Chapter Seven #2
“That,” Bella said, ears pricked, “is the way.”
“Or the bait,” Keegan said, only helping my worries right along.
But at least we were on the same page.
“It’s both,” Nova said serenely. “That’s how neutral ground works. It gives you the truth and asks whether you can be trusted with it.”
“Are we trusted?” Skonk asked, peering into the shimmer until his nose almost touched the light.
“That depends on whether we behave,” Stella murmured. “Everyone, behave.”
“Define behave,” Twobble said, but even he kept his hands tucked into his mittens and his mittens tucked under his arms.
We stepped out of the forest and onto the ice. It didn’t creak. It didn’t threaten to swallow us. It simply accepted our weight and made a gentle pluck of a harp string to mark our passing. The light above us braided a little tighter.
I almost forgot why we were here. The Hollows was that kind of place. It offered quiet not as a trick, but as a gift, and it was easy to lose edges in gifts. I let myself have three extra heartbeats of wonder and then counted backward from five until my head found the present again.
Luna. Gideon. Feather. Find them first.
“Maeve,” Keegan said softly, and I realized he’d been watching me watch the light. I looked up at him. His eyes were winter-hazel here with less gold, and greener of all things, and I could see my own shape reflected in them. “You with me?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s just…beautiful.”
He glanced around. “Yeah. It is.”
We reached the far side of the lake, where the ice turned back into frost-stitched grass. The path narrowed, climbing a slight slope to a scatter of boulders furred with frost. Between two stones, a tassel of blue thread fluttered.
Luna’s color.
I hurried, dignity forgotten, because sometimes you’re a headmistress and sometimes you’re just a woman in love with her town’s people and the ways they leave breadcrumbs.
The tassel was tied to a small, bone-white spindle pocked from use.
Wrapped around its middle was a scrap of paper the exact size of my patience.
Good, it said, in Luna’s neat hand. You mended what I couldn’t. This ground answers to kindness faster than it does to courage. (Bring both.) You’ll think I chose the long way. I did. That’s where the truth hides.
A smudge below that, where the ink had bled as if snow had tried to read it. A single word I had to look at sideways: North.
Stella read over my shoulder, then patted my arm and pretended not to be moved. “I do adore a competent woman with good penmanship.”
“North from here is more Glacial Hollows,” Nova said, tilting her head, listening for seams. “And something else. A pressure. Not a trap,” she added, flicking a glance at me. “A test.”
“Difference?” Twobble asked.
“Traps want you,” Nova said. “Tests want to know if you want yourselves.”
“We do,” Skonk said brightly.
“Most of the time,” Bella amended, trotting back and forth with half her tail puffed in excitement as the foxlet rode her like a merry-go-round.
Keegan’s gaze swept the boulders and the slope beyond, the invisible math in his mind mapping places for me to stand and places for trouble to land.
“We stay tight,” he said. “Maeve in the center. Nova sets the pace.”
I opened my mouth to argue on principle and then closed it because sometimes wisdom sounds like romance.
“Fine,” I said. “Center. But if something offers a bargain, nobody answers. Not even if the bargain is warm socks.”
“Especially if it’s warm socks,” Stella said, scandalized. “You’ll end up in a decade-long knitting contract with the frost spirits and a pile of half-finished sweaters.”
“Is that a thing?” I asked.
“Do we want to find out?” Stella countered.
So, we climbed.
The path wound through pillars of ice so finely veined they looked carved, each with pockets of trapped air that popped like polite applause when the bramble mule went by.
The cold came closer. It wasn’t harsher, but more intimate, as if the Hollows insisted we be present to ourselves.
At the top, the ground leveled into a little plateau.
In the center, frost had drawn a circle so perfect that it made my teeth itch.
A single raven feather lay across it, tied in blue thread to a sprig of alder.
I thought of the circle we needed to make between my dad, Keegan, Gideon, and me.
Four weeks ago, it felt so close…and then Gideon fled.
I didn’t want to let myself believe it could be this easy.
Luna had been here. The shadow had not. I could feel the difference, the way you can feel whether a room has been happy in the last hour.
I thought about how often my previous life with Alex had plenty of those unhappy rooms. The tension and confusion that mixed with uncertainty and disbelief over a life I’d worked so hard to build, but what a difference a year had made.
I knelt and touched the birch. It was alive, stubborn with green even under all this silver. The feather jittered with my breath as if impatient.
“What do you think she did?” Bella asked, back in human bones, hair sugared with frost.
“Stitched a room into the world,” I said. “Like a pause. So she could look without being seen.”
Stella gazed at the feather and, for once, didn’t try to talk it into gossip. “If she’s buying us time,” she said softly, “we should pay it back by not wasting it.”
I slipped the birch sprig into my satchel, left the feather in place, and stood.
“North,” I said, and the word plumed white.
We moved forward.
Twobble whispered “no bargains” like a prayer.
Skonk muttered about how cold it was and how he’d write a stern letter to winter when this was done.
Lady Limora’s crew flowed around us, quiet as silk.
Nova’s staff kept time with our hearts. Ardetia’s gaze stayed on the horizon, a little line of worry between her brows that hadn’t been there when we started.
I looked ahead where the path opened to a sweep of white and light like a curtain about to rise. Somewhere beyond that, Luna’s long way was waiting. Somewhere beyond that, Gideon would have to stop pretending we were not on his board.
For a moment, I wished for the Academy’s dragons with an ache that made my fingers curl. But the Hollows had its own old eyes, and I could not bring every ancient in the world to every crossroads. I could only be kind and brave and keep mending.
“Ready?” Keegan asked again, which in our language meant he would walk into any storm as long as I chose it first.
“Let’s find her,” I said.
The Hollows listened, and snow spiraled up from the path in a soft column of hope.