“Stella prescribes tea,” I said.
He almost smiled. “She is very good at convincing the world to behave when she herself could drink them all and still not be satisfied.”
“Sounds like you.”
“Possibly.”
I set my palms to the edge of the ice and respected the chill as I sat. “You said yes.”
“I did.”
“Will you keep saying it when the circle tightens, and the shadows watch?”
He didn’t flinch, but he didn’t preen either. “I have kept more dangerous promises in less hospitable rooms.”
“You’ve also broken easier ones,” I said, and the Hollows liked that.
A pause between us settled, but it wasn’t awkward.
“Tell me about her,” I said finally, because the question had waited in me since the first letter with the thorned sigil. “My grandmother. The head priestess of Shadowick. You keep sayingpriestesslike a title that happens to wear a face. If you know her, tell me what shape she makes in a room.”
He looked past me, toward the shroud, toward the winter beyond that was endlessly itself.
“I don’t know her,” he said. “Not as a person. Not the way you mean. The way a boy knows the man behind the curtain: a myth that becomes habit. I know of her. She is akin to a rumor made law.”
“Rumors always hide detail,” I said, and my throat felt thick. “Give me one.”
He considered. The Hollows flattened the temptation to dramatize; the answer came out spare.
“Cold,” he said first. “Not the kind that punishes, but worse. The kind that preserves. She keeps what she cares about in ice and calls it safety.”
“Vision,” he said next. “A gift sharpened on the wrong stone. She sees possible futures and falls in love with the versions where she is necessary.”
“Darkness?” I asked.
“Not as theatre,” he said, and his eyes brightened a fraction, as if naming it gave him a charge he didn’t intend to show. “As currency. She spends other people’s pain to buy peace.And she’s good at her math.” His gaze came back to mine. “Too good.”
My stomach turned.
“And is that enticing?” I asked. I insisted on knowing which way he leaned when offered a throne and a set of knives.
His eyes darkened, the way the sky does when a storm remembers itself.
The smile I had seen too many times returned, a curving, infuriating shape that says he enjoys the argument more than the answer.
“Of course,” he said. “Every difficult thing is.”
“And someday,” he added, almost lightly, “you will join Shadowick.”
I stood up so fast the chair skittered backwards and caught on the spiral’s edge. The breath punched out of me like a bird smacking a window.
The shroud breathed once, a gentle recalibration. I gulped air that tasted like mint and iron and the fear of being made into someone else’s prophecy.
And the Hollows didn’t punish him for telling a lie.
Keegan didn’t move from his post, but the air around him sharpened. Stella’s head tipped, the jewel at her throat catching cold light like a threat with very good lipstick. Nova’s staff marked a small, exact beat, a metronome for my pulse to follow back to steady.
Gideon stood, palms still on the table, as if to tell the Luminary he remembered himself even when he’d said something designed to upset the room. His expression didn’t gloat. For once, it looked… tired.
