Chapter Text
Shiny Things
The first bell of spring washed the halls in the smell of wet wool, chalk dust, and potting soil. Brenda Good’s classroom had always felt a little like a thrift store that learned to garden- kitsch posters, hand-lettered labels, a terrarium with a lizard that refused to be named anything but Marvin. However, since the winter’s incident, it had shifted. Vines had crept onto the windowsills in orderly trellises, glass buttons nested in saucers like dew, a small alcove of shining things tucked into the corner shelf: a pewter thimble, a smooth black stone, a length of silver thread looped like a moon. The children called it the shiny shrine when they thought she couldn’t hear. She always heard. She didn’t always correct.
Today, the shrine had company. Three ravens-one ragged, one glossy, one with a single white feather like a bad secret-dozed on the curtain rod as if they paid rent. Another leaned over the rim of the aquarium, clicking at Marvin. The fish tank across the room sent a net of light rippling onto the ceiling like water.
Kravitz knocked twice and the door still opened without him. He stepped in with the careful gravity of a man who has taken too many doors to too many thresholds. His suit was charcoal with a sheen that made Brenda think of midnight ice. In his hands, a small bouquet: hellebore bound with silver string.
“Miss Good,” he said, and his voice, if a voice could bow politely, bowed. “I hope I’m not early.”
“Never early for tea,” Brenda said, and meant it. She relieved him of the flowers as if he’d brought something dangerous and precious; which, to her, he had. “The children left a kettle note: ‘Please don’t poison Mr. Death.’ I told them good kettles mind their own business.”
“Mr. Death?” He almost smiled. “That will be popular at work.”
He would have followed her to the desk-he meant to-but a bright flare of light stitched along the aquarium’s curved glass and took him like a hook. He drifted two steps left, head tilting, eyes catching the glint the way, say, a magpie might. The glossy raven mimicked him with unnerving accuracy. Both reached out at once: man and bird, fingertip and beak, tap-tap on the glass. Marvin, unimpressed, contemplated algae.
Brenda placed the hellebore into a chipped pitcher, pebbles and water already waiting like a plan. When she turned back, she found Kravitz refocusing with the guilty composure of someone who knows he’s been sawed clean through by a second grader’s 'Oooooo shiny.'
“It’s all right,” she told him, pouring tea. “They actually like it when someone taps. It makes them feel like they’ve accomplished something mysterious.”
“Who, the ravens or the fish?”
“Yes,” Brenda said.
The door banged. “Krav-oh, good.” Taako swept in as if the air had been expecting him and was relieved to be right. He took in the room the way a tailor takes in a client: eyes dragged across every fabric and sin like a measuring tape. “Angus’s Miss Good. The sweater situation. The… altar. The birds. Why is your workplace a neighborhood witch’s Pinterest board?”
“Ravens prefer the term congregation,” Brenda murmured, and slid a cup his way. Taako stared down at the tea, arched an eyebrow at the honey pot, and, for once, took it without tampering. The cup had a knitted cozy. Of course it did.
He made it three strides into the room toward the tea before the first raven sidestepped along the curtain rod to be above him. He glanced up. The raven blinked. They both, somehow, looked like they had decided the other was a problem for later.
Kravitz took the other cup with gratitude and the caution of a man who had survived worse than hot beverages. “We came to see how you’re recovering,” he said, turning a fraction to keep himself from being abducted by a sunbeam sliding across the pencil sharpener. “If that’s all right.”
“Recovery is a sort of group project,” Brenda said. “The children make it easier to grade.”
“And the sweaters?” Taako said, suspicious.
She glanced down at herself as if she’d forgotten she was wearing one. Today’s was a deep forest green, moths embroidered along the yoke, their wings made of matte thread overlaid with tiny metallic stitches that caught the light in a scandalously non-educational way. The cuffs were ribbed and, if one looked closely, runed. Nobody looked closely unless they were invited. She rarely invited.
“They have… stitches,” she allowed.
“Those,” Taako said, leaning in to squint without permission, “are runes. Those are very specifically placed runes. Those are ‘a lich breathes on my kids and I would like it to regret existing’ runes.”
Brenda puffed. “Oh dear. The craft store clerk said they were for ‘bling.’”
“You,” he announced, “are a menace.”
He meant it affectionately. She took it that way. Kravitz held his tea with both hands, relieved to have something to hold that didn’t glint in the light.
