She flung a line of salt in a thin, exact curve, feeling for the place the ley bucked hardest. “When I say breathe, you breathe with me.”
“Copy.”
A firework hammered the sky into gold. The crowdoohed like the world wasn’t lurching under their boots. Good. Oli doing what he was made to do.
Maude’s pulse tried to gallop away without her. It wasn’t the panic that got her—it was the memory braided into it, the way the wrongness in the hum wore Bailey’s absence like a face. The spell was a hunger for belonging. She knew that hunger. She’d fed it all summer on anger until it grew teeth.
“Hey.” Wesley’s voice cut clean. He had the night-apple peel already looped around the ironvine, his fingers moving with that maddening baker’s precision. “Look at me.”
She kept working.
“Look,” he said, “count with me. Four in. Hold two. Six out.”
“I don’t?—”
“Maude.”
She looked. He didn’t smile—he grounded. One, two, three, four in; hold; six out. His chest rose and fell like a metronome for a nervous system. Her own breath caught it without permission, matched, steadied. Rage moved to a back burner. Not gone—never gone—but tamed enough to wield.
“Glasswort,” she said, voice lower now, hands sure. “Three drops. Not four. If you give her four she’ll glass the whole square.”
“Three.” He uncorked the little vial with big, careful hands and let the resin fall exactly where she pointed—lemniscate over the waxed heart. The Weftmark shivered and then moaned as if somebody had rubbed the edge of a wineglass. Good. Not catastrophic. Yet.
“Heartmire,” she said. “Pinch only. We want her listening, not lashing out.”
He arched a brow. “You’re talking to a spell like it’s sentient.”
“It is.” She flung him the salt. “Every spell has a will. You just hope it agrees with yours.”
He didn’t argue. He pinched and scattered, his rhythm matching hers. He touched the ring with his fingertips—not timid, but respectful—the way a man might touch proved dough he could ruin if he forgot it was alive.
“Now,” she breathed, and set her palms down on the basin stone. “Breathe with me.”
They did. Together. Her words found the old track Bailey had cut for her when she was a girl—how to ask a thing to hold. She altered a line without thinking, made it blunter, and felt Wesley catch the shift and steady it like a second pair of hands on her magic.
The hum dropped half a tone. The water lost its syrupy thickness and went back to being water. Lanterns stopped dripping and started behaving. The distorted stalls sighed, canvas forgettingit ever flirted with wood. The ring under the fountain dimmed from fever to warm.
It took two minutes. It took a year.
When the Weftmark settled into that low, contented purr she recognized, Maude let herself sag back on her heels. Her hands trembled so hard she had to curl them into fists to get them to stop.
“It’s done.”
Wesley didn’t touch her. He only tilted his head—first toward the sky, where Oli punished the night with fireworks, then toward the far end of the square, where a slim figure knelt by the northeast corner, holding it steady with healer’s hands. Selene had the second loom singing like a wineglass too.
Around them, shouting tilted from fear to curiosity. People are simple: if a thing looks like it is going to eat them, they panic. If it looks like it is someone else’s problem, they gossip. Veyne hovered with his ledger as if it might block a hex on contact. A few brave idiots stepped closer.
Wesley didn’t even look up. “Back,” he snapped, voice pure command. “Unless you want your buttons fused to your shirt and your eyebrows in your shoes.”
They backed up. He didn’t even have to shout.
Maude’s heart skipped as the ring’s glow eased to a low murmur. “You’re useful.”
“Be still my heart,” he said. “Where to next?”
“The Bonebridge. The last loom.”
The bridge arched black over the river, an iron spine crossing white water. Ley lines braided there with currents and old stories. She’d saved it for last because it would be worst.
