Chapter 53
Ash
Vanessa banks hard enough to rearrange my internal organs.
“Left!” Sabina shouts from somewhere below us, and the twang of a bowstring cracks the air, followed by something shattering mid-flight. The arrow she’s shot out of the sky in the last thirty seconds.
I don’t know how she is doing it but the magic in them shatters the protections around the Academy.
Somewhere below us Dagda and the goddesses are taking back the wilds, and easing the survivors.
I flatten against Vanessa’s spine, one hand fisted in the leather harness Dagda rigged, the other gripping Pepper’s wrist because my cousin decided straddling a dragon in a combat zone was the appropriate time to stand up.
“Sit the fuck down!”
“I can’t aim sitting!” Purple sparks trail from her free hand, whipping behind us in a chaotic ribbon. She’s grinning. Of course she’s grinning. Pepper has always been the one who grins when things are about to go sideways. “This is why I chopped my hair.”
She’s also a chaos witch currently in her element. “I bet you accidently singed it.”
“Shush.”
Below us, in Vanessa’s right claw, Orion hangs like a man who has accepted his situation and is simply waiting for it to end.
And is for some reason loving it. Seriously, he’s as bad as Vanessa, shooting fireballs from her talons.
I am pretty sure they have some kind of unspoken competition rolling.
In her left claw, Sabina nocks another arrow without looking, tracking something past my line of sight.
Then we clear the tree line.
The Academy is dying.
That’s the only way I know how to describe what I’m seeing.
The spires that used to twist in elegant impossible directions now jerk and stutter, stone grinding against stone in movements that look like seizures.
Walls grow and collapse in the same breath.
The courtyard is a mess of cracked earth and upheaved roots, as if the ground itself can’t decide what shape it’s supposed to hold.
Wards crackle across the surface in jagged arcs. Not targeted, not defensive. Just firing. Everywhere. At everything. A bolt of crystallized magic hits an oak on the perimeter and the tree explodes into splinters.
Students pour from every exit. Some run, some fly, some shift. All of them heading for the wilds with the specific panic of people fleeing something they can’t fight.
Because you can’t fight a building.
“The Balance,” I breathe, and no one hears me over the wind, which is fine because what’s surfacing isn’t the kind of thing you say out loud anyway.
Four thousand years of we must protect the Balance was really just four thousand years of we must protect our share of it, and the difference only becomes obvious when you’re watching the result eat itself alive from the inside out.
The Seelie wards are gone. Amarantha torched her own court and took a third of the Academy’s operating system with it.
The fortress that kept three courts in equilibrium for years just lost a leg, and everything held in check by that equilibrium is now slamming against the walls from the inside out.
The Academy can’t tell friend from foe. It’s fried.
“We can’t land!” I shout into the wind. “The wards will shred us on approach.”
“They’re already trying!” Pepper yells.
Vanessa rolls, actually rolls, and a bolt of ward-lightning scorches the air where her left wing was half a second ago. Sabina yelps. Orion does not, because Orion has left his body and is operating on autopilot. With a laugh that terrifies me and also turns me on a little.
It’s a weird place to be.
I scan the chaos below. Fourteen seconds between ward surges on the eastern wall. Eight on the western. The northern approach has the least coverage, which would be great, except the ground there is actively splitting open like Faerie is trying to swallow the whole building and start over.
So. Eastern wall it is.
“Vanessa!” I press my mouth against the scales between her shoulder blades because she won’t hear a damn thing if I scream into the wind. “East side. Bank wide. You’re going to draw every ward on this side of the building.”
A rumble rolls through her chest. Agreement. Or indigestion. With Vanessa it’s genuinely hard to tell.
“Pepper.” I grab my cousin’s arm. “When I tell you, hit the wards with everything you’ve got. Not breaking them. Scrambling them. Make the system hiccup.”
“That I can do.” Her eyes go full black for a second. Chaos magic pooling behind them like ink in water. “How long do you need?”
“Thirty seconds.”
“I’ll give you twenty. Take it or leave it.”
“Done.”
“Sabina!” I lean over the side. She tilts her face up, blonde braid whipping, bow drawn. “Cover our approach. Anything the building throws at us—debris, wards, I don’t care—you keep it off us.”
“I don’t miss, Ash.”
“I know you don’t.”
Vanessa drops Orion first. Not gently. He hits the ground in a roll and comes up moving, fire licking at his forearms.
The building responds—wards swinging toward him, recognizing something but unable to process it. Like a guard dog catching a scent it should know but can’t place through the smoke.
Then Sabina. She hits the earth lighter than Orion, nocks and fires before her feet are fully planted. The arrow takes a chunk of flying masonry out of the air six feet from Orion’s head. He doesn’t flinch. He probably didn’t even see it.
Vanessa climbs. The Academy tracks her, every ward on the eastern face swinging upward, bolts of destabilized magic chasing her wingspan. She’s the biggest threat in the sky and the building knows it. Good. That’s the plan. She can take hits that would vaporize the rest of us.
“Now!”
Pepper doesn’t hesitate. She rises onto the dragon’s back like she was born there and throws both hands toward the Academy.
Chaos magic doesn’t look like anything else.
Not light, not shadow, not elemental. Disruption—reality stuttering, the way a screen glitches when you hit it wrong.
My thorns recoil under my skin, every root-and-growth instinct flinching from something that unmakes patterns instead of building them.
