Chapter 44
LILY
We returned to camp. The silence between us wasn’t awkward—it was charged, trembling with everything we weren’t saying. Each glance was a memory. Each breath, a tether.
Mira spotted us first. Her brows lifted, eyes flicking between our bodies and the subtle way our hands brushed as we passed. She didn’t say a word, but something in her gaze softened.
We peeled off in different directions. August moved toward where the wounded Weavers were being tended. I sought out Syra, heart still pounding from what I’d seen beneath the water.
She was hunched over a map near the edge of camp, speaking with another elder. Her sharp eyes met mine before I reached her.
“I need to speak with you,” I said.
She waved the other Weaver off.
I didn’t waste time. “I saw Ysella. She’s alive. But—she’s building something. A resistance.”
Syra blinked once, but the rest of her face held firm. “Go on.”
“The threads were showing me things. The last image vanished before I was able to get a clear picture. A bridge was the last thing I received. I don’t know what it means.”
Syra frowned, her fingers tracing patterns on the map as she considered.
“A bridge. . .” She shook her head slowly.
“The threads don't always speak clearly.
It could mean many things—a literal bridge, a connection between forces, a person who spans two worlds.
Perhaps it's time we build a bridge between the Weavers and those that have no magic.
But I'm only guessing. Visions are tricky things, and yours seem particularly. . . complex.”
The uncertainty sparked frustration, but I pushed it aside. At least it was something.
“Threads don't just show you what is,” she continued. “They begin to shape what will be. If Ysella is working from the inside to contact Weavers, we need to work on the outside to find people in Oxford that will fight with us, not against us.”
The Weavers circled the dim glow of firelight. August and I sat next to each other. It was hard to believe that a Hunter, especially August Hawthorne, was here communing with Weavers.
“They’ll do it in public,” one of the elders said. “Public Unravelings keep the fear sharp.”
“She has less than a week,” Mira whispered. “If that.”
I leaned forward. “Then we don’t wait. We go in. She was weaving hope from the walls of a prison. We cannot let her light go out while we hide in the trees.”
August stepped forward, silencing the murmurs. “I’ll lead the infiltration. I know the layout. I know how to get in and out.”
The others bristled. Arguments sparked.
“We need to show Oxford the Weavers are nothing to fear,” Syra said at last. “August knows the Iron Spire. He will lead our infiltration. Can you get a message to Adeline for us?”
“I will do anything you need,” August replied.
“If she can gather our sympathizers, have them start seeding doubt about the Unraveler, it may be what we need to push this in our favor.”
“I will go with August,” I said.
“No,” Syra snapped. “You’re too valuable and too unstable at the moment.”
“I’m also the only one who can pull someone back from being Unraveled. We can’t risk losing more Weavers.”
No one replied. The silence was a kind of surrender.
The meeting dissolved into smaller groups making detailed plans, but I couldn't focus.
My thoughts scattered in too many directions.
Too much had changed in such a short time.
The vision, August's transformation, my own shifting sense of self—it all swirled together like threads tangled beyond repair.
That night, I tried again. Beneath the veil of moonlight and birch, I called the threads.
They answered. Twitching. Wild. Unstable.
I shaped a small weave—a knot of light—and it burst apart like broken glass. My hands trembled. My chest ached with pressure I couldn’t release.
“You’re pushing too hard,” Marigold said softly behind me.
“I don’t have time to ease into this,” I said. “Not with Ysella’s life at stake.”
She stepped closer, placing a hand on my arm. “She wouldn’t want you to unravel for her.”
I didn’t respond. Because some part of me already was.
I was no longer Lily Whitmore, historian.
Sure, that was a part of me still but in nine days my whole life had been turned inside out.
Magic now flowed through me, and I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to go back to just reading about history.
Experiencing it firsthand had become so much more.
Marigold squeezed my arm gently before leaving me to my struggles. I stayed in the moonlight a few minutes longer, trying to find some center, some calm in the storm of change. But the threads remained chaotic, reflecting my inner turmoil, and eventually I gave up.
As I walked back toward the heart of camp, I spotted August sitting alone on a felled tree.
His hand wrapped around the pendant at his chest. His fingers moved restlessly over the metal.
