Kindling

Every Samhain, someone has to carry the light up the mountain. This year its her.

Corinne Ashdown is thirty-four, the lamplighter of Brannocks Ford, a curvy, wry, warm-brown woman with a mass of long black curls and a habit of telling men exactly what to do. For twelve years she has lit the villages lamps at dusk and walked home alone. Tonight, while the bonfires roar on the green below, she climbs the switchback road to Cinderhold in an old black velvet gown cut far too low and her own emerald cloak, carrying the small brass lantern that keeps the valley safe for another year.

Two lords are waiting at the top.

Aurek is forty, towering and fair, his long ash-blond hair swept back loose past his shoulders and his short beard neat, formal to the bone and drier than the mountain wind. Kazimir is thirty-seven, olive-skinned and restless, with wavy black hair to his shoulders, a dark stubbled jaw, a gold hoop in his left ear and a crooked smile thats trouble from the first word. Both are shirtless, both are enormous, both run as hot as a hearthstone, and both insist the lantern is theirs to take. They have been rivals for years. They have reasons for it that neither will say aloud.

Corinne is cold, tired, and not in the mood to choose.

So she doesnt.

In a firelit hall heaped with gold, beneath an open arch and a burning hunters moon, the lamplighter is about to find out what happens when two very patient, very warm men are told theyll have to share, and that shell be the one giving the orders. Until dawn, anyway. After that, the old promise says nothing at all.