Aaron
Wintermoon Academy—A Week Later
Ikeep telling myself I have no business being here.
A man who’s about to walk out of one life shouldn’t be standing in the middle of it like it still belongs to him.
I gave up my claim on this place the night I tore the magic out of the Glen and felt every soul in it reach for me at once.
And still my feet carried me up the Academy stairs this morning like they have every morning for years.
The truth is uglier and simpler than that.
This place made me, and it’s the only ground that still feels like home while I get myself ready to leave all of it behind.
I’ve spent the whole week a stranger in my own skin.
Mara watches me when she thinks I’m not looking, and the question’s right there, the wrong one, the one I can’t find a way to fix.
She thinks I’m pulling away from the cub. That I’ve looked at the life growing in her and started backing toward the door.
She couldn’t be more wrong. I want that cub so bad it sits low in me and never lets up.
Worse than the pull of the Glen or the weight of Eric or anything else stacked on top of me.
I want it more than I’ve ever wanted anything, and that’s exactly the problem.
She won’t understand until I find the words, and I don’t have them yet.
I’ve made my decision, and it’s the only one I can live with.
I can’t take her into the Glen. It’s got nothing to do with the realm or her safety.
Mara would walk into a dead world at my side and make it bloom out of pure stubbornness, and I’d burn anything that looked at her sideways.
The Glen isn’t what I’m afraid of. I’m afraid of me.
I’ve spent too long reaching across the table and pulling her out of her own life into mine, over and over.
Away from her pride, away from the classroom she’s wanted since she was a girl.
I’m a selfish man, and she lets me be one.
I’m not doing it again. Not with our son in her belly. Not this time.
So this is goodbye. I haven’t said it out loud to anyone yet.
My classroom is half full when I come in, and they already know something.
Not the facts of it, but the room’s wrong this morning, too quiet, the usual noise pulled down to a murmur.
Priya’s got her chin in her hand, watching me instead of bickering with Mercer.
At the back worktable, my brother sits slumped low, hood half up, not looking at anyone, folded tight around whatever’s eating him.
Seth’s been moping for a week too. I’ve got a guess why, and I’ve been a coward about it, same as everything else.
I set my bag down and lean against the front of my desk and let them settle, and when the last of them is in a seat I don’t pick up the chalk. I don’t open the lesson on the board. I look at these fourteen kids who’ll be the ones standing here when I’m gone, and it’s harder to look at them.
“Put your books away,” I tell them. “We’re not doing potions today.”
Priya straightens. “Are we in trouble?”
“No.” I push off the desk. “Today I’m going to teach you the one thing it took me everything to learn.”
I lift my hand, and I don’t say a word, and I don’t reach for anything. I just want it, and the room answers me.
The chalk lifts off the rail and writes itself across the board in a clean blue-gold line.
The shutters swing open on their own. Every copper bowl on every worktable rises an inch and turns slow in the air, and the light comes up out of the floor and the walls, soft and gold at the center and blue at the edges, until the whole room is swimming in it.
A girl in the front row gasps. Mercer breathes out a curse he’s going to pretend he didn’t say. My feet leave the floor.
I rise until I’m level with the top of the windows, and I turn there, slow, the light pouring off me, and below me the upturned faces have gone slack with wonder.
Even Seth has his hood pushed back, staring at me, his mouth a little open, and for a second he looks five years old again, like he did before the world taught him to be ashamed of half of himself.
“Not long ago I stood in this room and froze time, just to show off,” I say into the quiet.
“Some of you were here. You clapped.” Priya’s mouth twitches.
“I told you magic is a gift. That a gift has a price. That every spell you cast for your own gain comes with a bill that always comes due.” I sink a few inches, drifting.
“I want to tell you the rest of it now, because I won’t get another chance. ”
The light gathers tighter around my hands while I talk.
“I was a selfish man. I cast for myself. I bent rules I had no business bending and called it protection, when the truth was fear—me, trying to keep everything I loved under my own hand.” A small storm of stars kindles over my open palm, a whole turning galaxy the size of an apple, and I send it drifting out over their heads.
“The bill came due. It cost me trust, people who’d never done me wrong, years I won’t get back, and it damn near cost me the person I love most in this world.
