Chapter Eleven
Morning light crept through the curtains of Orias's room, thin gold bars stretching across the floorboards. They were pretty as pie. But It did nothing for the weight sitting on my chest that I'd been carrying since before dawn.
No amount of sleep had managed to scrub out the image of Rowan standing in that clearing, eyes glowing with light that had no business existing.
Hmm. I still wanted to punch him. Just a little. But that was a cruel thing to do to someone you cared about...
I lay there a while longer than I needed to, replaying it. The way the air had thickened and twisted the second he'd stepped out from behind the oak. The way he'd looked at me right before ordering me home.
I was going to go back eventually. I already knew that much about myself. The woods were a mystery that I was stupidly eager to solve...
I sat up and hugged my knees to my chest, staring out at a street that looked deceptively ordinary.
Trees swaying in a mild breeze. A pair of magpies squabbling over something on the pavement two doors down.
But underneath the calm, the whole town had a sort of...
vibe to it. Like it was a Scooby Doo villain wearing a mask, and one day soon I was going to yank that mask right off.
The locket at my throat felt heavier than usual against my collarbone.
I ran my thumb over the cool metal, turning it between my fingers without really meaning to, and found myself wondering — properly wondering, for reasons I couldn't yet name — what it actually did, beyond being the last real thing my dad had ever given me.
I got up, dressed in a rust-red jumper and jeans from the small pile of clothes Orias had let accumulate in the corner of his wardrobe over the last few weeks, since apparently neither of us wanted to say out loud how often I'd started staying over.
The house smelled like cinnamon and browning butter by the time I made it downstairs, which meant Orias had beaten me to the kitchen and was already several minutes into whatever he was cooking.
He could cook, unlike his twin. Which was why the scent filled me with happiness rather than nerves.
"Morning, little witch." He didn't look up from the pan, sleeves shoved to his elbows, a spatula working something golden around the edges. Dark circles sat heavy under his eyes, worse than they'd been yesterday, though he was doing a decent job of hiding it behind the usual grin. "Sleep alright?"
"Better than you did, clearly."
"Rude. Accurate, but rude." He plated the eggs and slid them across the counter, followed by a pumpkin-shaped mug with the coffee already fixed exactly how I liked it — too much cream, barely any coffee flavor left.
He remembered that without ever once needing reminding, which was a small, stupid thing to feel emotional about at seven in the morning, and I felt emotional about it anyway.
I was clearly in dumb bitch emotions mode. That was fine. I could handle it.
I sat at the counter and let myself talk about the festival for a while — the maze getting bigger this year, extra traders coming in from the next few towns over, whether we'd have enough staff to cover both the shop and the stall we always ran on the green.
Orias asked good questions, actually listened rather than just waiting for a gap to talk over me, and for a few minutes the tight coil in my stomach loosened enough that I almost forgot what yesterday had felt like.
Then something in his posture changed. He set his mug down slower than the moment called for, both palms flat against the counter like he needed the surface to hold him up.
"Amber." His voice had gone careful. "I need to tell you something. About your dad."
Whatever ease I'd built up over the last ten minutes evaporated in a single breath. "What about him?"
"Rowan found Cian's old journal this morning, back at the manor." He kept his eyes on mine, steady. "There's things in it. About your dad. Stuff that... that I found out not long after our mother's passed. Stuff your mom put in her own journals, and papers and... yeah."
I froze. "What kind of things?"
Orias had never been one to beat around the bush.
"He found out he was adopted. Not long before he vanished."
I blinked. "Adopted? My dad never said anything about—"
"He didn't know either. Not until right before he went into the woods." Orias's jaw worked, like he was deciding how much to give me at once. "He wasn't fully human, Amber."
I set my fork down. "That's not funny."
"I'm not joking." He said it quiet, steady, watching my face the whole time. "He was born into the Rose family."
"The Roses." The name landed somewhere half-familiar, like something I'd been told once and never thought about since. "Aren't they the ones who — the whole family died. Yeah. The entire coven of witches. Some spell that went wrong, years back."
"Decades back. He would've been a baby." Orias nodded slowly. "Somehow he made it out. Got adopted into a human family after, raised thinking that's exactly what he was."
My brows furrowed. "That's not possible. He never acted like there was anything different about him. Not once."
"Cian's journal says you used to hear the whispers too.
When you were small." Orias reached across the counter, not quite touching me yet, just closing the distance a little.
"Says your dad found a way to take them off you.
Protected you from them somehow, and made you forget you'd ever heard them at all. "
Something shifted loose in my memory at that — not a clear picture, nothing I could properly grab hold of, just an impression.
A sensation of sound at the edge of sleep when I was maybe six or seven, a voice that wasn't quite a voice, and my dad's hand on my forehead afterward, humming something under his breath that had never made sense to me as a kid and had never once come back to mind since.
I hadn't thought about that morning in fifteen years.
