Chapter 16
Sixteen
Her cottage met her with its usual mutter of charms. The runes Bailey had carved into the beams glowed their low, reassuring amber. On most nights, they felt like a hand at her back. Tonight, they felt like a row of tutors watching to see if she’d cheat.
She cleared the table of ordinary life—a teacup with a lipstick crescent, a spoon she didn’t remember using, a single bobby pin she’d been pretending was a bookmark.
She pulled the leather-bound spellbook with Bailey’s margins into the lamplight, then set out the old, sensible scaffolding first because muscle memory insisted: ironvine, blackthorn bark, yarrow, rosemary, bloodroot, moondust caps, and shadowbell bloom.
A Weftmark—braided vine studded with thorns, parchment sigil sealed in beeswax, tuned to shadowbell.
Not a charm so much as a siphon. Bailey’s old stopgap, something he used when a hex outpaced him.
Not a cure. A bleed-off. A way of tricking the curse into thinking it had somewhere better to be while you scrambled to fix the real damage.
She stood over the neat little list, hands braced on the table, and felt a lump rise in her throat.
A simple drain wouldn’t be enough. Not for this.
Not with the changes slipping quietly through the village so quickly.
What she needed was something she could build with her own hands that wasn’t Bailey’s, something as stubborn and ugly and unkillable as what lived in her ribs.
She closed his book.
“Fine,” she told the lamp. “We do it my way.”
She unlocked the bottom drawer of the apothecary cabinet—the one Grim never tried to pry because even he respected boundaries when they hummed—and brought out the rarities she saved for stubborn problems.
Ashen ivy, brittle and gray, cut from ruin-stone upriver where the water had long since given up.
Glasswort resin, a honeyed lump of sap bled from plants along a shattered ley line.
Heartmire salt, dull silver, scraped from the bed of a storm-cracked lake.
Wolfsbone, ground fine from grave-bone mineral.
Night-apple peel, ribbons that glimmered like bruises in the dark.
Together, they would bind and steady, draw old magic out, mute her power’s glare, and hold what didn’t belong anywhere else.
Maude laid the new bones of her spell beside Bailey’s tried-and-true, a before-and-after she refused to apologize for.
The shape came to her hands first: a seam-loom, a narrow figure-eight woven from ashen ivy so the spell had to pass through one throat, then the other.
She warmed the glasswort resin over a low blue flame until it went clear, then brushed it along the ivy to harden the braid without killing its mean little will.
Wolfsbone crumbled to dust beneath the pestle, the rhythm a drumbeat under the cottage’s runes.
The dust met the heartmire salt in the bowl, shining together until it looked like crushed moonlight.
Night-apple peel came last, pared into long, even ribbons that curled when the knife left them, slick with their own secret.
With a silver needle, she threaded peel through the figure-eight, cross-stitching it over the narrow throat where the two loops met. A muffler. A cover. So the spell wouldn’t look directly at her when it snarled.
She chose three shadowbell petals and set them on her tongue one at a time to warm her voice, then laid four more along the seam-loom’s center line, each one a soft, impossible note.
A knock hit the door like a dare. One, two, three—in Oli’s exact rhythm: I’m a nuisance; open up.
She thought about hiding like a feral cat. Instead, she opened the door.
Oli filled the threshold, smelling like night air and too-expensive soap. A coat slung over one shoulder, collar loosened, his smile tempered by worry. “You’ve been ignoring me,” he said, breezing past like the house belonged to him.
Maude rubbed at her temple. “I haven’t had it in me to be social lately.”
“Lucky for you, I have.” His grin snapped back on, quick and bright as a lantern. “In fact, I’ve been hosting my ass off with the city magistrates.” He paused, eyes glinting, letting the words hang like bait. “Because I’m maneuvering for an open seat.”
She blinked. “You want to be a wolf?”
“I want to be the fox inside the henhouse with the blueprints,” he said dryly.
“They’ll vote after Samhain. If I win, I can stall condemnations, pull inspections, funnel protection your way.
Quietly. I don’t even need the seat to gum up their gears—a tavern expansion’s already crawling because I asked a few too many questions about the builder trying to push a widow off her lot.
The magistrates don’t like the smell of scandal, so the paperwork found its way to the bottom of the stack.
She gets another month. If I lose, I still have leverage on three of them—debts, favors, little knots they don’t want untangled. Enough to buy time when it matters.”
