He looked like a man being knighted by dust.
“What’s this part do?” he asked, nodding to the bone-and-salt mixture.
“Draws out old magic,” she said. “Interlock loves whatever’s buried and afraid. This coaxes it above ground where I can make eye contact.”
“How charming.” He gestured to the night-apple peel. “And the ribbons?”
“Mask,” she said. “Keeps the thing from seeing me seeing it. So it doesn’t decide to graft onto my spine.”
He winced.
She set a copper bowl at the seam where the figure-eight pinched and poured in warmed resin until it pooled like a meltedwindow. The cottage smelled sweet and electric. While it cooled to tack, she dropped in the four shadowbell petals one by one. Oli didn’t ask what it was. He just breathed with her. It helped, which made her nervous and grateful at the same time.
They chalked a circle on the floorboards. Her circles were always a little oval, a little mean—more ditch than lace. She set dishes at the cardinal marks: heartmire salt in the north, ash in the south, water in the west, and thistledown in the east to remind the spell that weightless things rise when you let them. Oli placed a single silver coin at the center of each dish—“For the ferryman,” he said, and when she gave him a look, he amended, “For luck, then.”
“Luck is for people who don’t plan.”
“Indulge me,” he said, and she didn’t argue because the coins gleamed like small promises.
She pricked her thumb and let a single drop fall onto the resin’s cooling skin. It spread, red threading the clear.Honesty clause. The spell wouldn’t hold a lie. She didn’t look at Oli when she did it, but didn’t explain. He said nothing, which was the right kind of mercy.
“Ready?” he asked, hands hovering.
“No…let’s do it.”
She set her palms over the seam and began. It wasn’t Bailey’s cadence. It wasn’t neat. Her magic rose the way it always did since Bailey died—like ink spilling too fast across paper, tangled and uncontainable, the taste of storms that refused to be scheduled. She whispered the unbinding line she’d stitched from three different dead languages, laced with the memory of how Bailey had once said her name when she was small and mean.
Oli caught her rhythm fast, breathing in on her in-breath, out on her out. When she tipped her head, he poured a narrow trickle of wolfsbone salt into the pinch of the figure-eight—the tight throat where both loops met—so the spell would have grit enough to catch.
The air changed. It always did when big magic bent its headto look at you. The runes in the beams ticked like a dozen clocks all deciding on one time. Somewhere outside, a nightjar called and then didn’t. The cottage floor lifted half a hair, or maybe it was the skin on her arms.
She felt it come: not a thing, not a mind, just a pressure with intentions. Hungry to belong. Hungry to bind.
“Don’t say hello to it,” she muttered, eyes on the seam. “It gets attached.”
“I hate that,” Oli whispered.
The first nudge pressed along the figure-eight like a palm sliding across a banister. It found the throat, slipped, found it again. Maude pressed her hands inward, crimping the space just enough to force the current through the narrow. It pushed. The glasswort held. The night-apple muffler did its work, dampening the flash, funneling the pressure. Her jaw ached. Oli tipped in another pinch of bone and salt at her jerked nod. He didn’t flinch when the resin hissed like a candle taking a breath.
The singing started then—a thin thread of sound not heard with ears. Bailey had called it the seam-note. Maude called it the warning. It meant the thing was choosing. She leaned closer, smelling heartmire and old rain, and said, “Here,” to the spell in the voice she saved for cats on ledges.
It listened.
It flowed.
Not all of it—she didn’t expect mercy—but enough. She felt the pull in the boards under her boots, in the chalk of the circle, in her spit and her spine. The cottage air cooled. Her scalp prickled. The runes went from ticking to a low, satisfied hum. The seam-loom’s narrow throat brightened one breath and then settled to the dull glow of something that would work as long as it was fed.
Her knees trembled. Oli slid his hand closer—not touching, but close enough to catch her.
She did not fall.Excellent. Character growth.
The pressure eased by degrees. Maude waited until she couldtaste her tongue again, then lifted her hands. The singing faded into the background. The coins in the dishes did not rattle. She looked at the loom until the room sharpened.
“It’s grounded,” she said, voice low.
“How grounded?”
“Enough to start drinking,” she said. “Enough to keep the seams from wandering while I build bigger teeth.”
