Chapter 21 #2
She slid off his boots after a bar or two, dignity reasserting itself, and put her palms flat against his chest where his shirt was soft and heat lived. “Don’t you dare try to spin me.”
“Oh? What would you do if I did?”
He dipped his head a fraction, close enough that she could count the blue flecks in his eyes, close enough that she felt the shape of the kiss he hadn’t taken last time like a heat map on her mouth. For half a second, the square, the town, the curse—everything—thinned to the ache of maybe.
Until something shifted in the air.
The fountain hiccupped. Once. Then again—deeper, wrong, like a heartbeat skipping a step.
Lanterns overhead flared too bright and began to drip, glass stretching into hot teardrops that hardened midair and shattered like frost. Stalls shuddered; canvas warped into timber, then back again, grotesque in-between. The square’s hum bent off-key.
A chord plucked too hard beneath the skin.
The third loom.
Maude felt it flare across the ley—bright, hungry. Not breaking. Not yet. But reaching with sticky, greedy fingers past the boundaries she’d given it.
Her stomach plunged. Salt crawled down her spine.
She tilted her head as if angling to hear the Weftmark more clearly and did the math that had been running in the back of her skull since dawn: Samhain’s tide rising, the whole town’s attention braided tight, magistrates meddling at the net, the first loom holding steady at the North Gate—until the third tried to carry more than it was built to hold. Of course it did.
The music faltered. Children froze mid-dance, wooden swords lifted in question.
Her stomach dropped again.
“Mau—” Wesley started.
“I know.” She was already moving. “I know.”
A murmur sharpened to a point. Someone shouted, “The witch!”—because of course they did. Nothing delights a crowd like blaming a woman.
Heads snapped toward them as they bolted for the wyvern.
A row of carved pumpkins warped—faces stretching, grins sagging—before snapping back into place.
A chair split into two, then collapsed back into one, ugly and indecisive.
The wyvern fountain’s eyes flashed lacquer-bright, then dulled; water hiccupped in the basin like it was trying not to retch.
“Selene!” Maude shouted, because she needed the only competent person besides herself—and Selene was already running.
Oli skidded in beside them, glitter looking suddenly absurd in the bad light. He gripped Maude’s elbows, eyes gone flat. “What do you need?”
Her hands were already in her satchel. “The fountain. She’s pulling too hard. Selene—second loom. Rosemary on the northern quadrant, yarrow ash on the southwest seam, heartmire salt across the sigil. Light touch. Don’t let the bind choke.”
Selene didn’t argue. Healer eyes, sharp and calm. “On it.”
“Oli—distract them.” Maude drew out the fireworks box, enlarging it. “Light the sky. Keep their eyes up and their feet back.”
“Are you sure you don’t need me?” Oli’s jaw was set.
“Don’t worry,” Wesley answered, steady. “I’ve got her.”
No theater in it. Just truth. Oli searched his face, found whatever he needed, kissed Maude’s forehead, and sprinted after Selene—already shouting about fireworks to a boy with the look of someone who’d just been given his first quest.
The square was tipping toward panic. Magistrates’ ledgers snapped open like jaws. Veyne’s voice carried, oily and righteous—“Stand back! Stand back! Witchcraft!”
Maude seized Wesley’s wrist. They ran. The crowd peeled back the way people do for calamity, for authority, for women who look ready to bowl you over with a jug if you don’t move.
They reached the wyvern in a handful of strides that felt like a thousand.
The fountain’s water sloshed wrong, spilling in thick, syrupy ropes that clung where they landed, then snapped back like elastic.
The Weftmark beneath the basin—ironvine ring, blackthorn teeth, waxed shadowbell heart—glowed too bright, the hum pitched high enough to make her skull ring.
All around, Market Square was forgetting itself.
A baker’s stall and a cooper’s bench had leaned too close and gotten ideas, reshaping into an ungainly creature with flour drawers where hoops should be.
Two neighbors who’d been arguing over goblin-made spoons a moment ago now found their coats fused at the shoulder—threads knitting fast, deciding they were married.
Maude flicked her hand, muttered a quick word, and the fibers snapped apart.
The men stumbled, looking at her as if she’d both slapped and saved them, before scuttling back into the crowd.
“Okay,” Wesley said, low, both to her and to the fountain and to the part of himself that counted by intuition. “Talk me through it.”
Her hands shook. She hated that they shook.
