Chapter Forty-Two
The wind picked up, stirring the snowflakes at my feet, but dread filled my veins. The butterflies that once fluttered in this Ward, glowing like fireflies, were gone. No shimmer in the air, no hum beneath the stones.
Just a quiet ache along my hip and the unshakable feeling that something invisible had curled its fingers around this place and squeezed.
Keegan stood as quiet as ever, with a steady weight at my side. I could feel him watching me, letting me think and breathe. But I also knew he was waiting. Waiting for me to decide what to do next.
Things weren’t right in the Ward.
Keegan didn’t speak, just turned toward me slightly.
I stared at the pale garden, the statue with her open book now flecked with frost.
“What if this bond between me and Gideon… what if it’s real? What if, when I said yes to listening to him, learning from him, or whatever I did back then, it left something behind? What if there’s a tether and I did this?”
“You’re not his,” Keegan said, steady.
“But what if that doesn’t matter? What if there’s some thread left tying us together and it’s leaking through, poisoning this place, and I can’t even feel it because I’m part of it?”
He looked at me, his eyes soft but serious. “Then we figure out how to cut it.”
I shook my head. “What if I already broke something just by being here?”
Keegan didn’t answer that. He didn’t need to. The silence was answer enough.
The Academy was waking up. The rooms were shifting, the teachers had started to arrive, and the halls felt warm again. It wanted to open. It had made its decision. I could feel it in the bones of the place. I’d heard it speak. I was the Headmistress. The time had come.
And yet… this.
A Ward unraveling.
Not the weak one. Not the damaged one.
The strongest.
The one most tied to the border, to life, to growth.
To me.
But what if I’d had a misstep along the way?
I pressed a hand to my hip again. The ache had dulled, but it was still there. A quiet throb, like a bruise just under the skin. It had started as we left the hotel.
“I should go back to the Academy,” I said slowly, turning the words over in my mouth like they might shift in meaning if I said them out loud. “Try to talk to it again. Try to… explain what’s happening.”
Keegan tilted his head. “You think it would listen?”
“It already has, ” I said. “It chose me. But it didn’t choose all my past… that I’ve spoken to Gideon, gotten in his mind.”
“You don’t know that.” He eyed me.
“I don’t know. But maybe it’ll understand. Or maybe it’ll tell me what to do. Because right now, I don’t know where to go next, and the longer we wait, the worse this place feels.”
Keegan looked up at me. “I wish I could be there with you.”
“Thank you.”
He held my hand for a brief second. “Things will be okay, Maeve. We’ve gotten this far. I’ll walk with you to the edge.”
We didn’t speak as we walked through the Ward. The path felt longer than usual.
Quieter. It was as if even the wind had decided to turn its back on the whimsy of the Butterfly Ward.
The stones underfoot, once warm with old magic, felt cold now. Sleepy. Dimming.
Had I done this?
I paused when we reached the last bend in the path where the hedge opened.
The Academy sat ahead for only me to see. Its spires cut through the low clouds, its windows glowing softly in the early light. Smoke curled from one of the many chimneys.
Life. It was stirring inside.
I turned to Keegan.
He didn’t smile, but he didn’t frown either. He nodded once, like he was placing something heavy in my hands but trusted I could carry it.
“You’re sure?” he asked.
“No,” I admitted. “But I’m going anyway.”
He stepped forward and touched my shoulder, his hand warm even through the layers I wore. “Come get me if anything feels off.”
“I always will.”
He dropped his hand, and I started walking.
The path to the Academy was familiar now. The turns, the dips in the path, the half-toppled marker stone covered in moss were all stitched into my steps. But my thoughts felt jagged, like walking over broken glass in a dream.
I kept picturing Gideon.
His smile. The smooth way he’d spoken when I first met him. Always just on the edge. Always waiting.
What if he was still waiting?
What if every step I took forward was pulling him closer?
I wrapped my arms tight around myself and kept going.
The Academy loomed larger the closer I got, but the comfort I usually felt didn’t come. My breath was tight. My boots felt heavy. I wasn’t afraid of the building.
I was afraid of what it wouldn’t say.
What it wouldn’t see.
Because the Academy had made up its mind.
It was ready.
But maybe it didn’t realize that I wasn’t.
I stepped inside and wandered through the main hall until I found my Grandma Elira was seated near the hearth in the main corridor, just near the library.
She looked up the moment I stepped through the doors.
