Page 52 of Severe Husband Warning

Her expression softens. “I wasn’t certain I’d see you again.”

“Neither was I.”

She studies the street behind me anyway before lowering her voice.

“Was everything all right at the spire?”

The question catches me off guard. How do I explain that everything is both better and worse than before?

“Lord Rothgar believes me,” I say at last.

“And?”

“And believing isn’t enough,” I admit defeatedly.

She doesn’t ask what happened between us. She has lived long enough to recognize the look of someone carrying disappointment alongside hope.

Instead, she reaches beneath the stall and produces two chipped mugs.

“The tea’s terrible,” she says, motioning for me to follow. “But you’ll drink it anyway.”

We sit on the narrow bench tucked beside her stall where passing customers can scarcely hear us over the hum of merchants and shoppers.

I untie the small cloth bundle I’d carried from the spire and lay the weaver’s shuttle across the bench between us.

Then I tell her everything.

I tell her about the hidden lightning-works beneath the abandoned western spire, the rows of imprisoned humans forced to move focusing crystals until their bodies gave out, and the weapon Lord Malakor has been building beneath the city’s feet. I explain what Rothgar recognized the moment he saw the storm-moth thread still caught inside the shuttle’s groove—that only sanctioned lightning-works possess material like this, and that Old Man Theron’s discovery had placed him directly in Malakor’s path.

By the time I finish, Cora’s hands have curled tightly around the shuttle, the mended cloth forgotten in her lap. She stares at the thread as if seeing it differently now—as if it has become proof of everything she feared.

“They took him and so many others to work these conduits?”

I nod, unable to shake the memory of those exhausted faces bent beneath impossible labor.

“Rothgar believes we can expose him,” I say quietly. “He just needs evidence so strong, no one in the King’s court can dismiss it.”

She snorts softly. “They’ll have plenty of evidence by the time everyone’s gone.”

The conversation trails away beneath the noise of the market. Around us, merchants continue calling to passing customers as though nothing has changed, while Cora and I share the same fear that has lingered ever since Old Man Theron vanished.

Cora rubs absentmindedly at the handle of the mug before looking back at me.

“I walk half this district every week. Delivering mended clothes, bread, blankets when someone’s managed to scrape together enough coppers. People talk while I’m there. Sometimes they don’t even realize they’re telling me something important.”

I feel myself leaning forward.

“What sort of things?”

“Who hasn’t opened their shop. Which family suddenly needs extra bread. Which child keeps asking when their father is coming home.” She pauses. “People remember one another around here.”

“Then that’s where we begin,” I say, feeling the shape of an answer slowly emerge. “If Lord Rothgar needs proof, then we’ll help him build it.”

I look down at the shuttle resting between us.

“Let’s write down everything we know,” I say, turning the parchment toward us both. “Who disappeared. Where they lived. Where they worked. Who saw them last. Every person Malakor took had a life before they disappeared, if we can trace those lives, we may find the threads that lead back to him.”

As the ideas come, they gather momentum of their own.