The witch behind the counter

Chapter 1: Hidden Funicular

Vesper's

The funicular smelled of rust and old rain, and somewhere around the third jolt I decided that if it meant to kill me, it should at least have the decency to do it before I'd finished paying off what was left of my old life.

I laughed at that. Quietly, to myself, because there was no one else in the car to hear it, and because if I didn't laugh I was going to do the other thing, and I'd promised myself, somewhere around Interlaken, that I was done doing the other thing.

My grandmother's recipe book sat on my lap like a stone I'd chosen to carry. Cracked leather spine, corners worn soft by hands that weren't mine, three generations of women who'd pressed their thumbs into that same cover, none of whom had ever needed to run. I kept one palm flat against it the whole climb, the way you'd rest a hand on someone's chest to feel that they were still breathing.

My wand rode in my coat pocket, wrapped in a dish towel like something I was ashamed of. I suppose I was. A fractured wand isn't a wand anymore. It's a warning. It's the piece they let you keep so you remember, every single day, exactly what you lost, and exactly whose fault the tribunal decided that was.

Mine. They'd decided it was mine.

The mist rose to meet the train before the village did. One moment I was watching gray rock slide past the window; the next, the whole world had softened to white, as though someone had breathed on a mirror and never wiped it clean. I pressed my palm to the glass. Cold. Solid. I needed things to be solid that week, because my own head had gotten far too good at insisting they weren't.

Zermatt-under-Mist. That was the name scrawled on my ticket by a stationmaster in Grindelwald who never once looked up from his newspaper long enough to wonder why a woman traveling alone, at dusk, with no return fare booked, wanted to go somewhere that didn't appear on any map he'd ever sold a ticket for. I hadn't offered him a reason. He hadn't asked for one. That, more than the mountains or the silence or the price of the room, was why I'd chosen it.

Nobody asks questions in a place nobody can find.

The funicular shuddered to a stop at a platform hacked straight into the mountainside, and when the doors opened, the cold struck me like a hand flat against my chest, sharp and clean, pine and woodsmoke, and underneath that, something sweeter,roasted hazelnuts. Cinnamon. My stomach turned over with a hunger I hadn't allowed myself to feel in months, because hunger felt dangerously close to hope, and hope was a debt I wasn't sure I could still afford to carry.

I stepped onto cobblestones slick with evening damp, looked up, and for one unguarded moment I forgot to be careful.

Chalets climbed the slope in crooked, companionable rows, timber gone, the silver-gray of old coins, window boxes spilling late geraniums the color of a bruise just starting to heal. Smoke curled from a dozen chimneys and hung low over the roofs like the whole village was breathing slowly, in and out, in and out. Somewhere below, a river I couldn't see rushed hard over stone, a sound like static, like the world clearing its throat before it spoke. It was, without argument, the most beautiful place I'd ever stood in.

It was also, I understood with the particular clarity that comes from having already lost everything once, exactly the kind of place that would eventually ask who I really was.

So I made myself keep walking. That had been the whole trick of the last six months: never stand still long enough to feel the size of what had happened to you. Find the next task. Do not, under any circumstances, stop in the middle of a cobbled lane in a village you've never seen and cry over a tin of flour you haven't even bought yet.

I found the estate agent's office by the smell of pipe smoke leaking under the door, and I signed for the chalet at the very edge of the lane, the last building before the tree line swallowed the road, small and slouched and considerably cheaper than everything else on his list, which told me plenty about what was wrong with it before he'd even cleared his throat.

"Bit of a fixer," he said, which is what people say when they mean the roof may try to kill you. "Good bones, though. Used to be a shop, back in the day. You'll have company close by, mind you, Glaus, next door. Keeps to himself. Mostly."

"Mostly," I repeated.

"He's not what you'd call "welcoming"." The agent scratched at his jaw, not quite meeting my eye. "But he's fair. Fixed my sister's cart wheel for nothing when she couldn't pay him. Just don't expect conversation. Or noise. He's particular about his noise."

