Brushfire and Blossom

I came to Fennic's Rest on a Tuesday in late spring, twenty-eight years old and freshly divorced, with a trunk full of enchanted junk and a head full of bad memories. The town sat in a fold of green hills like something somebody had imagined on purpose, all cobblestone and crooked chimneys and a fountain in the main square that spilled light instead of water. I mean that literally. The fountain stood about waist high and poured a steady sheet of soft gold glow back into itself, and kids were floating paper boats on the light and the boats just glided around in circles forever. I stood there longer than I meant to, staring. It felt like a place where nothing bad had ever happened, which I knew wasn't true, but I wanted it to be true for a while.

My new apartment sat above a magical supply shop run by a man named Tom Arthur, who was forty-two and built like a barrel with a beard stapled to it. He'd written me three letters over the winter about renting the space, all of them friendly and none of them pushy, and by the time I met him at the door with my trunk handles biting into my palms I felt like I already knew him. He took one look at the trunk and one look at the narrow stairs and said nothing, which was the kindest thing a man could do in that situation.

The stairs were the problem. They turned twice and each turn was tighter than the last, and the trunk was a family heirloom my grandmother had enchanted to be bottomless, which apparently meant bottomless in weight too. By the third landing I was sweating through my shirt and saying words my mother would have washed my mouth out for. Tom carried it the rest of the way without breaking a sweat, the cheater, and set it down in the middle of my new front room like it weighed nothing at all.

"You'll want to mind the shelves," he told me, tapping the wall. The shelves were wooden planks floating a hand's width off the brackets, held up by some charm that made them hum faintly if you put your ear close. "They're load rated for books and dishes, not whatever you've got in that trunk. Unload slow."

I promised I'd be careful. I was not careful.

The trouble started an hour later when Tom went back downstairs and I started unpacking. I'd been a saleswoman at a magical goods market in the city for four years, so I knew my stock, but I didn't know my new walls, and when I reached up to hang a string of glow-lanterns near the window my elbow caught the edge of the nearest floating shelf. It tipped like a see-saw. Everything on it went over the windowsill and out into the street, forty-odd little trinkets raining down onto the cobblestones of the square, self-stirring spoons and pocket braziers and a memory globe that cracked open and started projecting somebody else's birthday party onto the fountain for about six seconds before it sputtered out.

I hung out the window with my face going hot and looked down at the mess, and there were maybe a dozen people in the square, all of them staring up at me. Wonderful. Great first day. I wanted to climb into the trunk and mail myself back to the city.

Then a woman stepped out of the crowd, and I want to describe her right because she mattered, everything after this mattered because of her. She was thirty-five, give or take, tall and loose-limbed in the way of somebody who had spent her whole life knowing exactly where her body was. Dark hair cut short. Bright blue wrap top, dancing slippers, a bag slung across her back. She moved through the scattered trinkets like the mess was choreography, crouching and scooping and stacking, and the strange thing was she looked like she was enjoying it. Most people picking up forty enchanted spoons off cobblestone look like they're doing penance. She looked like she was warming up.

I came down the stairs at half the speed propriety allowed and met her in the square, apologizing before I'd finished the last step. She waved it off and held up a self-stirring spoon that was stirring the empty air, delighted with it.

"You must be the new tenant over Tom's shop," she said. "Whitney, right? He's been talking about you for a month. I'm Jody. I run the dance studio three doors down, across the square." She pointed with the spoon. "The one with all the noise."

"Sorry about the noise too, then."

"Don't be. The noise is my favorite part." She was grinning. She had a whole grin she deployed all at once, like she didn't believe in doing things halfway. "Jokes aside, is anything broken? I saw the light fountain hiccup."

"Only the memory globe. It's mostly decorative anyway. The rest of it is sturdier than it looks." I gathered the last of the trinkets into the hem of my shirt like a peasant carrying grain and felt like an idiot the whole time, and she laughed at me, but it was a warm laugh, the kind that says come sit down, you're among friends.

She helped me carry everything back up, which I hadn't asked for and didn't know how to refuse. She stood in my half-unpacked apartment looking at my life in boxes and made a low whistle.

"Fresh start?" she asked.

"That obvious?"