“Yes, well,” Kravitz said mildly, eyes flicking to the shelf corner where the shiny offerings collected themselves into small, indecipherable arrangements. “Her Majesty appreciates your… curation.”
Taako’s head swiveled like a weather vane. “Her Majesty what now?”
A pause fell- the small, meaningful silence that opens when a bureaucracy crosses its wires with a family and both refuse to admit the paperwork is complicated. Brenda tucked a loose strand of her hair behind one ear. A raven did the same, preening her white feather.
Kravitz cleared his throat. “Miss Good is in Her service,” he said. “Paladin, since the incident.”
Taako’s mouth opened; nothing came out; then too much did. “So. Not only are you and I 'romantically entangled', Kravitz, but our patron goddesses are equally entangled, and somehow-somehow-you did not think to mention that my boyfriend’s boss’s girlfriend’s girlfriend's new paladin is teaching my adopted son basic spell theory while wearing death runes from Fantasy Jo-Ann Fabrics. (RIP)”
“Michael’s,” Brenda said, helplessly honest.
“Oh good,” Taako said, color returning to the world. “At least we’ve got brand loyalty while we’re conscripting homeroom.”
"You could have simply said my boss's new paladin," Kravitz set his tea down. A reflective ring of liquid slid along the porcelain and he followed it with his eyes the way some people follow comets. Brenda nudged the cup an inch with a soft noise; he blinked and looked up, rueful.
“Forgive me,” he said. “There’s… more of her in the world around you now. It’s like standing on a beach after weeks of desert. I keep listening for the tide.”
Brenda’s ears softened. “Then you may listen,” she said simply. “Just don’t knock over the fish tank.”
On cue, laughter and shushing shot down the hall like misfired cantrips. A cluster of small faces occupied the window narrow as stamps. They scattered when the door creaked open-one bold spy left behind. Angus McDonald, backpack slung over a shoulder too small for so much earnestness, peered inside, saw what he saw, and smiled like he’d walked into a particularly good chapter.
“Hi, dads!” he said.
“Professional setting,” Taako scolded, purely on principle.
“You told me it 'warms your cold wizard heart',” Angus said, innocent.
“It does,” Taako admitted, already defeated. “Proceed.”
Angus stepped in fully, offering Brenda a palm-sized quartz pebble. “I found your shiny rock in my pocket,” he said. “From when you let me lead the class to the courtyard. Sorry I kept it, Miss Good.”
“Borrowed, not kept,” she said, and curled his fingers around it again. “Give it to the shrine so it goes where it wants.”
He crossed to the little alcove with the grave solemnity of a boy given a job inside a story. The ravens tracked him like theatergoers follow a spotlight. He set the pebble among the thimble and the buttons and the thread. The white-feathered one croaked and dropped a paperclip beside it like an approving tithe.
“See,” Taako muttered, “this is how cults start. First it’s shiny rocks, next everyone’s in matching cardigans at the winter banquet chanting 'death but make it fashion.'”
“They aren’t matching,” Brenda said, affronted. “We have… a palette.”
Kravitz put two fingers to his lips, thinking. “They do glow,” he said, “when the children are behaving.”
“Performance-based enchantments?” Taako said, strangled by aesthetic offense. “You gave a schoolteacher a dashboard indicator for twelve-year-old morality?”
“Would’ve saved me time in the field,” Kravitz said. “If I’d known Barry’s lit-up cuffs meant ‘being a menace,’ I could have taken more vacation.”
Angus, caught between laughter and martyrdom, looked up. “Mr. Bluejeans says he has a healthy respect for Miss Good now,” he offered. “He used the word ‘respect’ like it was chalky vitamins.”
Brenda flushed under her fur. The ravens, very interested, leaned as one.
“Respect is a start,” Taako said, satisfaction transmuted instantly into mischief. “Fear is a seasoning.”
“Please don’t season my colleagues,” Brenda murmured.
The bell tolled, a pleasant, ripe sound. The corridor swelled with voices and feet. Angus tightened his backpack strap, then hesitated. “Miss Good?”
“Yes, Angus?”
“Are you… all right?” It was the question he’d been carrying since winter, the one she’d seen tucked into his posture like a folded page in a beloved book.
