "Sit, sit," she said. "I have a berry cobbler still hot. You look like two people who need a bowl of it." She brought it in a wide dish. Blueberries and raspberries bled purple around a biscuit crust, a scoop of cream melting on top. Two spoons. She left them alone. Trema ate first. She talked while she ate, easy, the way she moved. She had lived in the swamp longer than most of the village had been alive. She had helped raise three generations of children in the lanes near the fountain. She wanted a garden of her own one day, and a low table, and someone at the other end of it. Rhys listened. The mask hid most of his face, but she watched his eyes and kept talking. "Your turn," she said. "Where were you before Chorastine?" "North," he said. "Cold country. Pine and stone." "And what did you do there?" His spoon stopped in the bowl. The word for it sat behind his teeth. Hunter. Cryptid hunter. The mask he had left in the chest was scored by the things he had killed. He could not lay that on this table, between the cream and the berries, with her waiting. The pause grew. Trema's smile stayed, but her eyes tightened at the corners. "I worked at night," Rhys said. "For coin. It is not work I want to talk about at a good table. Someday. Not tonight." He waited for her to pull back. She set her spoon down and reached across the wood and touched his wrist above the cuff. "Someday, then," she said. "I can wait for someday." He breathed out. He had not told her. He had not lied. She had given him the room and taken his hand anyway. That was the door he had not known to hope for, and she had opened it.