"There's a way people unpack when they're running from something and a way people unpack when they're running toward something, and yours is the first kind. No offense meant." She said it kindly, and it stung anyway, because it was true. I'd signed the divorce papers at twenty-seven after three years of a marriage that had been dying so slowly I hadn't noticed it was sick until it was gone. Running was the whole plan. Run to a small town, sell trinkets, become a person who had never been married, that was the theory.

She didn't push. Instead she changed the subject the way generous people do, and by the time she left she had talked me into something I still don't fully believe I agreed to. The town had a festival coming at midsummer, she said, the Blossoming, and there was a ceremonial dance that went with it called the Flowering Step, and she needed one more partner for the public demonstration, and I had the right build for it, and she'd teach me herself, starting tomorrow evening at her studio. I remember standing in my doorway holding a spoon that was stirring nothing, thinking, I don't dance. And then hearing myself say, sure, tomorrow evening, and watching her go across the square with that dancer's walk like the ground was grateful to be stepped on.

* * *

Her studio was exactly what I expected and nothing like what I expected, if that makes any sense. The building was old, beams and plaster, but inside she'd stripped it to bare wood floors and mirrors along one wall and a rack of lights she'd rigged herself. There was a smell of rosin and clean sweat and, oddly, lavender. The square outside hummed through the open window, the light fountain doing its quiet endless thing.

Jody warmed up while I stood there feeling like furniture. She moved through stretches with a fluid ease that was almost unfair, and when she was done she clapped her hands once and looked at me the way a carpenter looks at a crooked board.

"Show me what you've got," she said. "Anything. Walk across the floor."

I walked across the floor. She winced.

"Okay. We start from zero. The Flowering Step isn't hard, that's the lie everyone tells about it. What's hard is that you can't do it alone. It's a partner dance, two people, and the whole point of it, the reason the town does it every year, is that for about four minutes you have to trust another person with your weight and your balance and your timing. Completely. You lean, they catch. They pull, you follow. If you're thinking about yourself the whole time it looks like two people fighting in a field. If you're thinking about them it looks like flowers opening. The old folks here say you can tell which couples in town are happy by watching them do the Step."

"And which are we going to look like?"

"Terrible, for a month. Then we'll see."

We started. I was bad. I want that understood by history, I was comprehensively bad, all elbows and locked knees, and every time she counted the beat I lost it somewhere around four. She was patient in a way that didn't feel like pity, which I appreciated more than I could say. She adjusted my arms, moved my hips with two fingers, told me to stop thinking of my feet as feet and start thinking of them as wheels.

Then she got to the part she'd apparently been saving, the close contact. The Flowering Step in its true form is danced chest to chest, so each partner can feel the other's breath and weight, and she explained it plainly, no drama, and asked if I was all right with that. I said I was, and my voice did something embarrassing on the way out, and she pretended not to notice, which was its own kindness.

She stepped in close and put one hand at my back and took my hand with the other, and we began again, and something changed. It wasn't magic, or maybe it was the ordinary kind. With her this near I could feel the count before I heard it, her body ticking like a clock I could set mine against, and for eight whole bars I didn't stumble once. I got so surprised by not stumbling that I stumbled.

"There," she said, catching me without any effort at all. "That. You felt it?"

I had felt it. I felt it in a way that had nothing to do with dancing, her heartbeat against my collarbone, her breath on my neck, and a warm embarrassed flutter starting low in me that I hadn't felt in years and had assumed was gone for good. I was thirty-two inches from a woman I'd known for one day and my traitor body was acting like I was twenty-one again. I kept my eyes on the mirror across the room and got through the rest of the bar, and she called the lesson there, said I'd done well for a first night, that most people cry, and laughed at her own joke.

I walked home across the square in the dark with the fountain glowing and my heart doing things I didn't have names for yet, and I stood in my apartment surrounded by trinkets and thought, oh no. Not this. Not again. Not so soon. And then, quieter, in the voice I don't listen to, well. Maybe.

Three days of lessons changed me in a way I hadn't planned on. Every evening after the stall closed I crossed the square, past the fountain throwing its light up into the dusk, and by Friday my feet had stopped being the enemy. I still stumbled. But I stumbled less, and more importantly I stopped hating myself for it, which for a woman fresh off three years of being told she did everything wrong was a bigger achievement than the dancing.

It was Friday, the third lesson, when it came out of me. We'd been working the close hold