I gripped the frame so hard my fingers hurt. “Get out of my grandmother’s mirror.”
Amusement flickered in her eyes. “They were my mirrors long before she learned to use them.” The glass around her darkened, throwing the rest of the corridor into harsher contrast.
“Elira—” I began again.
The head priestess spoke over me. “You are playing at balance with men who do not understand hunger. Your circle is a child’s toy drawn in dust. The storm will not respect it.” Her form crackled and blurred, as if she were being broadcast through bad weather. “You are—” static “—fire, you do not know—” static “—secrets hidden in—” static.
Behind her, far away and too close, I saw a hint of a stone throne, and behind that, darkness that moved like something alive.
“What do you want?” I demanded. My voice wobbled but held. “What are you playing at? Throwing knives at us from the edge of sacred ground? Sending Gideon like a—”
Her mouth thinned. “Gideon is a tool who learned to enjoy being sharpened,” she said. “Do not mistake him for the blade.”
The glass flickered again. Elira’s face flashed back into view, partially overlaid with the priestess’s, their eyes mismatched, their mouths moving at different speeds. It made my head spin.
“Elira?” I whispered.
“Maeve, you must not let her—” Elira’s voice came back in a rush, cutting through the interference. “The circle—she will try to—”
White noise crashed over her words. The priestess blurred back to the forefront, features hard.
“Your path is already chosen,” the priestess said. “Do not pretend otherwise. You stand on my threshold, whether you acknowledge it or not. There will be a price for shutting the gate, closing the circle.”
“I won’t shut it your way,” I snapped, anger bright and ridiculous in the face of a woman who’d probably invented three kinds of curses before breakfast. “I’m not yours to instruct.”
Her eyes narrowed. For the first time, I saw something like interest there.
“Stubborn,” she said. “Elira was right about that. It will make you useful… or it will break you.”
Behind her, Elira’s shape strained, trying to push back. Light flared around her hands, warm gold against the priestess’s cold shadow.
“Maeve,” Elira cried. “Remember—”
The mirrors screamed.
It wasn’t sound, not exactly. It was a vibration made audible, the shattering groan of glass pushed past capacity. Every pane in the corridor exploded with light, then with cracks.
Lines spiderwebbed out from the central mirror under my palms, racing across the surface like lightning trapped in crystal. The priestess’s face fractured, her eyes shattering into a hundred tiny reflections, each one still watching me.
“Stop it,” I gasped. My butterfly mark burned now, as if someone had set a tiny brand there. “You’re breaking them—”
“You were always going to break them,” the priestess said calmly, even as her image pixelated, then tore. “Ask your mother which side of the fence she ran from.”
“Leave her out of this—”
The cracks deepened. Shards began to slough away from the frame, hovering instead of falling, each fragment catching a different sliver of reality: my face, Elira’s, the priestess’s, a flashof dragons’ eyes, the Luminary’s spiral, the curve of Keegan’s jaw, Gideon’s hand pressed to a stone circle, a sigil I didn’t know.
The magic in the room roared. The sigil under my feet surged up the tower, trying to buffer the chaos, but it was like pouring tea on a bonfire.
“Elira!” I shouted, blinking against the white-hot light. “Grandma…”
Her voice reached me one last time, thread-thin and fierce. “Maeve, listen. She is not…”
The word never landed.
The head priestess’s voice cut across hers, cold and closer than it should have been. “In four days,” she said, as the shards around her face splintered, “the circle…”
The glass blew outward.
