Page 33 of Magical Mayhem (Stonewick Magical Midlife Witch Academy #7)

The banquet hall felt like summer insisted upon itself. We all instinctively knew what this feast represented.

Lanterns floated at different heights, soaking into the honeyed wood tables until everything glowed.

The kitchen sprites had turned the place into a parade of garden-fresh delirium. Platters glided through the air as if the very smell of rosemary could lift them.

“Make room, loves,” a sprite trilled, shouldering a tureen twice his size. “Hot-weather stew with zucchini, sweet corn, summer beans, a suspicious amount of butter, and joy.”

Or at least that was what I imagined her to say.

Another skated past with a slab of feta crowned in olive oil and lemon zest, scattered with petals so bright they looked like confetti.

Someone set down a platter of heirloom tomatoes in every shade of red known to romance; someone else followed with chilled cucumber ribbons, glossed with dill.

There were baskets of herb rolls still steaming, their crusts brushed with garlic honey, and little bowls of stone-fruit chutney that tasted like memory.

I was starving, happy, terrified, and also pretending to be none of those things.

Keegan and I had been tucked at the end of one long table, close enough to the door that he could escape if his strength faltered, far enough in that no one would mistake him for a ghost. He’d insisted on walking here himself.

I’d insisted on walking so close that my shoulder could have been his crutch.

Across the hall, students were loud in that post-fear way, the kind of laughter that comes when you’ve survived something together and your body needs proof.

Bella, in human form, had three rolls and the impish calm of a fox who’d definitely charmed her way into fourths.

Stella breezed past, shawl floating like a parade banner, and left a plate of lemony roast chicken in front of Keegan without a word.

Ardetia stopped at each clump of students, whispering something that made shoulders settle and spines lengthen.

Nova… Nova stood in the doorway a moment, watching everything with that quiet, steady gaze that has always felt like a blessing and a warning.

Then she disappeared, staff tapping, to give the night some shape beyond us.

“Eat,” I told Keegan, because maybe if I said it like a command, the universe would obey.

“I am,” he said mildly, even though his fork was just hovering over a piece of chicken as if it might leap up and poke him.

The sprites set a bowl in front of me with grilled peaches on greens, curls of goat cheese, toasted walnuts, and a drizzle of something lavender and dangerous. I took a bite and forgot my name.

“This tastes like a responsible decision,” I mumbled.

Keegan’s mouth curved, barely, the fatigue still sanded into every plane of his face. “You have a very specific definition of responsibility.”

“It involves fruit,” I said. “And the illusion that I have my life together and there is no spooky cloud man lurking in the sky.”

“Wolf,” Keegan corrected.

I chuckled. “If you say so. You're more wolf than him.”

We ate, and for a few breaths, the world was as simple as bread and olive oil as everyone nourished their bodies to go with their minds.

I watched students split rolls and opinions, watched a sprite scold Twobble for attempting to steal an entire bowl of lavender sorbet.

“It’s medicinal,” Twobble argued. “For my delicate constitution”.

I watched Keegan’s hands, how steady they pretended to be, how careful he was not to reveal the tremor under his knuckles. The shadows outside had stayed sulking, for now.

Keegan caught me looking and didn’t flinch away. Instead, he set down his fork, turned his body toward mine, and the world narrowed to the square of the table between us.

“What?” I asked because his gaze had shifted into that intent gray I trusted and feared in equal measure.

“Nothing is wrong,” he said first, and I read the truth of that in the way his jaw eased. “But I need to tell you something.”

A little cold arrow slid under my ribs.

Gideon. The inn. The room key that still felt hot in my pocket even when it wasn’t there.

“What?” I asked lightly and hoped my eyes didn’t give me away.

“It’s about Gideon.”

Guilt is its own curse. It raced up my throat and sat behind my teeth. I lifted my water, took a sip, and set it down.

He didn’t look angry. He looked… concerned. That was almost worse.

“Okay,” I said, and kept my voice steady. “What about him?”

Keegan breathed, a slow, measured inhale, like someone coaxing a skittish horse.

“You know how you’re always searching for what turned him into what he is. Why he chose wickedness as a friend.”

My pulse stuttered. I saw fog and torches and Malore’s mouth stretched thin with promises. I saw a boy on a cliff looking at a town that glowed like a holiday he wasn’t invited to.

