Chapter 26: THE COUNCIL SEEN

Georgia

I saw something I wasn’t supposed to see, and everyone at breakfast pretended I hadn’t.

Sleep never comes easy at Rosethorne, not since the howling started rolling in close enough to make the windowpanes hum. Tonight I don’t even try. My mind won’t let me. Around one in the morning, I give up on lying there cycling through the same unanswered questions - gold eyes at the storm wall, warm hair caught in my sleeve, Puck’s faint trace lingering in the cold rink air after he vanished without a sound - and cross to the window instead. I press my forehead against the cool glass, watching the dark campus below the way I’ve started doing more often than I probably should. It’s become a habit now, this quiet vigil, as though staring long enough into the dark might finally hand me an answer instead of another question.

That’s when I see them.

Figures gather at the forest’s edge, in a clearing I’ve never noticed before, tucked just far enough back from the main tree line that it’s barely visible even from my window’s elevated angle. Dozens of them stand in a wide crescent, silhouettes dark against the deeper black of the trees, all facing inward toward the center. My pulse picks up before my mind even catches up to what I’m seeing, some older, animal part of me recognizing danger before logic has the chance to weigh in.

My whole body goes rigid. My breath catches somewhere in my throat and stays there, and I press my palm flat against the glass as though that might steady me, might keep me from swaying on my feet. I don’t dare move, don’t dare so much as shift my weight, terrified that even the smallest motion might somehow carry across that distance and give me away.

They barely move. A few shift their weight, adjust their positions slightly, but stillness blankets the whole gathering, something almost ceremonial in the way they hold their positions. The whole scene has the hush of a held breath, like the entire clearing is waiting for permission to exhale. I find myself holding my own breath in sympathy, as though my body has decided to mirror theirs without asking permission first.

A voice carries faintly across the distance, too far for actual words, but low and even, each phrase deliberate, carrying an unmistakable weight. Every figure in that clearing leans toward it, attentive, submissive in a way that has nothing to do with fear and everything to do with some deep, instinctive deference, the kind you don’t teach, only inherit or absorb. It’s a posture I recognize in my own bones, though I couldn’t say from where, some buried memory of bowing to a will larger than mine.

I search the shapes for anyone I might recognize. My breath snags when I find him.

Puck.

He stands near the center of the gathering, closer to whatever commands that voice than most of the others, his posture straighter than I’ve ever seen it, shoulders squared, head slightly bowed. Gone is the loose, easy way he moves through hallways, replaced by something rigid and careful. A strange ache opens in my chest at the sight, some tangled knot of worry and betrayal I don’t have the energy to unpick. Beside him stands a man I don’t recognize at all, older, tall, his bearing radiating authority even through the dark, even without a single visible detail of his face reaching me. The way the others orient themselves around him tells me exactly how much power he holds here, more clearly than any introduction ever could.

My fingers curl against the windowsill hard enough to ache. I stand there for what feels like a long time, barely daring to breathe, knowing that whatever I’m looking at, I was never meant to see it. A cold certainty settles low in my stomach, the kind that tells me this knowledge will cost me something before all is said and done.

Eventually the gathering disperses, figures peeling away from the clearing in small, quiet groups, vanishing back into the tree line one by one until the whole scene empties out, leaving nothing behind but darkness and the ordinary, empty stretch of forest I’ve grown almost used to looking at. I watch until the last shadow disappears, half expecting the whole thing to reassemble itself the moment I look away. Even the trees seem to hold their shape differently now, like the clearing itself remembers what happened there.

I finally step back from the window, my legs unsteady beneath me, and climb back into bed, pulling the blankets up tight, as if enough fabric between me and the world might undo what I’ve just witnessed. Sleep still doesn’t come easily even after all of that. I lie there running through everything I just saw, over and over, dozens of students, an unrecognized older man, a voice that commanded silence and stillness from an entire crowd like it was the most natural thing in the world.

No answer surfaces. I fall asleep eventually anyway, exhausted past the point of resistance, my dreams threading themselves with half-formed shapes and that low, commanding voice I couldn’t quite hear, no matter how hard I strain toward it even in sleep.

The next morning, sitting across from Mandi at breakfast, I bring it up carefully, keeping my tone deliberately light. The dining hall hums around us, all clattering trays and half-hearted conversation, ordinary in a way that makes the memory of last night feel even more unreal, like something I might have invented out of exhaustion and too much imagination.

"Weird night last night," I say, stirring my coffee, my eyes flicking up to gauge her reaction. "Couldn’t sleep, so I was looking out my window around one in the morning, and I swear I saw this whole group of people gathered in a clearing near the forest. Like dozens of them, just standing there. Kind of strange, right?"

Mandi’s fork stops halfway to her mouth.

She goes completely still, the easy, breezy warmth that usually lives behind her eyes vanishing so fast it’s like watching a light switch off. Her fork hovers there, forgotten, a piece of egg sliding slowly off the tines and back onto her plate. The silence stretches a beat too long, long enough that I feel it settle uncomfortably in my chest, a small, cold weight lodging itself right beneath my ribs.

"You saw what?" Her voice comes out flat, careful, every trace of its usual lightness stripped away entirely.