Chapter Eight #2
Gideon’s gaze slid back to me and stayed there. “I don’t intend to break your town. Not first.”
“Not first,” Twobble repeated, eyes going huge with scandalized delight. “Is that…was that meant to be reassuring?”
“It was meant to be accurate,” Gideon said, and the Hollows approved of the accuracy, which annoyed me on principle.
Luna’s fingers tightened around her cup.
“I asked him to say it here so you would believe he meant it,” she said. “I am not asking you to trust him. I am asking you to trust me when I say there is a thread he is following that is not cruelty.”
“Is it stupidity?” Stella asked, sweet as peppermint.
Gideon’s mouth actually quirked.
“Often,” he admitted, and Stella preened, because she had managed to insult him and extract a concession at once.
“Where does the thread lead?” I asked, ignoring the part of me that wanted to shake him until he confessed his intentions.
Luna looked down at the blue loop.
“To a knot that should never have been tied,” she said. “And to someone who has been tugging on it from the other side.”
“The priestess,” Keegan said, his body hardening the way stone does when it decides to be a wall.
Her gaze lifted, met mine, and held. “Maeve, I helped him escape because the long way was the only way to keep you from choosing a short one that looked like salvation and was not.”
I hated how well that landed. My mind flickered through a hundred short paths, all of them shiny, all of them wrong.
“You could have told me,” I said, and heard the small crack in my voice.
Luna’s expression broke, just for a heartbeat.
“I did,” she said softly. “In every way I could, without breaking what had to hold.”
The bramble mule, as if unable to tolerate the human density of all that honesty, nosed between us and planted his chin on the ice table, making both cups wobble. Gideon reached out without thinking and steadied one. Luna caught the other.
Keegan exhaled like a man unstringing a bow he’d been holding impatiently.
“All right,” he said. “We’re here. Say what you need to say. Then we’ll decide what to do with it.”
Gideon looked at him for a long moment, then nodded. He put both hands, empty, on the table where we could see them. The Hollows liked that. I could feel it approve: cards on the ice, no blades, no bargains.
“We have a visitor,” he said quietly. “Not from Shadowick. Not from Stonewick. From further…under.”
Skonk made a small, distressed sound that meant, in goblin, I was so happy, and now I am not.
“Something followed you,” I said, the cold of the birch dell settling back into my bones. “We know.”
Gideon dipped his head. “It’s learning the edges. It wants to learn the seam you mended to get inside. It wants the knot we’re walking toward. It will reach for either of us, and it will not care which.”
Luna laid her hand flat on the loop.
“He brought it here by accident,” she said. “I kept it from touching you as best as I could.”
“But you brought us here,” I said, watching Gideon and hating that I couldn’t hate the exact way I wanted to.
“I did,” Luna said. “Because whatever we do next, we do it knowing what this place will and won’t allow. We speak in a room where drama dies, and truth persists. It was worth the risk.”
“Many have died in rooms like that,” Stella said, almost fondly. “Mostly from boredom. But I take your point.”
“Tell us about the knot,” Nova said.
Gideon glanced at the shroud where the ice patterns refused to settle into anything my eyes could pin down.
“There’s a bargain older than either realm,” he said. “A promise made on a winter like this one, when the Hollows were new enough to be optimistic. It was meant to keep the ground between us quiet. It has been… misused.”
Luna’s mouth tightened.
“That misuse has a cost. You’ve paid some of it without knowing. So have we. The knot keeps the peace by tying more than it should.”
“And you want to untie it,” Keegan said, not a question.
“I want to stop it from eating what it was meant to protect,” Gideon said.
Gideon had made a habit of protecting himself, claiming power that wasn’t his, and controlling those with fear so he could get one step closer to his goals. Basically, trying to make it sound like he was on a noble, selfless pursuit was absurd.
I could hear the dragons in my head saying, Hedge Witch, sometimes a knot is all that keeps the boat from drifting. I could hear Elira saying, Sometimes you cut it, and sometimes you mend it.
“So, if we help you, we risk cutting you loose to wreak havoc. If we don’t, the knot tightens until it cuts something we love.”
“Accurate,” Gideon said, and the Hollows patted him on the metaphorical head for the truth.
“You don’t get points for honesty,” I told him.
Twobble sidled up beside me, his mitten sliding into mine, tiny and warm.
The foxlet hopped from Bella’s shoulder and trundled over to Luna, who cupped the familiar in her palms.
Keegan squeezed my hand once.
“We’re not making a decision tonight,” he said to the room and the man who’d been our enemy long enough to get a name for it. “We’re listening, but there are no promises.”
Gideon inclined his head.
“Then listen,” he said, as the shroud shifted. “And when you decide, do it for your town, not for me.”
“We would never do anything for you,” Stella said sweetly, seating herself with a rustle of frost-kissed cloak, “that didn’t also benefit us.”
“True,” Gideon said, and for the first time since we’d stepped into the hexagon, his mouth softened into a shape I almost recognized as human. “That is why I asked to speak here, but you are in grave danger.”
Luna exhaled, and the steam from her cup hung like a halo around her face for three perfect seconds before the room took it apart and fed it back into the air.
I pulled a breath of the Hollows into my lungs, let it press its strange, neutral calm against the edges of my panic, and looked at the two of them—one who had left to keep us from tripping and one who had spent years placing marbles in our path.
“All right,” I said, and in the quiet, the word sounded like a stitch catching. “Tell us everything.”