Chapter Fifteen #2
Keegan made a noise halfway between a cough and a laugh.
“You’re on their side too?” I asked her, a little plaintive.
The Silver Wolf considered me the way she might consider a young wolf trying to decide whether to jump a stream.
“I am on the side of my son not breaking himself trying to keep you from falling,” she said.
“He can only jump so far. If he knows you can meet him halfway, he will sleep better. So will I.”
That landed in a place I didn’t have shields for.
Twobble clasped his hands in delight. “See? Parental blessing. This is practically a cultural rite.”
“I hate this,” I said.
“I know,” Keegan said, his voice warm at my side. “You hated the idea of coming to Stonewick, too.”
“I did not,” I said.
“You did,” he said gently. “You came anyway.”
“And look how that turned out,” Twobble said. “Headmistress. Friends. Secret rites. Questionable romantic choices.”
“Hey,” Keegan said.
“Not you,” Twobble said quickly. “Other choices. Lesser choices.”
Skonk coughed, badly hiding a snort.
I scrubbed a hand over my face. “We have five days until the joining. I need to be reading. Studying. Talking to the book sprites. Not… whatever this is.”
“This is also studying,” Nova said. “Your grandmother will likely not meet you on the ground. She’ll pick somewhere high, dramatic, full of thin air and thinner patience. If you don’t want to look up at her, you need to be comfortable looking down.”
“Why are all my metaphors suddenly vertical?” I muttered.
The Silver Wolf took one step closer, and the air around her shifted. The butterflies along the edge of the Ward changed their flight to match her pulse.
“Fear is a weight,” she said quietly. “It keeps you from lifting when you need to. It also keeps you from being foolish. We’re not trying to erase it. We’re trying to teach it which direction to lean.”
Stella fluffed her shawl. “You stood in the Hollows while your priestess grandmother threw knives at your head. You can handle a few minutes of controlled descent.”
“Controlled,” I repeated. “I heard that word. I feel there’s a lie in it.”
Twobble reached into his vest and produced a folded sheet of paper that had definitely seen better days. He slapped it against his palm.
“Behold,” he said, “the plan.”
I took one look at the scribbles with arrows, circles, and a little stick figure with wild hair labeled Maeve and a series of increasingly chaotic doodles labeled maybe not this much and felt my soul attempt to exit my body through my ears.
“That’s not a plan,” I said. “That’s a cry for help.”
Skonk peered over my shoulder.
“You’re looking at the wrong side,” he said. “Flip it.”
The other side was worse, with a rough drawing of the Academy tower, a dotted line labeled trajectory, and a huge, aggressive arrow pointing upward, with don’t die underlined three times at the bottom.
“I’m not jumping off anything,” I said. “I have barely accepted that ladders exist.”
Keegan leaned in, his shoulder brushing mine.
“We’re not starting with the tower,” he said. “We’ll start in the Ward. The magic there is softer. It catches.”
“It also launched Twobble into a hedgerow for years,” I said.
“A learning experience,” Twobble sniffed. “I now know hedges intimately.”
Nova’s smile widened.
“You know the feeling when the Ward lifts you, just for a heartbeat?” she asked me. “When it approves of something you’ve done and gives you that little buoy?”
“Yes,” I admitted. It was one of my favorite pieces of magic: the almost-lift, the sense of being less heavy than usual.
“We’re going to teach you how to nudge that,” she said. “Not to fly like a bird. To fall like someone who decided the ground doesn’t get the only vote.”
The dread in my chest squirmed.
Keegan tilted his head, searching my face.
“You don’t have to,” he said quietly. “We’ll work around it if you say no. I’ll never push you off anything.”
“That’s my job,” Twobble muttered.
Skonk elbowed him so hard he nearly fell down the stairs.
Everyone watched me. Keegan, with his patient love, and Twobble, with his mischievous grin, and the logical part of me wanted to run off the Academy grounds and never come back, but the wilder side told me to stay.
But shouldn’t we be worried about closing the circle, stopping the hunger path’s plan, and learning what my grandmother really wanted from me? Yes. Absolutely. Every part of that list pulsed in my veins like a second heartbeat.
And yet… part of closing a circle is knowing it doesn’t trap you. Being able to step out, up, sideways, if the ground under it cracks.
Nova’s grin went a shade wicked. “It all adds to the plan,” she said. “If you can hover for even a breath, you can step into the joining with a different kind of confidence. Your grandmother expects you to be bound to the earth. We’re going to give her a surprise.”
“Like a flying hotdog,” Twobble said reverently.
I stared at him. “If you ever compare me to a hotdog again, I will curse your snack drawer to produce only raisins.”
“I was just following your lead.” He gasped.
“I’m warning you…the snack drawer.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Try me,” I said.
Stella clapped her hands once. “Settled. Flight lessons. Today.”
“Today?” I squeaked.
“Soon,” Nova amended. “We’ll ease you in.”
“Define ease,” I said, but the word felt thin. Between the dread and downright horror of seeing myself hanging in the air like a badly aimed sausage, I was speechless.
The Silver Wolf’s eyes softened.
“We’ll catch you,” she said simply.
Dread growled in my belly.
But hope, stupid, stubborn, cheating hope, nudged my ribs and whispered: Imagine her face when you arrive on her level.
I closed my eyes for a breath and saw it: the priestess of Shadowick on some high, icy platform, looking down.
The version of me she expected, ground-bound, small, staring up at her, and then another version of me, lifted by my own magic, held by my own choice, meeting her eyes without craning my neck.
I opened my eyes again to my found family arranged on the Academy steps, half-goblin, half-wolf, half-chaos, all in.
“Fine,” I heard myself say, voice a little higher than usual. “A small lesson. A very small lesson. No towers. No vertical drops.”
Twobble’s grin split his face.
“No promises,” he said, then yelped as Skonk stomped his foot in warning.
“No towers,” Skonk translated. “Ward only. Safety nets. We swear on the snack cupboard.”
“That’s binding,” Stella said approvingly.
Nova’s grin went feral.
“Perfect,” she said. “Let’s go throw our headmistress at the sky.”
My feet didn’t move.
But my heart did in a tiny, traitorous flutter that felt uncomfortably like the first step off a ledge.