The magic doesn’t charge you for what you wanted.
It charges you for what you took, and that debt lands on the people around you long before it ever lands on you.
You can’t hold a thing so tight you strangle it.
The bravest spell you’ll ever cast is opening your hand. ”
The galaxy breaks apart into single stars, and each one drifts down and settles over a different student, a small light hovering above each of them.
“Every one of you is going to be more than the ones who came before you. That’s the whole point of you.
You’re the next generation of Wintermoon, and it’s only as good as what you decide to become in it.
” My eyes move row by row, like they did that day, and land on my brother last. They stay there.
“So learn your craft. Learn what it costs. And don’t spend one day of your life ashamed of what Mother Fate made you, because there are people who would give anything to be born with what some of you carry and can’t see. ”
Seth holds my eyes, then drops them to the worktable, and whatever he wants to say, he swallows it.
The stars wink out. I bring myself down through the gold light until my shoes touch the floor again. I draw all of it back into my hands and close my fingers. The room is just a room, the morning sun coming flat through the open shutters. The bowls settle. The chalk lies down on the rail.
“It’s been the honor of my life to be your instructor,” I tell them. “I hope you never forget me.”
Nobody moves at first. Priya’s hand comes up off her desk, and she picks her way into it careful, like she’s stepping out onto ice.
“Mr. Blackwood.” She studies my face. “Why does it sound like you’re saying goodbye to us?”
The bell rings before I have to answer her, the long low chime rolling through the Witches and Warlocks Wing, and I’m grateful for it in a way I can’t show her. I just smile.
I try a smile on them. It doesn’t take. Nobody moves.
They sit in the last of the gold light with their eyes on me, waiting each other out.
Then, one by one, they stand and file past me toward the door.
A few slow when they reach me. Mercer lifts a hand, half a wave he doesn’t finish, like he can’t quite remember why he started it. The room empties out around me.
All of them but Seth.
He stays slumped at the back table until the door clicks shut behind the last of them, and then he sits up.
I turn from the door and scrub a hand down my face, and I think the room clean while I do it, the bowls floating to the wash bin, the chalk dust lifting off the boards, the worktables wiping themselves down behind me.
By the time my hand falls, the classroom’s spotless, and Seth is on his feet and coming around the worktables toward me.
“You’re leaving,” he says. It’s not a question. “For the Glen. You’re going, and you’re not coming back.” He stops a few feet off, his blue eyes hard on me. “I can taste it in your scent. You already decided.”
“It’s the right thing to do, Seth,” I say, and I hold his stare and don’t look away from it.
Seth doesn’t let it go. “What about our deal?”
I look at him. “Deal?”
It’s the wrong thing to say, and I know it the second it’s out of my mouth, because the anger breaks loose in him.
A growl climbs up out of him, his canines lengthening, his hands curling at his sides.
His eyes go bright and furious. And there it is.
The thing he asked me for once before, the one I’ve been walking around ever since.
“Are you serious. You still want this. You still want me to take your magic out of you.”
“Yes.” It comes out of him cracked and raw. “Yes, I do.”
“Seth—“ I start.
“We had a deal.” He cuts me off. He’s not shouting. It’s worse than that—low and raw, pleading. “You went quiet that day, and you didn’t say no. You looked at me like you understood. You let me believe you’d do it. We had a deal, Aaron. Please.”
“Why do you hate who you are so badly?” The words come out of me rough. “Do you know what I’d give to make people see you the way I—“
“I’m tired, brother.” He says it low, and it stops me where I stand.
His shoulders drop. His eyes fill, and he doesn’t wipe them away.
“I’m so tired,” he says again, quieter. “I spend every single day fighting to fit into two worlds, and neither one of them wants me. You don’t know what that’s like.
You walk into any room and you belong in it.
I walk in and the wolves smell the warlock, the warlocks smell the wolf, and the whole time I’m trying to earn a corner to stand in. ”
“What you have is special, Seth.” I hear how thin it sounds even as I say it. “What you are—both of those things at once—that’s a gift most people will never—“
He wipes the tears off his face with the back of his hand, fast, like he’s angry at them for showing up.