A Bargain Brewed at Willowbrook Market

About this book:

In the mist-cloaked valley of Willowbrook, Saffron Vance is the last herb-wife of a dying line—her copper kettle cold, her shelves bare, her magic reduced to boiling weeds no one will buy. Across the lane, Arthur Campbell pulls golden loaves from an oven that has fed the town for forty years, his bread the only warmth in Saffron's failing shop. When a stranger in a weather-stained green coat offers her a horn box and a bargain—her shop restored, her craft sharpened to supernatural precision, in exchange for the very *taste* of food—Saffron signs away the rosemary lard on her tongue to save her mother's legacy.

But magic paid for in senses does not play fair. As Saffron's brews begin to work with terrifying certainty—willow-bark salve that knits a drover's rotting feet, a draft that names a fever before the child stops breathing—she finds herself adrift in a world gone flavorless. A parsnip is wet fiber; small beer is cold water; even Arthur's bread, the one thing that ever tasted like home, turns to sawdust on her tongue. With the sheep-fair approaching and the collector's debt coming due, Saffron must navigate a tightening net of village politics, a baker who reads her silence like a burnt crust, and the creeping horror that she may have traded away the only thing that made the craft worth keeping.

*A Bargain Brewed at Willowbrook Market* is a lush, sensory fantasy steeped in the grit of daily work—the scrape of a peel, the weight of dough, the sting of parsnip juice on chapped fingers. For readers who love the quiet intimacy of *Legends & Lattes* and the eerie bargains of *The Bear and the Nightingale*, this is a story about the price of excellence, the hunger that drives creation, and whether a woman can reclaim her soul when she's already swallowed the contract.