The Witch Who Married the Weather

How it begins

The rain began in the wardrobe during the third week of our marriage.

I moved my boots.

Lior stood in the doorway looking offended on behalf of the weather.

"I didn't do that."

"Neither did I."

A small cloud gathered above the winter coats.

Outside, the fields were green for the first time in four years.

Inside, my best dress was developing a pond.

The council had called the ceremony symbolic.

They had called it temporary.

They had not mentioned whose house the symbol would occupy.

Lior looked like an ordinary man until he forgot to. His eyes changed with the pressure. His shadow sometimes moved a second before the rest of him.

He had been polite, generous and impossible to ask a direct question.

"Would you like to stay here?" I asked.

"I am here."

"That isn't what I asked."

Thunder rolled from the linen cupboard.

I handed him a towel.

At breakfast, we had argued about the orchard. He had watered it before dawn because he thought the trees needed more rain.

I had asked him to wait because the path was washing away.

He had heard doubt in his competence.

I had heard a future in which every practical request became a referendum on his power.

The wardrobe cloud began to hail.

"All right," I said. "We're taking a walk."

"In this weather?"

I looked at him.

He almost smiled.

At the gate, the council chair waited with a basket of fruit and a reminder that the agreement could not be disturbed until harvest.

I took the fruit.

Then I gave her the towel.

"Our wardrobe is disturbed."

She did not understand.

Lior did.

For the first time, he stepped beside me rather than arriving ahead.

"What would you like?" he asked.

It was not an apology.

Not yet.

But the hail stopped, and I found that I could begin with a question he had actually chosen to ask.