Chapter Seventeen
The Academy always felt too big when the students went home.
During the term, it buzzed as teacups argued with hexed textbooks, familiars chased each other down staircases, and midlife witches made the kind of decisions that should legally require a chaperone.
But now, with summer session over and everyone gone to their towns and lives and reluctant families, the halls had slipped back into the kind of quiet that magnifies your own thoughts.
My shoes clicked along the corridor, echoing off old stone and fresh lemon oil.
The charms hummed faintly in the walls. Somewhere far below, the boilers sighed.
A breeze threaded through a cracked window, carrying the scent of rain and paper and a faint hint of book sprite candy from the library wing.
I should have been in my office, reviewing sign-up sheets and pretending I knew how to organize classes for hedge magic, curse theory, and magical self-esteem.
Instead, I roamed, touching the carved banisters, straightening a frame here, patting an amulet there. It made me feel like the Academy and I were checking in on each other.
Halfway past the old enchanted astronomy cubby, my butterfly mark tingled.
Not the usual soft awareness, that friendly prickle that said a sprite was pleased or Keegan had walked too close to one of the boundary lines.
This was sharper. A sudden, bright sting under the skin on my hip, as if someone had drawn a fingernail along the birthmark from the inside.
I stopped and pressed my palm to it through my sweater.
“Okay,” I murmured, alone in the hall. “That’s new. What are you complaining about now?”
The mark buzzed again in answer, heat flashing outward in a pattern I couldn’t translate yet. For a heartbeat, my thoughts went straight to the den below.
The dragons.
I pictured them in their hidden chamber, large and small, winged, and luminous. Their scales flickering like candlelight and their eyes ancient and knowing. They weren’t supposed to tug at me like this, but then, nothing in my life was behaving according to pre-approved magical guidelines.
“Is it you?” I whispered. “Or is this a please come fix another terrifying crack in reality kind of twinge?”
The sensation shifted, not deeper, exactly, but sideways. Like a tug on a different thread. It drew me not toward the library, but toward the old east wing, toward the mirrored corridor.
The last time I’d truly used the mirrors, I’d bent them to look back in time, only hours, only just enough, to see who had tried to breach the Butterfly Ward.
It had worked, which still astonished me.
It had also shown me things I wasn’t ready to know.
The mirrors had been quiet since Elira’s sacrifice, as if they, too, were in mourning.
Now, they pulsed ahead of me, a faint, insistent shimmer around the corner.
“Of course,” I sighed. “Why not?”
I followed the pull.
The mirror corridor had always felt slightly apart from the rest of the Academy, even when we were full of students.
It was long and narrow, ceiling arched, walls paneled in dark wood that drank in light instead of reflecting it.
Floor-to-ceiling mirrors lined both sides, every frame different with carved oak, curling bronze, and a few delicate silver ones that looked like they’d crack if you breathed on them wrong, as vines and vegetation softened the mirrors’ sharpness.
Today, the corridor hummed like a beehive.
Light flickered across the mirrors’ surfaces in waves, colors sliding from warm gold to cold blue and back again. The air bent over my skin, raising goosebumps. The butterfly mark throbbed with every step, not in pain, but more like urgency.
“Okay,” I whispered. “I’m here. Please don’t let this be another thing that ends with me unconscious.”
One of the mirrors near the center, a tall oval with a chipped frame, brightened as I approached. Its surface went from cloudy to clear in a breath, like a pond deciding to show me its bottom.
My face stared back with a pale and tired expression, and hair I’d scraped into a messy knot that said “headmistress” only if you squinted from a distance. But behind my reflection, something else moved.
A familiar profile.
Silver hair piled atop her head in a coil that refused to be tamed. Laughter lines at the corners of bright, sharp eyes. A mouth that always looked half on the verge of scolding and half on the verge of kissing your forehead.
“Elira?” I breathed. “Grandma?”
The name cracked out of me.
My reflection shimmered, wavered, and then the mirror swallowed it.
Grandma Elira’s image stepped forward into clarity, as if she’d only been standing one room back and had finally decided to get closer.
“Maeve,” she said, voice muffled, as if it had to travel through a very long pipe. “Oh, Maeve, there you are.”
My knees nearly gave out. I grabbed the frame, wood biting into my palms. “You— You— I thought—”
She smiled, and it was the same smile she’d given me in the Academy when I’d first found her—proud, exasperated, unspeakably tender.
