“And on my father and Keegan,” I interjected.
He pressed his lips together and nodded. “I believed it was my decision and what was best for Shadowick.”
“But you didn’t seem unaware,” I said carefully.
“I wasn’t,” he replied. “But awareness doesn’t free you if the only choices you’re offered still serve someone else. I’m not trying to blame my age, but I was naïve.”
His confession landed harder than I expected.
“So you agreed because… what? You want redemption?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No. I agreed because for the first time, the choice was mine.”
I felt the hum beneath my feet strengthen, the Academy’s presence pressing closer now. It liked what it was hearing, but could the Academy decipher Gideon’s half-truths from reality?
“And because,” he added, quieter still, “I hope that if I start making the right choices, real ones, not strategic ones, then maybe what belongs to me will finally return.”
The words echoed through me, unsettling and strange.
“What belongs to you?” I asked.
His gaze slid past me, toward the Academy gates now visible ahead, stone and ivy and ancient promise. Something unreadable flickered across his expression.
“We’re here,” he said instead. “This isn’t quite as gloomy as Shadowick’s Academy.”
“I’ve never seen it,” I muttered, knowing he wouldn’t give me the answer I’d craved since I saw him at Stonewick’s edge so long ago. The vision might have been in my dreams and between realms, but I’d felt his anguish.
The Academy grounds loomed before us, the invisible boundary clear to my senses even if it looked like nothing more than a change in paving stones. I felt the Wards stir across the village, felt the land weigh him, assess him, and remember things I couldn’t see.
He stepped forward, and I tensed, breath caught, ready for resistance, for rejection, for some sign that the Academy wouldn’t allow this.
Instead, the hum deepened, and the air shifted.
Gideon crossed onto the Academy’s property without resistance, the stone beneath his feet steady and silent.
I turned toward him, my question burning now, impossible to hold back.
“Gideon,” I began. “What is it you think will return to you?”
He didn’t answer, and the Academy doors waited ahead, open and watching, and whatever truth he carried with him slipped into the space between us, unanswered, as the circle drew closer to closing.
Chapter Four
The Academy didn’t recoil.
Honestly, that alone was the first thing that unsettled me.
I felt that realization before I fully understood it: the absence of resistance.
There was no tightening of Wards or sharp intake of magic.
The stone didn’t shiver in indecision. Rather, it swallowed Gideon whole and allowed him another step forward. The vibration beneath my shoes deepened.
Gideon stood just inside the entryway, hands relaxed at his sides, posture open in a way that looked almost polite.
Almost. His mage magic brushed the edges of the foyer, testing nothing, pressing nowhere. He wasn’t challenging the Academy.
He was waiting.