She knelt-she never made a production of her size, but she never hid it anymore, either- and met him there in the space where children learn grownups are just practice humans. “I am recovering,” she said. “And I am watched over. By your family. By my Lady. By the fish.”
Marvin, doing nothing to help, blew a bubble.
Angus nodded, satisfied enough for now. He saluted Kravitz. He hugged Taako. He waved at the ravens as if they’d pass along a memo. At the door, he turned back. “I like the new plants,” he confessed. “They make it look like the classroom is thinking.”
“It is,” Brenda said. “It’s learning.”
He left into the churn and hum of the school. Kravitz reached toward a dazzling patch of sunlight caught on a desk nameplate, and Brenda, without looking, slid the plate two inches to the left.
“The nameplate is for the ravens,” she said.
Kravitz’s smile was small and real. “Professional courtesy,” he said, and put his hands safely back around his tea.
Taako hooked a finger in his sleeve. “Come on, Crowbrain. Before you eat a shiny paperclip and I have to explain it to ghost HR.”
Brenda returned to the kettle, to the lesson plan, to the tidy chaos. The ravens shuffled and settled; sunlight thinned and re-thickened on the ceiling; the room held, as rooms sometimes do, more than it could reasonably contain, and did not complain.
•••
The Recalibration of Barry Bluejeans
They met in the teacher’s lounge because Lup thrived on disrespecting the idea of teacher’s lounges.
“You’re the one who made my husband say ‘ma’am’ in a tone I didn’t know he possessed,” she announced by way of hello, hips already draped over the counter, hair flame-bright even when it was only hair and not spectral. “I brought contrition cookies.”
“Contrition?” Brenda repeated, gently cowed by the sheer conviction of Lup’s entrance.
“They say ‘I’m sorry I argued for a necromancy unit for twelve-year-olds’ in chocolate chips.” Lup slid the carton across the table. “He baked. I wrote the apology with icing. Teamwork.”
Brenda opened the lid, blinked. SORRY, MISS G, the cookies announced, except the O was a skull and the Y had horns.
“The skull was his idea,” Lup added, pleased. “The horns were mine.”
Brenda laughed, an unguarded bray that made her cover her mouth with both hands in belated embarrassment. Lup grinned like a storm rolled its sleeves up. It was not, strictly speaking, fair to have that smile and that much eyeliner at ten in the morning.
“Thank you- and him, as well,” Brenda said, and meant the cookie and the laugh and the mercy of being treated like a person and not a shrine. “He didn't need to do all of this.”
“Oh, he needed to,” Lup said, plucking a crumb. “He respects you now. He told me so with the body language of a man who’s been spiritually suplexed.”
Brenda choked in the back of her throat. “Suplexed?”
“Your whole thing with the lich? He forgot how tall you were until his survival instincts remembered first.” Lup’s eyes danced. “You know how rare it is to watch a lich be intimidated by someone’s moral backbone and quadricep?”
“I didn’t-” Brenda began, took a breath, started again. “I didn’t mean to frighten him.”
“You didn’t,” Lup said. “You scared him straight. Not in the orientation way. In the ‘my husband must go apologize with cookies so he is allowed to continue existing in homerooms’ way.”
Brenda folded one hand around a cookie and one around her cup. The lounge hummed with ice machine growls and the fluorescent light’s attempt at existing. A potted plant someone had been assassinating slowly for two years listed toward the microwave. Lup hopped down to water it with her mostly-finished bottle before her attention came back with the force of a lightning return stroke.
“Okay, now let me look at you.”
Brenda froze, prey to a stylistic predator. Lup circled like a fashion vulture that planned to return the bones glittering. She pinched the cuff, lifted the hem, examined the moth embroidery with a reverence that would have set Brenda on fire if she hadn’t recently met a goddess.
“Is this metallic thread?” Lup demanded.
“It… might be.”
“Is this rune placement intentional or did you use a seasoning packet labeled Pallor & Protection?”
“I had… guidance.”
Lup stopped her circuit. There was the ordinary warmth of being seen and there was the sort that felt like a mirror gave you a compliment. Lup’s was the latter, but nicer. “You look good,” she said. “Like a woman who made up with our goddess and now expresses it with knives disguised as knitwear.”
Brenda made an undignified sound. The ravens had started visiting the lounge, too; one rapped on the little window as if confirming the minutes. Lup rapped back. “Hey sweetheart. You tell Momma Bird she’s got great taste.”
