We stood there with it. I let the silence settle into my bones and turned toward him because it was easier to breathe with the scent of pine and soap and Keegan anchoring me. Earlier, in the tea shop, he’d said I love you like a bruise you press to see if it still hurts. I’d said it back like the only charm I knew for certain would work.
Warmth puddled low in my chest at the memory.
“About earlier,” I started, and immediately wanted to set myself on fire for picking the worst possible time to talk about hearts when villages were balancing on toothpicks.
“I meant it,” he said simply. “But we don’t have to solve it today.”
Relief unfolded through me. “Thank you.”
“We do have to solve Gideon,” he added, because of course he would bring us back to the map on the table.
I wrinkled my nose. “I was hoping you’d say he moved to a beach town and took up paddleboarding.”
Keegan’s mouth twitched. “And a gluten-free bakery.”
“With bad scones,” I said, warming. “The worst.”
“I’d still burn it down,” he said, and the humor left his voice like steam escaping a kettle. “He’s too quiet. I don’t like quiet.”
“Nova said stillness is a posture,” I murmured. “The river before the drop.”
He nodded. “So we go upstream and kick at the dam.”
“How?” The word came out thinner than I wanted. “We keep drawing circles, checking the Wards, reading until my eyesblur. He sends letters that smell like iron and rosemary and nothing else. The sky practices falling and then holds.”
“We drag him into our light,” Keegan said. “Make him come to us. We’re stronger on our ground.”
“Lure him out of Shadowick?”
“Maybe.” He leaned against the pillar, looking like a man considering a chessboard he’d once used to kill time and now had to use to save a village. “Predators stalk where they think they own the woods. We need to make the path look easy across our fence and then move the fence.”
“That was so many metaphors in one statement,” I said, chuckling.
“Stella would applaud.” He glanced toward the tea shop in his mind. “She’d also insist we bring tea to the ambush.”
A flutter of affection caught me off guard.
He traced the groove in the pillar with a thumb. “The question is, what does Gideon want badly enough to cross?”
“Me,” I said, because pretending otherwise served no one. The mark at my hip gave a twitch like it agreed. “The Academy. The Wards. The book Elira trusted to me. The pieces that make Stonewick more than a place on a map.”
“Control,” he said. “He wants to control you. So we choose what we’d be willing to pretend to lose.”
“It seems the priestess wants it too.” I thought of the mirrors in the pedestal, the way I could lean into time and pull a thread from hours earlier. I thought of the dragon-winged hush inside the stacks, of Luna’s shawl that held warmth like a memory.
It was still hard to believe she betrayed us, and a part of me wanted to believe she didn’t, somehow.
“What if we staged a fracture? A rumor that the Wards were failing, that I was alone, that you were gone. He loves a weakness he can’t resist.”
Keegan’s jaw flexed. “I don’t love the part where I’m gone.”
“I don’t love any of it,” I admitted. “But if we bait him with the shape of what he wants…”
He looked at me for a count of five, long enough that I shifted on my feet. Then he nodded once, decisive. “We can make him think the Flame Ward faltered again. The forge has been acting strange. He might believe it.”
“And we control the ground,” I said. “The Stone Ward, maybe. It’s steady. Ardetia can weave the edges. Bella can set fox trickery along the paths.”
“Nova will know where the light is thinnest,” he said. “We can use that.”
