Skonk coughed, badly hiding a snort.
I scrubbed a hand over my face. “We have five days until the joining. I need to be reading. Studying. Talking to the book sprites. Not… whatever this is.”
“This is also studying,” Nova said. “Your grandmother will likely not meet you on the ground. She’ll pick somewhere high, dramatic, full of thin air and thinner patience. If you don’t want to look up at her, you need to be comfortable looking down.”
“Why are all my metaphors suddenly vertical?” I muttered.
The Silver Wolf took one step closer, and the air around her shifted. The butterflies along the edge of the Ward changed their flight to match her pulse.
“Fear is a weight,” she said quietly. “It keeps you from lifting when you need to. It also keeps you from being foolish. We’re not trying to erase it. We’re trying to teach it which direction to lean.”
Stella fluffed her shawl. “You stood in the Hollows while your priestess grandmother threw knives at your head. You can handle a few minutes of controlled descent.”
“Controlled,” I repeated. “I heard that word. I feel there’s a lie in it.”
Twobble reached into his vest and produced a folded sheet of paper that had definitely seen better days. He slapped it against his palm.
“Behold,” he said, “the plan.”
I took one look at the scribbles with arrows, circles, and a little stick figure with wild hair labeledMaeveand a series of increasingly chaotic doodles labeledmaybe not this muchand felt my soul attempt to exit my body through my ears.
“That’s not a plan,” I said. “That’s a cry for help.”
Skonk peered over my shoulder.
“You’re looking at the wrong side,” he said. “Flip it.”
The other side was worse, with a rough drawing of the Academy tower, a dotted line labeledtrajectory,and a huge, aggressive arrow pointing upward, withdon’t dieunderlined three times at the bottom.
“I’m not jumping off anything,” I said. “I have barely accepted that ladders exist.”
Keegan leaned in, his shoulder brushing mine.
“We’re not starting with the tower,” he said. “We’ll start in the Ward. The magic there is softer. It catches.”
“It also launched Twobble into a hedgerow for years,” I said.
“A learning experience,” Twobble sniffed. “I now know hedges intimately.”
Nova’s smile widened.
“You know the feeling when the Ward lifts you, just for a heartbeat?” she asked me. “When it approves of something you’ve done and gives you that little buoy?”
“Yes,” I admitted. It was one of my favorite pieces of magic: the almost-lift, the sense of being less heavy than usual.
“We’re going to teach you how to nudge that,” she said. “Not to fly like a bird. To fall like someone who decided the ground doesn’t get the only vote.”
The dread in my chest squirmed.
Keegan tilted his head, searching my face.
“You don’t have to,” he said quietly. “We’ll work around it if you say no. I’ll never push you off anything.”
“That’s my job,” Twobble muttered.
Skonk elbowed him so hard he nearly fell down the stairs.
Everyone watched me. Keegan, with his patient love, and Twobble, with his mischievous grin, and the logical part of me wanted to run off the Academy grounds and never come back, but the wilder side told me to stay.
