Brenna turns to look at me. I feel her shock, something cracking open, the sudden vertigo of hearing someone defend you in a way you weren’t prepared for.
Cameron’s fire flutters, light receding down his arms, his hands, pulling inward. His shoulders drop. The rigid, furious posture crumbles into something smaller. A boy on a log in the woods who just learned his own history and doesn’t know what to do with it.
“Both of you lied,” he says. Subdued now. Exhausted.
“Yes,” Brenna says.
“Yes,” I say.
“And you were going to keep lying.”
“We were going to tell you,” Brenna says. “Together. When—”
“When you decided I was ready.” The bitterness is there, but it’s lost its heat. He’s running out of fuel. The magic has drained him… the scorched circle around the log, the hours of sustained burn. He’s shaking.
Brenna steps into the clearing. The residual heat washes over her, but she walks through it without slowing. She sits beside her son on the smoking log and puts her arm around his shoulders.
He resists. One second. Two. Then he leans into her the way he leaned into me in the yard. A few degrees of collapse, a surrender to the pull of the person next to him.
“I’m angry,” he says against her shoulder. His voice is muffled.
“I know.”
“I’m angry at both of you.”
“That’s fair.”
“I don’t know what to call him.” A pause. The tiniest crack of something that might be dark humor. “I’m not calling him Dad.”
“Nobody’s asking you to,” I say. I’m standing at the edge of the clearing because this moment is theirs, and I won’t intrude on it unless invited.
Cameron lifts his head. Looks at me over Brenna’s shoulder. His copper-flecked eyes—her eyes, Corvus eyes, but set in a face that’s half mine—are red-rimmed and searching.
“You really didn’t know?”
“I really didn’t know. If I had—” I stop. Because the honest end of that sentence is complicated. He doesn’t need complicated right now. “If I had, things would have been different.”
He holds my eyes for a long time. Then he nods. Not acceptance. Not forgiveness. Acknowledgment. The bare minimum that says,“I hear you, and I’ll decide what to do with it later.”
“I want to go home,” he says.
Brenna stands. Helps him up. He’s unsteady. The magic took everything out of him. She puts his arm over her shoulders and takes his weight.
I move to his other side. He flinches when my hand touches his arm. Then he doesn’t. He lets me take the weight on his left while Brenna takes the right, and the three of us walk down the logging road through the darkening timber with Cameron between us, held up by the two people who failed him most and showed up anyway.
Nobody talks. There’s too much to process: Brenna’s exhaustion, my grief, Cameron’s stunned and fragile processing. The forest closes around us. The ward line hums as we cross back into protected ground.
Halfway down the ridge, Cameron says, “The man. Bern. He knew.”
“Knew what?” Brenna asks.
“Who my father is. He looked at me, and he knew. I could see him checking.”
Brenna and I exchange a look over Cameron’s bowed head. There’s a shared unease that neither of us has to voice.
“Maybe,” Brenna says carefully. “We’ll deal with it.”
“Together,” Cameron says. The word comes out dry, almost ironic, echoing what we said in the yard. But underneath the irony, there’s something else; a tentative, bruised willingness to test whether the word means anything when the people saying it are the same ones who’ve been keeping secrets.
