Chapter 14 Fleur
I wake like a candle catching flame—sudden, silent, already burning.
For a moment, I don’t move. I lie still, listening to the hush of the tavern, the sound of the wind hitting the side of the building, the soft rhythm of breath beside me.
Winnie’s shoulder is warm where it presses against mine beneath the blanket.
Her hand rests between us, fingers barely grazing my wrist like she drifted off mid-reach.
I don’t want to move.
But something in me already is.
Not a thought. Not a feeling. A current pulling through my chest, my spine, my ribs. Like a string tucked beneath skin, being gently, insistently drawn forward. It doesn’t hurt, but it doesn’t ask permission, either.
I try to stay; I want to stay. But the part of me that’s awake now…it isn’t just mine.
Slowly, I ease out from under the blanket. Winnie shifts, murmurs something soft that doesn’t form words, but she doesn’t wake. Her hand falls away from my wrist as I sit up, the loss of contact sharp in a way I can’t name.
The floor is cold. The candle on my nightstand flares the moment I touch it, as if it, too, was waiting for this.
I dress by instinct, not thought—grabbing the first sweater I can find from the small stack on the nearby chair. It’s not mine. It smells faintly like cedar and flour and something warm. Winnie.
The hem hits mid-thigh. The sleeves are too long. I push them up and keep moving.
By the time I reach the hallway, I realize I haven’t spoken a word. Not to Winnie. Not to myself.
Whatever woke me…it doesn’t need words.
It needs me moving.
And I already am.
Down in the kitchen, the shadows feel heavier. Not darker, exactly—just denser, like the air is thicker here, steeped in something ancient. Something listening.
I need to fix this. I need to stop this never-ending storm, I need to break this time loop.
Reaching for the far shelf without needing to see it, my fingers graze glass jars until the right ones settle into my hands. Mugwort. Rowan. A twist of dried orange peel. I don’t question the choices. I don’t have to.
The charcoal is buried in a drawer I shouldn’t know about. The ribbon hangs from a hook near the hearth, tucked behind a cluster of copper ladles. I pocket both.
My hands are steady, my breath slow.
It’s not fear I feel. It’s focus.
The common room greets me with an unearned ease.
The hearth is low, more ember than flame, but the air carries warmth anyway—residual, pulsing. The sigil beneath the rug is faintly visible at the edges, just a soft shimmer under wool, like light seeping through skin.
I kneel beside it.
My hands work without pause. I fold the rug back, revealing the full circle beneath, charcoal lines still dark, still intact. But there’s something beneath them now, some faint glow like the tavern’s bones have begun to hum.
It’s always been here. I think I knew that the moment I stepped inside, even if I couldn’t name it.
But tonight, it’s awake.
I move through the space with purpose I can’t claim. The tables are heavy, but I shift them without effort, arranging them like anchors at the room’s edges. Chairs stacked. Lamps dimmed.
I light candles one by one—four at the corners of the circle, one at its heart. Their flames rise quickly, unnaturally, and hold steady even as I move past them. No flicker. No hesitation.
The herbs come next.
I crush them together in the old mortar that lives near the stove—mugwort, rowan, orange peel ground to a coarse powder that smells sharp and a little sweet. I sprinkle a line of it inside the charcoal circle, my hands drawing sigils into the powder without needing to remember them.
A spiral, a flame, a line broken and rejoined.
The ribbon comes last. I tie it around the candle at the center, three knots, each pulled tight as I hold my breath.
One for what was.
One for what is.
One for what waits.
The air presses inward as the last knot is secured. The tavern presses in through the cracks in the windowpanes.
Something is listening, and it’s almost ready.
I’m not entirely sure what I’m casting as I move through the motions, but something beneath the surface is urging me forward, like—despite my lack of knowledge of this particular spell—I know it somewhere, a need inside.
At a soul level.
To soothe the hum gathering beneath the floor, I reach for a grounding charm—simple, old. One my mother taught me when I was still young enough to fall asleep mid-incantation. I whisper the words, slow and steady, shaping the air between my palms.
The charm holds—for a moment. A soft, flickering pulse against my skin.
Then it bends.
The energy doesn’t break; it twists, warping sideways, like water forced through a cracked pipe. I try again, adjusting the phrasing, but it slips again, caught in some invisible current I can’t see.
I frown and step back, hands tingling. It’s not rejection. It’s not interference.
It’s redirection.
Another try. A sigil drawn in salt this time, meant to soothe a restless space. The salt hisses the moment it touches the floor, melting into the woodgrain like the tavern is drinking it down before I’m done.
My breath catches.
“All right,” I murmur, half to the room, half to the thing watching me. “You’re not looking to be calmed.”
