Chapter Ten
“What is it the priestess wants from me?” I asked.
“I assumed you knew.” He shook his head. “I’m sure she assumes as well. But, you’re key to her survival.”
A small, vicious heat flashed under my sternum.
The priestess of Shadowick, the woman who had slipped into my life as a possibility and then arrived as a grandmother, would assume I could read the room when the room was a labyrinth.
“She assumed wrong.”
Gideon’s mouth bent into the sort of smile you give a naive but promising student.
“No. She assumed you’d figure it out before I did. She has not met me on a good day.”
“I’ve never met you on one,” I said.
“And yet,” he murmured.
He let the silence sit long enough to be rude, then shook his head. “She knows you have something special. Something powerful. She doesn’t know what.” The arrogance slid back into him like a remembered posture.
The Hollows flattened it, but couldn’t smother it. He regarded me the way a locksmith looks at a door, admiring the craftsmanship, irritated by the lock.
“But I do.” His eyes stayed on mine.
I kept my breathing steady because that was the only rebellion left to me in here. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
His smile widened. It wasn’t warm, not cruel, exactly. Pleased, maybe?
“Because I know precisely what you’re keeping from everyone, Maeve.”
A shiver ran through me that had nothing to do with the cold.
The dragons. The memory of candlelight flickering over pearl-scaled flanks in the library’s hush. The soft weight of legend pressed into the dark, breathing, dreaming. Elira’s confession.
Everything in me went very still inside my mittened hands. I did not swallow. I did not blink. I lifted my chin and called on every ounce of Bellemore stubbornness and Stonewick manners.
“That’s ridiculous,” I said, crisp as frost. “I have nothing to give.”
“You’re charming when you lie,” he said, unoffended. “And careless. I know they’re not yours to give.”
My blood went cold.
He shook his head once, slowly, as if I were the student who could perform the spell if I stopped thinking about the performance.
“You don’t even know the power you have at your fingertips,” he said, voice low, the Hollows making it gentler than he meant it to be. “And I don’t know if that makes you more dangerous or less.”
My skin prickled. All at once, I could feel my palms, the thin pulse in my wrists, the ache behind my left eye that came when I hadn’t slept or had tried to balance emotions on a tightrope. The Hollows pressed cool against my thoughts steadily, and I put them in order.
“Why would you try to help?” I asked, and it came out almost soft, which surprised us both. “You, of all people.”
He didn’t dodge. His answer came as cold as his eyes. “Because she wants something she should never have. And if you are the key, I will play nicely.”
“I have seen you play nicely,” I said. “There were sharp objects involved and things with fangs.”
My mind began stitching old scenes to new threads, whether I liked it or not.
Malore’s teeth; the way the curse had throbbed under Keegan’s skin like a bruise waking; the hunger path’s quiet, ceaseless tug.
My grandmother’s silence, precise and heavy, like a book set down so gently you don’t realize it’s too important to move.
“What does she want?” I asked again, because I needed to hear it in this room where lies came out with frostbite.
“Power,” Gideon said simply. “Nothing more complicated, which is what makes it so complicated.”
I would have preferred a riddle. A riddle lets you be clever and pretend cleverness is enough. Power just sits there, a rock in the road you can trip over or move or build a house on. My stomach made the little drop it makes when the next step is lower than you think.
“Everyone wants power,” I said.
“Not like this,” he said. “She wants leverage over both realms without belonging to either. She wants to own the quiet between. She wants to tell the Hollows what balance is and have it agree. She wants to control all of the magic across this country. If she succeeds here, she will move on.”
I stepped back, not much, just enough to make the air feel less like a too-tight coat.
Beyond the shroud, Keegan had not moved.
He could stand like that for hours, a weather system choosing its moment.
Stella had shifted her weight to one hip: comfortable on the surface, coiled beneath.
Nova’s gaze had gone distant and deep. The bramble mule had, impossibly, fallen asleep with his chin on an ice table, confetti haloed around his soft muzzle like a questionable saint.
“Why now?” I asked. “Why pull this thread now, if it’s been knotted so long?”
“Because you showed up,” he said, as if I’d walked into a theater and the orchestra had lifted its bows. “Because the Wards hummed when you did. Because you’ve been mending faster than she can misname it as luck. Because you’re a hinge and someone finally noticed that hinges turn doors.”
“And?”
“And I realized I had been lied to. I was foolish when I tasted power, but I was only a puppet. You have seen clearly when I have not.”
I should not have felt warmed by that even in the smallest way, but the compliment had the right weight: it carried its own friction.
“You should have been a poet,” I said. “Then all of this could have been metaphors.”
“Poets are the most dangerous thieves,” he said, and the corner of his mouth pulled up. “They take reality and hand it back to you trimmed as a weapon with words.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” I said. “What exactly does she think I have?”
