“What?” I asked lightly and hoped my eyes didn’t give me away.
“It’s about Gideon.”
Guilt is its own curse. It raced up my throat and sat behind my teeth. I lifted my water, took a sip, and set it down.
He didn’t look angry. He looked… concerned. That was almost worse.
“Okay,” I said, and kept my voice steady. “What about him?”
Keegan breathed, a slow, measured inhale, like someone coaxing a skittish horse.
“You know how you’re always searching for what turned him into what he is. Why he chose wickedness as a friend.”
My pulse stuttered. I saw fog and torches and Malore’s mouth stretched thin with promises. I saw a boy on a cliff looking at a town that glowed like a holiday he wasn’t invited to.
“Yeah,” I answered. “I do. I’ve wondered it every day.”
“Maeve.” He hesitated, fatigue pulling at his features again. “I think you’re right. I think there was a defining moment.”
I pressed my hands flat to the table to keep from grabbing his wrists. “Do you know what it is?”
“No.” His mouth tightened in frustration. “Not exactly.” He glanced down, then up; the motion was so careful it hurt. “But I know that when he was a child, something got taken from him.”
The words rang like a bell in a stone room—clear, cold, and too loud.
“Taken,” I repeated. “By whom?”
“I don’t know.” He swallowed. “It could be rumor. But I always had the sense that something was stolen. Something that mattered, and not in the way you can fix with a replacement.”
“By whom?”
He lifted his gaze and let it meet mine straight on. “I think by Stonewick.”
The hall went on being loud and bright and summer-drunk; no one else’s world tilted.
Mine did.
It did a careful, slow spin, set down again, and suddenly there was not enough air between the candle and the oil and Keegan’s steadying hand on the edge of the table.
“Are you sure?” My voice came thin. “Keegan…”
“I saidthink.” His jaw flexed, and the urge to soothe him warred with the urge to shake the truth out faster. “I don’t have proof. Just… whispers. From elders who never wanted to speak plainly. From the way Malore always aimed his lies at seams that already existed.” His mouth twisted. “From the way Gideon looks when Stonewick’s name is said like a prayer and not a wound.”
“What would Stonewick take?” I asked. It came out harsher than I meant. “We’re not.” I swallowed. “We weren’t…”
He reached across the table and wrapped his fingers around mine. “Maeve. I am not saying the village gathered with pitchforks. I am saying the land has teeth and the old families have long memories, and sometimes things go missing in the service of the greater good. Sometimes the greater good is an excuse. Sometimes it isn’t. I don’t know which it was then.” He exhaled. “I only know he believes it was taken or lost. And belief is enough to turn a boy into a blade.”
His thumb rubbed once along the side of my hand, the gesture unconscious and intimate and exactly what kept me from breaking in half right there between the herb rolls and the lemon chicken.
A chill ran down my spine as I watched Keegan’s face, the way he spoke as if the words had been carved into him, not remembered. That was when it struck me. This wasn’t fromhismemory. If Keegan had known, he would’ve told me long ago. He never kept things from me, not like this.
No, this was something else.
Somehow, the curse Malore wove between Gideon and Keegan had tangled deeper than any of us had realized. The same sickness that drained them both was lacing their minds together. Keegan wasn’t drawing from rumor.
He was drawing from Gideon, pulling pieces of truth straight out of a place even I hadn’t managed to reach when I’d tried.
The thought left me breathless, guilt rising sharply in my chest. Here I’d been sneaking around, hiding Gideon at Keegan’s own inn, terrified he’d discover it. Yet all the while, the curse itself had been feeding Keegan whispers from Gideon’s past. Whispers I wasn’t meant to hear but desperately needed.
