Chapter Thirty
“Do you even realize,” she said, “what it is Gideon truly wants?”
The hedge around my thoughts bristled.
“I’m not playing guessing games with you,” I said.
Her eyes brightened, a cruel sort of amusement.
“You,” she said.
The word hit me like a slap.
“What?” I said.
“You, Maeve.” She rolled the name around like a taste she was considering.
“He wants you. Has wanted you since you first stood in his path and refused to flinch. You’re stubborn.
Loyal. Powerful in ways you do not yet appreciate.
You fascinate him. And men like Gideon… mistake fascination for devotion very easily. ”
Cold prickled along my arms.
“No,” I said, too fast. I shook my head. “He doesn’t know me. Not really. We’ve spent most of our time together on opposite sides of a disaster.”
“Disaster is a very intimate experience,” she said. “You shared a path. A curse. Wolves. Wards. You cut him deeper than any enemy’s knife, simply by existing in his way. You remind him of what he might have been if I had not molded him.”
Her smile thinned. “He hates you for it. And he loves you for it. He does not know the difference. That is what makes him such a deliciously unstable piece.”
Something in my chest gave an uncomfortable lurch.
I thought of the way Gideon had watched me in the neutral ground. Not soft—never that—but intent. I thought of the way his expression had flickered when he agreed to stand in the circle. Not just calculation. Something else.
“No,” I said again, quieter. “He loves power. He loves control. He loves… winning. That’s what he wants. Not me.”
She shrugged one elegant shoulder. “If you say so. But it does explain his latest… choices.”
My mouth went dry. “Where. Is. He.”
She studied me for a long moment, head tilted slightly, like she was picking the best way to bruise a piece of fruit.
Then she smiled.
“Closer than you think,” she said.
Shadows at the edge of the square stirred. In the corner of my vision, I thought I saw a shape as if something, someone, were pressed just beyond the visible dark. A ripple of magic brushed my mark, not the Luminary’s clean hum or the Wards’ steady thrum, but something ragged and half-familiar.
Gideon, my gut whispered.
The priestess’s eyes glittered.
“He ran,” she said. “Of course he did. That is his default setting. But he cannot outrun me. He never could. He is bound to the path we walked together. Do you think I would let my favorite knife be taken from my kitchen by a few sentimental wolves and an upstart Hedge Witch?”
Rage flared, cutting through the cold.
“He chose to stand in the circle,” I said. “He chose to break your path with us.”
She rolled her eyes. “He said he would. Words are cheap. The boy was always too fond of them. When he hesitated, when he turned his back on what we built, I reminded him where his leash ends.”
Ice crawled up my spine.
“Did you hurt him?” I asked, the words scraping.
She sighed, as if bored. “Pain is such a small incentive. Fear is more effective. He’s quite acquainted with both. Don’t worry, child. I haven’t broken him. He might still be useful.”
“Let him go,” I said, voice low. “If you ever want anything from me, start there.”
Her smile vanished.
For the first time since I’d stepped outside, her pleasant veneer cracked.
“Do not attempt to bargain with me,” she said, voice dropping. The shadows at her feet flared, spilling outward, licking at the edges of the square. “You are new to power. I am not.”
The air thickened.
Pressure slammed into my skull, sudden and sharp, like someone pressing their hands against my temples from the inside. Her presence pushed, hunting for cracks in the hedge around my thoughts.
Thorns, I thought wildly.
I pictured them thickening, interweaving, sap oozing. I shoved my awareness into small, stubborn things: the rough edge of the cobble under my heel; the smell of Stella’s tea drifting from the door behind me; the memory of Skye’s laugh; Celeste’s hand in mine when she was small.
You don’t get those, I thought. You don’t get me.
The pressure slid sideways, looking for another route.
The fountain’s ice groaned. Cracks spiderwebbed through the frozen arcs, refreezing immediately in new, jagged patterns. The lampposts around the square flickered, light dimming under a pall of shadow.
Behind me, I heard muffled reactions from inside the shop, Stella’s hiss, Twobble’s yelp, the low rumble of a wolf’s snarl, but they felt distant, muted by the focus it was taking just to stay upright.
“You impress me,” the priestess said, which did not feel like a compliment. “Elira was ever the clever one, but she never learned to shut. Always trying to connect, connect, connect. She reached for everything. It made her… easy to break.”
The mention of my grandma sent a hot stab through my chest.
“Careful,” I said, through gritted teeth. “We are very fond of haunting, these days. You may end up with more ghosts than you’d planned.”
Her eyes flashed.
And then she decided to stop playing.
She lifted her hand.
