The kettle begins to whistle behind us. Nobody moves toward it.
"The working is in the binding and the ink. It's wound through the words themselves. The story is the body of the spell." Noemi's fingers pull back from the page. "Every time it'sread, every time it's told, every time a Sunfell girl learns it by heart, it renews."
She finally looks at me.
"You've been reading it because you believe it’s the story of your family. It’s a tradition, one that you find yourselves compelled to share and blame for your misfortunes. But by reading it, you’ve been feeding it for generations, giving power to it."
The kitchen goes silent.
Even the kettle seems to change its mind.
"Break it," Grammy says, her voice grim, determined. "You're licensed. You broke a tangle-charm on the Hendrick boy. Break this."
Noemi looks stricken. "I can't."
"Girl—"
"Ican't." Noemi's eyes shine. Her voice gets quieter, which means every word lands harder. "This craft predates my license. It may predate my Codex. Emotional workings can't be layered.”
The exact same thing she said about Mirelle and why she can’t remove the effects of the potion from Mirelle.
Noemi puts one finger beside the book. "This issomething else. Generations deep. Fed by belief. Wound through a family line. If I set a counter-working against it, it would lash out against every Sunfell woman alive."
Her gaze comes to me.
"It would fight through you, Lissy. And it would win."
My hands have gone cold.
"Whoever made this used the strongest binding there is, and it isn't hate." Noemi swallows. "I know this craft. I've—" She stops, catches herself. Whatever lives behind that sentence, she folds it away. For one moment, my friend of twenty years looks like a house with one room locked from the inside. "It's grief-craft," she says finally. "Someone made this out of a broken heart."
Grammy sits down.
"Not only to punish your family," Noemi continues. "Grief-craft binds the caster too. You seal your own wound into the binding so it never closes, and then it won't let anyone else's wounds close either."
She looks at the bowed seamstress on the page.
"Somewhere back in your line, somebody loved a Sunfell woman and lost her. Or was left by one. Or watched her choose someone else. I can't read which. But whoever wrote this story put themselves inside it."
Her fingers curl against the table.
"This is what happens when love doesn't finish cleanly. It doesn't disappear. It rots where it was buried and poisons whatever grows above it."
My legs decide I'm sitting before the rest of me agrees. All my life, I've argued with the fable staring down at me from the mantel. Superstition. A dead woman's warning. A story with only the power I gave it.
And it wasreal.
Real enough for Noemi to feel from across the room.
Every night Grammy read it to me. I worked the oak leaf and needle into many of my creations. Every wedding where I stood at the edge and told myself,Not for you, Lisette.
I fed it.
We all did.
Generations of Sunfell women reciting our own chains like a bedtime prayer.
My throat closes. “Is there a way to… stop feeding it?” I have no other words for it.