Something about his posture—the weight in his shoulders, the careful distance he'd put between himself and the others—made me change direction.
“When I wear it,” he said, not looking at me, his grip tightening on the pendant, “I remember things. Her laughter. Her hands. Warmth. It’s like being haunted by someone I barely knew.”
I sat beside him, close but not touching.
“I don’t know who I am without him,” he said. “Without Elias.”
“You're not him,” I said quietly. “You've proven that already.”
August's laugh was bitter. “Have I? I've spent my entire life following his orders, believing his teachings. Even now, sitting here with you, planning to betray everything he stands for—part of me feels like I'm betraying myself.”
The pendant caught the moonlight as he held it up, studying it like it might reveal some hidden truth. “She left this for me. My mother. But she also left me with him. How do I reconcile that?”
I watched the way his jaw tensed with each internal argument. “Maybe she didn't have a choice.”
“There's always a choice.”
“Is there?” I shifted slightly, angling toward him. “Maybe leaving you with Elias was the only way to keep you safe. Maybe she thought he would change, that love would soften him.”
August's grip tightened on the pendant. “And instead, he raised me to hunt people like her.”
“But you're here now. With us.”
He looked at me then, really looked, and I saw the boy he must have been—confused, grieving, desperate for someone to tell him the world made sense.
“What if I cannot do it, Lily? What if, when the moment comes, I choose him over you?
The others don't trust me. I can see it in their eyes during the meeting. They think I'll betray them.”
The vulnerability in his voice made my chest ache. “Then I'll trust that you'll make the right choice when it matters.”
“How can you be so certain?”
“Because I've seen who you are when you think no one is watching.
I've seen you tend wounded Weavers, I've seen you question everything you were taught.
I've seen you choose compassion over duty again and again.” I reached out, covering his hand with mine.
“That's not conditioning, August. That's who you are.”
He stared down at our joined hands, his thumb tracing along my knuckles. “My father will never forgive me for this.”
“Will you forgive yourself if you don't try?”
The question hung between us like a challenge. August squeezed his eyes shut like he could block out the truth in my words. When he finally opened his eyes again, something had shifted. Not resolution, exactly, but a kind of weary acceptance.
“The pendant,” he said. “It's been growing warmer since we returned from the stream. And sometimes, when I hold it, I can almost feel. . .” He trailed off, shaking his head.
“Feel what?”
“Magic. Threads. Faint ones, like echoes.
At the stream, when you showed me the threads.
. . I experienced something I'd never known before. Peace. Like everything finally made sense. Whatever happens in Oxford, whatever choice I must to make—” The words caught in his throat.
“I want you to know that this, my feelings for you, it's the most real thing in my life.”
My heart clenched at the vulnerability written across his face.
“I know it's not fair to say this before we go into danger. I know it complicates things. But I needed you to know.”
I reached up, cupping his face in my hands. “I know. I feel it too.”
For a moment, we simply sat there, the weight of confession settling between us. I could see him processing what he'd revealed, the way it seemed to steady something fundamental in him. As if naming what lay between us had given him an anchor point in the chaos of everything else changing.
“Walk with me?” he asked finally.
I nodded, slipping my fingers into his.
We didn’t speak as we crossed the camp, the quiet crackle of dying embers and distant murmurs falling away with every step. The tent waited just ahead, its canvas glowing like honey from the lantern within. A hush settled between us—not awkward, not uncertain.
Just heavy. Expectant.
He held the flap open for me, and I stepped inside, the warmth of the space wrapping around me instantly. When I turned, he was still in the opening—backlit by moonlight and shadow, coat unbuttoned, hair tousled, jaw tight with restraint.
But his eyes. . .
God, they burned like they always did when he looked at me. Like I was salvation and damnation wrapped in willing flesh, and he'd gladly burn for the chance to touch me.
I didn't speak. Couldn't. The words had been stripped away by the intensity of his gaze, like he was already imagining all the ways he wanted to worship my body.
Instead, I reached for the buttons at the back of my dress with deliberate, agonizing slowness.
His breath hitched audibly as I let it fall. It slipped down my body like a lover's sigh, pooling at my feet in a whisper of silk and surrender. The night air raised gooseflesh across my bare skin, but I didn't reach for cover.