So, Maude did the worst, bravest thing: she let Wesley in. She opened the channel they’d stumbled on before—between her magic and his craft, first discovered at the counter when grief and anger had nearly chewed her to paste. Sorrow bled into warmth like water into flour. It didn’t vanish; it folded, stretched, turned malleable. His strength caught her fury and gave it shape.
The Weftmark drank. And this time, it drank true.
She felt the interlock’s hunger meet the softness she’d braided into the ring—the promise of a place safe to be contained. The pull redirected. The lanterns stopped crying glass. Across town, canvas decided to be canvas. Wood decided to be wood. Two men who’d been stuck hip-to-hip in a macabre almost-embrace shuddered and stepped apart, blinking like they’d forgotten their own names.
On the bridge, the iron shuddered and then settled. The chalk line under their hands cooled. The moondust sheen sank like stars drowned in cloud. The river kept hurling itself at stone in thatbelligerent way rivers do when they love something enough to try to break it; the stone loved it back by not moving.
Maude’s breath hitched. The quiet that followed wasn’t empty. It was full.
“It listened.”
She didn’t say it for drama. She said it because the words arrived and deserved air.
Wesley looked at her the way people look at sunrise when they’ve been convinced the night is permanent. “You made it listen,” he said, voice rough, reverent in a way that made her skin prickle.
Then he did something reckless, and also entirely obvious.
His hand found her waist, tugged her close—and before her brain could protest, his mouth was on hers.
Bright, fragile, firework mid-burst—she went still. The world stilled with her: river hushed, iron low, the veil sharp on her tongue.
Then the dam broke.
Her mouth met his, fierce, aching, like she’d been starving without knowing. Like she’d held her breath for months and only now remembered air lived here—in him, in this impossible closeness. Her hands fisted in his shirt, not to pull away, but to keep from falling.
Wesley stumbled with her, backing them into the rail, iron biting through her coat. The world tilted, steadied only by the desperate knot of their bodies.
It wasn’t pretty. Pretty was for ballads. This was crushing, exhausted, startled—his hands sliding to her jaw, her mouth opening on a gasp that wasn’t permission so much as recognition. He tasted of sugar and smoke and the warmth she’d been refusing since spring. Tears came the moment relief cracked her open. She hated that. She let them anyway.
“I’ve got you,” he said against her mouth, against her cheek, into the place under her ear that heard truth first. He didn’t loosen his hold when she shook. “You don’t have to keep carrying everything by yourself.”
It was as if he knew the words weren’t only his—like he’d caught them drifting through the veil, whispered once by Bailey and now returned, full circle, to her.
“Let me hold some of it. Maude. Let me stay.”
Her name in his mouth did something stupid to her lungs. The words stampeding in her chest jammed against her throat until it was a fist. The future loomed like an animal at the clearing’s edge—wild, skittish, ready to bolt if she so much as looked at it.
So Maude did the only thing she trusted herself to do: she nodded—one small, furious, grateful dip—and leaned an inch closer. Just enough to admit she liked the way the world felt when he was holding it beside her.
Behind them, the square roared a different sound—cheers and shaky laughter, the sputter of one last firework drawing a pumpkin that arced and bowed across the sky.
Across the way Maude could see the magistrates fidgeting, caught between rage and a public they suddenly couldn’t lead with a pitchfork. Veyne clutched his ledger like a life raft and looked personally offended by miracles.
Maude turned away, swiped her cheeks with the heel of her hand, and sat back. Wesley’s thumb lingered at the edge of her jaw. He looked like he wanted to say more. She looked like she might allow it later.
They crossed the Bonebridge side by side—a little too close, a little too careful, as if one sudden move might startle the night back into chaos. Below, the river hurled itself at stone and survived. Lanterns swung. The town exhaled, something it hadn’t known it was holding finally loosening, sliding back into place.
Maude didn’t say thank you. Not because she wasn’t grateful, but because if she opened that door, the flood would take them both. She did, however, let their fingers brush once.Twice. Then tangled for three heartbeats before she pretended she needed both hands for her satchel.Growth.
In the square, the wyvern fountain purred. The Weftmark held, content. Children restarted their stupid sword fights. Oli, predictably, found a drum and declared ownership. Selene leaned against a post with her arms folded and her smile quiet, watching Maude like she’d just witnessed a feral cat decide a human hand was a good place to sleep.
The night wasn’t done with them. The town would still talk. Veyne would still scheme. There were ledgers to terrify and looms to tend and a hundred ways for everything to go crooked again. But the ground under Maude’s boots was balanced. The pull in her chest had somewhere to go that wasn’t an open wound. And when the music tilted toward another slow song—because the musicians had a sense of narrative—Wesley’s hand found the small of her back like it had a homing rune inked into the skin.
She didn’t say yes. She didn’t say no.
She stepped forward.
That counted.
