“Maude?” Selene’s voice dropped in. “You’re grinding the slate.”
She looked down. Her pestle was carving neat aggression into the tablet. She set it aside. “Oops. New texture.”
Selene’s eyes were a question. Maude ignored them.You’re helping, she told herself.You’re not burning anything down. You’re helping. She moved to the tincture table and measured ghost nettle drops—two, not three, unless she wanted Captain Farrow to sleep ’til spring. She corked the bottle, tied a label with quick, ruthless bows that would never come undone.
Selene watched from across the aisle, suspicion and affection warring. Maude kept her face neutral: a hint of menace,nothing to see here. Inside, it felt like she was building a dam with matchsticks.
By late afternoon, the ward slowed. Selene finally cornered Maude at the jar shelf. “Do you want to tell me why you’re here?” she asked lightly.
Maude tucked stray hair back with two fingers. “Enjoying the ambiance. Love what you’ve done with the foot baths.”
“Uh-huh.” Selene tilted her head. “You came to take care of people.”
“Don’t spread that rumor.”
They just looked at one another for a beat. Selene, patient and luminous; Maude, dead-eyed and dug-in.
Eventually, Selene sighed. “Fine. Keep your secrets. But take a sandwich.” She pushed a heel of honey loaf and ham into Maude’s hands like it was a prescription. “Eat. Then go do whatever you came to do. Preferably without dying.”
“Noted.” Maude tucked the food under her arm like contrabandand stripped off the apron. She paused at the door. “Selene?”
“Mm?”
“Thanks. For letting me…not break anything.”
Selene’s smile was quiet and warm. “You never break the things you decide to hold.”
Sixteen
Her cottage met her with its usual mutter of charms. The runes Bailey had carved into the beams glowed their low, reassuring amber. On most nights, they felt like a hand at her back. Tonight, they felt like a row of tutors watching to see if she’d cheat.
She cleared the table of ordinary life—a teacup with a lipstick crescent, a spoon she didn’t remember using, a single bobby pin she’d been pretending was a bookmark. She pulled the leather-bound spellbook with Bailey’s margins into the lamplight, then set out the old, sensible scaffolding first because muscle memory insisted: ironvine, blackthorn bark, yarrow, rosemary, bloodroot, moondust caps, and shadowbell bloom.
AWeftmark—braided vine studded with thorns, parchment sigil sealed in beeswax, tuned to shadowbell. Not a charm so much as a siphon. Bailey’s old stopgap, something he used when a hex outpaced him. Not a cure. A bleed-off. A way of tricking the curse into thinking it had somewhere better to be while you scrambled to fix the real damage.
She stood over the neat little list, hands braced on the table, and felt a lump rise in her throat. A simple drain wouldn’t be enough. Not for this. Not with the changes slipping quietly through the village so quickly. What she needed wassomething she could build with her own hands that wasn’t Bailey’s, something as stubborn and ugly and unkillable as what lived in her ribs.
She closed his book.
“Fine,” she told the lamp. “We do it my way.”
She unlocked the bottom drawer of the apothecary cabinet—the one Grim never tried to pry because even he respected boundaries when they hummed—and brought out the rarities she saved for stubborn problems.
Ashen ivy, brittle and gray, cut from ruin-stone upriver where the water had long since given up.
Glasswort resin, a honeyed lump of sap bled from plants along a shattered ley line.
Heartmire salt, dull silver, scraped from the bed of a storm-cracked lake.
Wolfsbone, ground fine from grave-bone mineral.
Night-apple peel, ribbons that glimmered like bruises in the dark.
Together, they would bind and steady, draw old magic out, mute her power’s glare, and hold what didn’t belong anywhere else.
Maude laid the new bones of her spell beside Bailey’s tried-and-true, a before-and-after she refused to apologize for.
The shape came to her hands first: a seam-loom, a narrow figure-eight woven from ashen ivy so the spell had to pass through one throat, then the other. She warmed the glasswort resin over a low blue flame until it went clear, then brushed it along the ivy to harden the braid without killing its mean little will. Wolfsbone crumbled to dust beneath the pestle, the rhythm a drumbeat under the cottage’s runes. The dust met the heartmire salt in the bowl, shining together until it looked like crushed moonlight. Night-apple peel came last, pared into long, even ribbons that curled when the knife left them, slick with their own secret.
