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Elowen was quiet for a long moment. Then she withdrew her hand from his face.

“I cannot forgive you,” she said. “Not today. Perhaps not ever. What you did to our son—“ Her voice fractured. “What you did to the Weavers.”

Elias closed his eyes. Tears tracked down his temples into his hair.

“But I am alive,” she said. “And so are you. And so is August. And that is more than either of us deserved.”

She tried to stand. Her legs wouldn't hold her. I was there before I knew I had moved, catching her arm, steadying her. She looked up at me with those hazel eyes, my eyes, and I watched her see the man her boy had become.

“August, my boy. My beautiful boy,” she whispered. “You grew up strong.”

Her arms opened, and I came apart.

My knees buckled first. Then the rest of me followed, folding into her the way I had when I was five and the world was too large and she was the only person who could make it small again. She was frail, barely standing herself, but she held me. Her hand found the back of my head the way it used to, fingers threading through my hair, and the sound that came out of me was not a man's grief. It was older than that. The sound of a boy who had been waiting twenty-seven years to be held by the one person who never should have let go.

She didn't shush me. Didn't tell me it would be alright. She just held on and let me break, because mothers know that sometimes breaking is the only way back to whole.

Because the man she was looking at, the one who had cut corruption from his father's soul and fought his way back from nothing, that man existed because of someone who should have been standing beside me to hear those words.

And where Lily should have been, where her warmth should have been filling the bond between us, there was only the thread itself. Still there. Still reaching. But silent, the way a house is silent when the person who made it a home has gone.

She had given me back my mother.

And I had lost her.

CHAPTER 38

LILY

The world ended in light.

When it came back, it was cold. Not the warmth of a house, not the bone-deep chill of stone cellars. This cold was thin, electric, wrong against my skin, as if the air itself had changed shape.

I hit the ground hard.

Hurled forward by a force I couldn't see, couldn't fight, couldn't stop. My skirts tangled around my legs. My boots struck something smooth instead of cobblestone and I went down, palms scraping against a surface too flat, too perfect to be any road I knew. The momentum of a hundred years slammed into my chest and kept going.

I gasped. Couldn't breathe. Couldn't think. Gold light still flickered at the edges of my vision, the residue of what I had held, what I had almost become. My hands shook so violently I couldn't push myself up. My whole body trembled with the aftershock of nearly burning out, of holding a hundred souls and somehow surviving.

Had I survived? Had they? Lorien. Ysella. The Oxford Weavers. Elowen. Had they made it home? Had they woken in the world they'd been torn from, gasping and alive? Or had I failed, burned out too soon, let the threads scatter back into the void?

I didn't know. I might never know.

I forced myself onto my knees. My hand shot out for balance, catching against a hard metal surface. A carriage, no, not a carriage. Too low. Too smooth. No horse.

My reflection stared back at me from a dark glass window: pale face, hair loose and wind-tangled, bodice smudged with soot, skirts torn at the hem. A woman from another century, thrown into a world that had moved on without her.

My breath hitched. Where am I?

Light burned overhead, not flame, not gas, but a harsh white glow that hummed faintly. Rows of identical lights stretched down the street like a path of artificial stars. Buildings towered on either side, familiar and alien at once. No carriages. No horses. No voices calling out in accents I had learned to navigate. Only the distant rush of something mechanical and the whisper of wind through empty streets.

“August.” My voice came out raw, scraped hollow.

The last thing I remembered was being in his arms. The look in his eyes, fierce, desperate, final. His lips against my forehead. His voice, breaking: Find your way back to me. And then the severing. The push. The world turning white.

The first thing I did was reach.

Not with my hands but with everything else. The part of me where he lived now, a steady warmth behind my ribs, a presence I no longer had to think about to find.