Chapter Nine
Gideon’s gaze found me the way a compass finds north—inevitable, unblinking, a quiet click you feel more than hear.
“Maeve,” he said, voice even as the ice between us. “I want to speak with you. Alone.”
Keegan stiffened at my side so fast the Hollow’s air seemed to hitch.
The bramble mule lifted his head, ears pricked like punctuation.
Stella murmured a scandalized “Absolutely not,” almost on top of Nova’s calm, “That isn’t advisable.
” Skonk said, “Nope,” as if veto were a spell, and Twobble’s “We don’t do solos!
” came out in a squeak that fogged the air.
Bella went fox still…no sound, just the narrowed, steady stare of a creature measuring distance to throat.
The hexagon softened the edges of everyone’s voices, but the meaning landed sharp. They formed a half-ring without trying, every friend a small wall.
A dozen feelings jostled my ribs: relief at the instinctive way they gathered; annoyance at the part of me that wanted to step forward anyway; a thin, cold thread of curiosity I couldn’t unwind.
The Hollows was supposed to be void of manipulation, a neutral ground that tamped out theatrics and sanded down the sharp hooks of influence. The air here pressed you honest. That should have made this safe.
And yet.
What if the magic here failed me? What if I failed it?
Gideon watched me consider all of that and didn’t move. He placed both hands on the ice table where I could see them, palms open. The Hollows liked that. I could feel it.
Keegan’s fingers tightened around mine, then loosened just enough for me to feel the choice was mine.
“You don’t owe him this,” he said, low and certain.
But I owed all of us a chance at completing the circle.
“I know.” I squeezed back, the answer and the promise in one press. “It’ll be fine.”
He didn’t argue because he knew better than to try to herd me when I’d stepped onto a line only I could see. He didn’t like it, because love, in all its human stubbornness, asks you to do two impossible things at once: hold tight and let go, both on the same patch of ground.
Nova tipped her chin, reading the Hollow’s silence the way a sailor reads water.
“You’re protected by the Hollows,” she said to me, to Keegan, to the room. “True names stay shut. Bargains need two hands. If any pressure rises, we come back in.”
“Pressure rises?” Twobble whispered. “What are we, bread?”
Stella swept to my shoulder, cold glittering along her hem like a private galaxy.
“If he tries anything, you scream,” she said, voice bright as a blade. “I refuse to sit through a villain soliloquy again.”
Gideon’s mouth twitched—as much amusement as the Hollows allowed. “You do make it hard to be dramatic.”
“Good,” Stella said, and kissed my cheek quick and cool. “We’ll be right there, darling. Give him absolutely nothing he doesn’t earn.”
Keegan’s pulse thudded against my palm.
“One word,” he said, and the one word wasn’t a word at all; it was his name in my bones, his magic a warm bruise at my shoulder. I nodded.
“Five minutes,” Nova added, tapping her staff once to mark the time into the room’s slower heartbeat. “The Hollows doesn’t like conversations that forget the hour.”
Reluctantly, they peeled back. Stella steered Twobble and Skonk toward the threshold with the authority of every terrifying headmistress I’d never had.
Bella padded to the veil’s edge, fox again in a blink, small body a line of attention.
Lady Limora and her crew melted toward the corner pillars, eyes cool and watchful.
Ardetia hovered as if stitched to the air, the faintest frown between her brows.
Keegan moved last, as if distance was a language he didn’t speak but would learn for me.
He stood just beyond the veils, a shadow of heat in a room of winter, jaw set, eyes on Gideon’s hands.
The shroud breathed once as the circle thinned to two. The air between Gideon and me sharpened to a fine, bright line. I took three steps forward and stopped when I could smell rosemary and iron and something else like darkness.
“You’re wasting everyone’s patience, asking for alone time,” I said, because I couldn’t lead with the thing I wanted to ask, not without breaking something I needed intact. “Say what you brought me here to hear.”
He didn’t start with words. He started with a look that was half calculation, half… regret? The second half irritated me more than the first.
“You came,” he said finally.
“Luna asked,” I said, and watched the way his eyes moved when I said her name. “You manipulated her into freeing you and tying up the vampires to buy your exit. You chose chaos when you could’ve chosen honesty. Why?”
He tried, and failed, not to look amused. The cockiness is part of him, even in a room that refuses theater. On other nights, I’d have promised to invent a hex specifically for that mouth.