Her knitting needles stilled in her hands.
“Maeve?” Her voice held surprise, not alarm, but it stiffened her shoulders. “What’s happened?”
I pulled my gloves off slowly, trying to delay the answer. My fingers were stiff and cold, my nerves were tight, and the warmth of the Academy wrapped around me like it knew I needed it, but I didn’t feel any comfort from it this time.
Just heated worry.
“It’s the Butterfly Ward,” I said, meeting her eyes.
My grandma lowered her knitting to her lap. “What about it?”
“It’s fading.” I took a breath. “Cracking, maybe. This was my worry. That I wasn’t cut out to be headmistress. Things have already started falling apart.”
She blinked. “No, that’s impossible. It’s our strongest Ward.”
“It is,” I said, heart still pounding. “Keegan came with me. The shimmer is gone. The stones have lost color. There’s no resistance to the boundary, not even the faint hum. And my birthmark…it's been aching like a warning bell all day.”
My grandma stood, her movements sharp now. She crossed the space between us and took my hand, pressing her thumb against the spot just below my hip through my coat. Her eyes didn’t leave mine.
“It’s never faltered,” she said, almost to herself. “In all these years, the Butterfly Ward has never lost strength.”
“Well, it has now.”
We stood there in silence, the fire popping gently behind her, casting flickers of orange across the walls and books.
“I came back,” I said, my voice quieter now. “To talk to the Academy. To explain.”
“Explain what?”
I hesitated, and when I spoke, I looked away.
“That I might have… left something open. With Gideon.”
Her mouth tightened.
“Not on purpose,” I rushed to say. “But he got inside my head, Grandma. He showed me things before I realized what he wanted. And now I keep wondering, what if there’s a tether? A magical tie I didn’t feel form, but it’s there. And now that the Academy’s waking up, so is he. And he’s draining what he can.”
My grandma was quiet for a long time. When she finally spoke, her voice had dropped to that low, firm tone she only used when she was angry and afraid at the same time.
“If he’s still reaching through, we’ll cut him out.”
I nodded, throat tight. “I thought… maybe if I spoke to the Academy, it would help.”
“And?” she asked.
I looked at the high ceiling, the old stone arches, the long stretch of hallway that still felt too quiet.
“Nothing,” I said. “It didn’t respond.”
My grandma’s expression didn’t change, but she pulled back slightly, eyes searching my face.
I shook my head. “No hum. No whisper. Not even a flicker in the wall.”
She slowly turned and walked to the center of the room as if listening. The sconces lit automatically, as they always did. The warmth still pulsed beneath our feet. The place was alive. But it wasn’t speaking to me.
“The Academy made its decision,” I said. “It’s opening. Whether we’re ready or not.”
Grandma Elira turned back toward me, her hands at her sides. “The two won’t happen at the same time. If the Wards are crumbling, the Academy won’t open.”
“But it’s already opening. Making rooms. Gathering people. Pulling students toward us like the tide. Even Nova said she could feel it in her bones, like something had taken root and was already growing.” I rubbed my arms. “But it doesn’t feel the danger. Not this part. Not the thin edge of the Ward or what it means.”
“Maybe it does,” she said slowly. “And it just… doesn’t care.”
That landed like a stone in my stomach.
For all its life and movement and quiet intelligence, the Academy was still a construct of ancient, unknowable magic. It responded to the need. It answered longing. It shaped itself around intention and possibility.
But it didn’t love. Not like we did.
Or did it?
It didn’t feel fear the way we felt fear. And it didn’t hesitate in how we were taught to be cautious when something cracked.
“It might see the Ward as a casualty,” I whispered. “A piece of the old magic that doesn’t serve the new anymore.”
Elira’s face was unreadable. “And if it’s right?”
I looked at her sharply.
She held up a hand. “I don’t mean it should be right. But what if it’s thinking in a way we can’t? What if it knows something we don’t?”
I wrapped my arms tighter around myself. “Or what if it doesn’t know that I connected to Gideon?”
My grandma walked back toward me and placed a hand on my cheek.
“Then we don’t wait for it to tell us what happens next. We act. We protect what we can, and we dig until we understand.”
I nodded, though every inch of me felt like it was buzzing with uncertainty.
The Academy wanted to open. The Ward was dying. And whatever link I might’ve left open, whether real or imagined, wouldn’t be solved by sitting and waiting for whispers that might never come.
The time had come. But we had to decide what we were opening into.