Stella planted herself beside the ice as if she had personally curated it. Frost took a shine to her and rhinestoned the hem of her cloak, which she allowed.
“If I had known the décor would be this charming,” she said, “I would have brought my crystal opera gloves.”
“You own crystal opera gloves?” Skonk asked, scandalized and desperate to see them.
“Several,” Stella said. “For emergencies.”
He blinked at the horizon. “What constitutes a crystal-glove emergency?”
“Look around,” she said. “Obviously, this.”
The world was quiet here. It wasn’t empty, but composed. Even the wind, when it decided to exist, moved with intention. It threaded through the frozen grass and played the ice like an instrument. The silence made a space inside me that hadn’t existed in months. My thoughts tried to sit down in it.
That was dangerous.
Because once I let them, they started their favorite game:What if you are not enough?
What if Elira had known a better way to thread this needle? What if the dragons frown in the Academy’s den and tell me thatthis is not how you mend a world?
The dragons.
The thought slid in on cold feet, sat down in my ribcage, and looked at me like it had questions I didn’t want to answer.
Would they approve of us stepping into a truce place with a bramble mule and a bag of moon puffs to greet a man who wanted to end Stonewick?
Should I have gone to them first, to the hush under the stacks, to the scales that knew old winters and older luminaries?
When Elira entrusted the Academy’s secrets to me, she hadn’t meant touse them recklessly. She’d meant for me touse them wisely.
I slid the thought away the way you tuck a stray lock behind your ear.
Later, dragons.
For now, there was a feather tied in thread and a shadow that studied our edges before we made our first step.
For now, there were mittens, a foxlet, and an old vampire with rhetoric sharp as icicles.
“Maeve,” Nova said very softly, and just like that, the quiet inside me turned into something steadier. She didn’t touch me. She never did when the magic in a place ran hotter than our good sense, but her presence drew my attention back to my feet, my breath, the crease where my glove folded over my thumb. “You’re here,” she said, as if I had drifted. “Stay here.”
“I’m here,” I said, and the place approved. A faint, pressurizedyestickled the air.
Far ahead, the light wove itself into a pale braid along the horizon, marking something like a road where no road wanted to be. The braid loosened and tightened as if reacting to our gaze.
“What did Luna mean by a dropped stitch?” Keegan asked, studying the braid. His breath came out in tidy clouds, each one puffing into shape and then hanging there politely like a room full of ghosts waiting to be offered tea. “Was that merely to gain access?”
“Something slipped where the Luminary gathers,” Nova said. “She wanted Maeve to pick it up and set the tension right.”
“Why bring me here?” I asked.
“Because the Hollows like hands that have mended,” she said. “Not hands that only cut.”
Keegan’s knuckles brushed mine through our gloves, a human reminder threaded through all this pearl and winter logic. “You’ve always been better at mending.”
“Tell that to my ex,” I said, and the joke came out steadier than I felt.
Bella bounded back to us with snow dusting her whiskers like sugar. She hopped sideways at Stella’s feet, tail flagging, then shook herself in a halo of frost.
“There’s a smell,” she reported, muzzle lifted. “Not Gideon. Not Luna. Like—” She paused, sneezed, considered. “Old and ancient.”
