Page 100 of The Threads Between

Because of me. Because of Lily.

Through the bond, her attention. Her understanding. She knew exactly what sat heavy in my chest: being a symbol for something I had once tried to destroy.

The days after the bond ritual blurred into a rhythm of arrivals. By the twelfth of February, I had lost count of them. Weavers came to Diana's farmhouse in ones and twos and small, cautious groups throughout the afternoons, into the evenings, sometimes appearing at dawn as though they had traveled through the night. Some came by cart. Some came on foot. One elderly woman arrived on horseback, dismounting with the ease of someone who had been riding since before I was born.

Diana stopped protesting after the first dozen. She simply began making more soup.

I stood at the window and watched them gather in the yard below. Women of every age and bearing. Some in elegant clothes that spoke of comfortable lives carefully hidden. Others worn thin by years of running, of hiding, of pretending to be less than they were.

They did not look like an army. They looked like survivors. And perhaps that was more dangerous.

“Thirty-seven,” Garrick said from behind me. He had been moved to a chair by the window at his own insistence. Mira hovered nearby with an expression that suggested she was contemplating sedation. “I've been counting. Thirty-seven Weavers since midday, not including the ones already here.”

“Almost more than my father commands in hunters,” I said quietly.

“Yes.” Garrick's voice was thoughtful. “Rather changes the arithmetic, doesn't it?”

It did. For generations, the hunters had relied on secrecy and fear. Weavers hid. Weavers ran. Weavers did not gather in force because gathering meant exposure, and exposure meant death.

But now they were gathering anyway. Because they were done hiding.

In the yard below, a young woman demonstrated something to a cluster of others, threads spinning between her fingers in a pattern I did not recognize. Defensive, perhaps. A ward or a shield. The others watched with fierce attention, some of them clearly seeing magic used openly for the first time in their lives.

An older woman approached them. She had arrived an hour ago from somewhere north of London, and she moved with the careful economy of someone whose joints no longer forgave excess. But when she raised her hands, the threads that spun from her fingers were stronger than any I had seen, thick ropes of gold that wove together into something that looked almost architectural.

The young woman's eyes went wide.

“You're watching them like they might vanish,” Garrick observed.

“I am watching them because I spent all of my life making women like them vanish.”

The words came out flatter than I intended. Garrick was silent for a moment.

“And now you're going to help them survive,” he said finally. “Doesn't erase what came before. But it's not nothing, either.”

Something in my chest loosened. Garrick wasn't offering absolution. He was offering something harder to accept: acknowledgment that I was trying. That the trying mattered, even if it could never erase the blood already spilled.

“Thank you,” I said quietly.

Garrick's expression softened slightly. “Don't go all soft on me. I still think you're a disaster.”

“Noted.”

Lily was across the room, deep in conversation with Beth about logistics, but part of her reached for me. Always there now. A steady presence. I was no longer alone in carrying the weight of what I had been.

“She's good for you,” Garrick said, following my gaze. “Lily. I've never seen you this—“ He paused, searching for the word. “Present.”

“Present?”

“You used to disappear. Even when you were standing right in front of me, part of you was always somewhere else. Somewhere dark.” He shifted carefully, wincing at the pull on his wound. “You don't do that anymore.”

I thought about that. The years I'd spent as a stranger in my own life, present but not participating. Always doing as I was told. The corruption muting everything until I forgot there had ever been a version of me that existed without pain.

“The corruption is gone,” I said.

“It's not just the corruption.” Garrick's voice was unusually serious. “I watched you before all that. Before your father twisted everything. You were disappearing even then. She brought you back.”

I had no response to that.