The raven fluffed like a praise-drunk pom-pom and flew off. Lup turned back, conspiratorial.
“So,” she said, somehow twinkling without glitter, “tell me how Kravitz reacts to your altar. He does the thing, right? The… crow head tilt? Taako calls him Shiny Boy and it has only made him worse.”
“He is very polite to the fish,” Brenda confessed. “And the pencil sharpener.”
Lup cackled. “I knew it. I knew it. The man is a walking engagement ring for reflective surfaces. Did he tell Taako first about your whole paladin situation or did Taako have to find out like a civilian?”
“He… mentioned it casually,” Brenda said, which was both true and generous.
Lup wheezed. “Perfect. I wish I’d been there. He probably did the face where his soul leaves the body, checks a coat at the existential desk, and returns with an agenda.”
“He did insist my sweaters have range,” Brenda offered.
“They do. They say, ‘I will nurture your joys and also sunder your skeleton if you endanger my kids.’ This is elite branding.”
Brenda, who had spent the morning moving a bowl of buttons so Kravitz wouldn’t absent-mindedly pocket six, rubbed the heel of her hand over her sternum. “I don’t know what to do with being… admired,” she said, quiet. “My clan valued obedience. I failed obedience. I left. Now there’s this-” She gestured vaguely: the ravens, the students, the way the air in her classroom sometimes felt like a held breath that decided to become a hymn. “This life that keeps saying ‘good job,’ and my first instinct is to duck.”
Lup’s smile gentled without dimming. “Duck sometimes,” she said. “And sometimes do this.” She reached out and, with the businesslike efficiency of a woman who has adjusted armor mid-battle, tipped Brenda’s chin up with two fingers. “Let it land. It’s not flattery. It’s inventory.”
Brenda swallowed. The lounge noise faded to a thread. “Inventory,” she echoed.
“Yeah. ‘Here is your courage. Here is your patience. Here is your sense of humor about quippers. Here are your murder-runes: tasteful, seasonal.’ That sort of thing.”
Brenda laughed into her wrist. “Tasteful.”
“Seasonal. Don’t make me get you a cardigan with crows for fall and snow-lichen for winter. I will do it. I will collaborate on knitwear with our goddess. It will be a whole thing.”
The door opened. Barry entered, took in Lup, took in Brenda, took in the cookies with his apology on them, and assumed the posture of a man in a courtroom who knows pleading guilty is his best route to lunch.
“I brought… milk?” he attempted, holding up a jug like a diplomatic envoy offering grain.
“Accepted,” Lup said. “State your contrition.”
Barry looked at Brenda, earnest to the point of pain. “I’m sorry,” he said, and the apology landed exactly where apologies should: not as a self-excusing paragraph, not as a performative curtsy, but as an offering. “You were right. They’re kids. I got excited about theory. I forgot… the everything else. Thank you for keeping them safe. And for… keeping me safe from my worst academic instincts.”
Brenda, who often wanted to fix the shape of other people’s guilt into something more comfortable and therefore less true, only nodded. “Thank you for the milk,” she said, because gratitude is also inventory. “And the skull cookie.”
“Skull was me,” he admitted, sheepish. “I panicked.”
“Skulls make me feel included,” Brenda said, with the precise politeness that made Lup snort.
“Okay,” Lup declared, clapping as if to settle the air. “Remedial boundaries are complete. Barry, eat your apology. Miss Good, drink your tea. I have an entire PTA to terrorize later.”
“Please don’t,” Brenda said, automatically.
“Oh I will.” Lup slid off the counter, already texting on her stone of far-speech. “But with style.”
As she swept out she almost collided with the principal, who had the quiet tread of a woman who could move silently and make a whole room stand up straighter. Missus Aurix paused, took in Lup, took in the cookies, took in the milk jug, the skull icing, the fact that the teacher’s lounge plant had perked despite itself, and smiled like a dragon tolerating an excellent circus.
“Miss Good,” she said, warmth threaded with iron. “A reminder that the spring showcase will be next Friday. Your classroom displays are… popular.”
“Popular,” Brenda repeated faintly, as if the word were a new stamp in a passport.
“Mm.” The principal’s eyes crinkled. “The Director is visiting as well. Do try to prevent the ravens from making off with her pen.” A pause. “Unless it would be very funny.”
Brenda, helplessly: “It would be.”
