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your hammer!”
    Sparks crackled in the fire pit as the two betrothed glared at each other.
    “This is a mockery,” she said at last. “Will you not speak with your mother? Why should we be thrust into a marriage neither of us wants?”
    He growled, “A son does what his parents ask. Maybe a witch doesn’t bother with such things.”
    “Our differences are too great,” she said through clenched teeth. “It cannot work.”
    He shrugged, an easy roll of his massive shoulders, but his expression belied the movement. “We have no say in the matter.”
    She wanted to scream, to grab his hammer and hurl it against the wall. But he was right: They had no say. They were trapped by the decisions of others. The unfairness of it ate at her heart.
    Bromwyn managed a curtsey. “Until tomorrow, Sir Smith.”
    He nodded, once, and then he showed her his back. It was broad, and peppered with fire scars, and unforgiving.
    She fled.
    Only when she was atop her mother’s shop, safe on the wooden roof and away from nervous stares and critical gazes did she allow herself to cry, briefly and silently. Then she called herself three kinds of fool, wiped away her tears, and began to practice her spells. The first attempt fizzled and died before it left her fingertips. The second fared little better. But the third took hold, and magic sparkled as she worked through the movements.
    After an hour, all that existed was Bromwyn and her magic; nothing else mattered. She was focused. Determined. She would master her emotions, even if she had to turn her heart into stone to do so.

 
     
     

    THE BAKER’S SON
     
    “Good Midsummer to you, Winnie!”
    Bromwyn flinched, and then she bit her lip as her spell slipped away from her control. “Fire and Air,” she muttered as she tried to recast the magic before the pain began. Ignoring Rusty—who’d bounded over the rooftop, she had no doubt, like some storybook hero—she slowly coaxed the spell back into proper form. Sitting cross-legged, her hands resting lightly on her lap, she appeared to be relaxed; only the sweat beading on her brow showed her effort.
    “Winnie? Don’t you hear me?”
    A deaf mule would hear you, she thought with a scowl—and then the entire casting crumbled. Bromwyn didn’t have the chance to direct the power from the broken spell before it slammed into her, and she gasped as wild magic surged through her until it felt like her skin was aflame. With a hiss, she channeled the energy into the air, where it crackled and sparked like heat lightning.
    After what felt like an eternity of burning alive, the pain subsided. Bromwyn sighed in relief. The she glowered. By Nature’s grace, she hated losing control of her magic! It made her feel like a child, to say nothing of the physical pain. Oh, her grandmother would have such words with her if she knew that Bromwyn’s concentration could slip when she cast even a basic spell. And Niove used her hands a lot during such conversations.
    A bleak thought wormed its way into her mind: What if she could not cast properly during her test?
    She took a deep breath and told herself not to panic. She had been studying the Ways of Witchcraft for nearly seven years. She would pass her test, and she would keep her magic. There was nothing else for it; without magic, Bromwyn was nothing. And she was too stubborn to ever be reduced to nothing.
    Behind her, Rusty snorted. “No answer, Lady Witch? Truly, my feelings are hurt.”
    She looked over her shoulder. There he stood, looking proud as a storybook peacock, and no matter that he was a beanpole of a boy in ill-fitting clothing, with a floppy brown hat that completely covered his auburn hair: Derek Jonasson, called Rusty, apprentice baker of Loren. Whenever she called him Sir Baker, he threatened to box her ears.
    “A good morning to you, Rusty,” she said brightly, pushing aside her nerves over her upcoming test. “You know as well as I that your feelings are well protected by your