Page 87 of The Threads Between

I didn't try to fix it. Didn't offer platitudes about how Syra would want her to celebrate, or how the grief would ease with time. Some things couldn't be fixed. Some things just had to be sat with.

So I sat with her.

After a while, Marigold's hand found mine. Small fingers, cold from the night air, gripped mine tight.

“She told me once,” Marigold said, voice barely audible, “that the strongest repairs are the ones that show their scars.”

My throat tightened.

“She was right,” I said.

Marigold was quiet for a long moment. “I held the shield. At the warehouse. When they were shooting.”

“You did.”

“I didn't know I could do that.”

“Neither did anyone else.”

She looked at me then. Eleven years old. Already carrying more than anyone should.

“Syra would have been proud,” I said.

Marigold's eyes glistened. But she nodded and held my hand a little tighter.

We sat together and watched the fire burn.

My gran used to say that grief was just love with nowhere to go. She'd been wrong about one thing—grief wasn't love misplaced. It was love's proof of purchase. The cost of having been brave enough to need someone. Without it, the laughter around this fire would mean nothing. The bond in my chest would be just magic, not miracle. Every person I had lost had carved space inside me, and it was that hollowed-out space that made room for everything I'd found.

I would not trade the grief. Not for safety. Not for numbness. Not even for peace.

It meant I had loved well enough for the losing to matter.

Marigold had drifted to sleep against Claire's shoulder. The bottles had been passed and passed again. The conversations had softened into the comfortable murmur of people too tired to perform. I settled near the edge of the circle where Beth and Beatrice sat together, August beside me—always with me now, in ways both visible and not.

The two older women were speaking quietly, their words half-lost to the crackle of flames. Something about the ritual. About what the trees had done—lending power none of them had expected.

I hesitated at the edge of their conversation. The historian in me—the part that had spent years hunting fragments of lost women through incomplete archives—burned with questions.

Beth looked up and smiled faintly.

“You have questions,” she said.

“I always have questions.” I settled onto the ground nearby, pulling my blanket tighter. “It's something of a professional affliction.”

August lowered himself beside me. He had never been told the full shape of what he was. Only that he was dangerous. Only that he needed to be controlled.

“The texts I've studied,” I began, “they document the hunts. The persecution. What was done to the Weavers. But they never explain the magic itself.” I paused. “Where it comes from. Why it chooses who it chooses.”

Beth and Beatrice exchanged a glance. Something old passed between them.

“The oldest stories,” Beatrice said slowly, “speak of three sisters. The Fates.”

My breath caught. The Fates. Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos. I had read about them in a dozen traditions—Greek, Roman, Norse variations. Always dismissed as mythology by the academic texts.

“The Spinner, the Measurer, the Cutter,” Beth continued. “They wove the world before time learned to count itself. Before men built walls and called them civilization. Before any of the systems we live under now.”

“You're saying the Fates were real,” I said carefully.