The second Orias said it out loud, it felt less like a new idea and more like something surfacing after being held underwater a long time.
My hand found the locket on its own. It felt warm against my palm in a way it hadn't a minute earlier, a low, steady pulse of something I couldn't have described if you'd asked me to.
"He gave me this the day before he left," I said slowly.
"Told me it was magic. That it would keep me safe.
I never really believed him — figured it was one of those things parents say to make a kid feel better.
Maybe it did something small. The kind of charm that works because a person believes hard enough in it, not because there's anything real behind it. "
"If your dad was Rose blood," Orias said, quieter now, "that's not a small charm. And you're not just a person who believes hard, Amber. That would be magic and you would be too."
"I'm—" The word stuck somewhere in my throat before I managed to push it out. "I'm a witch?"
"Part of one. At least." Something gentled behind his eyes, the glow softening from its usual sharp neon into something warmer, pink bleeding slow toward violet at the edges.
"It explains a lot, if you think about it.
Why you've always felt tied to this town in a way most people don't. Why the woods have never once left you alone, even when you wanted them to.
" He grinned, trying to soften the blow.
"And why you love me so much. You clearly have a thing for magic men. "
My eyes stung, though it wasn't grief exactly — closer to relief, the specific kind that comes from finally hearing an explanation for something you'd spent your whole life assuming was just a flaw in you.
Every strange, unexplainable piece of my childhood clicked into a shape that finally made sense.
"Thank you," I said, and meant it more than the two words could really carry. "For telling me. I know that wasn't easy." I narrowed my eyes a little. "Though I will admit you knowing for a few years and not telling me is kinda... I was gonna say shitty but not quite."
He blanched. "In my defence, I didn't think you'd want to know yet, and that crash kind of... kind of made me forget. I was only thinking about myself and I shouldn't have been."
He reached across the counter and squeezed my hand, and in the same instant the mug under my other palm gave a small, sharp jolt against the wood — enough that coffee sloshed near the rim, enough that when I glanced down a hairline crack had appeared along the ceramic, thin as a hair, already stilling into nothing.
Neither of us said anything about it. I wasn't even fully convinced I'd seen it happen, and Orias's expression gave nothing away, though his eyes had flicked to the mug and back to my face just a fraction too fast.
A knock landed on the front door before either of us could dwell on it. My pulse jumedhalf a second before my brain worked out why.
"That'll be Rowan," Orias said, already crossing toward the hall, wiping his hands on a tea towel as he went.
He pulled the door open to find his twin standing on the step, tall and windblown, dark circles matching Orias's own almost exactly, a battered black journal tucked under one arm. Rowan's gaze found mine over his brother's shoulder and stayed there a beat too long before he managed a short nod.
"Morning," he said. Flat. Guarded, same as he'd been every second since the clearing.
"He's been dying to see you since about six a.m.," Orias said, entirely too pleased with himself. "Wouldn't say so, obviously. Wanted to let you eat first before he showed up looking like he crawled out of a grave to drag you into a serious conversation."
Rowan huffed. "I never said that."
"You implied it extremely hard, on the walk over, in a text I still have."
Rowan's jaw ticked, but he didn't bother arguing the point, which told me Orias probably wasn't exaggerating by much.
Something warm loosened under the nerves still sitting heavy in my chest, watching the two of them fall into that easy rhythm like the last three years hadn't put any real distance between them at all.
"We were thinking," Orias said, turning back to me, the grin returning, gentler this time, "you've had a hell of a morning already, and it's not even eight.
Let us take you out. Properly. The shop's shut, the festival planning can wait an hour, and you look like you could do with breathing actual air that isn't full of whispers. "
"We?" I looked between them, suspicion flickering underneath the surprise before I could talk myself out of it. "Both of you?"
Orias nodded, easy, like it was the most natural thing in the world. Rowan gave a single short inclination of his head, silent, watching me with an intensity that made it hard to tell whether he wanted me to say yes or half expected me to say no.
I probably should have asked more questions.
Should have pointed out how strange it was, the two of them turning up together with a plan they clearly hadn't discussed until thirty seconds before knocking, given how surprised Rowan had looked at Orias's version of events.
But whatever pull kept drawing me toward saying yes to either of them lately won out easily over good sense.
"Fine," I said. "Give me a minute to grab my coat."
Orias's grin widened into something close to victorious. Rowan's expression didn't quite soften into a smile, but I caught the way his shoulders dropped a fraction, like he'd genuinely braced for me to turn them both down.
I went to grab my coat off the hook by the door, and behind me the kitchen light flickered once, twice, a faint electrical stutter that settled itself before I'd even fully turned my head toward it. I didn't think much of it.
Neither of them said a word about it either. But I caught the look that passed between them over my shoulder anyway, quick and wary, gone the second I turned back around.
It was safe to say I was thoroughly suspicious.