Chapter 5 Someone Tried to Rob My Magic Shop

The morning air inside the greenhouse smelled of burnt lemon oil and old dust, but for the first time in three days, the cellar felt almost quiet.

Rowan had left at dawn to handle Student Council business or whatever it was Fae princes did when they weren’t hiding in illegal basements. He had promised to send a carpenter from the lower village to fix my shattered trapdoor, provided I agreed not to blow up any more pre-Concord artifacts while he was away. I had agreed, mostly because my right wrist was still thrumming with a faint, cold itch that reminded me every five seconds that my life was no longer my own.

I sat at my mahogany workbench, carefully using a pair of bone tweezers to align the copper gears of a floating brass tea-kettle. Beneath the desk, Sir Fluffington was snoring softly, his head tucked under his wing on top of a stack of restricted potion ledgers.

And then I saw the shelf.

I froze, the bone tweezers hovering an inch above the kettle’s rim.

The top shelf of my workbench the place where I kept my high-value inventory was usually an organized disaster. I had three silver-plated pocket wands, two jars of crystallized starlight, an enchanted silver pocket watch (not Rowan’s, thank goodness), and a tiny, repaired fairy charm shaped like a golden acorn.

The silver wands were still there. The starlight jars were still there.

The golden acorn charm was gone.

"Fluff," I said softly, my voice dropping an octave. "Wake up."

Sir Fluffington opened one round, orange eye, letting out a disgruntled honk at being disturbed from his mid-morning nap.

"Did you eat the acorn charm?" I asked, pointing tweezers toward the top shelf. "Because if you swallowed three grams of enchanted brass, you're going to be pooping glitter for a week, and I am not cleaning the carpet again."

Sir Fluffington sat up, his feathers puffing out in complete, indignant outrage. He stood on his webbed feet, marched over to the empty spot on the shelf, and let out a sharp, accusatory hiss at the empty air.

My stomach dropped. Sir Fluffington was a menace, but he had a ironclad rule about my inventory: he only ate paper and expensive tea leaves. He didn't steal brass.

I stood up, pushing my magnifying loupe onto my forehead, and leaned in close to the wooden shelf.

The dust on the mahogany wood had been disturbed. A single, distinct smudge ran across the surface where the acorn charm had rested—not wide enough to be a human hand, but far too neat to be a bird's beak. And hovering directly over the smudge was a faint, purple shimmer of residual magic.

It wasn't Fae magic. It wasn't standard academy elementalism, either. It smelled faintly of ozone and crushed nightshade—the distinct, metallic tang of a targeted detection spell.

Someone had broken into my cellar while I was upstairs grabbing breakfast at the mess hall. They had ignored forty gold pieces' worth of silver wands and rare ingredients, stepped over my accountant, and stolen a brass charm I had fixed for a second-year fairy student two weeks ago.

Why?

Before I could reach for my diagnostic chalk to trace the residual residue, the cellar trapdoor groaned on its single remaining hinge. Heavy, deliberate footsteps began to descend the stone stairs.

I grabbed my heavy brass soldering iron, holding it like a club, and stepped into the shadow of the workbench. "I have a very angry goose and a soldering iron heated to three hundred degrees!" I called out, my voice echoing off the damp walls. "Identify yourself or I’ll turn your boots into liquid copper!"

"A formidable defense, Bellweather," Rowan’s voice drawled from the darkness.

He stepped into the amber glow of my fairy-lamps, looking as insufferably composed as ever. He was wearing a fresh dark velvet coat, a high silver collar, and carried a leather-bound folio under one arm. His dark eyes immediately swept the room, taking in my defensive posture and the brass tool in my hand.

"You're late," I said, lowering the soldering iron with a heavy breath. "And your carpenter hasn't arrived."

"The carpenter is currently replacing the lock on the Student Council archive," Rowan said smoothly, walking toward my desk. "A minor administrative delay. Why are you wielding plumbing equipment?"

"Someone broke in," I said plainly.

Rowan stopped dead in his tracks. The casual, aloof expression on his face vanished in an instant, replaced by that sharp, predatory stillness I was quickly learning to associate with the Crown Prince of the Moon Court.

"When?" he asked, his voice dropping into a low, dangerous register.

"Sometime between seven and eight this morning," I said, turning back to the shelf and pointing with my tweezers. "They didn't touch the cash box. They didn't touch the silver wands. They took the golden acorn charm."

Rowan stepped beside me, his long frame towering over my shoulder as he leaned in to inspect the top shelf. His dark hair brushed against my cheek, smelling faintly of winter frost and cedar wood. He didn't move away, and for a second, my heart did a stupid, unhelpful flutter that I aggressively ignored.

