My Mate's Last Message Wasn't for Me novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: Cormick's POV: Veil-Wool

Cormick's POV

The seamstress worked in a high room above the Hall kitchens, with a long table and a window full of lamp-lit thread.

She had made my christening gown. She had made my grandmother's Rite dress.

I put the grey scarf on her table and the two threads beside it, and Seren stood at my shoulder with her arms crossed tight.

The old woman looked at them for a long time.

Then she took out a pair of glasses I had never seen her wear and picked up the thread with a tweezer.

"Where did you get this?"

"The hem of that scarf," Seren said. "And off an Ormond elder's coat."

"Of course you did." She laid it down. "That's veil-wool."

"What's veil-wool?" I asked.

"A craft the council banned on the plain forty years ago. The Ormond loom kept it anyway." She tapped the grey thread. "You spin a wolf's scent out of the air with it. Not from everyone. From one nose."

"Whose?"

"The weaver names it at the loom. Whoever the thread is woven against can't smell the wearer. Anyone else can."

Seren said, very quietly, "Pip always smelled me fine through it. So did the whole dance wing."

"Of course they did. The veil makes a hole in one wolf's nose and nowhere else."

I heard my own voice, flat and slow.

"Who does a family weave a veil against?"

The seamstress took off the glasses.

"A mate," she said. "You don't veil a stranger. A stranger can pass you in a corridor and neither of you cares. It is used when a wolf is promised, from birth, to one she must not be found by."

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