“I didn’t manipulate her,” he said, and the Hollows didn’t flinch at the word. “I found the only person I could reach during the fight and asked for a message to be carried. She chose what to do with that.”
A flash—not memory, but the taste of it: Luna’s shawl snagging on a doorknob, her mouth shaping words she didn’t want to say, the sharp, dark pulse that ran under the battle like a current beneath a floor.
The feeling I didn’t have time to examine then, that someone had tugged on a thread I wasn’t holding.
“You tied up the vampires,” I said. “With your shadow, with your men, with tricks you could have avoided.”
“I tied up the vampires,” he agreed. “Because if I hadn’t, I would have been taken.”
“Back to Shadowick,” I said, as if saying the destination would make the map behave. “Your home.”
He shook his head, a single precise movement that cut the word from the air. “It isn’t any longer.”
The not-home sat between us like a third chair, making my stomach clench. “You expect me to believe the village you’ve spent years bending isn’t yours to sit in?”
“It was never mine to sit in,” he said, surprisingly mild. “I was the guest who stayed too long and rearranged the furniture. The house remembers who signed the deed.”
“You’re very fond of metaphors I don’t like,” I said, even as the image landed with an accuracy I hated. “Why would it be a problem if they took you back?”
He considered how much to bite off. He’s always been good at portioning truth, as if honesty were a tray of sweets and the right-sized piece would keep you from noticing the missing cake.
“Because I would have been used to close something that shouldn’t be closed,” he said. “Or open something that shouldn’t be opened. It depends on what the priestess desires.”
Cold needled up my arms.
“The head priestess,” I said quietly.
He smiled without teeth and shook his head, as if to say: you know. “Your grandmother.”
The words didn’t echo. The Hollows didn’t care for melodrama. But inside me, they struck metal. It’s one thing to hold a secret in your mouth until you can spit it into a safe hand. It’s another to hear it turned into a conversation.
“Yes,” I said, and my voice stayed steady only because this place pressed it flat. “I meant her.”
He watched me say it. There’s a cruelty in being seen when you’re trying to carry yourself unnoticed.
There’s also a relief. My stomach hushed. My palms remembered they were hands and not fists.
“You were there for decades. Why run?”
He took the smallest breath, as if obeying an old rule. “She would have bound me into the knot and called it mercy. Or cut me out of it and called it justice. Sometimes the labels don’t matter as much as the knife.”
“Why bind you?” I asked. “Why cut you?”
“Because I can carry a charge she cannot,” he said, and for once the cockiness was gone. “Because if the knot eats something, it prefers a man who made the first trouble.”
“You didn’t make the first trouble,” I said. “You just refined it.”
“See,” he said, and there was something like admiration in it, which made me want to throw the raven feather at his forehead. “You don’t need me to explain to you.”
“Unfortunately,” I said.
He leaned a fraction closer, hands never leaving the table. The Hollows hummed in warning: steady, steady. He heeded it. His voice dropped, not to seduce but to fit inside the shape of the room. “I asked to speak alone because I know you can hear reasons without falling in love with them.”
“That’s not a compliment,” I said.
“It’s the only truth worth anything in a place like this,” he said.
Outside the shroud, Keegan didn’t move, but his attention pressed like heat through glass. I didn’t turn. If I looked, I’d go to him, and that would end the conversation, and I wasn’t done wanting a smaller blade to pick up.
“You sound tired,” I said. “Since when do you come to neutral ground for absolution?”
“I came for an audience,” he said. “The absolution is between me and…whatever I’ve got left.”
“What have you got left, Gideon?”
He smiled at the question, as if it were an old enemy that still drew blood.
“Enough to be inconvenient,” he said.
“So your plan is to throw it all at Stonewick?” My pulse rose as I stared into his darkened eyes. The curse running through Keegan and him had taken something out of both of them.
Snowflakes drifted between the shroud, gathered at the edges of the table like small listeners. The raven feather’s quill caught a current and twitched, then stilled.
I tapped the table edge once. “Why Luna?”
“Because she could hear me when the rest of the room turned its face,” he said.
“Because she knows the difference between tying your own hands and letting someone else do it. Because she doesn’t confuse kindness with surrender.
And because,” he added, almost like a confession, “she is the one you never would have suspected.”