"The acorn charm," Rowan repeated, his dark brows pulling down in a sharp frown. "The toy you repaired for the First-Year fairy from the Eastern Glade?"

"It wasn't a toy," I corrected, my tone turning defensive. "It was a family heirloom. The core was fractured, so I used a microscopic Mending thread to fuse the internal brass lattice back together."

Rowan’s dark eyes flashed. He reached out, his pale fingers hovering an inch above the purple residue left on the wood. He closed his eyes, letting out a soft, hissed breath in High Elvish.

The purple shimmer instantly flared brightly, reacting to his Fae magic, before dissolving into thin air.

"It wasn't a thief looking for gold, Iris," Rowan said quietly, opening his eyes and looking down at me with an expression that made my skin go cold. "It was an extraction spell. Someone brought a diagnostic siphoning device into this room, located the exact object containing the highest concentration of your personal Mending Magic, and stole it."

I stared at him, my grip tightening on the tweezers until my knuckles turned white. "They stole my magic signature?"

"They stole a physical sample of your work," Rowan corrected, turning his back to the shelf and leaning against the workbench, folding his arms across his broad chest. "The acorn charm wasn't valuable for its brass. It was valuable because it contained a intact, stabilized thread of ancient Bellweather Mending script."

Sir Fluffington let out a low, uneasy honk, waddling over to press his head against Rowan's polished boot. Rowan didn't kick him away this time; he absently reached down with one finger, scratching the goose behind his orange crest without looking.

"Who knew I fixed that charm?" I asked, my mind racing through every face that had crossed my trapdoor in the last month. "Only the girl who brought it to me and she was terrified her professor would see her with a broken artifact!"

"She didn't report you," Rowan said coldly. "But someone has been monitoring the magical output of the West Tower. Last night, when my watch activated, it triggered the upper wards. Whoever stole that charm wanted to compare the magic inside the acorn to the resonance spike from the watch."

"To see if it was the same Mender," I whispered, the realization hitting me like a bucket of ice water.

"To see if a Bellweather was active inside Moonvale," Rowan corrected softly.

I sank down onto my wooden stool, resting my elbows on the desk and rubbing my face with my hands. The cozy, quiet little life I had built in this cellar—the tea-kettles, the secret earnings, the quiet nights fixing alarm clocks—was shattering into a million sharp pieces, and no amount of my magic was going to mend it back together.

"My grandmother told me to keep my head down," I said, my voice muffled by my palms. "She said if people found out what our magic could do, they wouldn't ask us to fix their clocks. They'd hunt us."

Rowan was silent for a long moment. Then, I felt a solid, reassuring weight on the wooden desk right next to my elbow.

I pulled my hands down and looked up. Rowan had set his leather-bound folio on the desk, unrolling a thick, parchment map of Moonvale Academy. It wasn't the standard student map sold at the bookstore—it was an ancient, ink-drawn blueprint detailing the subterranean foundations beneath the school, covered in royal Fae seals.

"Then we don't wait for them to hunt us," Rowan said, his dark eyes locking onto mine with an unyielding, fierce intensity. "They have a sample of your magic, Iris. Which means by sunset, whoever ordered that theft will know that the last Bellweather Mender is sitting in a basement beneath the West Tower."

I looked from his face down to the ancient map, tracing the dark lines that ran deep into the bedrock below our feet.

"What are you doing, Rowan?" I asked softly. "You're a Fae Prince. You have a seat on the High Council waiting for you. You could hand me over to the faculty right now, claim you were investigating me, and walk away completely clean."

Rowan leaned forward, pressing his hands against the mahogany wood, trapping me between his dark gaze and the blueprint between us.

"I could," Rowan admitted, his voice dropping into a rough, quiet velvet that sent a shiver straight down my spine. "It would be the politically sensible choice. It would protect my court, satisfy my father, and keep my name untarnished."

"So why haven't you?"

Rowan’s jaw clenched. For a long, breathless second, the prince dissolved, leaving only the young man who had walked into my shop three nights ago carrying a broken piece of his mother’s heart.

"Because the people hunting your magic are the same people who lied about what happened to my mother," Rowan said quietly. "And because I am not going to let them destroy the only person in this academy who looks at me without expecting a crown."

Sir Fluffington let out a soft, approving honk from the floor.

I looked at Rowan for a long moment, feeling the cold mark on my right wrist pulse with a sudden, warm resonance that had nothing to do with the Hollow King's seal.

"Alright, Your Royal Highness," I said, reaching for my diagnostic chalk and drawing a sharp circle on the mahogany desk. "Let's go find my acorn."