Maude’s throat tightened. She wanted to double down, to lay another brick in the wall between them. But all she could do was stare—at the calm way he stood even after she’d snapped at him, at the flicker of hurt in his eyes he didn’t bother to hide.
He let out a slow breath. “You don’t have to keep swinging at me, Maude. I’m not your enemy.”
Something twisted in her chest. She wanted to tell him he didn’t understand—thatshewas the problem. The rot in the roots. The crack in the glass. The enemy of herself, of this town, of anyone foolish enough to stand too close. But the words jammed behind her teeth.
She turned and walked. Boots too loud on the cobbles, breath thin and sharp.
Samhain crept closer, tallying her failures in its dark little ledger.
Fine. Add another line.
Behind her: silence. No footsteps following this time.
And that was what hurt most.
Maude did not go home to wallow like a respectable disaster. She turned her boots toward the Lantern Ward—Mistwood’s not-quite-hospital and very-much-haunted clinic stitched to the back of the healer’s guild. The place sat in the crook of Brackenhall, where the streets narrowed and wild grapevine clung to the walls, its leaves turned red and gold, its withered clusters hanging like forgotten offerings. A slate roof sagged over arched windows clouded with age; lanterns burned with slow, bluish fire behind stained glass cut in moons and palms. Someone had carved a motto over the door in an ancient hand:Suffer softly. Pay promptly.
It always made Maude smile.
Inside, the Lantern Ward breathed in hush and tincture-sour. Iron bedframes lined the walls like polished skeletons. A briny steam rose off the covered baths where feverish men soaked their feet in kelp and hot stones. A nurse with raven feathers for hair glided past; a boy fidgeted on a cot, palms glittering with a glamour rash he was clearly pretending not to adore. The whole place smelled of alcohol, rosemary, and a hint of misery.
Selene spotted Maude near the front table and blinked like she’d seen a ghost. “You’re here.”
Maude shrugged out of her coat. “I needed to be somewhere I’m not a walking calamity. Thought I’d diversify my catastrophic portfolio.”
Selene’s mouth tilted. “We’re very honored. Also, put this on.” She tossed Maude a linen apron. “Try not to terrify the patients.”
“I’ll subdue the impulse.”
Though Maude preferred the solitude of her own shop—or the comfort of her cluttered rooms—this wasn’t the first time she’d come to lend a hand at the Lantern Ward. The place had its own rhythm: poultices to grind, herbs to sort, endless shelves of tinctures that needed labeling. Work so steady and simple that it hushed the noise in her head. It was the perfect environment to untangle her thoughts, to let them rise and settle while she moved through the rhythm of someone else’s routine.
Selene handed her a slate of orders and a tray of dried comfrey, arnica, and willow bark. “We’re low on bruise salve. And Captain Farrow has spectral frostbite again—refuses to stop night fishing. He’ll need the ghost nettle tincture.”
“Spectral frostbite from fishing? Sounds like natural selection at work,” Maude said, tying the apron.
They fell into the rhythm of the ward. The good thing about healing rooms: they wanted hands, not feelings. Maude crushed comfrey into a paste with a mortar, folded in goose fat and a whisper of sun salt so bruises would fade quick as morning mist. She labeled jars with neat, sharp letters that looked nothing likeBailey’s, even when she tried. Across the aisle, Selene murmured to a child whose ear was sprouting a very small, very embarrassed mushroom—a side effect of a wish left too close to a damp pillow.
“Hold still, little barnacle,” Selene soothed, dabbing. “It will fall off by supper.”
The mushroom wobbled, offended. Maude handed Selene a strip of cloth. “Tie it snug. Tell him it adds character.”
Selene bit back a smile. “We say ‘texture’ in the ward.”
A man limped in with a knee the size of a pumpkin. Sprain. Maude rolled up her sleeves and wrapped him—sage and vinegar compress, tight figure-eight band, four-beat knot. “Rest, elevate, repeat,” she instructed, tugging the wrap tight. “You can manage that, can’t you?”
He flushed. “Thank you, mistress.”
She kept moving. She knew the ward’s cadence the way she knew Blightbend’s damp stones. Pinch of yarrow for bleeding, three drops of ghost nettle for cold that seeps from the inside.
Her mind was moving, too. It spun scenarios while her hands did the work. Bailey’s handwriting scrolled behind her eyes.Interlock, variant: for the holding of what strains to part. Must be severed.Severed with what, exactly? She moved from bed to table to shelf, crushing, pouring, cutting gauze, while inside she was building an argument with the dark.
Maybe I can find every scattered contamination and stitch wards around them? No, too many, too far. Sever the curse at its source? Bailey never wrote what that source was… Helpful, Bailey. Very thorough of you. Or maybe…ground it. Redirect it. If interlock wanted to fuse, then maybe I could give it something else to fuse to. A decoy. A focus, something strong enough to drink the curse dry.
A Weftmark.
Her fingers smudged rosemary across the slate as she wrote the word without meaning to. Weftmark: a focus for warp-prone magic. Thread must meet anchor. Anchor must not break. Which meant iron and thorn. Which meant something living, somethingremembering, something that could sit at the crossroads and sayhereto every wayward stitch of the spell.
She bit her lip. The plan was a skeleton at best, more jumble than theory, but it was the first thing that didn’t sound like “lie down and die.”
