Chapter Seventeen
The Academy always felt too big when the students went home.
During the term, it buzzed as teacups argued with hexed textbooks, familiars chased each other down staircases, and midlife witches made the kind of decisions that should legally require a chaperone.
But now, with summer session over and everyone gone to their towns and lives and reluctant families, the halls had slipped back into the kind of quiet that magnifies your own thoughts.
My shoes clicked along the corridor, echoing off old stone and fresh lemon oil. The charms hummed faintly in the walls. Somewhere far below, the boilers sighed. A breeze threaded through a cracked window, carrying the scent of rain and paper and a faint hint of book sprite candy from the library wing.
I should have been in my office, reviewing sign-up sheets and pretending I knew how to organize classes for hedge magic, curse theory, and magical self-esteem.
Instead, I roamed, touching the carved banisters, straightening a frame here, patting an amulet there. It made me feel like the Academy and I were checking in on each other.
Halfway past the old enchanted astronomy cubby, my butterfly mark tingled.
Not the usual soft awareness, that friendly prickle that said a sprite was pleased or Keegan had walked too close to one of the boundary lines.
This was sharper. A sudden, bright sting under the skin on my hip, as if someone had drawn a fingernail along the birthmark from the inside.
I stopped and pressed my palm to it through my sweater.
“Okay,” I murmured, alone in the hall. “That’s new. What are you complaining about now?”
The mark buzzed again in answer, heat flashing outward in a pattern I couldn’t translate yet. For a heartbeat, my thoughts went straight to the den below.
The dragons.
I pictured them in their hidden chamber, large and small, winged, and luminous. Their scales flickering like candlelight and their eyes ancient and knowing. They weren’t supposed to tug at me like this, but then, nothing in my life was behaving according to pre-approved magical guidelines.
“Is it you?” I whispered. “Or is this a please come fix another terrifying crack in reality kind of twinge?”
The sensation shifted, not deeper, exactly, but sideways. Like a tug on a different thread. It drew me not toward the library, but toward the old east wing, toward the mirrored corridor.
The last time I’d truly used the mirrors, I’d bent them to look back in time, only hours, only just enough, to see who had tried to breach the Butterfly Ward. It had worked, which stillastonished me. It had also shown me things I wasn’t ready to know. The mirrors had been quiet since Elira’s sacrifice, as if they, too, were in mourning.
Now, they pulsed ahead of me, a faint, insistent shimmer around the corner.
“Of course,” I sighed. “Why not?”
I followed the pull.
The mirror corridor had always felt slightly apart from the rest of the Academy, even when we were full of students. It was long and narrow, ceiling arched, walls paneled in dark wood that drank in light instead of reflecting it. Floor-to-ceiling mirrors lined both sides, every frame different with carved oak, curling bronze, and a few delicate silver ones that looked like they’d crack if you breathed on them wrong, as vines and vegetation softened the mirrors’ sharpness.
Today, the corridor hummed like a beehive.
Light flickered across the mirrors’ surfaces in waves, colors sliding from warm gold to cold blue and back again. The air bent over my skin, raising goosebumps. The butterfly mark throbbed with every step, not in pain, but more like urgency.
“Okay,” I whispered. “I’m here. Please don’t let this be another thing that ends with me unconscious.”
One of the mirrors near the center, a tall oval with a chipped frame, brightened as I approached. Its surface went from cloudy to clear in a breath, like a pond deciding to show me its bottom.
My face stared back with a pale and tired expression, and hair I’d scraped into a messy knot that said “headmistress”only if you squinted from a distance. But behind my reflection, something else moved.
A familiar profile.
Silver hair piled atop her head in a coil that refused to be tamed. Laughter lines at the corners of bright, sharp eyes. A mouth that always looked half on the verge of scolding and half on the verge of kissing your forehead.
“Elira?” I breathed. “Grandma?”
