The crowd shifted. Nobody spoke. Even Veyne’s ledger drooped like it was embarrassed to be seen. Eventually, he managed, voice brittle, “Be that as it may?—”
“It may,” Maude snapped. “And while you’re reviewing, keep your hands off the ring. Anyone touches it, I’ll hex their eyebrows so they migrate south and never return.”
A child snorted with laughter so loud it became contagious. Somewhere behind them, a vendor muttered, “Leave the girl be.”
Veyne, sensing his audience thinning, snapped his book shut. “Very well. We will…review.” He aimed a last brittle smile at Maude. “Do keep it safe, Ms. Harrow. Another incident?—”
“Then don’t cause an incident,” she said sweetly.
Veyne stalked off, the inspectors trailing behind with the careful faces of men trying not to look like cowards.
The tension bled out of the square by degrees. And then, as if a spell broke, life restarted: the fiddler picked up a tune; the teenagers resumed hitting each other; a pair of elderly women argued about whether the wyvern statue had always had that expression (it had).
Wesley stayed where he was, shoulders squared, gaze steady on Maude. Watching like she was something he’d set in the oven and couldn’t afford to take his eyes off in case it burned.
“You okay?” he asked at last. Not soft. Not pitying. Just there.
Her throat felt raw. “No,” she admitted, the truth scraping on the way out. “But the third loom is set.”
He nodded once. “It is.”
She could feel it now: a low, contented purr under thefountain, the way a cat hums in a room where it isn’t being observed. The square had steadied. The tiny wrongnesses had un-wronged themselves.
Wesley angled his body slightly, shoulder brushing hers—barely a touch, easily misinterpreted as crowd mechanics—and lowered his voice. “I’m going to hang a sign near the ring. Polite, firm.‘Do not touch. If you value your eyebrows.’” A beat. Then, “I’ll also post myself here for a while. Make it look official.”
“You have a business to run,” she said, eyes on the chalk line. “Go bake something, smug.”
“I did. At dawn.” He tilted his head toward the chimney in the distance. “Sourdough boules the size of your ego.”
She almost smiled. “Must be enormous.”
“Colossal.”
Silence stretched, weighted. He didn’t move. She didn’t either.
Finally, she muttered, “Thanks. For what you said.”
“It was true,” he said simply.
She kept her eyes on the chalk ring, unwilling to let him see her face. But low in her gut, ache and warmth folded into one another, a knot of feeling so tightly drawn she could no longer name its strands.
Twenty
Fog hung low over Mistwood Hills, slow and hazed, the air thick with the char of woodfires and the copper bite of spent offerings burned on doorsteps. Samhain always smelled like endings and beginnings tangled together—sweet rot from carved gourds left overnight, wax from guttering candles, the faint tang of mulled wine spilled sticky across the cobblestones.
Light pried through the crooked panes of Maude’s bedroom, catching the chalk of her runes and tugging their metallic scent into the air. Her quilt had long since migrated to the floor. So had she. Now she lay sprawled across the boards, cheek pressed into their ridges, hair a halo of strawberry-blonde curls fanned unevenly on the rug. The floor and she were on speaking terms—it didn’t mind her company.
Selene knocked once and then didn’t bother with a second, because boundaries were for people without ward-defying key-shaped hairpins. She breezed in wearing a sweater the color of storm-light and carrying a basket that steamed in three distinct directions.
“Breakfast,” Selene sang, kicking the door shut with her heel. “And before you ask—no, I didn’t bring a lecture on joy. I brought carbs.”
Maude pushed up on her elbows. “Those are the same thing.”
Selene set the basket on the trunk at the foot of the bed and untied the twine. Not just any twine—bakery twine. Pastel colors, all smug about it. Inside: a garlic-salted croissant still warm enough to fog the lid, a savory hand pie that smelled like caramelized onions and thyme, a little jar of lemon curd with a ribbon (kill it with fire), and two paper cups of coffee, one marked with a tiny ink star.
Maude stared at the star until it felt like it was staring back.
Selene coughed into her fist in the world’s least innocent way. “I passed a place on my way here.”
