How could I have said no after that—especially to parents who had always been so supportive of my choices, and my magicless life in Chicago? A life they’d never understood, and one that so pointedly made no room for them?

“I know that,” I said, not mentioning the letter, because there was no way my mother would have let him send something so emotionally manipulative had she known about it. My parents were basically the living embodiment of #relationshipgoals, and I had no desire to stir the pot between them. “And the spirit of the thing demands that it be me. And since the Blackmoores have won since pretty much time’s inception, it’s not like I’ll have all that much arbitration to even do.”

This was technically incorrect. The Thorns won once, back in 1921—but only because Evrain Blackmoore was such a roaring drunk he lit both himself and the Avramov combatant on fire while transforming a fishpond into a fountain of flaming spiced rum.

See? Suck it, Delilah, I did know my Thistle Grove history.

My mother sighed softly and capitulated, rubbing her temples. “I suppose that’s true. And you’ll have a few days to rest up before the tournament opening on Wednesday. Acclimate a bit to being back.”

At the mention of rest, I tried to stifle a yawn and failed miserably, my jaw nearly unhinging from the force. “Sorry,” I barely managed through it. “I’m just beat.”

My mother pushed back from the table and swiftly gathered up our empty mugs, then set them in the sink. “No worries, sweet. I have the carriage house all ready for you,” she told me over her shoulder as she rinsed them. “I thought, for a whole month, it would be nice for you to have your own space rather than a guest room in the house proper.”

“That would be great,” I said, my heart lifting at the prospect with genuine pleasure. I’d loved the carriage house as a kid, and spent most of my sleepovers with Linden Thorn sequestered out there, apart from my parents but never too far away for help if any was needed. The kind of distance they’d probably envisioned would carry over into my adulthood, instead of the two hundred miles of Illinois flatlands that now yawned between us, vast and intractable.

Together, we lugged my things out the back door and down the paved path that led through my mother’s flower garden. The night bloomers stirred in their beds, swaying toward one another and tittering in high-pitched tones like gossiping fairies. Jasper trotted over to sniff a particularly lively evening primrose, leaping like a rabbit when it leaned over with a tinkling giggle to bop him on the nose.

It was a simple animating spell, though nothing like what a Thorn could have done with one. Flowers in a Thorn-animated garden might have distinct names and personalities and the power of speech, all the trappings of sentience. I knew because Linden Thorn, my best friend of over twenty years, once animated a cherry tree in the Honeycake Orchards for me as a birthday present. Cherry—so styled by yours truly, the world’s most literal eight-year-old—whooped my ass at chess a solid four games out of five, and enjoyed regaling me with its gorgeous, uncanny dreams.