“Men like that always want an audience,” Skonk muttered.
“Then we’ll sell tickets,” Stella replied briskly. “And donate the profits to the ‘We Won’t Die of Stupidity’ fund.”
Twobble raised a mitten. “I would like to be treasurer.”
“No,” we all said, which cheered me more than it should have.
Keegan leaned in, his breath a soft ghost on my temple. “Uneasy?”
“Yes,” I said. “Like everything’s been dipped in fudge. The world is moving, but it’s sticky.”
He huffed a laugh that wanted to be a kiss and politely wasn’t. “We’ll scrub it off.”
“Good,” I said.
Nova tapped her staff twice, the sound sliding through the spiral like a thread pulled snug. “We should leave the Hollows before we teach the priestess to enjoy throwing weather.”
Bella’s chimes answered with a small, bright agreement. Outside the hexagon, winter was just winter again, breathtaking and blunt. The seam waited, a polite door. The path we’d made across the lake still hummed, tight and true where my fingers had set the loop right. It felt like a tiny pride, which I kept because the day had offered very few.
We gathered our charms, our kettle, and our courage. Luna tied her knitting bag tight and looped the strap across her chest like armor. Lady Limora’s crew tucked away their instruments until the next crisis asked for artistry. The bramble mule refused to move until Twobble kissed his nose and promised him a carrot.
As we stepped into the cold of the outside world, the chimes gave their thin, merry chatter. No ice fell. No tremor answered. The Hollows parlor behind us steadied back into ritual and promise, as if ready to hold the next argument without bias.
The path home gleamed. Five days.
Luna walked between us, quiet, the set of her mouth not quite brave and not quite afraid.
Somewhere behind the curtain of cold, the head priestess had learned two things: that Gideon had said yes, and that I had asked. I didn’t know which one bothered her more.
Maybe it didn’t matter.
Maybe what mattered was that the snow under our boots made that crisp sound like a page being turned, and the town ahead of us had a kettle that would boil and a circle that would close, and I had hands that knew how to catch dropped stitches even when they’d been thrown at my face.
“Home,” Keegan said.
“Home,” I said back, and the path let the word be true while the part of me that watched for knives kept its eyes open.
Chapter Thirteen
The walk back from the Hollows felt like riding a snow globe someone had finally decided to stop shaking.
The light unbraided itself behind us, the birch chimes Bella had laced along the threshold gave one last polite tinkle, and August, real, damp, herb-scented August, sidled around us with the brazen air of late summer.
Keegan kept pace at my side, our hands brushing every dozen steps like a secret handshake. As we made our way into town, the others peeled off one by one. Lady Limora and her crew went to their townhouse on Lantern Row. They’d been a recent purchase. Stella walked to the tea shop with a promise to brew tea when needed all week, and Nova, with a last, measuring look at the sky that made me feel oddly safer even as she slipped away to her shop.
By the time the road curved toward the cottage, we were just the two of us.
The gargoyles’ silhouettes shifted along the ridge like thoughtful crows.
Miora’s lantern glowed in the front window, its warm honey light making the stone cottage look exactly like the cozy place it had always been.
Miora insisted on waiting up for us, even when I told her not to. She always insisted on taking one more watch, mending one more crack, fussing one more thread back into the cottage’s weave. Only lately, since Grandma Elira’s sacrifice, her insistence had frayed. The busy hands still moved, but the music behind them, Miora’s humming, Miora’s cluck-tongue teasing, Miora’s mind your boots ritual, had gone thin.
“Home,” Keegan said under his breath, and the door, delighted by the word, unlatched itself.
Miora was in the big chair by the window, wrapped in a shawl the color of old snow. She had a darning mushroom in one hand and a sock in the other, and she wasn’t doing anything with either…just holding them, as if she’d forgotten which part came first.
“You look like a pair of sensible heroes,” she said, voice warm and tired. “Boots off. Thoughts later. Tea first. Or whiskey.” Her eyes tracked our faces with the steadiness of a woman who’d watched too many storms to be startled by lightning anymore. “Trouble?”
