Chapter Thirteen
The walk back from the Hollows felt like riding a snow globe someone had finally decided to stop shaking.
The light unbraided itself behind us, the birch chimes Bella had laced along the threshold gave one last polite tinkle, and August, real, damp, herb-scented August, sidled around us with the brazen air of late summer.
Keegan kept pace at my side, our hands brushing every dozen steps like a secret handshake.
As we made our way into town, the others peeled off one by one.
Lady Limora and her crew went to their townhouse on Lantern Row.
They’d been a recent purchase. Stella walked to the tea shop with a promise to brew tea when needed all week, and Nova, with a last, measuring look at the sky that made me feel oddly safer even as she slipped away to her shop.
By the time the road curved toward the cottage, we were just the two of us.
The gargoyles’ silhouettes shifted along the ridge like thoughtful crows.
Miora’s lantern glowed in the front window, its warm honey light making the stone cottage look exactly like the cozy place it had always been.
Miora insisted on waiting up for us, even when I told her not to.
She always insisted on taking one more watch, mending one more crack, fussing one more thread back into the cottage’s weave.
Only lately, since Grandma Elira’s sacrifice, her insistence had frayed.
The busy hands still moved, but the music behind them, Miora’s humming, Miora’s cluck-tongue teasing, Miora’s mind your boots ritual, had gone thin.
“Home,” Keegan said under his breath, and the door, delighted by the word, unlatched itself.
Miora was in the big chair by the window, wrapped in a shawl the color of old snow. She had a darning mushroom in one hand and a sock in the other, and she wasn’t doing anything with either…just holding them, as if she’d forgotten which part came first.
“You look like a pair of sensible heroes,” she said, voice warm and tired. “Boots off. Thoughts later. Tea first. Or whiskey.” Her eyes tracked our faces with the steadiness of a woman who’d watched too many storms to be startled by lightning anymore. “Trouble?”
“Promise of it,” Keegan said, hanging his coat. “But a plan, too.”
“Plans are better than panic,” Miora agreed. “Though panic burns more calories.”
I crossed the room and set my hands over hers, gently prying the darning mushroom from her grip. Her knuckles were colder than I liked.
“You waiting up for us again?” I asked softly.
“Who else is going to scold the door when it groans?” she said, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes. They were rimmed red, the way eyes get when you’re out of tears, but they remembered the shape.
Since Elira had…no verb really behaved; sacrificed, yes, and also chosen, and also stopped breathing in this world, so the Academy could…since that day, Miora had gone thinner at the edges.
She still kept the hearth going, but the pokes had less gusto. She still mended, but the stitches sat sad for a day before settling. She still teased Keegan, but her sarcasm had learned to yawn.
“I brought you something,” I said.
I dug in my satchel and brought out the birch sprig from the Hollow’s plateau.
Its green had refused the cold; it looked defiant in my palm.
“For the mantle. For… continuity.”
Miora’s breath hitched. She reached, then hesitated the way people do when they think taking the good thing will make it disappear.
“Oh,” she said. “Elira always said birch remembers the right kind of trespass.”
“I’m counting on it,” I said.
She took the sprig and tucked it into the old blue bottle on the mantle, where we put found things that felt like messages. The sprig made the room smell faintly of river and stubbornness.
“Karvey,” Keegan called up as he stoked the fire. “We’re in.”
The stone above the lintel rumbled, and Karvey walked into the cottage.
“North wind on your boots,” he said, approving. “The roof felt it. Safe trip, I see.”
“Jealous?” I asked, grinning despite myself.
“Relieved,” Karvey said. “But things around the village are…”
“Are what?”
“Unsettled.”
I nodded. “I think it will remain that way until we close the circle.”
“And you think that is sooner than later?” Karvey asked, glancing at Miora.
“I do. Five days, to be precise.”
“Then you need to rest,” Miora said softly, standing.
“I’m too restless.”
“That’s precisely why you need to calm your soul. I’ll make some tea.”
“What can I do?” I asked Keegan.
“Sit,” he said, chin, jaw, eyes gentled into a smile that lived in the bones. “Tell Miora something ridiculous while she makes tea, and I make dinner out of what your garden called you a slacker for not harvesting.”
“My garden and I need to go to therapy. It’s too needy…too clingy.”
He chuckled and made his way to the kitchen when the back door clicked, and my father shuffled in with the posture of an English Bulldog pretending not to be an English Bulldog. He was back in human form, wearing a blue flannel, hair sticking up like he’d been out arguing with the moon.
“Hey, kid,” my dad said, eyes doing that soft-dog thing before he remembered dignity and tried to look less huggable. “You did good work at the Hollows, but you also look like you wrestled with an alligator and lost.”
I chuckled, and he sniffed the air like a bloodhound, being careful not to be insulting. He took a seat next to me.
“Is Keegan mixing garlic and butter, or are my senses drunk?”
“Both,” Keegan said, not looking up. “You’ll live. I’m trying to harvest what’s left of your daughter’s garden.”
The front door swung open, and my mom came inside, looking relieved the moment her eyes fell to mine.
She sat on the bench by the window like a woman perched on the edge of a cliff who keeps deciding not to throw the paperwork over. She had a stack of papers in her lap and the particular tightness at the mouth.
“Mom?” I said.
She looked up, and her face did that familiar rearrangement it did with me—sternness softening, then snapping back into place so nobody had to guess how she actually felt.
“I was served,” she said, shaking her head once like she could dislodge the absurdity. “Can you believe it?”
Shock skittered down my arms and fizzed at my fingertips.
“He served you—” I thought blankly for a second, and the word arrived with a rude little thud— “divorce papers?”
She nodded, a tiny, disbelieving dip. “Apparently, he takes his cruising seriously.”
Keegan coughed in the kitchen so violently that Miora handed him a towel without looking.
“Cruising,” I repeated, because sometimes the human brain needed to hear the stupid thing twice to be sure it deserved the eye roll. “As in his midlife crisis with a bar tab and a buffet?”
“As in two-for-one daiquiris and a woman named Saffron,” my mother replied. “He boarded a ship and decided marriage is too terrestrial.”
My dad made a sound in the category of canine smug. He lurked in the corner like a gloating gargoyle.
“Told you he was a boiled noodle,” he said. “Salted and floppy, definitely not al dente.”
“Frank,” Miora said mildly. “No kicking the man when he’s run away on a floating mall.”
“I’m not kicking,” Frank said, failing to hide his grin. “I’m observing.”
I sat beside my mom and slid the stack of papers off her lap and onto mine because sometimes the most magical thing you can do is carry the weight of bureaucracy for someone you love. The papers were thick, heavy and, full of the sharp edges of other people’s decisions.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I’m not,” she said, then winced. “Well. I am. I’m sorry I didn’t leave first.”
There are a thousand I-told-you-so’s available in a moment like that, and not one of them is worth the breath. I bumped her shoulder with mine.
“Do you want me to conjure a wind that blows all cruise ships off course when he boards, or how about a latrine that overflows because someone put toilet paper down it?”
“Tempting,” she said, a laugh cracking like a thaw in her voice. “But I think karma with a sunburn will do.”
“Garlic bread,” Keegan announced, sliding a tray onto the table. The cottage filled with the smell of hope. “And soup in five. I found the potatoes that were auditioning for a new life.”
Miora levered herself up with a little more effort than the chair deserved to require and crossed to the kitchen.
I shuffled the papers into a neat stack.
“We’ll look through this tomorrow,” I told my mother. “We’ll talk to someone who knows how to bully the right gods. You’re not doing this alone.”
. “Thank you,” she said simply. “But at least I’m where I belong.”