“She knows I’m here,” he said again, softer this time, less for drama and more for ledger. “She knows you are, too. That will bother her more.”
For a second, the thought made me sick in the way altitude does, when you remember you are higher than your body likes. My grandmother’s attention is not a thing I have ever sought since I learned of her existence.
“Then we’ll give her something else to know,” I said, and the vow rose in me like heat from a hearth that has finally caught: “We are ending this. Not for her. For the magical people everywhere.”
The shroud whispered agreement.
Nova’s mouth curved in that rare way that meant prophecy had been satisfied without getting smug.
Keegan’s shoulder touched mine, deliberate and light.
Gideon said nothing more. He didn’t need to. The room had all the words it could hold for the moment. Outside the hexagon, winter went back to being beautiful instead of sharp.
The Hollows settled like a book closing to keep its place.
Somewhere far off, the priestess would be listening for the next tremor.
Good. Let her. We would meet her on the ground, which refused her favorite tricks and made all of us speak knowingly.
What mattered was that, for the first time since I’d stepped into Stonewick, I could feel the path under my feet, and it didn’t feel like a trap. It felt like a seam waiting for the right hands willing to mend.
“Ready?” Keegan murmured.
“As I’ll ever be,” I said, and the Hollows, gently and without fanfare, agreed.
Chapter Twelve
Surreal didn’t begin to touch it.
If you told me yesterday, no, an hour ago, that Gideon would say yes to standing in a circle with my father, with Keegan, and with me to end the path Malore foamed at the mouth to carve… I would’ve laughed into my tea and asked Stella to check the scones for suspicious herbs.
Yet here we were: the hexagon breathing its slow winter breath, the shroud hanging like silk held very still, and Gideon sitting solemnly at an ice table that looked grown rather than built, the raven feather and blue loop between his hands like a truce someone could pocket by mistake.
The room had steadied after the priestess’s tantrum. Crystals that had tried to be knives now glittered decoratively, tamed by Nova’s calm into frost filigree. Chimes Bella had strung along the seam tinkled when the Hollows exhaled, not enough sound to count as music, exactly, but enough to remind the heart that time hadn’t stopped, only slowed, the way snow slowed a town into hush.
And still, unease pressed under my breastbone as if my ribs had decided to be a laced corset.
On what planet did Gideon agree with anything that wasn’t part of his own legend? In what story did the antagonist sayYeswithout a flourish, and mean it just enough for the Hollows to let it stand?
Keegan saw it. Of course he did. He read me the way the gargoyles read weather by watching the tiny shifts, the angle of my shoulders, the way my thumb found the seam of my glove when I tried to think a problem into behaving. He didn’t ask me to explain. He brushed his knuckles against mine and went back to scanning the edges.
Gideon looked better than he had at the hotel…the night of the almost-catastrophe, when his magic dragged like an anchor, and his eyes had that thin sheen desperate men get when they pretend not to shake. He didn’t look nearly as strong as the first time I met him, when he wore power like a well-cut coat and expected everyone to comment on the fit. Now, there was a carefulness to the way he held himself. A cost that hadn’t cleared. A human in the shape of a myth deciding whether to admit to being tired.
Could it be as simple as that? Preserve your own life; call it strategy; walk toward the side with blankets and tea. Men have done worse and named it wisdom.
Or was there more? He always glowed faintly with more, like the ember that refused to die because it loved the argument.
Nova turned to us, opening her eyes as she held her staff steady. “Five days for Gideon’s intentions to solidify. It must not be sooner, or the circle will not accept his willingness. This isn’t a whim.”
“Five days,” Keegan repeated to the room, the words pitched for Gideon even if he pretended not to look at him. “Stonewick. The joining.”
The words lit up my nerves like a struck match. Five days to set a hearth for a vow that would either stay warm or set us all on fire. Five days to decide how to stand in front of the world and ask it to change its habits, to do something wilder and kinder than hunger. Five days to wonder if my grandmother would throw weather at us again or something worse.
I couldn’t sit inside my own unease and call it preparation. I crossed to the ice table and stood opposite Gideon. The bramble mule snored in a saintly heap near his elbow, confetti breath rising and falling in a halo. The feather looked like a silly oath or a very serious joke. I tugged my glove tighter and took in the lines of his face without indulgence.
“You look… steadier,” I said.
“And you look like you slept less than you pretend,” he said mildly. “Stella should prescribe more dramatic naps.”