“We re-anchor, slow the draw, give her something sweeter to drink.” She dumped her satchel at the fountain’s edge.
“Night-apple peel—covering agent. Glasswort resin—stabilizer, three drops only. Heartmire salt to tune the balance. If I overdo it, she’ll eat us. ”
He reached without hesitation. “Night-apple.”
She slapped the dark ribbon of peel into his palm. “Wrap the ironvine clockwise. Don’t cross the ends.”
“Yes, chef,” he said, then grimaced. “Sorry. Habit.”
She flung a line of salt in a thin, exact curve, feeling for the place the ley bucked hardest. “When I say breathe, you breathe with me.”
“Copy.”
A firework hammered the sky into gold. The crowd oohed like the world wasn’t lurching under their boots. Good. Oli doing what he was made to do.
Maude’s pulse tried to gallop away without her. It wasn’t the panic that got her—it was the memory braided into it, the way the wrongness in the hum wore Bailey’s absence like a face. The spell was a hunger for belonging. She knew that hunger. She’d fed it all summer on anger until it grew teeth.
“Hey.” Wesley’s voice cut clean. He had the night-apple peel already looped around the ironvine, his fingers moving with that maddening baker’s precision. “Look at me.”
She kept working.
“Look,” he said, “count with me. Four in. Hold two. Six out.”
“I don’t—”
“Maude.”
She looked. He didn’t smile—he grounded. One, two, three, four in; hold; six out. His chest rose and fell like a metronome for a nervous system. Her own breath caught it without permission, matched, steadied. Rage moved to a back burner. Not gone—never gone—but tamed enough to wield.
“Glasswort,” she said, voice lower now, hands sure. “Three drops. Not four. If you give her four she’ll glass the whole square.”
“Three.” He uncorked the little vial with big, careful hands and let the resin fall exactly where she pointed—lemniscate over the waxed heart. The Weftmark shivered and then moaned as if somebody had rubbed the edge of a wineglass. Good. Not catastrophic. Yet.
“Heartmire,” she said. “Pinch only. We want her listening, not lashing out.”
He arched a brow. “You’re talking to a spell like it’s sentient.”
“It is.” She flung him the salt. “Every spell has a will. You just hope it agrees with yours.”
He didn’t argue. He pinched and scattered, his rhythm matching hers. He touched the ring with his fingertips—not timid, but respectful—the way a man might touch proved dough he could ruin if he forgot it was alive.
“Now,” she breathed, and set her palms down on the basin stone. “Breathe with me.”
They did. Together. Her words found the old track Bailey had cut for her when she was a girl—how to ask a thing to hold. She altered a line without thinking, made it blunter, and felt Wesley catch the shift and steady it like a second pair of hands on her magic.
The hum dropped half a tone. The water lost its syrupy thickness and went back to being water. Lanterns stopped dripping and started behaving. The distorted stalls sighed, canvas forgetting it ever flirted with wood. The ring under the fountain dimmed from fever to warm.
It took two minutes. It took a year.
When the Weftmark settled into that low, contented purr she recognized, Maude let herself sag back on her heels. Her hands trembled so hard she had to curl them into fists to get them to stop.
“It’s done.”
Wesley didn’t touch her. He only tilted his head—first toward the sky, where Oli punished the night with fireworks, then toward the far end of the square, where a slim figure knelt by the northeast corner, holding it steady with healer’s hands.
Selene had the second loom singing like a wineglass too.
Around them, shouting tilted from fear to curiosity. People are simple: if a thing looks like it is going to eat them, they panic. If it looks like it is someone else’s problem, they gossip. Veyne hovered with his ledger as if it might block a hex on contact. A few brave idiots stepped closer.
Wesley didn’t even look up. “Back,” he snapped, voice pure command. “Unless you want your buttons fused to your shirt and your eyebrows in your shoes.”
They backed up. He didn’t even have to shout.
Maude’s heart skipped as the ring’s glow eased to a low murmur. “You’re useful.”
“Be still my heart,” he said. “Where to next?”
“The Bonebridge. The last loom.”
The bridge arched black over the river, an iron spine crossing white water. Ley lines braided there with currents and old stories. She’d saved it for last because it would be worst.
He rose and offered a hand without thinking. She ignored it and stood on her own, then took it anyway when her legs swayed. His fingers closed around hers like a promise.
She grabbed her kit. He shouldered the rest before she could argue. And they ran.