“You’ve been…campaigning.”
“Like hell,” he said. “Not for the hat. For the door it opens. I didn’t tell you because you’d make a face.”
She made a face. “This face?”
“That face.” He huffed a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh.
“I’ve made promises I don’t love to people I don’t trust so I can put my body between them and people I do.
You can be furious later. Right now I came because—” he glanced at the loom, then back, “—because I—” The grin drained out of him.
For the first time in forever, Oliver Hale looked not in control.
Not composed. Human. “What’s going on here, Maude? What are you making?”
“A mess,” she said. “Hopefully a useful one.”
“What kind of useful?”
“The stop-this-before-the-curse-swallows-everything kind.” She didn’t look up. “It didn’t end with the shops.”
He went still. That was the thing about Oli—under the silk, he was a wire you could pluck, and he’d sing.
“Tell me.”
She did. Not the worst of it—she didn’t need to hand him her panic—but enough. Roses turning into books. Duet bells. Cobbles wrong. The itch of something rooting beneath plaster and skin. Bailey’s note about the interlock.
“I’m making a drain. A place the curse has to pass through, one throat then the other. I’ve braced it, muffled it, salted it down so it can’t flash or wander. It’ll cut if it tries to swell, but it’ll catch, too—hold it, keep it from spilling into everything else.”
He folded his arms. The careful smile didn’t come back. “And you were going to do that alone because…?”
“Because people make things more complicated.” She met his eyes. “And because if it goes sideways, I’d rather it burn me than anyone else.”
He looked around as if he were searching for a second opinion. “Shouldn’t we fetch the coven? The wizards? The druid-whatsits who charge triple on solstice?”
“No, they’re all twits,” she said, “and they’ll crowd my home. And argue. And make a committee.”
He pointed at his chest. “What about this twit?”
Her mouth tugged, but the retort lagged. For one unguarded beat, her face slipped—eyes catching on him, touched with something bare. Worry.
Oli’s grin faltered. “I can follow directions,” he said. “I won’t get clever. I’ll grind, I’ll stir, I’ll keep my sleeves out of the fire. You don’t have to do this alone.”
She hesitated a second, then nodded once—briskly, like she was signing a death warrant. “Fine, but if I tell you to duck, you duck. If I tell you to run, I’d better see your ass hurling out my front door before the words finish leaving my mouth.”
His grin crooked, warm as a lantern flaring back to life. “Deal. Though, for the record, my ass has excellent reaction time.”
They moved like they’d practiced, even though they hadn’t.
Maude explained, and Oli didn’t interrupt unless there was a reason to.
He warmed the glasswort while she tested the ivy’s give.
He sifted wolfsbone and heartmire together carefully until the powders married and shone.
He cupped his hands, and she shook a pinch of the blend across his palms so he could feel the weight.
He looked like a man being knighted by dust.
“What’s this part do?” he asked, nodding to the bone-and-salt mixture.
“Draws out old magic,” she said. “Interlock loves whatever’s buried and afraid. This coaxes it above ground where I can make eye contact.”
“How charming.” He gestured to the night-apple peel. “And the ribbons?”
“Mask,” she said. “Keeps the thing from seeing me seeing it. So it doesn’t decide to graft onto my spine.”
He winced.
She set a copper bowl at the seam where the figure-eight pinched and poured in warmed resin until it pooled like a melted window.
The cottage smelled sweet and electric. While it cooled to tack, she dropped in the four shadowbell petals one by one.
Oli didn’t ask what it was. He just breathed with her.
It helped, which made her nervous and grateful at the same time.
They chalked a circle on the floorboards.
Her circles were always a little oval, a little mean—more ditch than lace.
She set dishes at the cardinal marks: heartmire salt in the north, ash in the south, water in the west, and thistledown in the east to remind the spell that weightless things rise when you let them.
Oli placed a single silver coin at the center of each dish—“For the ferryman,” he said, and when she gave him a look, he amended, “For luck, then.”
“Luck is for people who don’t plan.”
“Indulge me,” he said, and she didn’t argue because the coins gleamed like small promises.
She pricked her thumb and let a single drop fall onto the resin’s cooling skin. It spread, red threading the clear. Honesty clause. The spell wouldn’t hold a lie. She didn’t look at Oli when she did it, but didn’t explain. He said nothing, which was the right kind of mercy.
“Ready?” he asked, hands hovering.
“No…let’s do it.”