“Yeah,” I answered. “I do. I’ve wondered it every day.”

“Maeve.” He hesitated, fatigue pulling at his features again. “I think you’re right. I think there was a defining moment.”

I pressed my hands flat to the table to keep from grabbing his wrists. “Do you know what it is?”

“No.” His mouth tightened in frustration. “Not exactly.” He glanced down, then up; the motion was so careful it hurt. “But I know that when he was a child, something got taken from him.”

The words rang like a bell in a stone room—clear, cold, and too loud.

“Taken,” I repeated. “By whom?”

“I don’t know.” He swallowed. “It could be rumor. But I always had the sense that something was stolen. Something that mattered, and not in the way you can fix with a replacement.”

“By whom?”

He lifted his gaze and let it meet mine straight on. “I think by Stonewick.”

The hall went on being loud and bright and summer-drunk; no one else’s world tilted.

Mine did.

It did a careful, slow spin, set down again, and suddenly there was not enough air between the candle and the oil and Keegan’s steadying hand on the edge of the table.

“Are you sure?” My voice came thin. “Keegan…”

“I said think.” His jaw flexed, and the urge to soothe him warred with the urge to shake the truth out faster.

“I don’t have proof. Just… whispers. From elders who never wanted to speak plainly.

From the way Malore always aimed his lies at seams that already existed.

” His mouth twisted. “From the way Gideon looks when Stonewick’s name is said like a prayer and not a wound. ”

“What would Stonewick take?” I asked. It came out harsher than I meant. “We’re not.” I swallowed. “We weren’t…”

He reached across the table and wrapped his fingers around mine.

“Maeve. I am not saying the village gathered with pitchforks. I am saying the land has teeth and the old families have long memories, and sometimes things go missing in the service of the greater good. Sometimes the greater good is an excuse. Sometimes it isn’t.

I don’t know which it was then.” He exhaled.

“I only know he believes it was taken or lost. And belief is enough to turn a boy into a blade.”

His thumb rubbed once along the side of my hand, the gesture unconscious and intimate and exactly what kept me from breaking in half right there between the herb rolls and the lemon chicken.

A chill ran down my spine as I watched Keegan’s face, the way he spoke as if the words had been carved into him, not remembered. That was when it struck me. This wasn’t from his memory. If Keegan had known, he would’ve told me long ago. He never kept things from me, not like this.

No, this was something else.

Somehow, the curse Malore wove between Gideon and Keegan had tangled deeper than any of us had realized. The same sickness that drained them both was lacing their minds together. Keegan wasn’t drawing from rumor.

He was drawing from Gideon, pulling pieces of truth straight out of a place even I hadn’t managed to reach when I’d tried.

The thought left me breathless, guilt rising sharply in my chest. Here I’d been sneaking around, hiding Gideon at Keegan’s own inn, terrified he’d discover it.

Yet all the while, the curse itself had been feeding Keegan whispers from Gideon’s past. Whispers I wasn’t meant to hear but desperately needed.

If Gideon’s pain had become Keegan’s knowledge, then maybe the only way forward wasn’t just healing them separately. Perhaps it was untying the knot that bound them both, or risking that it strangled them together.

“Dad?” I said, without looking away from Keegan. “Did you ever hear…”

“I heard pieces,” my father said from just behind me, because of course he’d moved closer when Keegan’s voice went quiet.

“Not facts. Shapes.” He slid into the chair on my other side without asking, all bulldog steadiness in human form and careful eyes.

“There were disputes. Arguments about training and custody, about whose ward-line counted, about whose debt was older. You know how councils can get…”

“Petty,” I said. “Sharp.”

“Self-righteous,” he added. “People convince themselves that the thing they want is the thing the land wants, and then they act like the land deputized them. But I don’t know why that would change a boy into what Gideon became.”

I thought about what Keegan went through, but he was older. So what happened to Gideon?

Keegan’s hand squeezed mine. My throat tightened.

“If Stonewick took something from him,” I whispered, “then Malore didn’t have to build a lie. He just had to aim the truth.”

“And gild it,” Keegan said. “And promise to serve.”

And for the first time ever, Keegan had an understanding about Gideon that none of us ever had, and the reason for it was crushing.

