Page 29 of Magical Mirage (Stonewick Magical Midlife Witch Academy #6)

Twobble’s answer never made it past his lips.

He let out a noise like a kettle shriek, sharp, delighted, and utterly goblin, and dove headfirst beneath the writing desk. Papers rattled, the chair skittered, and his boots kicked twice before he wriggled back on his belly, both hands lifted in triumph.

“I knew it!” he crowed, eyes glittering. “A clue.”

He pressed something small and glassy into my palm and stood. The object was no larger than a coin. It was clear and imperfect, with a hairline crack running through its center like lightning trapped mid-stroke.

“Storm marble,” He breathed.

“Okay?”

Twobble was already moving, scanning the room with new focus. “He wouldn’t leave this unless he wanted me to know he’d been here. He leaves crumbs for clever people. Well. For me.”

He tilted his head, listening with his whole body the way only goblins can, with ears pricked, nose flaring slightly, shoulder muscles going still. “There’s jam on it.”

I blinked. “Jam?”

He flashed a grin. “Everything worth following has jam on it.”

He lifted his bundle of charms, and the tiny whispers against my belt shifted from warning to attention as I stuffed the marble into my pocket. The room felt closer suddenly, the walls leaning in to hear what we would do next. Twobble’s delight was catching.

“Come on,” he said, already half out the door. “He wouldn’t leave a marble without giving it something to chase.”

“Twobble…” I started, then stopped, because he was gone, and because the answer I’d wanted, that heavy question about who lived here, could wait if it meant one step closer to finding Skonk.

I followed him.

The door swung open on hinges that had decided not to creak for us, and cold air moved across my face.

Outside, the light was the peculiar dim of Shadowick. It wasn’t night or day. Rather, it was a perpetual bruise that spread.

The irony of willingly stepping into this village was not lost on me, but in my defense, I didn’t know this was where Twobble had planned to lead me.

I tried to tell myself everything would be okay.

No one was watching us. Yet everyone was watching us. The difference was only in how they meant it.

That was the moment it hit me. I was in Shadowick.

Truly in it. Keegan was not here. The portal was gone.

No firelight behind us belonged to me. There was no Miora humming against the walls back at our cottage.

There was no Karvey squinting down from a slate roof.

There was silence instead of Stella clicking her tongue and thrusting tea into my hands, whether I wanted it or not.

It was just me and Twobble, a storm marble ticking in my pocket, and a village built to keep the dark from getting ideas.

My mouth went dry. I tasted metal. I swallowed and felt the swallow all the way down.

Twobble glanced back at me, reading my silence with a precision that would have been unnerving if it weren’t so tender.

“We’ll mind the rules,” he said. “We’ll be rude only to things that deserve it. And I’ll do the talking if you decide to pick fights with shadows. We are in and out quickly.”

“With Skonk,” I said automatically, mostly to prove my voice still worked.

“Exactly.” He sniffed the air and squinted down the lane. “Come on. Hand me the marble.”

“The marble says left and then left again and then stop making faces.”

“I’m not making faces.”

“You are making faces with your insides,” he said. “I can hear them.”

The forest behind the cottage gathered at once and at a distance. Up close, the trunks rose with a fine, dark sheen, bark crosshatched like thin script. Farther in, the shapes knitted together into lacework shadows.

“Twobble?” I said softly.

“Mm?” He didn’t stop moving.

“Tell me more about those rules.”

He didn’t miss a step. “Don’t touch what looks like it wants to be touched. Don’t promise anything without a witness who can write it down. Don’t pay with anything you’ll miss, and never bargain with something that thinks you won’t. And when a tree asks your name, give it a recipe instead.”

“A recipe?”

“Trees love recipes.”

“I don’t have a recipe.”

“It won’t know it’s a bad one until we’re out of the way.”

I nearly laughed, which felt like a small victory. “Are you saying all my recipes are bad?”

“I’m not saying they’re good, if that’s what you mean.”

The path in the woods narrowed until it wasn’t a path. The air changed into cooler and wetter, foggier and reminiscent of Shadowick.

Twobble’s hand shot out, palm down, and I stopped so fast my sandals scuffed. He went very still. His ears tipped forward. His eyes widened.

“What?” I breathed.

He didn’t answer. He only lifted one shaking finger and pointed.

At first, I saw only the silhouette of a curly willow. Its branches cascaded in ropes that pooled on the ground like hair.

The darkened leaves moved even when the air didn’t. Then a shape within the curtain of branches appeared.

“Skonk,” I said, and the word came out of me like a fall.