“Indeed.” Missus Aurix’s mouth tipped, a secret. “See you at rehearsal.”
She left in a pleasant wake of competence. Lup leaned in from the hall, whisper-shouting, “She and the director flirt like that for hours,” and vanished.
Barry poured milk. Brenda ate a cookie. The skull tasted like sugar and apology; it dissolved into sweetness. Outside the tiny window a raven landed and clacked, triumphant, at its own reflection.
Brenda raised her paper cup in a solemn toast to the glass. “Inventory,” she told the bird in beast-speech. “We’re learning.”
The raven approved with its whole body. Somewhere down the corridor a small boy laughed; somewhere else, two goddesses adjusted the seam between fate and endings with a weaver’s easy hands. In a classroom that smelled like green things and chalk and slightly burned tea, the buttons gleamed where the sun touched them, and nobody moved them. They were for the shrine. They were for the birds. They were for the work.
And the work, this late in the year, shone.
•••
Thread and Talon
By late afternoon the courtyard had become a polite riot. Paper lanterns breathed in the breeze. Banners-painted by helpful children and unhelpful ravens-ran like color across the colonnade. Someone had spelled the fountain to burble in harmony with the school song; someone else had slipped the fountain a handful of glitter. The ravens approved of glitter in principle and in practice; they approved of stealing it more.
Missus Aurix directed the chaos with one hand and a ledger. She did not raise her voice. She did not need to. When she pointed, tables moved; when she smiled, tempers remembered they could be put away. The last of the sun caught along the delicate scales at her temples, and the students-who had stopped being afraid of her and started being impressed-worked faster just to see if they could make that smile happen again.
“Lanterns along the west wall,” she said to a cluster of sixth-years carrying a string like a captured river. “No, higher. Consider the perspective from the lawn- good. Thank you.”
A raven, ambitious, attempted to lift an entire reel of ribbon. Missus Aurix plucked it neatly from the air mid-heist without looking, then handed the ribbon to a child and the raven a paperclip. Justice, at this school, often looked like a paperclip.
“Principal,” someone called, “the lemon bars are missing.”
“Not missing,” Lup said, strolling in with a tray at shoulder height like a celebrity caterer. “Redistributed to the people. Calm down, the people are you.” She slid the tray onto the refreshment table with a flourish and a wink and- because her brand insisted on it- a candle that spontaneously lit itself and then, chastened by Missus Aurix’s glance, politely went out.
Behind her came Lucretia with a clipboard thick enough to qualify as a novella. She wore her competence the way some people wore jewelry: visible, intentional, and quietly devastating. The white stripe in her hair caught the lantern light; a pen hung on a slender chain at her throat like a small sword.
“Principal Aurix,” she said warmly. “You’ve turned a courtyard into a map of civic joy.”
“And you’ve turned a PTA into a functioning government,” Missus Aurix replied, equal parts admiration and mischief. “I’m choosing to see that as parallel progress.”
They stood in the middle of the churn like two stones in a stream, the water deciding to behave itself for as long as it brushed their edges. Around them, banners wrinkled into cooperation; eighth-years practiced their string quartet under a tree; Brenda’s friends, the ravens, having determined that glitter was a finite resource and therefore boring, had moved on to reorganizing the clothespins by an inscrutable system of their own.
“How is Miss Good?” Missus Aurix asked, turning to the business they both shared.
“Recovering, I'm told,” Lucretia said. “Guarded by her ravens, her children, and an alarming amount of metallic thread."
Lup cackled, then, like a campfire combusting dry wood, "Kravitz keeps drifting toward her pencil sharpener like a man lost at sea hearing bells.”
“Only him?” the principal asked, amused.
“Only him. It’s the crow brain. He’s got the shine-seeking setting turned to ‘husband who wandered away in a jewelry store.’ Barry and I are immune.”
“Because you’re liches?” a PTA parent asked, then blanched, realizing both the indelicacy and the accuracy.
“Because our benefits package is different,” Lup said sweetly. “We got the ‘ignore glitter, respect boundaries, unionize the undead’ upgrade. Krav got ‘ooh, reflective surface.’”
“Mm,” Missus Aurix said, weighing this against her experience of all three and finding it both true and deeply funny. “I will reposition the trophy case.”
“Please do,” Lucretia murmured. “The last time he visited the bureau, he apologized to his reflection for hogging the view.”