Candles flare.
I freeze, heart thudding once, and only once, before settling back into that same unnatural stillness. The kind of stillness that comes before something breaks open.
I press my hands to my thighs to steady them.
“Then what are you asking for?”
The tavern doesn’t answer.
But the magic stirs.
And I know what comes next won’t be small.
I kneel again, palms flat to the floor, trying to feel it—to trace the thread that keeps slipping from my grasp. The sigil beneath the wood is pulsing now, too faint to see in full light, but I can feel it in my bones. A heartbeat not my own. A warning.
Or a summoning.
The first gust of wind comes not from outside but through the room itself—curling up from the floorboards through stone. The flames on the candles gutter, then rise, too tall and too still. They don’t flicker; they watch.
The air thickens.
I speak another incantation—one I’ve used a hundred times, a tethering charm to steady loose energy. But the words don’t land. They stretch, fracture in the air, and the syllables echo back wrong, twisted at the edges.
Spells I’ve cast since I was fifteen bend in directions I didn’t ask them to.
I try to redirect the current, voice low and steady despite the tightness in my chest, but it’s like trying to catch stormwater in my hands. Every grip I find slips loose again.
I grit my teeth, planting one hand against the circle’s edge, the other raised to anchor. The floor hums louder. The sigil flares with sudden light, blinding white, then dims just as fast, as if inhaling.
The tavern groans deep in its frame.
“No,” I whisper, voice cracking. “Not yet. Not like this.”
But it’s not listening to me anymore.
The magic builds faster. It curls up my spine, wraps around my ribs like smoke with fingers, threading into my mouth, my lungs, my eyes. The pressure climbs until it’s inside my skull, squeezing, flashing heat behind my eyes.
My knees hit the ground.
The last thing I register is the way the floor begins to shimmer, not with light, but memory.
And then—
A hand.
Steady. Warm. Real.
Winnie.
The moment she touches me, the magic shifts.
Not in resistance.
But in recognition.
The pressure inside me releases all at once, not like a breath or an exhale, but like surrender. The energy that had been threading through me uninvited now pulls back, coils around Winnie like a ribbon finding its rightful anchor.
The air stills.
The candles flare once more, then settle.
The sigil beneath the floor pulses once, and this time it doesn’t push—it bows.
To her.
I can’t speak. I can’t move.
But I feel it, deep and quiet and final.
It wasn’t rejecting me.
It was waiting for her.
And in some small, crumbling corner of myself, I understand:
It’s not my fire it needs.
It’s hers.
The final image I see is her face, jaw tight, eyes wide with a mixture of fear and understanding.
And then the room tilts. The air thickens.
And I fall into dark.
I wake to warmth.
Not the smothering, consuming kind that overtakes you in ritual, but something quieter. Steady. Real.
The stone floor is cold beneath my cheek, but there’s a weight across my back—Winnie’s housecoat, maybe. Something soft pulled over me with careful hands. My limbs ache, but not from pain. From use, from magic stretched too far through a vessel not quite ready.
I don’t open my eyes right away.
Because I remember.
Not everything, not clearly, but the feeling.
Of the spell slipping past me.
Of the power bending, not around me, but to her.
Of the sigil bowing.
When I finally sit up, the room is dim again. The candles have long since burned down to wax puddles. The circle on the floor is half-scattered, but the center remains undisturbed, chalk and ash like quiet breath.
And there, just a few feet away, Winnie.
She’s curled in one of the chairs, knees tucked to her chest, chin resting on her arms, watching me.
Her eyes don’t look afraid.
They look like she understands more than I said, maybe more than I know.
“How long—?” I try to ask, but my voice cracks.
“A few hours,” she says softly. “You were breathing. I didn’t want to move you.”
I nod, throat dry.
She leans forward, elbows to knees, studying me in that way she does when she’s not sure whether to ask or wait for me to offer.
“It listened to you,” I whisper, the words raw in my mouth. “Not me.”
She doesn’t flinch. “I felt it.”
I press my hand flat to the floor again. The energy’s settled, but it’s not dormant. It’s tethered now. Like something finally found what it was waiting for.
“You weren’t just steadying me,” I say, eyes still on the sigil, the edges of my vision hazy. “You were anchoring the whole spell.”
Winnie shifts, like the truth of it makes her uncomfortable—but she doesn’t deny it.
“I think it was always meant to respond to you,” I murmur. “I just…I lit the match.”
She’s quiet for a long moment, then asks, almost reluctantly, “Then what does that make me?”
I look up at her. “The fire.”
The last thing I see is her face, jaw clenched, eyes wide with something between fear and knowing.
My head swims; the floor lists beneath me.
The air thickens.
And again I fall into dark.