Charlie stared across the table at the burly redneck she was sharing with; she hadn’t thought her nationality was up for debate.

“. . . you should hear John’s cover of ‘Hallelujah.’”

“Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’?”

“No, Handel’s ‘The Hallelujah Chorus.’ Of course Cohen.” He erased his frown with another swallow from a root beer can full of bourbon. “That boy and that song’ll strip the meat right off your bones. Closest thing to a religious experience you’ll ever get in a place where your shoes stick to the floor.”

Hearing her own qualifier thrown back at her, Charlie grinned and hummed a quick charm onto his tattooed forearm, the sound slipping through pauses in the room’s ambient noise. There were powers that respected a Gale charm, even this far south, and this man, who understood what music meant, needed a little luck in his life. From the moment he’d sat down beside her, she’d been half afraid of a lightning strike from the metaphysical black cloud hanging over his head.

A few days later, the music led her to a campground on a river, emptied of the summer tourists and filled with family in all but blood. Although the days were still pleasant enough, the nights nudged freezing. Charlie barely noticed the chill as she jammed until dawn with old women and young men and old men and young women and banjos and mandolins and fiddles and a dozen guitars. There was even a set of pipes and although the piper got pelted with bottle caps every time he began to play, he was clearly a familiar and loved part of the circle. Charlie had to fight to keep her power from rising with the music. She let it go once, after midnight had safely passed and let her creation hang in the air for a moment after the last note had been played.

“Well, damn,” breathed the piper as wings and scales and fire dissolved into the night.

Then one of the banjo players picked out the opening bars of “Talking Dust Bowl Blues.”

And they were off again.

The next day Charlie stopped off at a coin laundromat in Austin—even Gale girls needed clean underwear—then stepped out of the world, back into the Wood, and listened for where the music would take her next.

Allie’s song wove through a stand of rowan, berries formed in the Wood’s perpetual late summer but never getting a chance to ripen. She could follow Allie’s song home, only Charlie wasn’t ready to go home yet—and not only because Allie’s song sounded a little sharp. Allie wanted Charlie to stop wandering. To stay home for more than a few months at a time. To allow herself to be gathered in under Allie’s newly maternal wing.