Nova’s gaze flicked to Gideon, to me, to the veils themselves, as if reading the room’s ledger. “And?”
Gideon met my eyes from across the ice table. No theatrics. No coyness. No bargaining with tone.
“Yes,” he said, for all of us to hear. “I will join your circle to end the hunger path.”
It was the quiet that made it true. The Hollows wouldn’t have let a lie sit there with its back straight. Relief flooded my chest so fast it made me lightheaded.
“Can we do it here before he changes his mind?” Twobble asked.
“Afraid not,” Nova said, shaking her head. “No rituals of such scale are to be held at or near the Hollows. This is sacred ground, and things can go wrong with rituals.”
I flinched at that last statement. It hadn’t occurred to me that something could go wrong when we closed the circle, but this was magic so…
Keegan exhaled in one slow, deliberate breath. He didn’t look at Gideon when he did it; he looked at me, and there was pride in that look and worry nailed down very neatly beside it.
Skonk punched the air and then tried to pretend he had just been stretching.
“Ha! I mean—hmm. Sensible choice. Obviously.”
Bella’s fox form shook out in a flour-sparkle halo, and she came upright on two legs with a grin that made me hope the Hollows understood mischief was a kind of faith. “About time someone with claws decided to use them for good.”
“Careful,” Stella murmured. “They’ll think we expected it and start charging.”
The bramble mule, perhaps swayed by the general mood, rested his chin on Gideon’s shoulder with a saintly sigh and dropped a single piece of confetti onto his coat like a benediction. Gideon didn’t brush it off.
For a heartbeat, or three, the room felt
Luna’s eyes shone with the kind of tired joy that made me realize how long she had been standing upright on our behalf. Lady Limora’s mouth made the tiniest pleased shape. Opal’s hands loosened on the travel spike case. Vivienne tucked a vial back into her basket and let the clasp catch.
Then the floor moved.
It wasn’t dramatic at first, more like the ground clearing its throat under the snow. The spiral etched into the packed white shivered, lifted a fraction as if breathing, then dropped. A hairline crack ran from one pillar of the hexagon to the next and stitched itself shut before I could gasp. The shroud rippled, a sound like silk lines strummed in warning.
Keegan pulled me behind the table in the same motion that brought him between me and the nearest seam. Nova lifted her staff, eyes narrowing to fine-needle green. Stella’s bracelets chimed once as she placed herself an exact pace to my left, where her particular brand of charm turned into a protective magic faster than anyone expected.
The ground shook harder.
“What??” Skonk began, already reaching for Twobble, who had gone very still in the way only goblins who have seen avalanches can.
Ice crystals began to fall.
Not snow. Crystals. The first few tinkled against the shroud and slid down like lazy, glittering rain. Pretty, I thought for a foolish second. It was almost like a sparkly snow globe.
Then the next wave hit with weight as long, thin spicules that sliced the air and sang as they spun. The sound went through my teeth and into my bones. Where the crystals struck the floor, they embedded.
“Down,” Keegan snapped, and we dropped, pulling Luna with us, dragging the mule into the crook behind a pillar where even he understood to tuck his garlanded head.
Gideon’s face went sharper. He hissed, not at the crystals but at what threw them.
“The high priestess,” he said, voice flat and furious. He angled his forearm to shield his face and still spoke clearly enough for the Hollows to record it. “She’s testing the circle. Spite wrapped in etiquette.”
“That’s not possible,” I said, half to him, half to the room that had promised neutrality. “This is sacred ground.”
A constellation of crystals hit the nearest shroud and turned in midair. They elongated, thinned, and fell like a scatter of glass daggers. The nearest one hit the table, sank, and quivered…still a knife, but briefly indecisive about who to belong to.
Gideon didn’t take his eyes off the rain.
“Shadows curl,” he said, and the words sounded older than he meant them to be, like a line someone else had taught him. “They delight in calm. Give them silence, and they’ll throw pebbles to hear what kind of echo they can make.”
