Later That Evening
They lay stretched across the hill behind the cottage, the grass cool beneath them, still alive with the ghost of their footsteps. The sun had spilled low now—a slow bleed of honey and plum across the sky, the kind of dusk that made the world feel paused, just for them.
Renauld rested with his arms folded behind his head, the faint whistle of wind whirling through the reeds. Hannah lay beside him, picking burrs off her socks with militant precision. And Beth, ever the odd one out, had crowned herself with a loop of dandelions and was humming something vaguely off-key.
"Do you even know what tune that is?" Hannah asked, arching a brow.
"Nope," Beth said brightly. "But it annoys birds, and I consider that a public service."
It had been a miserable August sky—dense with the kind of clouds that looked like they hadn't made up their mind whether to cry or thunder.
Renauld was in the fields again.
Not playing. Not reading.
Practicing.
He was eight—still small, but already brimming with purpose. He had spent the better part of the morning sitting cross-legged beneath the leaning ash tree that divided the lower fields from the bramble fence, trying to will a flame into existence in his palm.
"Intent, emotion, control. Magic is will. Magic is breath."
He repeated it like a mantra.
But the sparks never came.
Just warmth. A vibration. The buzz of potential that never quite tipped into action.
And then he fell asleep.
He dreamed of dominion.
Of maps made of stars.
Of crowns shaped like wands.
Of a future where he did not need to beg for power because he simply was it.
But the sky above him had made its decision.
The rain came soft at first, then cold and insistent, like coins against skin. His clothes soaked through. His cheek lay flat against wet grass. He did not wake.
Enter Beth Montmorency.
New to the area. Bookish. Weird. Bright in a way that made teachers either love her or send her out of the room. She had been exploring the footpath near the eastern hedge, following a rumor about an abandoned treehouse and trying to find something—anything—that didn't smell like damp sheep or boredom.
She found him instead.
A boy curled under a half-bare tree, in a rain-soaked shirt and shorts, shoes kicked off, face peaceful and utterly unconscious.
For a brief, panicked second, she thought he might be dead.
Then he snorted. Turned over. Mumbled something that sounded vaguely like "global infrastructure."
Beth squinted.
"Who falls asleep in the rain talking about world domination?"
She ran home. Returned with a blanket. Bundled him up without ceremony. The boy barely stirred—just groaned once when she yanked him to his feet and carried him fireman-style toward the only nearby house she hadn't yet introduced herself to.
It was the first time she knocked on the Atkins' door.
Olenna answered, eyes narrowed, wand hidden behind her back like it was a nervous tick.
Beth smiled, breathless and soaked through. "Hi. I think I found your—uh—offspring?"
Hannah appeared behind her mother.
Her eyes went wide. "Renauld?!"
Beth dumped him into Hannah's arms with all the reverence of someone returning a library book.
"He's fine. Just… very asleep. And very dramatic."
Later, wrapped in towels and frowning into a mug of tea, Renauld glared across the room at her.
Beth shrugged.
"You're welcome."
"I didn't ask for help."
"You were drooling."
Hannah smirked.
Olenna raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
That was how she entered.
Not through magical discovery.
Not through invitation.
But by dragging their little legend out of a rainstorm like it was the most normal thing in the world.
And after that… she just kept showing up.
She never asked for secrets.
She just sat near them like they were books she was determined to finish—whether or not she was supposed to be reading.
It started with a pile of laundry.
More precisely, a pile of singed, bubbling, and slightly carnivorous laundry that had erupted after Renauld had attempted to "improve" the house's self-cleaning charm by layering it with an experimental folding hex.
The towels now refused to stay in one place. The sheets folded themselves into nooses. One sock had bitten Beth on the ankle.
"Does this happen often?" she asked, watching a pair of underpants scuttle under the table.
"Often enough," Hannah muttered, wand pointed like a general's sabre. "Vellicorpus."
The garments stilled, then flopped like stunned fish.
Beth blinked. "Right. So that's how you do it."
She picked up a pillowcase still fizzling at the seam and handed it over. "Want help?"
"You don't have a wand."
Beth raised an eyebrow. "You have two hands. Lend me one."
They folded the rest in silence, a rhythm quickly established—Hannah charmed, Beth sorted, both occasionally swatting at a rogue sock that hadn't gotten the memo.
At one point, Beth asked, "So what's it like?"
"What?"
"Knowing your brother is going to be terrifying one day."
Hannah paused.
Then she gave the faintest, bitter smile.
"It's like living with a spell that hasn't gone off yet."
Beth nodded. "Sounds about right."
By the end of it, the house was quiet again.
Beth didn't leave that evening.
She stayed for tea, picked apart a charm book while Hannah read next to her, and laughed when Emma turned the pudding into frogs by accident.
From then on, she came by twice a week.
Not because she needed magic.
Not because she understood it.
But because she liked how the Swaynes made the world feel slightly off-axis—and honest in spite of it.
Beth didn't know the worst of it, of course. Not the things he'd done. Not what he'd once nearly done to Hannah. Not the bloody talons. Not the almost-suffocations. Not the way Emma used to hover in the hallway, wand in hand, just in case.
Beth saw the clever boy who made firecrackers hover in perfect rhythm and always had the sharpest comeback in a five-mile radius.
And strangely… he liked that version of himself.
"You were really good out there," Beth said now, staring up at the stars that had begun to blink through the deepening sky. "Like… scary good. I thought you were gonna eat dirt after the first hit."
Renauld shrugged. "Adapt or die."
"Right, very uplifting. I'll put that on a tea towel."
Hannah smiled faintly but said nothing.
Beth caught the shift in silence and turned her head toward her friend.
"He'll be fine," she said softly. "I think."
Hannah didn't respond for a long moment.
Then: "That's what I'm afraid of."
The wind picked up. A shooting star slid across the sky like a secret told too quickly.
And the three of them—a half-shadowed boy, a watching sister, and a stubborn girl with no clue how deep the water ran—lay side by side on a patch of land that still remembered when magic first walked barefoot across it.