“And I realized I had been lied to. I was foolish when I tasted power, but I was only a puppet. You have seen clearly when I have not.”
I should not have felt warmed by that even in the smallest way, but the compliment had the right weight: it carried its own friction.
“You should have been a poet,” I said. “Then all of this could have been metaphors.”
“Poets are the most dangerous thieves,” he said, and the corner of his mouth pulled up. “They take reality and hand it back to you trimmed as a weapon with words.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” I said. “What exactly does she think I have?”
“I told you that she doesn’t know. It is the not-knowing that keeps her moving, that makes her dangerous. If she knew, she would have made the wrong bargain already.”
The dragons breathed under the stones again—in memory only, I swore it—and I felt the barest brush of scale and heat where my heartbeat lived.
Come ask us,that old warmth seemed to say.We have seen winters you can’t dream.
“Stop looking at me like that,” I said, because I could feel his attention skimming the surface of my thoughts, not reading them, not here, but weighing what the Hollows allowed to show.
“Like you’re capable?” he asked.
“Like you’re setting a table you hope I’ll sit at.”
A low, pleased sound. “Your seat has always been there. You kept refusing it in favor of the wolf.”
“Wolves are underrated,” I said.
“They behave for scraps,” he murmured.
“Enough.”
His eyes locked on mine, and he pulled a deep breath. “Do you realize how incredible your life would be if you chose correctly?”
“What do you mean?”
“I can offer you things your imagination couldn’t even begin to conjure.”
Nausea sloshed in my stomach. How did he always turn it back to that?
“So, what we’re dealing with isn’t just squashing the hunger path and turning back to the ancient rites. Something else darker has stirred, and the priestess isn’t even aware?”
“First, the Hunger Path needs to be stopped. It isn’t a road. It’s a habit. It eats the will of a place until the place believes hunger is the most reasonable thing it can be.”
“And the curse?” I asked. “Your curse? His curse?” I didn’t say Keegan’s name because the Hollows would have made me mean it too much.
“The curse is a diet,” he said, eyes unkindly kind. “It asks you to be less. The hunger asks you to be more than anyone can feed. Between them, you disappear or you devour.”
“I don’t accept those options.”
“That is why I’m here.”
I rubbed my thumb along the seam of my mitten and thought through the parts that hurt to hold. Malore nearly tearing the world’s fabric in the cottage, taking away the people I loved. The way the Wards had watched me from the corners of this world. The way the Luminary had accepted my hands on its stitch as if it had been waiting for exactly this pair of fingers. The way my grandmother’s silence had been a language, and I was only now learning to conjugate it.
Gideon wanted something. He was always wanting something. But the Hollows had insisted he say it without persuading me to want it for him.
“Join us,” I said, before I gave myself the chance to be careful. The words left my mouth and hung in the cold like a dare. “Join the circle. End the hunger path with us. You said yourself that is the first path.”
The shroud sighed. The feather on the table stirred and lay still. Beyond the glassy quiet, I felt my people react without moving.
“Don’t,” Gideon said reflexively, cockiness returning to cover a seam I’d finally found. “You don’t know what you’re inviting.”
