We didn’t say his name like an invitation, but the memory uncoiled anyway: teeth like winter, the crack of stone, the Ward throwing itself between me and a body built for ruin. I still saw the way the cottage flared, how the butterfly vines burned like a prayer candle. How my magic came up in me like a tide and then kept coming.
And Elira, Grandma Elira, her hand in mine and then not.
A suitcase bumped into the pillar near my hip, snapping me back. I bent to steady it for its flustered owner, one of our midlife witches with a smile that could talk a storm out of raining.
“Thank you, Headmistress,” she said, breathless. “See you in the fall. Try to rest!”
“You too,” I said.
When the doors closed behind the last student, the foyer exhaled with us. The charmed fern drooped, finally allowed to stop waving. Somewhere deeper in the building, a clock chimed the hour and then changed its mind about chiming the next one. Keegan rubbed his thumb along the edge of my sleeve as if memorizing the stitching.
“Autopilot,” I said, surprising myself.
He glanced down at me. “Hmm?”
“I feel like I’ve been on it since the battle,” I said, speaking to the pillar at first and then to him because he was the only person I trusted to hold that honesty without poking holes in it. “Teaching, mending, smiling for a hundred women who needed to see the person in charge be steady. Pouring tea in a moving carriage while the wheels wobble. I keep doing the next almost right thing.”
He took that in. He always did. Keegan listened with his eyes as much as his ears. Hazel, today. Warm in the middle and flanked by worry.
“You kept us breathing,” he said. “Autopilot or not.”
“I’m not asking for a medal,” I said, even though part of me kind of wanted one in the shape of a teacup. “I just…sometimes I think if I stop to feel all of it, I’ll never start moving again.”
A soft sound mumbled from him, not pity, but agreement. “I know the feeling.”
“I know you do.” I tipped my head up toward him. “How are you? The answer I’ll accept is not ‘fine’ or any synonyms.”
He huffed a laugh that wasn’t really a laugh. “Synonyms are out, then. That cuts my repertoire in half.”
“Keegan.”
He folded one big hand over the other and looked at our reflection in a piece of antique glass. It threw the two of us back at ourselves, a little blurred at the edges. There was a line between his brows he didn’t used to have. The curse had colored him darker for a while, then lighter, then stranger still. We kept chiseling at it, and it kept returning with a new face.
“I’m…not sleeping,” he said at last, choosing each word like a tool. “But it isn’t the same as before. It used to be shadowsgnawing. Now it’s…noise. Like the forest when it’s about to storm. I can hear it…the pressure of it all. And,” he added, almost sheepish, “I keep dreaming about the roof.”
“The roof?”
“The gargoyles,” he said, like that made perfect sense, which for us, it did. “Karvey is arguing with a raven that isn’t there. I can’t tell if it’s a memory or a warning.”
“We’ll put that in Nova’s cauldron,” I said. “See what bubbles.”
“Does she have one?”
I chuckled and shrugged. “I don’t know. It just seems like she should.”
He nodded, but his gaze had drifted to the high staircase, to the landing where Grandma Elira used to wait just so she could greet me before I reached her. The throb behind my ribs answered the look.
“Do you feel it,” I asked, “the place where she should be?”
“I feel the place she is,” he said quietly. “Inside the walls. In the way the lights hold a little longer at night. In the way the library remembers what you need.”
My throat went tight. “She gave herself to save the thing I was supposed to protect.”
He squeezed my hand. “She didn’t do it to make you smaller.”
“I know.” I blinked. “I just wish I’d had more time to say the right words.”
“You said the ones you had,” he said, without flinching from the ache. “She knew.”