It was killing him, and I had to find the answers.

I had to stop Malore. I had to get us to the circle.

The food in front of me tasted like a language I’d suddenly lost. No more daydreaming about the simplicity of break and olive oil.

Around us, students debated whether lavender sorbet qualified as a course. Twobble tried to trade a muffin for two truths and a scandal, and was denied on procedural grounds.

Stella cackled at something and then pretended she hadn’t. Ember drifted by our end of the table.

But it all felt like a blur.

“What do we do with it?” I asked, more to myself than to anyone. “If Stonewick stole something from Gideon, if the land did or the families did, how do I ask him to stand in the circle and give his strength to a place that took from him?”

“You tell the truth,” Keegan said. It sounded like it hurt him. “You let the land tell it too.”

I stared at him. “You’d stand next to him after saying that out loud?”

He stared back. “Would you?”

We didn’t move. Then, carefully, we both smiled the same tired, feral smile that says I will tear down my own fear if it keeps you safe.

“I’d stand,” I said.

“So would I,” he answered, and the table between us felt less like a thing and more like a bridge.

“But will Gideon?”

Twobble thunked a skillet down in front of us, startling me into the present.

“Summer hash,” he announced, hands on his hips. “New potatoes, charred scallions, garden squash, and something I’m calling ‘confidence butter.’”

“Confidence butter,” Keegan said dryly. “Will it make me immune to making a fool of myself?”

“No,” Twobble shrugged. “But you won’t care. You’re barely holding on as it is.”

He darted off to police some students talking animatedly, and Keegan shook his head.

“It’s like dealing with a toddler’s honesty,” Keegan grumbled.

“And I honestly love it, but you need to rest,” I said softly. “Because tomorrow…”

“Tomorrow,” he agreed, “we find out what Stonewick took.”

“And why,” I said.

A silence fell over our end of the table. I had the absurd urge to make a joke to break it, but the truth coming from Keegan deserved to be honored.

At the far end of the hall, Nova reappeared, her staff angled low. She spoke to Ardetia, who nodded and slipped out. Bella caught my eye and mimed a question. I nodded, and she relaxed, tail flicking in an echo that probably charmed two kitchen sprites and a plate of rolls.

“Do you remember,” Keegan said suddenly, voice soft as thread, “the day you told me the Academy chose me too? That first week when we opened the doors and I kept insisting I’d rather sleep at my place than inside these humming walls.”

“Not quite how I remember it, but go on.”

He ignored me, which is his love language. “You said that if a place asks for you, maybe it’s because it intends to give something back. That isn’t true for me yet. But it was true for you. And I think… I think even if Stonewick took it, it can give back. If it’s asked properly.”

“Not with demands,” I said. “With making room.”

“With making room,” he echoed.

“Unity.”

We ate, because sometimes you can only say a thing once without breaking it, without lessening it.

Students peeled away in pairs and trios for evening lessons to prepare for what might be ahead. “Maeve.” Keegan’s tone changed to low and wary. “Look.”

I followed his gaze to the far wall, where the portraits of past headmistresses hung in a row. The oil faces usually kept their opinions to themselves, but tonight they’d tilted.

Each one angled subtly toward the same spot over the doors, toward the carved lintel where our crest, ash leaf, fox tail, and star, was etched.

The crest pulsed. Once.

My breath faltered.

“Do you feel that?” I whispered.

“Yes,” Keegan said, but underneath the yes was wolf.

The hair on my arms lifted.

Nova’s head snapped toward us, green eyes bright. Even across the hall, I could hear the two words she didn’t speak.

Be ready.

The crest pulsed again delicately. It wasn’t a warning but a greeting.

The kitchen sprites stilled midair. The students fell into a hush that wasn’t fear this time, but one of expectant anticipation.

The door at the back of the hall didn’t open.

The space around it did.

Air thinned, bent, cooled, if that were such a thing.

Keegan’s fingers found mine under the table, and I gripped back hard enough to anchor both of us.

“Maeve,” he breathed, not my name so much as a prayer.

I didn’t answer. My throat had forgotten how.

Because for one breath, I could have sworn I heard four soft footfalls on the threshold, as if a wolf had set one paw inside a home it hadn’t entered in years.