I thought, with the specific arrogance of a woman who had just crossed half a mountain range on nothing but stubbornness: "I can manage a quiet neighbor."

I would like it noted, for the record, that I was wrong about nearly everything: that the key was heavier than it looked, black iron gone cold enough to sting my palm, and the door groaned open on hinges that hadn't seen oil since whichever monarch last bothered ruling this stretch of the Alps. Inside, the air smelled of dust and old mice and, faintly, unmistakably, of flour, ghost flour, worked so deep into the floorboards over the years that no amount of neglect had scrubbed it fully out. A shop, the agent had called it. Something in my chest eased at that, just slightly, the way it does when you learn a stranger's abandoned house was once, a long time ago, kind to the same sort of person you're trying so hard to become again.

I lit the lamp Grandmother had packed, wrapped in wool, at the bottom of my case, real flame, no magic, because I was finished, utterly finished, with letting magic decide what happened to the people around me, and walked the ground floor slowly, fingers trailing along a counter where some other baker, some other woman entirely, had once stood. The wood was scarred with decades of knife-work, initials and tally marks and one small, deliberate heart. Somebody had loved this room, once.

I decided then, lamp raised to a ceiling beam gone black with old smoke, that I would love it too. Quietly. Carefully. Without ever telling it my real name.

That was when the hammering started next door.

Not the gentle, winding-down sort, not

"just finishing a shelf before supper. This was fast and hard and relentless, the kind of noise that climbs up through your own floorboards and settles behind your teeth, and it did not stop. Not after five minutes. Not after ten. And something in me, something that had spent half a year being very, very quiet so nobody would notice her, simply gave out.

I marched out my own front door and into the lane, lamp still in hand, and knocked on the workshop door beside mine. No, I hit it, hard enough that my knuckles stung on the wood.

The hammering cut off mid-swing.

The door opened.

He was tall in the specific, unreasonable way that makes a doorframe look built too small for the man standing in it, shoulders shaped for exactly the labor I'd just spent ten minutes hating, sawdust caught pale in dark hair that had clearly abandoned any hope of neatness sometime around noon. Ice-blue eyes swept over me, the lamp, the soot streaked down my coat sleeve, the flour tin I was apparently still clutching, even now, even here, because some habits outlive their usefulness, and something in his expression settled, instantly, into thorough unimpressed disapproval.

"You're the one who bought Widow Hasler's shop." Not a question. A verdict, already delivered.

"I'm the one who's trying to sleep," I said, "which is proving difficult, given this" I gestured, rather wildly, at him, at the doorway, at the entire fact of his existence.

"It's seven in the evening."

"It's loud. "

"It's a workshop." He said it the way one explains gravity to a person who's just complained about falling. "You bought a building next to a workshop."

"I bought a building next to a shop, according to the man who sold it to me, who somehow failed to mention that the neighboring business specializes in noise pollution, " I stopped. Because I could smell it now, suddenly, threading beneath the sawdust and the cold mountain air, something underneath, something wrong, something that lifted the fine hairs along my arms before I understood why I should be afraid.

Magic. Old magic, worked deep into wood and iron over years and years until it stopped being a spell and became something closer to a warning. It was rolling off his workshop in slow, deliberate pulses, like a heartbeat behind a door someone had locked a long time ago and never quite trusted to stay shut.

He watched my face change. Watched me feel exactly what he'd been standing guard over.

And for one bare second, one single, unguarded second, something flickered behind those ice-blue eyes that had nothing to do with irritation at all. It looked, unmistakably, like fear.

"You need to go back inside." His voice had dropped, low and quick, every trace of sharpness gone out of it. "Now. Lock your door."

"Why, "

The lamp guttered in my hand. There was no wind

to blame it on.

Behind him, deep inside the workshop, something began to glow.