“I know what you thought,” she said. “And you’re not entirely wrong. But I told you, didn’t I? The Academy keeps what it has claimed.”
My heart pounded. “Are you—? Where are you? Are you—?”
“Complicated,” she said gently. “Half-woven. Do not worry about it yet. There are more pressing—”
Her image jerked like a puppet with its strings yanked. A ripple ran across the glass, warping her features for an instant. Behind her, darkness flickered. Frost bled in from the edges of the frame, etching along the silver like fingers.
My grandma’s eyes went sharp.
“We don’t have much time,” she snapped. “Listen to me. The circle—”
Static hit. It shouldn’t have been possible in a mirror, but that’s what it felt like: a shudder, a crackle, a violent interference. Her mouth kept moving, but the sound went thin, then vanished entirely.
“Elira?” My voice went high. “Grandma?”
Her hand lifted, palm pressed on her side of the glass. I mirrored it without thinking, my fingertips tingling where they met the cold barrier.
Her lips shaped words I couldn’t hear. One, two, three. I thought I caught don’t and trust and something that might have been a name, but the frost thickened.
For a heartbeat, I thought it was just the ambient magic. Then another image surged up behind hers, as if ink dropped in water.
A figure taller than Elira, wrapped in heavy, dark robes, appeared. Hair black as wet stone, braided and coiled into a crown with pale skin as moonlit snow. Her eyes reflected chipped onyx. Her presence pressed against the inside of the mirror with a weight that made my shoulders ache.
The head priestess of Shadowick.
My other grandmother.
The frost wasn’t just frost. It was her.
Elira’s image flickered, fought, like two slides being forced into the same projector. One second, I saw my grandmother’s familiar, beloved face; the next, the priestess’s cold, severe features overlapping hers, eyes cutting through.
“Maeve,” Elira mouthed, urgent. “Maeve, listen—”
The priestess’s voice cut in, ice slicing through the muffled warmth of Elira’s like a knife. “Enough.”
It wasn’t loud, but it rang in my bones.
Every mirror in the corridor shuddered in sympathy. Some flashed bright white, others went black as ink. My butterfly mark flared, a sting so sharp I gasped.
“Elira,” I said, or tried to. The word snagged in my throat.
Elira’s image jerked sideways, like she was being dragged away from the glass. Her hand left a smear of light on the surface that the priestess’s frost chewed through an instant later.
For the first time, I saw my mother’s bone structure in the priestess’s face. The same line of jaw. The same shape of lips, though my mother smiled with hers and this woman turned hers into a weapon.
“Maeve Una Bellemore,” she said, and hearing my full name in that voice made my stomach drop. “You are making a mess.”
I gripped the frame so hard my fingers hurt. “Get out of my grandmother’s mirror.”
Amusement flickered in her eyes. “They were my mirrors long before she learned to use them.” The glass around her darkened, throwing the rest of the corridor into harsher contrast.
“Elira—” I began again.
The head priestess spoke over me. “You are playing at balance with men who do not understand hunger. Your circle is a child’s toy drawn in dust. The storm will not respect it.
” Her form crackled and blurred, as if she were being broadcast through bad weather.
“You are—” static “—fire, you do not know—” static “—secrets hidden in—” static.
Behind her, far away and too close, I saw a hint of a stone throne, and behind that, darkness that moved like something alive.
“What do you want?” I demanded. My voice wobbled but held. “What are you playing at? Throwing knives at us from the edge of sacred ground? Sending Gideon like a—”
Her mouth thinned. “Gideon is a tool who learned to enjoy being sharpened,” she said. “Do not mistake him for the blade.”
The glass flickered again. Elira’s face flashed back into view, partially overlaid with the priestess’s, their eyes mismatched, their mouths moving at different speeds. It made my head spin.
“Elira?” I whispered.
“Maeve, you must not let her—” Elira’s voice came back in a rush, cutting through the interference. “The circle—she will try to—”
White noise crashed over her words. The priestess blurred back to the forefront, features hard.
“Your path is already chosen,” the priestess said. “Do not pretend otherwise. You stand on my threshold, whether you acknowledge it or not. There will be a price for shutting the gate, closing the circle.”
“I won’t shut it your way,” I snapped, anger bright and ridiculous in the face of a woman who’d probably invented three kinds of curses before breakfast. “I’m not yours to instruct.”
Her eyes narrowed. For the first time, I saw something like interest there.
“Stubborn,” she said. “Elira was right about that. It will make you useful… or it will break you.”