Shadows reared up around her like a living thing, then lashed outward toward the nearest building. A tendril of darkness struck the sign above the bakery, and the wood splintered with a sound like bones breaking. Frost bloomed across the door, sealing it shut.
She flicked her fingers, and the fountain’s ice exploded, shards hanging suspended in midair before coalescing into a jagged ring around her, glinting.
Magic rolled off her in waves, old and hungry and used to being obeyed.
My mark burned like fire and ice together.
“Stop it,” I snapped. “You don’t get to demonstrate in my town. This is my ground.”
She arched a brow. “Your ground? Child, this entire land once bent to my will. Stonewick, Shadowick, the Wards between. You think because you coaxed one broken Academy awake, you own this place?”
“I think because I live here,” I said, voice shaking, “because these people chose me, because the Luminary let me hold it and the dragons didn’t eat me, that counts for something.”
Something flared behind her eyes at the mention of dragons, gone too fast for me to name.
Good. Something she didn’t like.
Her lips thinned.
“Then show me,” she said. “Show me what your something can do.”
Shadows surged again, racing along the cobbles toward Stella’s tea shop, rising up like a wave about to crash over the windows.
For a heartbeat, panic clawed at my throat.
Everyone I loved most in the world was on the other side of that glass.
Keegan. My parents. Nova. Stella. Twobble, Skonk, Bella, the Silver Wolf, Ardetia, Lady Limora and her witches. All of them.
“No,” I said.
I didn’t shout it.
I meant it.
Hedge magic wasn’t about dramatic gestures. It was about boundaries.
I reached down, not for the sigils, not for dragon power, not for anything grand and cosmic.
For the Hedge.
For the Butterfly Ward. For the stubborn, invisible lines that said this is one thing and that is another, and you do not cross without permission.
I threw my will into the space between the tea shop and the oncoming shadows and imagined a line.
A simple one.
Drawn in chalk.
In salt.
In thorn.
The shadows hit it.
They didn’t stop completely.
She was too strong for that, but they slowed.
Their wave crested and turned sludgy, piling up against the unseen barrier like mud against a dam.
The priestess’s eyes widened, just a fraction.
“You are… inconvenient,” she said.
I was shaking now, from the inside out, but I managed a smile that felt mostly like baring my teeth.
“It’s kind of my brand,” I said. “Now, I’ll say it again. Let Gideon go. Whatever game you’re playing with him, it ends. He’s not your knife. He’s not your leash. He’s not your anything.”
Her gaze went flat, all amusement gone.
“For a girl who claims not to care for him, you are very insistent,” she said softly.
“I care about anyone you think you own,” I shot back. “On principle.”
She regarded me for a long, terrible moment.
Then her lips curved.
“Very well,” she said. “You want your little shadow-boy freed? You want him cut from my path? Fine. Prove you are worth the trouble. Give me what I want, and I will put down the leash.”
“What you want,” I said slowly, “is power.”
“That is always true,” she said. “Specifically, I want the thing you are hiding. The thing Elira died to protect. The door I cannot open, no matter how I push.”
My chest went tight.
Dragons, the thought whispered.
The hidden wing.
The anchor in the cottage.
Everything the Academy had tucked away from greedy hands like hers.
Her eyes gleamed. “Did you think you could keep such creatures tucked behind your bedroom corridor forever, child? The moment you touched them, the world shifted. I felt it.”
The shadows pressed harder against my invisible line.
Behind me, the tea shop door rattled, as if someone inside had just tried to yank it open and been stopped.
I didn’t look back.
“I’m not giving you anything,” I said.
The dragons…she was merely testing. She didn’t know.
Her smile sharpened. “I want access. To the hinges. To the Hollows, the Wards, the anchors you’ve so thoughtfully woken. You are the key for too many locks, Maeve Una Bellemore. Give yourself to my circle, and I will release Gideon.”
The world narrowed to her face, her words, the cold promise in them.
Behind my thorns, my thoughts snarled.
Give myself.
To her circle.
To her path.
To the thing I’d just watched nearly crack the town.
My heart thudded in my ears.
“No,” I said.
Her expression didn’t change.
I realized, with a sick little lurch, that she’d never expected me to say yes.
This was just the opening move.
“Very well,” she said. “Then we continue to play.”
Shadows gathered behind her again, coiling, thickening, readying for something worse.
My mark flared and screamed a warning.
From the cottage, distant but bright, a flicker of Elira’s anchor answered.
And somewhere in those same shadows, faint as a heartbeat through walls, I felt Gideon’s presence twist…
Before the priestess’s magic surged, and the world went dark around the edges.