Chapter 1 In need of your service

Miri pov

The thing about having a perfect record is that every single person in the village expects you to keep it.

"One hundred, Miri. One hundred successful matches." Mrs Biddleton clasped her plump hands together over the bakery counter, her cheeks wobbling with the force of her smile. "You simply must let me bake you a celebration cake. Three tiers. Sugared rose petals. A little marzipan couple on top."

I slid two copper pennies across the worn wood and accepted my daily sourdough loaf, still warm from the ovens. "That's very kind, but I haven't reached one hundred yet."

"You will, dear. You will."

The confidence in her voice should have been reassuring. Instead, it settled somewhere in my stomach like a stone I'd swallowed by accident. Ninety-nine matches. Ninety-nine couples currently holding hands, bickering over whose turn it was to milk the goats, or producing alarmingly adorable babies with dimples and my name as their middle.

I'd earned my reputation. I'd built it, smile by smile, late night by late night, carefully coaxing the shy and the stubborn toward each other like a gardener training climbing roses up a trellis. Bramblewood trusted me. The neighbouring villages trusted me. Old Widow Hempstill, who hadn't spoken to another human being for eleven years, trusted me enough to let me introduce her to the retired sea captain who kept bees, and now they bickered happily over honey extraction methods every second Thursday.

Ninety-nine matches.

The hundredth was somewhere out there, waiting.

"Same time tomorrow?" I asked, tucking the sourdough into my basket beside the small linen-wrapped bundle that contained my lunch, my notebook, and a sprig of dried lavender I'd been carrying around for three days for no particular reason.

"Of course, dear. Give my love to that lovely starter of yours."

I glanced down at the basket, where a faint, contented bubbling sound was emanating from beneath the cloth. "She says she'd prefer a rye flour feeding tomorrow, if you have any spare."

Mrs Biddleton didn't blink. In Bramblewood, nobody blinked at a matchmaker who conversed with her sourdough starter. We were a village of quiet magics, small knacks, tiny impossibilities that had long since become ordinary. The miller's flour never spoiled. The innkeeper's soup always tasted like whatever you were homesick for. And I, Miri Thistlewick, could see the invisible threads that connected people's hearts.

It wasn't dramatic. I couldn't conjure lightning or command the weather or speak to the dead. I just knew, with a certainty that sat somewhere between my ribs and my spine, when two people belonged together. The starter—whom I had named Persephone in a moment of mythological whimsy I'd never quite lived down—was my particular bit of magic. She'd been a wedding gift from my grandmother, who'd whispered into the bubbling jar that every matchmaker needed someone to talk to who couldn't talk back.

Persephone begged to differ on the "couldn't talk back" part, but that was between me and my bread.

I stepped out of the bakery and into the honey-gold light of an early autumn morning. Bramblewood sprawled before me like a contented cat, its cobblestone streets winding between half-timbered buildings painted in faded shades of sage, cream, and robin's-egg blue. Window boxes overflowed with the last of the season's geraniums. Somewhere, the blacksmith's hammer rang out in its familiar rhythm, a sound as constant as my own heartbeat.

I paused.

The smithy. I'd been meaning to stop by for weeks. The old blacksmith, Master Harlow, had retired to a cottage by the river two summers ago, and his replacement—some fae fellow from the northern courts, if the gossip was accurate—had been keeping to himself with a determination that bordered on professional rudeness. Not that I'd had cause to meet him. Smiths tended to be solitary sorts, and I didn't need a new kettle.

Still. A new face in the village was a new heart to understand, and understanding hearts was my business.

"Later," I murmured to Persephone, who burbled what I chose to interpret as agreement. "Business first."

Business, on this particular morning, was a young woman named Daisy Greenbarrow, who had come to me three weeks ago with tears in her cornflower-blue eyes and a problem that had stumped every matchmaker in the county. Daisy was lovely, sweet-natured, and possessed of a dowry that included forty acres of prime grazing land. She should have been the easiest match of my career.

The problem was her smell.

Not a bad smell, precisely. It changed hourly. At dawn, she smelled of freshly baked bread. By midmorning, of woodsmoke and autumn leaves. Afternoon brought rain on hot stone, and evening drifted into something floral and musky that made the village bees follow her home. Nobody could explain it. Her mother claimed it was a blessing from a fae godmother who'd had too much elderberry wine at the christening. Daisy just wanted to find a husband who didn't sneeze whenever she entered a room.

I had a candidate in mind. His name was Tom Coppernose, and he'd lost his sense of smell in a childhood fever. More importantly, he was kind, stable, and had mentioned to me at the Midsummer Fair that he found Daisy's laugh "like bells." When a man who can't smell describes the quality of a woman's laughter unprompted, I pay attention.

The introduction was scheduled for noon, in the village green where neutrality and fresh air would do most of the heavy lifting. I had three hours to prepare.

Three hours, as it turned out, was about two hours and fifty-seven minutes more than I needed.

Because when I rounded the corner of Clover Lane, still mentally rehearsing my opening remarks about the weather and the surprisingly robust turnip harvest, I walked directly into a wall.

The wall, I realised with considerable dismay from my new position flat on the cobblestones, was in fact a man.

"Oh," I said, which wasn't my finest rhetorical work but seemed appropriate given that my basket had upended, Persephone was making indignant bubbling sounds from somewhere near my left elbow, and my dried lavender had landed in a puddle. "Oh, dear."

The man—the wall—the obstacle—did not help me up.

He stood over me, backlit by the morning sun, and for one absurd moment I thought the old stories had come true and someone had carved a statue from shadow and embers and set it loose in Bramblewood. He was tall in a way that made my neck ache just looking up at him. Broad in a way that suggested he'd never met a doorway he didn't threaten. His hair was the deep, blue-black of a moonless night, pulled back from a face that might have been handsome if it hadn't been arranged in an expression of such profound irritation that I felt vaguely guilty for existing in his path.

His eyes, when they met mine, were the colour of banked coals. Literally. There were actual embers glowing in their depths, a faint smoulder that had nothing to do with reflected sunlight and everything to do with the fact that this was not a human man.

This was a fae.

The fae. The Lord of the blacksmith.

"Oh, no," I said, with somewhat more feeling.

"You," said the fae, in a voice that sounded like gravel and thunder and the deep, resonant ring of a hammer striking hot iron, "are the matchmaker."

It wasn't a question. It was an accusation, delivered with the same tone someone might use to say you are the person who poisoned my well or you are the individual who let my goats escape.

"Yes," I admitted, from the ground. "I am. And you are the new blacksmith. Who is currently standing in a puddle of what I sincerely hope is rainwater while I sit here getting a very damp skirt."

He did not apologise. He did not offer me a hand. He simply stared down at me with those smouldering eyes, and I felt something shift in the air between us, something that had nothing to do with my bruised dignity or his apparent lack of basic social graces.

Then he spoke again.

"I require your services."