I laughed, the sound small in all that silver. “It is for the most part, until my mind starts running through all the possible scenarios where this could go very wrong.”
“Ah,” he said, and the small smile he gave me put a plank under my feet. “We’ll just choose the right one.”
“Good plan,” I said. “Let’s do that.”
We crested a shallow rise of frost that crunched like biting into sugar, and the structure opened in front of us. The hexagon was bigger than it had seemed from a distance.
It was big enough to hold a gathering. Pillars of clear ice rose at each corner, their centers threaded with fine cracks that looked like trapped light.
Between them hung shrouds—thin sheets of frozen air, each etched with patterns that made my eyes itch if I tried to look at them too directly.
The floor was snow-packed so smooth it shone, with a faint spiral drawn into it by nothing I could see.
“This is Quiet Ground’s parlor,” Ardetia whispered, reverent and hesitant as ever. “We used to meet here, when meeting was safer than not.”
“You’ve been here before?” I asked, surprised.
Ardetia nodded. “When Stonewick first divided, we came here to discuss a truce with the shifters,” she said softly.
“How did that go?” I asked.
“Not well.”
“Good to know,” Keegan grumbled and shook his head.
Lady Limora’s breath made a white pearl that floated just long enough to be polite. “It remembers.”
“The Hollows likes traditions that don’t end in blood,” Nova said. “You cannot yell in here without sounding foolish.”
“Which is the best kind of magic,” Stella said decisively. “Take away the drama, force everyone to use their indoor voices, and suddenly they’re reasonable.”
“Not always,” Ardetia said solemnly.
Twobble was already craning to see around the nearest shroud, standing on tiptoes on the mule’s stirrup.
The air inside the hexagon felt… not warmer, exactly, but contained, as if temperature had become less interested in proving its point.
As we crossed the threshold, a sensation washed over me that was a terrible mix of hope and doubt.
We took two more steps inside, our footfalls making the softest hush against the packed snow, and the scene resolved, already in progress.
I couldn’t believe what was before me.
Luna sat to the left of the center, shawl drawn tight around her shoulders, fingers cupped around a cup of something steaming that didn’t steam the way steam normally steams.
She looked exactly like herself except for the thinness around her eyes. Her hair was pinned back in its usual practical twist; her mouth did the tender thing it did when she pretended not to be worried. The Hollows approved of her in that pressurized way, as if it recognized a person who had made a thousand small mends with a patient hand.
Gideon sat opposite her, as if somehow they had both found the most normal angles in a geometry that refused to be ordinary. He wore that same handsome arrogance like a suit he’d outgrown and decided not to tailor, dark hair damp with cold, jaw shadowed, eyes shadowed more. The Hollows did not approve of him, but it did not reject him either. It did what the Hollows did: it held the room in balance, refusing allegiance, refusing hunger. He seemed to feel it like a sweater he hadn’t chosen, all restless in the shoulders, watchful, not quite himself, and yet unmistakably so.
Between them stood a small table carved from ice with ridiculous delicacy: legs like antlers, surface like a window. On it, two cups, a plate with sugared berries, and a raven feather lay across a blue thread loop.
For a moment, the sight didn’t compute. We had been moving through winter’s whisper, following light, mending stitches in a world that insisted on balance. To find Luna and Gideon already seated, calm as a quiet afternoon, as if this were the most normal meeting in a neutral parlor, made something inside me lurch.
Luna looked up and smiled like a candle being kind to the dark.
“Good,” she said, voice steady, eyes registering all of us and tucking each one into her tidy heart. “You found the right seam.”
Gideon’s gaze slid over us with that particular calculation I hated—a weighing of worth and threat and inconvenience.