My throat tightened in a way I refused to show him. “You’re very articulate today.”
“The Hollows flatten my worse instincts,” he said. “Savor it.”
I glanced toward the shroud. Outside, Stella had arranged the others in a diagonal line that made eavesdropping easier.
I moved a pace closer to Gideon and stopped when the Hollows tightened—not a threat, a reminder.
“So you’re saying that Shadowick isn’t your home,” I said. “And Stonewick isn’t mine to give. Why are you truly here? You’ve always had a self-serving purpose with your intentions.”
He sat very still. For the first time since I’d known him, he looked like a man who had found the place inside that did not perform. “Because the ground between the two is, for a moment, honest,” he said. “And because the thing tugging on that knot doesn’t care which side tears first.”
“What thing,” I asked, already hating the answer.
“The same shadow that sniffed your chimney and put its face to the Ward and learned the temperature of your breath,” he said.
“Not the priestess,” I said.
“No,” he said. “Older. Hungrier. Closer to the seam and too stupid to respect it.”
The hair along my arms prickled. “So you drag us here to ask for what?”
“Room,” he said. “To cut without the knot snapping back at me. To mend without it deciding the thread you used is the wrong color. To act without your wolf breaking himself on the part of the curse that doesn’t care how noble he is.
Everything has been a lie. Malore thought he’d manipulated the ancient rites and turned the Hunger Path in the direction he pointed.
I thought it was the priestess controlling him to do so.
I was wrong on both counts. The dark magic has built its own rules, and it is infiltrating villages all across the country.
It’s not just Shadowick and Stonewick’s burden to bear. ”
“And you suddenly want to be the savior?”
His eyes narrowed. “Not at all, but I’m owed something that is mine. That Stonewick took from me long ago, and if I don’t stop the darkness from spreading, I will never get it back.”
“What is it?”
“Nothing of concern to you.” His lie didn’t sit well. “Your noble and loyal Keegan will get himself into trouble if he tries to play hero.”
Keegan’s name flared behind my breastbone like a ward. “Don’t talk about him like you know him.”
“I know the curse,” he said. “It is indifferent to romance. It has eaten better men.“
“And worse,” I said.
“And worse,” he agreed.
The room liked the symmetry. The air eased. My head felt marginally clearer, which was either the Hollow’s doing or the fact that I had used up the first round of anger and needed to fetch a second.
“Tell me about the head priestess,” I said, because if I didn’t shape the conversation, he would use it to build a house I couldn’t enter. “My grandmother. Tell me what she asks of you.”
He lifted a hand, then put it back down.
His mouth bent, not quite a smile.
“She asks me to return what I stole,” he said.
“And what did you steal?”
“The part of the fence that listens,” he said. “I taught it tricks, and now it listens to me more than it should. She would like the fence back. I would like to stop being the only person it answers.”
“Fence?”
“Her shadow guards,” he explained.
Under other roofs, the word fence would have sounded small, domestic. Here, it meant the line between whole and broken.
“You’re doing this,” I said slowly, “because you know the curse will break you. Like it’s trying to break Keegan.”
It was the first time I’d said the thought out loud. The Hollows noticed. The pressure changed as if the room had leaned in.
Gideon’s eyes flickered. His jaw worked. The cockiness folded
When he spoke, the voice that came out belonged to someone who was, for the first time, not performing for the sound of his own legend.
“I am doing this,” he said, “because if I don’t, I will be used up by the thing the priestess can’t name and the town can’t survive. No town can survive. The curse doesn’t break you because it hates you, Maeve. It breaks you because you are exactly the shape it needs.”
The words landed like cold metal pressed to skin; you don’t flinch, you decide what to do next.
“And you?” I asked because I had to hear it, because I had to know the scale of what I was weighing in a room that refused to tilt. “What shape are you to it?”
He held my gaze until I forgot the braiding of the light and the frost under my boots and the raven feather’s absurd dignity. He didn’t blink. He didn’t soften the edges.
“The piece that fits between the teeth,” he said. “And Keegan’s role is far worse.”
I cleared my throat as a shiver ran through me, and Gideon’s gaze caught mine.
“And you will be next.”
Beyond the shroud, Keegan’s breath fogged the glass of air and disappeared. Stella’s bracelets chimed once as if reminding the day that manners still mattered. The Hollows waited, as patient as winter, for the next stitch to be chosen.