The room liked the symmetry. The air eased. My head felt marginally clearer, which was either the Hollow’s doing or the fact that I had used up the first round of anger and needed to fetch a second.
“Tell me about the head priestess,” I said, because if I didn’t shape the conversation, he would use it to build a house I couldn’t enter. “My grandmother. Tell me what she asks of you.”
He lifted a hand, then put it back down.
His mouth bent, not quite a smile.
“She asks me to return what I stole,” he said.
“And what did you steal?”
“The part of the fence that listens,” he said. “I taught it tricks, and now it listens to me more than it should. She would like the fence back. I would like to stop being the only person it answers.”
“Fence?”
“Her shadow guards,” he explained.
Under other roofs, the wordfencewould have sounded small, domestic. Here, it meant the line between whole and broken.
“You’re doing this,” I said slowly, “because you know the curse will break you. Like it’s trying to break Keegan.”
It was the first time I’d said the thought out loud. The Hollows noticed. The pressure changed as if the room had leaned in.
Gideon’s eyes flickered. His jaw worked. The cockiness folded
When he spoke, the voice that came out belonged to someone who was, for the first time, not performing for the sound of his own legend.
“I am doing this,” he said, “because if I don’t, I will be used up by the thing the priestess can’t name and the town can’t survive. No town can survive. The curse doesn’t break you because it hates you, Maeve. It breaks you because you are exactly the shape it needs.”
The words landed like cold metal pressed to skin; you don’t flinch, you decide what to do next.
“And you?” I asked because I had to hear it, because I had to know the scale of what I was weighing in a room that refused to tilt. “What shape are you to it?”
He held my gaze until I forgot the braiding of the light and the frost under my boots and the raven feather’s absurd dignity. He didn’t blink. He didn’t soften the edges.
“The piece that fits between the teeth,” he said. “And Keegan’s role is far worse.”
I cleared my throat as a shiver ran through me, and Gideon’s gaze caught mine.
“And you will be next.”
Beyond the shroud, Keegan’s breath fogged the glass of air and disappeared. Stella’s bracelets chimed once as if reminding the day that manners still mattered. The Hollows waited, as patient as winter, for the next stitch to be chosen.
Chapter Ten
“What is it the priestess wants from me?” I asked.
“I assumed you knew.” He shook his head. “I’m sure she assumes as well. But, you’re key to her survival.”
A small, vicious heat flashed under my sternum.
The priestess of Shadowick, the woman who had slipped into my life as a possibility and then arrived as a grandmother, would assume I could read the room when the room was a labyrinth.
“She assumed wrong.”
Gideon’s mouth bent into the sort of smile you give a naive but promising student.
“No. She assumed you’d figure it out before I did. She has not met me on a good day.”
