At the top, the ground leveled into a little plateau. In the center, frost had drawn a circle so perfect that it made my teethitch. A single raven feather lay across it, tied in blue thread to a sprig of alder. I thought of the circle we needed to make between my dad, Keegan, Gideon, and me. Four weeks ago, it felt so close…and then Gideon fled.
I didn’t want to let myself believe it could be this easy.
Luna had been here. The shadow had not. I could feel the difference, the way you can feel whether a room has been happy in the last hour. I thought about how often my previous life with Alex had plenty of those unhappy rooms. The tension and confusion that mixed with uncertainty and disbelief over a life I’d worked so hard to build, but what a difference a year had made.
I knelt and touched the birch. It was alive, stubborn with green even under all this silver. The feather jittered with my breath as if impatient.
“What do you think she did?” Bella asked, back in human bones, hair sugared with frost.
“Stitched a room into the world,” I said. “Like a pause. So she could look without being seen.”
Stella gazed at the feather and, for once, didn’t try to talk it into gossip. “If she’s buying us time,” she said softly, “we should pay it back by not wasting it.”
I slipped the birch sprig into my satchel, left the feather in place, and stood.
“North,” I said, and the word plumed white.
We moved forward.
Twobble whispered “no bargains” like a prayer.
Skonk muttered about how cold it was and how he’d write a stern letter to winter when this was done. Lady Limora’s crewflowed around us, quiet as silk. Nova’s staff kept time with our hearts. Ardetia’s gaze stayed on the horizon, a little line of worry between her brows that hadn’t been there when we started.
I looked ahead where the path opened to a sweep of white and light like a curtain about to rise. Somewhere beyond that, Luna’s long way was waiting. Somewhere beyond that, Gideon would have to stop pretending we were not on his board.
For a moment, I wished for the Academy’s dragons with an ache that made my fingers curl. But the Hollows had its own old eyes, and I could not bring every ancient in the world to every crossroads. I could only be kind and brave and keep mending.
“Ready?” Keegan asked again, which in our language meant he would walk into any storm as long as I chose it first.
“Let’s find her,” I said.
The Hollows listened, and snow spiraled up from the path in a soft column of hope.
Chapter Eight
At first, I thought the horizon had learned a new trick.
A pale swell rose from the white, smooth as a wave that had decided to hold its breath. Then the light shifted, sliding like silk over glass, and the swell revealed edges.
It wasn’t the rounded dome of an igloo, though that was the first comparison my mind reached for.
This was more… faceted, like the clarity of a gemstone. It caught the Hollow’s pearly glow and broke it into soft prisms that drifted across the snow like quiet auroras.
“The ice knows architecture,” Stella murmured.
As we drew closer, details emerged.
The walls weren’t true walls, not in the way Stonewick’s were. They were layers of frozen veils, translucent and veined with faint blue, set in a hexagonal ring that rose to a peak. Between each plane, a seam of frost wove like lace. The entrance wasn’t a door so much as a pause in the intricate pattern.
“It looks like a snow castle,” Bella said, and the breath she took fogged in front of her like a miniature version of the building.
“It’s a meeting space,” Nova said, voice low and sure. “If there is to be one.”
My heartbeat quickened. The bramble mule’s ears pricked; Twobble’s earmuffs tilted crooked; Skonk muttered something about contracts and soup.
Keegan shifted closer without making a point of it, a warm presence in a land that prized neutrality.
“This place is supposed to be calming,” he said, not quite teasing, not quite worried. ”Right?”
