“Are we trusted?” Skonk asked, peering into the shimmer until his nose almost touched the light.
“That depends on whether we behave,” Stella murmured. “Everyone, behave.”
“Define behave,” Twobble said, but even he kept his hands tucked into his mittens and his mittens tucked under his arms.
We stepped out of the forest and onto the ice. It didn’t creak. It didn’t threaten to swallow us. It simply accepted our weight and made a gentle pluck of a harp string to mark our passing. The light above us braided a little tighter.
I almost forgot why we were here. The Hollows was that kind of place. It offered quiet not as a trick, but as a gift, and it was easy to lose edges in gifts. I let myself have three extra heartbeats of wonder and then counted backward from five until my head found the present again.
Luna. Gideon. Feather. Find them first.
“Maeve,” Keegan said softly, and I realized he’d been watching me watch the light. I looked up at him. His eyes werewinter-hazel here with less gold, and greener of all things, and I could see my own shape reflected in them. “You with me?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s just…beautiful.”
He glanced around. “Yeah. It is.”
We reached the far side of the lake, where the ice turned back into frost-stitched grass. The path narrowed, climbing a slight slope to a scatter of boulders furred with frost. Between two stones, a tassel of blue thread fluttered.
Luna’s color.
I hurried, dignity forgotten, because sometimes you’re a headmistress and sometimes you’re just a woman in love with her town’s people and the ways they leave breadcrumbs. The tassel was tied to a small, bone-white spindle pocked from use. Wrapped around its middle was a scrap of paper the exact size of my patience.
Good,it said, in Luna’s neat hand.You mended what I couldn’t. This ground answers to kindness faster than it does to courage. (Bring both.) You’ll think I chose the long way. I did. That’s where the truth hides.
A smudge below that, where the ink had bled as if snow had tried to read it. A single word I had to look at sideways:North.
Stella read over my shoulder, then patted my arm and pretended not to be moved. “I do adore a competent woman with good penmanship.”
“North from here is more Glacial Hollows,” Nova said, tilting her head, listening for seams. “And something else. A pressure. Not a trap,” she added, flicking a glance at me. “A test.”
“Difference?” Twobble asked.
“Traps want you,” Nova said. “Tests want to know if you want yourselves.”
“We do,” Skonk said brightly.
“Most of the time,” Bella amended, trotting back and forth with half her tail puffed in excitement as the foxlet rode her like a merry-go-round.
Keegan’s gaze swept the boulders and the slope beyond, the invisible math in his mind mapping places for me to stand and places for trouble to land.
“We stay tight,” he said. “Maeve in the center. Nova sets the pace.”
I opened my mouth to argue on principle and then closed it because sometimes wisdom sounds like romance.
“Fine,” I said. “Center. But if something offers a bargain, nobody answers. Not even if the bargain is warm socks.”
“Especially if it’s warm socks,” Stella said, scandalized. “You’ll end up in a decade-long knitting contract with the frost spirits and a pile of half-finished sweaters.”
“Is that a thing?” I asked.
“Do we want to find out?” Stella countered.
So, we climbed.
The path wound through pillars of ice so finely veined they looked carved, each with pockets of trapped air that popped like polite applause when the bramble mule went by.
The cold came closer. It wasn’t harsher, but more intimate, as if the Hollows insisted we be present to ourselves.