A small commotion at the east gate marked a cart arriving with folding chairs. Missus Aurix gestured. The chairs unfolded themselves and stacked politely. Lucretia watched them with the calm of a woman who had once filed paperwork in a collapsing universe and had been denied reimbursement for the pen.
“I’m glad you’re here,” the principal said, more personal now that the major logistics had been tamed. “The children like it when you take notes and then those become policy.”
“The children are my favorite policy,” Lucretia said. “And your school is an addiction.”
“A healthy one, I hope.”
“The healthiest.” Lucretia’s fingers, absent-minded, touched the pen at her throat. The gesture looked like a habit and felt like a vow. “It’s good work, Aurix. Work that… holds.”
They stood in that for a breath: two women who had spent significant amounts of time preventing the end of things, now deliberately midwifing the beginning of many small ones. The lanterns made soft shapes on the brick; the fountain, convinced of its own harmony, burbled smugly.
Missus Aurix broke the silence. “Will you walk with me?” It wasn’t a question she asked lightly. Lucretia nodded as if she’d been waiting for the asking.
They made a circuit of the courtyard that looked like inspection and felt like courtship. Lucretia noted everything: the angle of the easels to the sun, the way the chalk dust would drift across the west tables if the wind turned after dusk, the pinch points where parents would bottleneck and how to unfurl them. Missus Aurix, who knew the precise capacity of every child’s attention span and every staff member’s patience, matched each observation with a solution and every solution with a small smile.
“Stage here,” Lucretia suggested, “so the quartet can bleed into the readings, and the readings into the science demos. It keeps the crowd braided instead of chopped.”
“Braided,” Missus Aurix repeated, savoring the word. “Weavers’ language.”
“Appropriate for a place that teaches children to stitch themselves into a world,” Lucretia said, then caught herself, embarrassed by a metaphor in public. “Pardon me. I’ve been spending too much time with Brenda.”
“She’s contagious,” Missus Aurix said. “In a good way. Like laughter, or lanterns.”
They reached the refreshment table. Lup had negotiated a ceasefire between a PTA faction that believed in napkins and a faction that believed in “experience.” She saluted the Director and Principal with a lemon bar and went to menace a parent holding a clipboard in a different corner. A raven, bored with clothespins, landed in front of Lucretia, cocked its head, and presented her with a button like a challenge coin.
Lucretia’s eyebrows lifted. “For me?”
The raven did the slow blink of a creature that had learned bureaucracy through osmosis. Lucretia accepted the button, turned it once in her palm, and tucked it into her pocket with the care of a woman who understood offerings. Missus Aurix watched her do it and felt, absurdly and accurately, that a vow had moved across the courtyard like a shadow and found a perch.
“You handle them well,” the principal observed.
“I’ve learned to respect the rites of small kingdoms,” Lucretia said. “The PTA, ravens, six-year-olds with glue-it’s all the same theology. Do not insult their gods. Provide snacks.”
Missus Aurix laughed, low and rare. “I should embroider that on a banner.”
“I’ll put it on the agenda,” Lucretia said, cool as a mint sprig. Their eyes met for a half beat that contained, unhelpfully, several other beats. They looked away in the same breath and pretended they hadn’t.
Across the lawn, Brenda shepherded a group of students carrying poster boards, her green sweater catching the dusk and answering it. She paused to gently extract a glitter-crazed raven from a paint cup. Kravitz, in attendance as a parent this time, standing at the far edge of the crowd, drifted two millimeters toward the brass plaque on the dedication bench; Taako snagged his sleeve like a fisherman hauling in a shiny, distracted trout. Barry arrived balancing a stack of folding stools and an apology; Lup stole the apology, turned it into a joke, and handed it back wrapped in affection.
Lucretia watched the knot of them with an expression soft enough to be dangerous. “It’s a good thing you’ve built,” she said to Missus Aurix, voice gone late-evening. “It keeps insisting on itself.”
Missus Aurix followed her gaze. The lanterns had come fully into their own; the courtyard was now a shallow bowl of gold. “We’ve built it,” she corrected. “You, with your lists that make the air behave. Brenda, with her shrine that teaches the children to give. The Birds, with their—” a small, helpless gesture that meant chaos and casseroles and resurrection and the kind of love that shows up with chairs-“constancy. The children most of all.”
