His mouth didn’t move, but something in his expression softened when his eyes landed on me, which made me want to both throw the table and ask him if the Hollows allowed moral clarity as a party trick.
“Headmistress,” he said, using the title like an old story he’d found useful once.
Keegan’s hand tightened around mine and then eased, because that is how you hold someone in a room where time slows down to watch you.
“We’re not late?” he asked Luna, as if we’d agreed on a schedule.
“No,” she said, and her gaze rested on Keegan with a quiet plea he wasn’t ready to read. “We just started the kettle.”
Stella inhaled, exhaled, and went full theatre.
“Well,” she said, sweeping into the hexagon like a duchess who had just been told the ball was informal. “Isn’t this civilized?”
“Please don’t warm the scones,” Skonk muttered, awed and appalled.
Twobble slid off the mule and hovered in the doorway like a very polite raccoon.
“Is this a trap,” he stage-whispered, “or a tea party that went awry?”
“Neither,” Nova said, and the Hollows seemed to agree, as a faint pressure in my ears eased. She lifted her staff a fraction, and the veils shivered with a sound like a silk curtain in aroom no one walked through. “It is exactly what it looks like. A meeting, if we can keep our tempers and our tongues.”
“Impossible,” Stella said cheerfully, already gliding toward Luna to kiss her cheek. “But we’ll try. Hello, darling. You look like you need a biscuit and a nap.”
Luna squeezed Stella’s hand, relief flashing so quickly across her face I almost missed it.
“Both,” she admitted. “But this first.”
Gideon’s gaze flicked to Keegan, then to me, then to the bramble mule, who tossed his garlanded head and blew a confetti sneeze that drifted with inexorable dignity onto Gideon’s immaculate sleeve. He did not brush it off. He looked at the confetti as if reconsidering his life choices.
Twobble beamed. “Diplomacy.”
Keegan drew me a step forward, his shoulders making a quiet promise at my back.
“We came because Luna asked,” he said, every word a wedge set carefully in a wall. “Not because you called.”
Luna didn’t apologize. She laid a palm against the blue thread on the table and said, “Thank you for coming.”
Things could be calm, yet still dangerous.
I wanted to sit. I did not want to sit. I wanted to shake Luna. I wanted to hug her until her bones remembered me.
Instead, I said, “Tell me you’re safe.”
“I am,” she said, and then, more quietly, “For now.”
Nova’s staff ticked once against the packed snow.
“The Hollows will hold the circle,” she said, more to the room than to the people. “We accept its terms.”
The shroud made that ribbon-silk sound again. The air pressed against the skin at my wrists and then released. The room, having reconfirmed our willingness to behave, turned its attention back to the negotiation it had been born to host.
“Explain,” Keegan said to Luna, not to Gideon, and in the corner of my eye I saw Gideon’s mouth twitch, insulted or amused or both.
Luna took a breath and looked at me.
“I couldn’t let him walk alone,” she said simply. “Not where he was going.”
Gideon didn’t roll his eyes, which either meant he was trying a new form of self-control or the Hollows had veto power over petulance.
