She picked up what was left of the salt. He gathered the reins. They didn’t talk about how hard he shook when he thought she wasn’t looking. They didn’t talk about how she had to press a fist to her sternum like she could shove the heart back in through the bone.
The forest closed behind them, the web of light receding until it was only a rumor hung in branches.
They walked in step without trying. Not because they liked each other; not because fate or magic or the Peaks had decided it, but because sometimes surviving meant matching your breath to the person beside you. Even if he was an idiot. Even if she was impossible. Even if the mountains listened and reached and wanted.
Maude kept her eyes forward.
The quiet crouched, attentive. But it listened to something new now, something the wolves couldn’t quite translate: two heartbeats, stubborn as iron filings, ringing like a bell through the trees.
Eleven
By nightfall, they made camp in a small glade where stone jutted through the earth in crooked slabs.
The Peaks loomed closer now, their ridges serrated against the crescent moon. The forest had thinned into a clearing where fern fronds glowed faintly silver under starlight, and the air carried the clean bite of pine and cold stone. Even the horses seemed relieved to stop, stamping and snorting in the shadows.
While Wesley built the fire, Maude walked the perimeter, pressing her palm to rock whenever she found it. She let her nails bite into her scab and offered blood to the cracks, a bead here, a smear there, weaving protection line by line until the glade pulsed with it. She worked quietly, careful not to draw Wesley’s attention. She wasn’t sure why she hid it. Instinct, maybe. Or because she knew exactly what he’d say—that she was reckless, bleeding herself thin; that there were likely smarter ways. He’d give her lip for it, and she didn’t have the energy. Easier to keep it to herself.
By the time she finished, her head swam faintly, but the air around them felt lighter, clearer. The wards pulsed steadily in the stone. Maybe, with luck, the wolves would leave them alone for the night.
She returned to the fire, settling cross-legged across fromWesley as he coaxed the flames higher—kindling, tinder, logs stacked like he’d done it a hundred times. Maude tried not to watch him. Instead, she unpacked her satchel, laying out herbs and vials in tidy rows, as though neatness might stitch the frayed seams of her mind back together.
The firelight licked over Wesley’s face as he sat back on his heels, and for once, his expression wasn’t smug. It was careful. Quiet. His eyes, usually bright as frost, softened in the glow, blue deepening to dusk.
“You’ve done this before,” Maude said at last, if only to fill the silence. Her voice was low, scratchy. She gestured at the fire, the pan he balanced over it. “Camping. Roughing it. Not exactly bakery skills.”
Wesley stirred whatever he had in the skillet, shoulders shifting. “I grew up on it. My mother…plants were her language.” He paused long enough that Maude almost thought he’d stop there. But then he added, softer, “I picked up a little.”
The fire popped. She should’ve left it there, let the silence fall back into place. But something in his tone—the gentleness in it—slipped under her armor.
“I haven’t been out here since Bailey died.”
She bit the inside of her cheek hard enough to taste copper. Six months of choking silence, and she’d handed a piece of herself to Wesley of all people?
But he didn’t sneer. Didn’t laugh. Didn’t offer the empty platitudes people still tried to press on her like useless poultices. He only stirred the pan once, then set it aside, the firelight catching in his eyes.
“I figured,” he said, his voice quiet. “The way you looked at the woods. Like they’d stolen something from you.”
Her throat burned. She glanced away, focusing on the flames chewing logs into glowing coals. Anger, the only thing that ever seemed to come easily anymore, swelled in her chest.
For a long stretch, the fire was the only sound, pine sap hissing as it cracked intosparks.
Then Wesley said, softer still, “Bailey taught you, didn’t he?”
She swallowed. “Everything I know.”
“My mother was the same,” he said. The firelight danced, mirrored in his eyes like glints off a frozen lake. “Not spells, exactly. She wasn’t much for words of power. But she knew plants—how they healed, how they harmed. People came to her more than they went to the physicians. She could look at you and know if your lungs were wrong or if your blood was thinning. Could put the right leaf in your tea and you’d breathe easier by morning.”
“What happened to her?” she asked before she could stop herself.
The pause was long. His gaze had shifted past her, somewhere into the trees where shadows bent crooked. “She died. Fever. Even knowing every herb in the forest, she couldn’t cure herself.”
The flames popped again.
Her hands clenched on her knees. “He left me with all of this.” She gestured at the satchel, the herbs, encompassing in the motion the cursed shop that was waiting for her back home. Her throat went tight. “And I don’t know if I’m angry at him for leaving or at myself for being the one left.”
“I was angry too.”
She lifted her gaze, and he was already watching her.