Lucretia’s hand drifted toward Missus Aurix, barely, as if testing the distance between acknowledging and touching. She did not complete the movement. Missus Aurix felt the ghost of what it would have been like if she had.
“Spring showcase begins at six,” the principal said, suddenly practical because she had to be. “If you stand by the east entrance, the parents will do whatever you tell them without resenting you for it. It’s your superpower.”
“And yours is making dragons out of kindergartners,” Lucretia said.
“Only on Fridays.” The smile was quicksilver. “Will you stay after? There’s tea. And quiet.”
“I like both of those,” Lucretia said, which was agreement and something else folded neatly into it. “Yes.”
A PTA parent hustled over, panic clinging like tinsel. “We’ve run out of thumbtacks,” she gasped. “We have nothing left to attach with.”
Missus Aurix pointed to Brenda’s ravens, who had, as it happened, sorted the entire supply into piles labeled by a system only divinity and birds understood. “Ask nicely.”
The parent, dubious but obedient, did. The ravens considered, conferred, and dispensed exactly the right number with the bored benevolence of minor gods. Lucretia made a note on her clipboard that read, simply, more thumb tacks and drew a small raven beside it because she could.
Families began to arrive: hands smoothed hair; hair smoothed hands. Someone tuned the last string; someone else found their courage where they’d left it by the lemonade. The fountain, having mastered harmony, attempted a countermelody and, chastened by a glance from Missus Aurix, thought better of it.
“Shall we?” the principal asked.
“Let’s,” Lucretia said, as if the word were a spell.
They moved into the opening moments together, the way two people step into a dance they’ve practiced at separate mirrors for years. Brenda, in her classroom for more supplies, placed a new button on her shrine; across the yard, Kravitz saw the lanterns go from pretty to holy and squared his shoulders against the urge to drift toward their light. Taako held him steady with two fingers and a smile. Lup heckled a budget line item with love. Barry handed out programs like absolution.
Above, the ravens settled themselves along the beam of the evening, eyes reflecting small worlds. The courtyard waited, then didn’t; the showcase began.
Tea and quiet would come later. For now, it was enough to stand beside the person who made the air behave and ask the world to hold still long enough for children to show it what they’d learned.
•••
After the Lanterns
By the time the courtyard emptied, the lanterns had gone soft.
They hung in the air like low stars, their flames small and stubborn against the dark. The banners drooped, paper damp with evening, and a hundred chalk-smudged footprints traced loops across the stones. Somewhere near the fountain, Magnus was finishing what remained of the lemon bars, his laughter carrying like the last spark of the party. A raven landed beside him and stole the final crumb. He saluted it with genuine respect.
Missus Aurix stood near the stage steps, her ledger closed at last. Her scales caught the residual light-less fire now, more the reflection of fire, like embers seen through glass. She breathed in the aftermath: wax, sugar, the faint ozone scent of overenthusiastic spell craft. It was the smell of things well-done.
Lucretia lingered at the refreshment table, dismantling the lemonade apparatus with the precision of someone closing a library. A pen hung from her fingers by its chain, twirling absently in rhythm with her thoughts. Lup’s laughter still echoed faintly from the PTA meeting space - something about “tax write-offs for necromancy electives”-and then the door thudded, leaving the night clean again.
“You stayed,” Missus Aurix said.
“I like the part after,” Lucretia replied. “The exhale. The proof that things existed.”
They fell into step along the flagstones, unhurried. The ravens had gathered on the railing, black commas against the dim gold. One tilted its head as they passed, a punctuation mark approving the sentence.
“Your students shone tonight,” Lucretia said. “Literally, in some cases.”
“The potion experiments were meant to be bioluminescent only internally,” Missus Aurix sighed, not unhappily. “Still. Nobody exploded. Growth.”
“I’ve always admired your definition of success.”
“It’s practical. And yours?”
Lucretia thought about it. “I measure success in silence. When people leave without fear. When no one checks the sky to see if it’s ending.”
Missus Aurix’s expression softened into something like reverence. “You and I have lived through very different apocalypses.”
“And survived them both,” Lucretia said. “That’s the trick, isn’t it? To build something that will keep surviving after we’re finished watching it.”
They reached the fountain. The spell that made it sing had quieted, leaving only the small sound of water convincing itself to fall. A pair of ravens hopped along the rim, drinking and gossiping in low, satisfied croaks. One of them dropped a button into the basin. Missus Aurix fished it out delicately, drying it on her sleeve before handing it to Lucretia.
