“Maylily Dogblossom, the manners on you! You’ve not even opened them!”
“I opened some of them,” May said miserably. She edged around her mother toward the closet. “Those are the ones I haven’t. There’s too many, Mum. At first I thought I’d just store them as they came in, and open everything once a week or so, but they just kept coming, and I kept stowing them away, and before I knew it…” She shut the closet door with a clunk. “Well, you saw.”
“Oh, May.” Mum stepped forward and took her hand. “You should have told me.”
May blinked. “I should have?”
“The same thing happened to me at your age. It’s the hair, you know. Boys are enchanted.” Mum smiled, dimpling her cheeks, and May had to admit she could imagine the halfling lads of the Reeve lining up for a chance at young Pansy’s hand. “Girls, too. Everyone really. Well, I had so many suitors I simply froze. Spent the longest spring of my life tossing pebbles in the Weeping River, wondering whomever to choose. Half of them had married other girls before I made up my mind. I swear, sometimes I think your father won on sheer dogged patience alone.”
“Mum, that’s not the problem,” May said. “I don’t want to marry—”
“The wrong one, yes, I understand, darling.”
“No—”
“Luckily, your mum has just the solution.”
May let go of her mother’s hand. She had planned to keep arguing, had steeled herself for Mum’s next emotional assault, but she found herself so curious what in the world her mother was thinking that she felt a perverse and overwhelming urge to go along with it simply to find out what it was.
“And that is?” May asked cautiously.
“Why, it’s simple, love.” Mum smiled. “Somewhere in that closet is a present that’ll win your heart. Surely one of these suitors of yours has actually bothered to get to know you. We only need to find his gift.”
“But Mum, that would mean—”
“No quailing, Maylily. We’ll have to open them all.”
And so they did. Box by box and bag by bag, May and Mum tore paper, untied ribbon, snipped string, and opened envelopes until May’s hands stung from paper cuts and she prayed she would never celebrate a birthday or Winterfair ever again, simply to avoid the presence of presents.
The single most common gift was perfume. Every one of them was awful. Why so many men thought they were better judges of scent than a woman who made people smell good for a living, May couldn’t begin to guess, nor did Mum have a pithy answer when she asked the question out loud.
The second most common gift was food, which, having all spoiled, admittedly smelled worse than the perfume—though they made many jokes to the contrary.
Then there was the clothing. So much clothing. Some of it fit and some didn’t, some was tasteful and some wasn’t. But considering May worked seven days a week and rotated through the same set of simple dresses and aprons, it was hard to argue that any man who sent her clothing really knew her, even if he knew her measurements.
Four and a half hours later, the sun had long since gone down, and May and her mother sat like two lonely dinghies in an ocean of ribbon, string, and paper.
“Well,” said Mum. “Whom do you like best?”
May picked up a block of blue-veined cheese—they hadn’t decided if it was supposed to be that way or not—and dropped it back into a pile of white waxed paper.
“Don’t sulk, Maylily,” Mum said. “You’ve got to pick someone.”
“I certainly don’t!” May gestured at the wreckage around them. “Look at this place. You came here to help me clean my shop for the season and instead we destroyed it, because you’ve got a bee in your bonnet that I need a ring on my finger and a man in my life. Well, I don’t. I built a successful business on Coin Hill, I have loads of friends, and I’m happy, Mum. I’m happy! Doesn’t that count for something?”
Mum leaned over, picked up the veiny cheese, and began wrapping it up. “It counts for everything, May,” she said softly. “I’ll start tidying this mess. You take a break.”
“Forget it. We’ll tackle it tomorrow.” May stood and reached out a hand to help Mum up. “Good thing I closed for the week. Come on, I’ll put a kettle on for tea.”
Mum took her hand and hauled herself to her feet, and together they headed for the door to May’s workroom, shuffling through the remnants of their afternoon’s efforts. As she neared the edge of the debris, May aimed a sarcastic kick at a stack of crumpled wrappers in various candy colors. Having removed her shoes hours earlier, she yelped when her toe clanged against something hard.
“What was that, darling?” asked Mum.
“I don’t know,” May said. “The one that got away, I guess.”
“A perfume bottle, I expect.” Mum sighed. “Just leave it, we’ll sweep it up with the others tomorrow.”
“That’s all right.” May leaned down and began shuffling through the papers. “I’d rather get it now.”
But rather than a perfume bottle, she found a package the size of her hand, plainly wrapped in brown paper, with no card or marking other than the name “May Featherlight” written in pencil. It was strangely light for its size, as though whatever was inside was hollow, and… warm.
“Well?” said Mum.
“I don’t know.” May tugged at the paper, which fell away easily. Inside was a glass jar of the sort used for pickling. But rather than food, it held—
“Maylily Dogblossom, some boy sent you a fire elemental!”
Within the jar, a ribbon of blue flame jerked and sparked like a living thing. May was no archmage, nor did she know much of city magic—the spells she worked for her special-order soaps were ones she’d learned far from the crowded streets of Lackmore—but she understood that most urban enchantments were powered by bound elemental spirits like this one. It was a tidier form of sorcery than the wild magic of the highlands, or the humble rustic spells she’d learned in the Reeve, but it suited the orderly chaos of life in the big city.
May beamed at her mother. “Do you have any idea how much this could help me with my work? Just making the quicklime—the amount of wood I burn to get the fire hot enough—this elemental will save me… I don’t know, a lot of gold!”
“May, that’s an expensive gift.” Mum’s voice was soft. “Who sent it?”
Catching her mother’s tone, May tamped down her excitement. “I don’t know. It didn’t say.” She stared at the wreckage around them. “Even if there was a card, we’ll never find it now.”
“Well, if you ever do sort out who sent it, you could do worse than to marry a rich fellow with a knack for the sensible.”
