Page 105 of The Threads Between

Inside, untouched, lay a folded piece of paper.

August let out a breath. His hands were shaking slightly, but his expression⁠—

I had never seen him look like that. Hopeful and afraid and astonished all at once.

“I did not destroy it,” he said quietly. Almost to himself. “I broke the binding without destroying what it held.”

“Cutting is not always destruction,” Beatrice said. There was something warm in her voice now, something almost maternal. “Sometimes it is release. Sometimes it is mercy. A thread cut cleanly can be rewoven. A bond severed with care leaves both sides intact.”

August stared at the open box for a long moment.

“All my life,” he said, “I believed I was built for ending things. That my only purpose was to unmake. To ruin.”

“Your father told you that,” I said.

“Yes.” His voice was rough. “And I believed him.”

I crossed to him and took his face in my hands so he had to look at me.

“Your father was wrong. He used you to destroy because that served his purposes. But this—“ I gestured to the box, the intact letter, the ward released without violence. “This is what you truly are. Freedom. You break chains, August. You cut people loose from what binds them.”

His eyes searched mine. He was testing the idea, I could feel it through the bond. Turning it over. Examining it for flaws. Waiting for it to crumble the way good things had always crumbled in his life.

It held.

He pulled me against him and held on.

Beatrice quietly excused herself.

***

We returned to training the next morning, but the energy had shifted. August moved differently now, less braced for failure, more curious about what he could do.

Beth arrived with more complex wards. An elderly Weaver named Margaret offered threads she had woven into a protective amulet for her daughter decades ago.

One by one, August learned to read them. Learned to find the seams, the anchor points, the places where cutting would release rather than destroy.

And I watched him transform.

The man who had flinched from his own power now worked with focused intensity. His movements grew more confident. His cuts grew cleaner. And the bond hummed with something new, something I had never sensed in him before. Pride. Not arrogance. Not the cold satisfaction his father might have taken in dominance. Just the simple, earned pride of a man discovering he was capable of something good.

“Lily,” Beatrice said without looking up from the ward she was examining. “You are sitting idle.”

I blinked. “I'm observing.”

“You are observing August work while your own power goes unused.” She finally looked at me, one eyebrow raised in that particular way that suggested she found my reasoning inadequate. “He will never need as much practice as you needed and still need. His job is far easier than yours, cutting versus creating from nothing. Which makes it all the more inefficient for you to sit idle while he practices.”

August's mouth curved. “Yeah, Lily. Just going to sit there while I do all the work?”

I shot him a look. Through the bond, his amusement, warm and teasing and entirely too pleased with himself.

“What exactly do you suggest?” I asked Beatrice.

“He severs. You restore.” She said it as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. “Practice working together. August, break something. Lily, put it back.”

Beatrice produced another knotted thread, this one more complex, with multiple bindings woven through it. It floated in the air before us.

“August, sever the central knot. Lily, restore it before the binding collapses entirely.”