My dad’s gaze snapped to my mother.
“Nadia,” he said sharply. Not Mom. Not honey. Her name, like a command and a plea. But not the name that I grew up knowing.
Her chin lifted, defensive on reflex. “I have every right to be doing magic in my own daughter’s house, Frank.”
“I didn’t say you didn’t,” he replied, voice softer now. He took a step closer, hands slightly raised—not in defense but like he might try to catch something invisible. “I’m saying you’re doing it like someone who hasn’t stretched in twenty years and then decided to run a marathon.”
“That’s oddly specific,” I muttered.
He shot me a brief look that saidnot now,then tuned back in to my mom. His nostrils flared again. “You smell like Shadowick.”
Every muscle in my body went tight. “Excuse me?”
Mom flinched, just a little. “I do not.”
“You do,” Frank insisted. “Under the rosemary and the lemon oil and whatever Stella put in that candle. Ice. Old stone. Bad manners.”
“Very rude,” My mom muttered.
“Accurate,” he said. “What did you link to?”
She pressed her fingers to the bridge of her nose. “I didn’tlinkto anything. I just— The mirrors were buzzing. I felt it through the Wards. Through Maeve’s mark.”
My hand flew to my hip. “You can feel that?”
“Of course I can feel that,” she snapped. “I carried you, Maeve. Your magic and mine share a wall. When someone pounds on yours, mine rattles.”
Something in my chest went very, very quiet at that.
She went on, words spilling faster. “There was this pressure, like… like someone trying to pry a door open with a blade. And I…” She swallowed. “I pushed back.”
“With what?” my dad asked.
She hesitated, then looked away. “With everything I had.”
Silence fell over the room like a blanket. The fire crackled nervously. The kettle in the corner gave a small, anxious hiss.
I looked around properly then, through the leftover adrenaline and confusion.
The cottage had changed, but not in big, obvious ways.
In tiny glimpses like the protective charm above the door, once a simple twist of rowan and twine, now glowed faintly, sigils woven between the branches in a pattern I didn’t recognize. The iron nails hammered into the thresholdshimmered with a soft, protected sheen. The stone of the hearth bore new chalk marks, half-smudged but still visible, layered over Miora’s older, familiar runes.
My mother’s work.
Had it always been there? No. I would’ve noticed. This was new. Recent. Quiet.
“You reinforced the cottage,” I said slowly.
She huffed out a humorless laugh. “I decided I was done pretending I’m useless.”
Something in me lurched.
“You’re not useless,” I said. “I never thought—”
“Yes, you did,” she said, but there was no heat in it. Just tired honesty. “Not because you’re unkind. Because I told you to think that. I told you multiple times that I couldn’t do what Elira did. That I left because I wasn’t enough. You saw me turn my back on your dad and Stonewick…and magic.”
“You said you felt overshadowed,” I recalled, throat tight. “Like Stonewick made you small.”