“I told you that she doesn’t know. It is the not-knowing that keeps her moving, that makes her dangerous. If she knew, she would have made the wrong bargain already.”
The dragons breathed under the stones again—in memory only, I swore it—and I felt the barest brush of scale and heat where my heartbeat lived.
Come ask us, that old warmth seemed to say. We have seen winters you can’t dream.
“Stop looking at me like that,” I said, because I could feel his attention skimming the surface of my thoughts, not reading them, not here, but weighing what the Hollows allowed to show.
“Like you’re capable?” he asked.
“Like you’re setting a table you hope I’ll sit at.”
A low, pleased sound. “Your seat has always been there. You kept refusing it in favor of the wolf.”
“Wolves are underrated,” I said.
“They behave for scraps,” he murmured.
“Enough.”
His eyes locked on mine, and he pulled a deep breath. “Do you realize how incredible your life would be if you chose correctly?”
“What do you mean?”
“I can offer you things your imagination couldn’t even begin to conjure.”
Nausea sloshed in my stomach. How did he always turn it back to that?
“So, what we’re dealing with isn’t just squashing the hunger path and turning back to the ancient rites. Something else darker has stirred, and the priestess isn’t even aware?”
“First, the Hunger Path needs to be stopped. It isn’t a road. It’s a habit. It eats the will of a place until the place believes hunger is the most reasonable thing it can be.”
“And the curse?” I asked. “Your curse? His curse?” I didn’t say Keegan’s name because the Hollows would have made me mean it too much.
“The curse is a diet,” he said, eyes unkindly kind. “It asks you to be less. The hunger asks you to be more than anyone can feed. Between them, you disappear or you devour.”
“I don’t accept those options.”
“That is why I’m here.”
I rubbed my thumb along the seam of my mitten and thought through the parts that hurt to hold.
Malore nearly tearing the world’s fabric in the cottage, taking away the people I loved.
The way the Wards had watched me from the corners of this world.
The way the Luminary had accepted my hands on its stitch as if it had been waiting for exactly this pair of fingers.
The way my grandmother’s silence had been a language, and I was only now learning to conjugate it.
Gideon wanted something. He was always wanting something. But the Hollows had insisted he say it without persuading me to want it for him.
“Join us,” I said, before I gave myself the chance to be careful. The words left my mouth and hung in the cold like a dare. “Join the circle. End the hunger path with us. You said yourself that is the first path.”
The shroud sighed. The feather on the table stirred and lay still. Beyond the glassy quiet, I felt my people react without moving.
“Don’t,” Gideon said reflexively, cockiness returning to cover a seam I’d finally found. “You don’t know what you’re inviting.”
“I know enough,” I said. “I know you like to pretend you’re the only one who can carry the fire through the forest without burning. Come carry it in a circle where your hands will be counted and watched.”
“You want me bound,” he said, amused again. “How cozy.”
“I want the path ended,” I said. “You can stand at the edge and make commentary or you can stand inside it and help. You like being necessary. Be necessary for the thing that keeps people fighting.”
“People always fight, and their hunger only grows as temptation dangles,” he said.
“And when the plate is empty,” I said, “they remember who hoarded the bread.”
“What would you even require of me?” he asked lightly, but his eyes had lost their play.
“The truth, spoken here and elsewhere,” I said. “The knowledge you’ve refused to hand over because it would make us less afraid of you. The names of the hands tugging on the knot from darkness. The places you’ve taught the shadows to listen. Your work, in daylight, with witnesses.”
He went very still, something inside him settling into a posture I rarely saw—no swagger, no theatrics, just a man standing still enough to hear the sound of his own breath.
“Keegan will never allow it,” he said.
“Keegan will let me choose,” I said, and the Hollows liked that enough that the cold around my wrists warmed by a degree. “He will hate it and still let me choose.”
“And if I say no?”
“Then you will tell me why,” I said. “In a way that respects the fact that I came here on Luna’s word and stayed on mine. You said yourself that the Hunger Path needs to be stopped before you can move on to getting back what is yours, whatever that is.”
He studied me for a long count of heartbeats and looked beyond me to the shroud where the silhouettes of my people waited.
“But you know that the curse is pulling tighter, and while there might be a small reprieve, it will end you.” I stared at him.
“And Keegan,” he said curtly.
“I want to end what Malore set in motion before any of us had a chance.”
“You want to end the path,” he said finally, and it wasn’t a question.
“I want to end a habit that makes us think swallowing each other is the only way to be alive.”
“A pretty sentence,” he said. “You should be careful about becoming the poet you accused me of being. It’s catching.”
“Answer me,” I said, and the last of my patience set down its cup.
He did. He said a sentence I had not prepared for, and the Hollows, neutral, measuring, winter, agreed it counted.
And his answer changed everything.