"Except Elira,” I finished. “She told me you once walked one.”
Miora turned slowly toward me, the trace of her image trailing slightly behind like memory unwilling to catch up. Her eyes were softer than I’d ever seen them.
“Yes,” she said simply.
The word hung between us like an open door.
“I’m sorry,” I said, voice low. “I didn’t mean to press.”
She pulled out the opposite chair, though her form hovered just above it, never quite touching. She looked at the tea, then at me.
“When I saw mine,” she said, “it was dawn. There had been a storm the night before. It was one of those deep, unruly spring storms where the weather cracks the sky apart but doesn’t let the rain fall. I’d woken early. The air was still heavy with the promise of thunder, but it never came.”
I nodded, hoping for more.
“The path was violet,” she continued. “Silver at the edges, like it had been stitched with moonlight. It wound through the grounds beyond the old stone fence, and where it passed, the grass grew taller, lusher. Lilies were blooming in places I’d never planted and that were too early to bloom. And the air…”
She paused, eyes far away now.
“It smelled like the in-between,” she whispered. “Like salt and sweet and loss and home, all at once.”
A chill crept up my arms despite the fire’s warmth.
“The inn-between?” My heart stilled. “Wait. Are you a hedge witch?”
“Indeed.” Her eyes sparkled with pride. “And you are too, my dear.”
“You knew?”
“I did.” She didn’t offer more.
“What did the path want?” I asked.
Her gaze sharpened.
“That’s the thing, Maeve. A calling path doesn’twantanything. It offers. It reflects. It listens. But it doesn’t pull.”
I studied her face as the flicker in her outline steadied again.
“But you went through.”
“Yes.”
“And?”
Miora hesitated, then gave a ghost of a smile. “That’s the part I never told Elira. Not fully. Between you and me, she wasn’t happy I’d received one, and she hadn’t.”
“She was jealous?”
“Partly. I think she felt she was the more studied witch, the more loyal student.” Miora smiled fondly. “She was probably right, but that’s not how magic works. We don’t choose it. It chooses us.”
I leaned in.
“Anyway, I walked for what felt like hours, but there was no sun to measure the time, no shadow to follow. The trees shifted when I looked away from them, and some whispered while others wept, but they all watched as I roamed the path.”
My fingers curled around the mug a little tighter.
“I found myself in a mirror grove,” she continued. “Trees with bark like glass. Reflections in every direction. And every one of them showed a different version of me. One where I stayed home. One where I followed love. One where I never left the woods.”
