He made a small sound that wasn’t quite a laugh and wasn’t pity either. “Maybe he was right.”
“Don’t you dare,” she said, but there wasn’t any heat in it.
They watched the drawer. Dough lifted from itself, layers taking breath. The shop’s temperature eased into a sweeter place; the chandelier’s tiny prisms went still. On the shelf behind them, a jar that had been vibrating imperceptibly since the curse abruptly settled, as if grudgingly convinced to behave.
“You’re doing it again,” he said, not unkindly.
“What? Being excellent?”
“Counting all the ways it could go wrong.”
“Useful habit.”
“Sometimes,” he allowed. “Sometimes it keeps you from seeing when it’s going right.”
She turned to say something biting and discovered he was closer than she’d clocked. Not looming, not crowding, but warm in that annoying way he specialized in. Lantern light drew copper from her hair and gold from his. For a second, the whole room feltpaused, like the space between inhale and exhale when you’re about to laugh or cry and haven’t chosen yet.
The timer chimed.
They both exhaled and moved at once, grateful for motion. He slid the tray from the proving drawer; she held the oven door like a priestess holding a portal. Heat breathed out—clean, good, carrying a faint mint of rosemary from her side and the butter-fat prayer from his. He slid the tray in. They stepped back, shoulder to shoulder, bathing in warmth like cats.
They didn’t talk for the first few minutes. It felt sacrilegious, somehow, to put words on top of the visible chemistry: the water flashing to steam, lifting layers; the butter basting from within; the delicate brown drawing like dawn across each ridge. The faint line of the rune moved—no, that wasn’t right. It didn’t move. It persisted. It held quiet in the middle of unfolding.
When the crescents were done, he pulled the tray. The room filled with the most unfair smell on earth: warm butter and proof that she had done at least one thing correctly. He set the tray down; she leaned in to inspect: laminated layers, clean lift, no butter bleed, no curse shimmer. She could feel her rune under her teeth, a hum that saidhere, here, we’re holding.
He tore one in half to check the interior. The layers parted with a sigh, steam brandishing the scent in her face like a dare. He held half out to her. “Taste.”
She took it, bit down, and the outside shattered. The center was honey-laced and tender. The magic didn’t spark on her tongue; it sank. Carefully. Gentle as a hand over a frantic heart. She hadn’t realized how bitter everything had tasted for months until it didn’t.
“Well?” he said.
She chewed and swallowed and considered. “It’s…fine,” she said, and then, because the joke felt too small for what was happening in her chest, she added quietly, “It’s steady.”
He let out a breath that landed like a laugh that hadn’t found voice yet. “Yeah,” he said. “It is.”
She stared down at the half in her palm, at the clean line of layers. A scandalous thought arrived uninvited and sat down: maybe she couldn’t force her magic to stop mourning. Maybe she couldn’t un-grief her grief. But she could give it steps. She could hand it to a process that knew how to repeat itself until the noise became muscle memory.
She knew this should make her furious. That it made her relieved felt like betrayal.
Silence stretched again, but it had changed shape—less the echo of a crypt, more the hush of a sanctuary. He looked at her hands—flour-grazed now, rune-warm—and then at her mouth, probably debating whether he had earned the right to say the thing forming behind his teeth.
“Say it,” she said. She hated dithering.
“I think…your magic likes the way mine counts.”
She should have bitten him for that. Instead, she set her half-crescent on the tray, pressed her palm to the cool bench, and gave a single nod. “Maybe. Don’t let it go to your head.”
“It already lives there,” he deadpanned. That made her snort, which made him grin—like someone she could accidentally trust.
They made another tray.
Nine
The cold had finally arrived. It wasn’t the soft kind that nipped playfully, but the sort that clawed at skin and tried to bore into bone.
Maude had stitched extra warming charms into her coat that morning, just to make it from her door to Market Square without turning into a freckled icicle. They worked well enough, humming faintly against the seams as she tugged the collar higher, breath misting in the air.
Strange, though. People were looking at her. Not in the usual way—like she carried a sickness everyone feared catching—but directly. A butcher gave her a nod as she passed. A young couple, arms tangled together, offered tentative smiles. One woman even lifted a hand as if to wave, then thought better of it and pretended to adjust her shawl.
