“You could have,” he said, quiet and edged with something I didn’t know what to do with. “It would have been kinder to you.”
“It would have been crueler to us,” Luna said, and did not flinch from the pronoun. Us as in Stonewick. Us as in all of us. “You know that. She would find you and use you.”
Silence is a tool in rooms like this. It is a space where truth wears a coat and then chooses to take it off. I let it hang for a beat and then stepped in because I am not a creature built for long silences where men pretend nobility.
“Why here?” I asked. “Why the Hollows? Luna, you could have come to me.”
Gideon looked at the shroud, at the pattern etched on the floor, at the feather that made a small, ridiculous line between teacups.
“Because she knew the likelihood of my survival was low if she didn’t take the opportunity to stage what she did. And my intentions have shifted.”
“To what?” Keegan asked, the warm steel in his voice a comfort.
Gideon’s gaze slid back to me and stayed there. “I don’t intend to break your town. Not first.”
“Not first,” Twobble repeated, eyes going huge with scandalized delight. “Is that…was that meant to be reassuring?”
“It was meant to be accurate,” Gideon said, and the Hollows approved of the accuracy,which annoyed me on principle.
Luna’s fingers tightened around her cup.
“I asked him to say it here so you would believe he meant it,” she said. “I am not asking you to trust him. I am asking you to trust me when I say there is a thread he is following that is not cruelty.”
“Is it stupidity?” Stella asked, sweet as peppermint.
Gideon’s mouth actually quirked.
“Often,” he admitted, and Stella preened, because she had managed to insult him and extract a concession at once.
“Where does the thread lead?” I asked, ignoring the part of me that wanted to shake him until he confessed his intentions.
Luna looked down at the blue loop.
“To a knot that should never have been tied,” she said. “And to someone who has been tugging on it from the other side.”
“The priestess,” Keegan said, his body hardening the way stone does when it decides to be a wall.
Her gaze lifted, met mine, and held. “Maeve, I helped him escape because the long way was the only way to keep you from choosing a short one that looked like salvation and was not.”
I hated how well that landed. My mind flickered through a hundred short paths, all of them shiny, all of them wrong.
“You could have told me,” I said, and heard the small crack in my voice.
Luna’s expression broke, just for a heartbeat.
“I did,” she said softly. “In every way I could, without breaking what had to hold.”
The bramble mule, as if unable to tolerate the human density of all that honesty, nosed between us and planted his chin on the ice table, making both cups wobble. Gideon reached out without thinking and steadied one. Luna caught the other.
Keegan exhaled like a man unstringing a bow he’d been holding impatiently.
“All right,” he said. “We’re here. Say what you need to say. Then we’ll decide what to do with it.”
Gideon looked at him for a long moment, then nodded. He put both hands, empty, on the table where we could see them. The Hollows liked that. I could feel it approve: cards on the ice, no blades, no bargains.
“We have a visitor,” he said quietly. “Not from Shadowick. Not from Stonewick. From further…under.”
Skonk made a small, distressed sound that meant, in goblin,I was so happy, and now I am not.
