Chapter Seventeen #2
Behind her, Elira’s shape strained, trying to push back. Light flared around her hands, warm gold against the priestess’s cold shadow.
“Maeve,” Elira cried. “Remember—”
The mirrors screamed.
It wasn’t sound, not exactly. It was a vibration made audible, the shattering groan of glass pushed past capacity. Every pane in the corridor exploded with light, then with cracks.
Lines spiderwebbed out from the central mirror under my palms, racing across the surface like lightning trapped in crystal. The priestess’s face fractured, her eyes shattering into a hundred tiny reflections, each one still watching me.
“Stop it,” I gasped. My butterfly mark burned now, as if someone had set a tiny brand there. “You’re breaking them—”
“You were always going to break them,” the priestess said calmly, even as her image pixelated, then tore. “Ask your mother which side of the fence she ran from.”
“Leave her out of this—”
The cracks deepened. Shards began to slough away from the frame, hovering instead of falling, each fragment catching a different sliver of reality: my face, Elira’s, the priestess’s, a flash of dragons’ eyes, the Luminary’s spiral, the curve of Keegan’s jaw, Gideon’s hand pressed to a stone circle, a sigil I didn’t know.
The magic in the room roared. The sigil under my feet surged up the tower, trying to buffer the chaos, but it was like pouring tea on a bonfire.
“Elira!” I shouted, blinking against the white-hot light. “Grandma…”
Her voice reached me one last time, thread-thin and fierce. “Maeve, listen. She is not…”
The word never landed.
The head priestess’s voice cut across hers, cold and closer than it should have been. “In four days,” she said, as the shards around her face splintered, “the circle…”
The glass blew outward.
For a second, I saw everything. Every mirror, every reflection, every possible version of myself smeared across the surfaces as headmistress, Hedge Witch, dragon-keeper, Shadowick priestess, stranger, child. All of them blurring, splitting, merging.
Then it all went white.
Something slammed into my chest with an unknown force or magic or just the world deciding I needed to sit down very fast. The last thing I felt was the sting of a small cut on my cheek as a sliver of glass brushed it, then the cold rush of the floor rising to meet me.
“Maeve. Maeve. Maeve, awake now, please, before Keegan starts howling and we all have to comfort him, and it will be a whole thing—”
The voice filtered in like a radio trying to find the right station. Annoyed, anxious, and very, very goblin.
I groaned. The world was heavy. My eyelids felt glued shut. My butterfly mark throbbed in time with my pulse. The stone under my back was cool and hard.
“Try poking her again,” another voice said, farther down, dry as parchment.
Nova. Of course.
“I have poked her four times,” Twobble said, scandalized. “There is a limit to how much one can poke their headmistress before it becomes an HR issue.”
“Twobble,” Nova said patiently. “She’s awake.”
I cracked one eye open.
Twobble’s face was inches from mine, his ears drooping, his eyes wide with worry and an unflattering amount of relief. He had what looked like a bandage stuck to his own forehead, slightly off-center. Behind him, Nova loomed, staff in hand, expression composed but tight at the edges.
The corridor lights glowed low, each sconce burning steadily. The mirrors…
I flinched, trying to sit up too fast. The world tilted. Twobble yelped and caught my shoulders.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he babbled. “Easy there, Flying Hotdog. You’ve been out long enough, no repeat performances and…”
Keegan’s footsteps thundered down the hall.
He reached us in a rush, breath sharp, eyes wild in that way they got when the curse whispered too loudly, and fear turned him into a storm. He dropped to his knees beside me, hands hovering over my face, my arms, my shoulders, as if afraid touching me would reveal something broken.
“Maeve,” he rasped. “Talk to me.”
“I am…” I swallowed. My throat was dry, and there was a metallic tang in my mouth. “Apparently alive.”
Some of the feral tension left his shoulders. He let out a shaky breath that ghosted across my cheek, then very carefully brushed his thumb over the small cut there. His hand trembled.
“You scared the hell out of me,” he said.
“Join the club,” Twobble muttered. “Membership includes a complementary panic attack.”
“How long was I…?”
“Too long,” Keegan said.
Nova eased down to a crouch, her green eyes assessing.
“We found you on the floor,” she said. “The Ward shrieked loud enough to bring Karvey halfway up the tower from the cottage. Twobble was first to reach you.”
“I was already on my way,” Twobble said stoutly. “I felt a disturbance in the snack force.”
I blinked, trying to piece together the last… however long.
“The mirrors,” I said hoarsely. “Elira was there. And the priestess. They were—” I gestured feebly. “Fighting over the connection. They both tried to talk to me. And then…”
I looked past them.
Every mirror in the corridor was cracked.
Each pane, from smallest to largest, bore a spiderweb of fine fractures, like frost etched in an instant. The central oval, the one I’d stood at, had a single, clean line running from top to bottom—like a scar.
In that mirror, reflected faintly amid the fractured images of the corridor, one sigil glowed.
Not the priestess’s thorned circle.
Something else.
Something I didn’t recognize.
My butterfly mark pulsed once, hard, in answer.
“Maeve?” Keegan’s voice was gentle now, wary. “What did they say?”
I opened my mouth.
And realized I couldn’t quite remember.
Not all of it. Not in order. Just shards like half phrases, the echo of Elira’s urgency, the priestess’s cool emphasis, muddled together like words seen underwater.
Don’t trust…
The circle.
In four days.
Gate.
Hunger…
And that new sigil humming in the corner of my eye.
I swallowed, throat tight.
“I… don’t know yet,” I whispered.
Nova followed my gaze to the cracked mirror. Her mouth pressed into a line.
“We’ll find out,” she said. “But not while you’re still half in the floor.”
Twobble straightened, trying to look brave and failing at the ears.
“Don’t worry,” he told me. “While you were unconscious, I took detailed notes.”
He held up a notepad.
It was blank.
“…Meaningful notes,” I croaked.
“I was emotionally taking notes,” he said defensively.
Keegan slipped an arm under my shoulders and helped me sit. My head swam.
“Let’s get you out of here,” Keegan said.
I managed a weak smile. “You think distance is going to stop them?”
He met my eyes, his hazel steady, his jaw set.
“No,” he said. “But it might give us time to figure out what, exactly, they just started.”
The cracked mirrors watched us leave, every fractured surface holding some version of our reflections.
Somewhere in the broken glass, for just a heartbeat, I thought I saw my own face looking back—
not as I was,
but as someone I hadn’t decided yet to be.