“For your notes,” she said.
Lucretia held it in her palm-a plain pewter circle, unremarkable until the lanternlight found it and revealed a faint etching: a spiral, precise and unfinished. “Brenda’s work?”
“She leaves them everywhere,” Missus Aurix said. “A quiet contagion.”
Lucretia smiled. “Recursion. Lup’s influence.”
“And preservation. Barold’s. You see? Even their chaos finds symmetry.”
They sat on the fountain’s edge. For a moment, neither spoke. The ravens re-sorted their feathers, pretending not to listen. Far off, the last parents gathered forgotten jackets; laughter thinned and dissolved.
“I keep meaning to ask,” Lucretia said softly. “When you invited Brenda to teach here, did you know?”
“That she would tear a lich in half?” Missus Aurix’s eyes gleamed. “I suspected she had the potential. One can often tell which souls will bend toward divinity. But no-I didn’t foresee that.”
Lucretia huffed a small laugh. “You sound like someone who’s learned to enjoy surprises.”
“I’m learning,” said Missus Aurix. “The old ways of control were efficient but lonely. Letting things grow imperfectly-it’s messier, but it breathes.”
She turned her head then, and Lucretia realized she was being studied with the same patient attention the principal gave her students. It wasn’t scrutiny; it was curiosity given form.
“And you?” Missus Aurix asked. “Do you still write everything down? Even now, when nothing’s trying to vanish?”
Lucretia looked down at the pen in her hand. “It’s habit,” she said. “And a promise. The world likes to forget its own tenderness. Someone should keep minutes.”
The dragon smiled-small, dangerous, kind. “Then perhaps I’ll dictate some to you, one day.”
“That sounds like a story,” Lucretia said.
“It could be.”
She poured tea from a thermos she’d produced from nowhere, steam curling between them. The cups were mismatched; one had a chip, the other a constellation of hairline cracks filled with gold lacquer. The Raven Queen’s birds watched as if tea were an act of prayer.
They drank. The silence was companionable, thick with unspoken jokes and parallel regrets.
Lucretia set her empty cup down on the fountain’s edge. “You know,” she said, almost shy, “I think the children have started calling you the Dragon of the Lanterns.”
Missus Aurix arched an eyebrow. “Do they. And what do they call you?”
“The Archivist of Good Snacks.”
“An illustrious title.”
“I earned it. I bribed a small army of eight-year-olds with muffins to stop trying to teach the ravens algebra.”
“I will add that to the curriculum review.”
Their laughter met halfway, collided, and settled. It wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be.
Overhead, a raven lifted into the air, circling once before vanishing toward the forest. Another followed. The third hesitated, looked at them both, and hopped closer instead, landing between their feet. Its head cocked sharply. In the dark of its eyes, Lucretia saw both her reflection and Aurix’s-two faces overlapping like twin lanterns seen through water.
“Balance,” Missus Aurix murmured, as if the bird had said it first. “Even the goddess can’t resist symmetry.”
“Nor can we,” Lucretia said.
When she rose to leave, she hesitated, smoothing her skirt as though to buy time. “You’ll be at the staff meeting tomorrow?”
“I’m always there early.”
“Then perhaps I’ll be late on purpose.”
It was, objectively, a ridiculous thing to say. The kind of thing only someone who’d survived apocalypse could admit without blushing: that lateness might be a kind of permission. Still, it made Missus Aurix’s eyes glint like candlelight caught in amber.
“As you wish, Director,” she said.
“Lucretia,” came the reply, softer.
“Lucretia,” she repeated, testing the word like a gemstone.
She didn’t look back as she crossed the courtyard-she didn’t have to. The ravens lifted, swirling above her like punctuation marks rearranging themselves. One peeled off and dropped something shiny at her feet: another button, this one gold. She smiled, pocketed it, and kept walking.
Behind her, Missus Aurix watched until the lanterns guttered out, until the ravens settled into their night roosts, until the courtyard was just a quiet geometry of things preserved.
She closed her ledger, finally, and whispered into the dark, “Let it breathe.”
And somewhere in the distance- perhaps in a cottage that smelled of moss and honey and tea leaves- Brenda stirred, smiled in her sleep, and did.