He hung two feet off the ground, trussed by willow whips that wound around his torso and arms and ankles and across his mouth.

The branches pulsed faintly, tightening, loosening, squeezing him like a bellows. He was conscious, his eyes opened, rolled, fixed on us, widened, and then he made a muffled sound that might have been relief or profanity. With Skonk, it was often both.

Twobble exhaled my name like a swear and a prayer at once. “Maeve.”

“I see him.”

“Don’t touch the Keeper tree,” he said, two-thirds warning, one-third pleading.

“I know.”

We came closer together, step for step, the way people do when they’re walking toward the dumbest brave thing they’d ever done.

Up close, the willow’s bark was slick, and the script-etching was deeper, as if the tree wrote its own story over and over until it liked the ending. Those written lines ran under the vines that gripped Skonk.

“Skonk,” Twobble said. “If you can hear me, blink twice for I admit this was a bad idea. ”

Skonk glared and blinked once, dramatically, as if to say never .

“Still infuriating. Still in denial,” Twobble said, and scrubbed a hand over his face, which was suddenly wet.

The willow rippled. Not the way trees ought to in the wind. This was the shiver of something paying attention. A few branch tips lifted from the ground and angled toward us like fingertips testing the air.

“Don’t give it your name,” Twobble murmured.

I nodded and stepped forward anyway.

“Hello, Keeper,” I said, and kept my voice level and my words tidy. “You kept a guest who isn’t yours.”

The branch tips hovered, then touched the edge of my coat and slid away with a distaste that wasn’t personal. The whole tree leaned a fraction. A sound came through its ropes of leaves, with a low, resonant echo.

Twobble inched to my side.

“Willows here don’t weep,” he whispered. “They keep. They keep what lands in them and decide when to let go.”

“How do we persuade it?” I whispered back.

“Politics,” Twobble said grimly. “Bargaining. Or poetry if we must humiliate ourselves.”

A muffled growl from the leaves suggested it was willing to bargain.

I reached for the part of me that had coaxed root and flame together in my world, the part that had felt the Ward heed me like a heartbeat learning a new rhythm. Hedge magic answered, thinly. Shadowick had its own Hedge, and they did not stand to attention for a stranger from the bright side.

But they seemed to listen, a little.

“Keeper,” I said, and chose my words as if they were ingredients I didn’t want to waste. “You’re holding something that belongs to my family. He is loud, and he owes jam, and he is not yours. He is not mine either, but he belongs with us. We miss him.”

A few vine-bands flexed as Skonk’s eyes squinted.

Twobble leaned in, hands out, palms up, showing he held nothing.

“Keeper Willow,” he said, and his voice changed, less Twobble and more eldest-cousin who knew how to ask a favor. “You know goblin law. We do not steal. We borrow flamboyantly and return improved. You have borrowed my cousin. I ask for his return with improvements optional.”

A branch grazed his wrist. He did not flinch, but the skin under the touch went pale where the blood ran out.

“Payment,” I whispered.

He nodded once, grudgingly. “They like recipes, stories. And, unfortunately, songs.”

“No poetry,” came a garbled sound from Skonk.

The willow’s branches tightened around his mouth, either annoyed by the interruption or trying not to laugh.

“Recipe, then,” I said quickly.

“You take flour, salt, and moon water that knows a name. You knead until your hands turn dry. You fold in the rosemary last, but only fresh, because dried won’t tell the truth, and you let it rest until the dough remembers its shape.

You bake while someone you love tells you that you’re making it wrong, and you feed them first.”

The willow shivered. The low echo sound came again, and this time it had an edge of… approval.

Branches loosened a fraction around Skonk’s ribs. He gasped through his nose, eyes rolling with relief and a promise of later complaint.

Twobble shot me a quick, proud look. “More.”

I spoke again.

“You steep mint only until it remembers it’s green and add a pinch of sugar.”

The willow’s tendrils brushed my sleeve like a cat that doesn’t love you but appreciates your choices. Another band slid off Skonk’s left arm. He tried to wiggle his fingers.

Twobble cleared his throat. “And let me tell you that Maeve is quite excellent in the kitchen. Her recipes explode with taste.”

I scowled at him, and the tree swayed. If a willow could smirk, it did. A third band eased.

“Payment accepted?” I asked.

The willow stilled, listening to a wind that didn’t cross our path, and the writing in its bark brightened as if something inside them agreed. But the bands around Skonk’s ankles did not release. Nor the ones across his mouth. The tree was not done keeping.

A sound rippled through the branches like a sigh that had been rehearsed. A figure stepped from behind the willow.