The wards spasm then flicker. For one stuttering heartbeat, the eastern perimeter goes dark.
“Go, go, go!”
I kick off my boots on the dragon’s back. They tumble into open air. I don’t watch them fall.
Vanessa dives. The ground comes up fast, too fast, and I throw myself off her neck before she pulls up. Stupid. Reckless. Exactly what Graves trained me to do and exactly what my body does when there’s no time to be smart about it.
I hit Faerie soil barefoot.
The impact jars my knees and I roll, but the moment my skin touches the ground, Wild Court magic surges up through the contact like a drowning thing breaking the surface.
It isn’t welcoming or is it gentle. It feels like getting snatched out of thin air, or the way you grab someone when you’ve been waiting too long and you’re not sure they’re actually real yet.
Orion appears at my left shoulder. Where he belongs. Guardian and queen sprinting toward a building that’s trying to kill everything within a hundred yards of its walls.
The ground bucks under my feet. A root the thickness of my thigh erupts from the soil and I hurdle it without breaking stride because stopping means dying and my body has always understood that math better than my brain.
Orion vaults it behind me. His fire flares, a wall of heat at my back that incinerates something I hear but can’t see.
“Don’t look back,” he says.
I don’t look back.
Sabina’s arrows crack the air above us. One, two, three. Each one intercepting something I don’t have time to identify. A chunk of wall. A ward-bolt. What might have been a piece of a gargoyle. A fourth arrow sings past my ear close enough to disturb my hair and stone shatters behind me.
“You’re welcome!” she shouts from wherever she’s perched.
The eastern wall rises ahead of us. Fifty yards. Forty. Thirty.
A section grows. Just extends itself upward like a hand reaching for the sky, new stone layering on old, the building trying to seal itself shut against everything outside. Including us.
The wards come back online. Pepper bought us twenty seconds and I’ve burned fifteen.
Twenty yards. The wall is still growing. If it seals before we reach it—
Above us, Vanessa screams. I want to look but I know her roars, and this one is a warning. One directed at the wall. She breathes fire onto it. The Academy reacts. Ward-fire swings skyward in a unified barrage that lights the twilight white.
Five seconds. Ten yards.
“Orion!” I reach for him without slowing. My hand finds his forearm, my nails digging into his flesh.
I slam my palm against the wall.
Nothing.
The building shudders under my hand. It’s trying. The stone buzzes under my palm like it’s trying to remember my name and can’t find it through the damage.
This was the first place to tell me I belonged. And it can’t find me through its own damage, which is—I press harder against the stone—nothing. That’s fine. I’m absolutely not going to cry on a wall during a combat op. That’s not something I’m doing.
“Ash!” Orion presses me flat against the wall, his body between me and the next shot. “Whatever you’re doing, do it faster.”
The Stone.
I dig into my pocket with fingers that have apparently decided this is a great moment to stop working properly, find the Stone by feel, and press it flat against the wall.
Everything goes quiet.
Not silent. Quiet. The way a room goes quiet when someone important walks in.
The wards stop firing.
The walls stop shifting.
The ground beneath my bare feet stops heaving.
Two Treasures. Two out of four. The Cauldron of Life and the Stone of Destiny.
And somehow it’s enough, because the wall moves.
It opens. Stone parting around my hand like it’s been waiting four thousand years for me to show up and knock, and something in my chest cracks open alongside it in a way I wasn’t prepared for and don’t have time for and feel completely anyway.
Oh hell yeah.
The wall under my palm softens. Not crumbling but opening. Stone flows like water, parting around my hand, my wrist, making space. A doorway that didn’t exist ten seconds ago forms in solid rock, edges smooth as if it had always been there.
The Academy didn’t let us in.
It made us a door.
Behind us, another ward-bolt fires. Old programming still stuttering. But it fires wide. Away from us. The fortress is learning, in real time, what is threat and what is not.
I step through, with Orion at my back.
Inside, the corridors have rearranged themselves.
Not unusual but also its more of that chaotic spasming of the outside but something more deliberate.
Every hallway angles toward us, every crystal sconce flickering to life as we pass in green-gold light that matches the thorns pulsing under my skin like the building is saying yes, that one, follow her.
Pepper drops through the doorway behind us, breathing hard, chaos magic still sparking at her fingertips. Sabina follows a second later, bow still drawn, eyes still scanning. She takes one look at the corridor and lowers her weapon for the first time since we left the tavern.
Pepper looks at the lights. At the way the floor has smoothed itself flat under my bare feet while leaving the rest of its usual uneven surface everywhere else. At the portraits on the walls whose painted eyes are tracking me with something that looks less like surveillance and more like relief.
“Ash.” She turns to me, purple sparks dying in her eyes, replaced by something rare on Pepper’s face. Awe. “This building is literally rolling out the red carpet for you.”
Orion’s hand settles on my shoulder.
“Not a carpet,” I say, and I can feel it in the stone beneath my feet, in the walls still rearrange themselves around us.
Somewhere deep in the building, something ancient exhales. Outside, Vanessa roars. The Academy doesn’t fire back, finally.
Pepper cracks her knuckles. “So, where’s this door to the Sidhe mounds that Dagda mentioned?”
I look down the corridor the building made for me. The one lit in green-gold. The one that leads somewhere I’ve never been but my blood already knows. I can feel them.
“The Academy is about to show us.”