Chapter Eleven
Keegan was the first shape I saw when I stepped back to the shroud, with his broad shoulders, winter-hazel eyes, and jaw set like he could hold the whole hexagon together with grit alone.
He didn’t ask what Gideon had said. He didn’t need to.
The Hollows had pressed the echo of those words into the air like a watermark.
Twobble barreled into my side with earmuffs askew, arms open for a hug, and snacks already in the offering position.
“Alive?” he squeaked, then peered around me, stage-whispering, “Did you throw anything?”
“Only my patience,” I said, mouth dry and somehow smiling anyway.
Stella took my other elbow and drew me a step farther into the circle’s warmth, the frost around her hem glittering like sequins that had learned manners.
“How did he phrase it?” she asked, because she knew the way a sentence sits in the mouth matters more than people think. “Like a man offering amends or like one making a reservation?”
“Like a man choosing a door, knowing there was another escape exit,” I said.
Nova’s gaze flicked to Gideon, to me, to the veils themselves, as if reading the room’s ledger. “And?”
Gideon met my eyes from across the ice table. No theatrics. No coyness. No bargaining with tone.
“Yes,” he said, for all of us to hear. “I will join your circle to end the hunger path.”
It was the quiet that made it true. The Hollows wouldn’t have let a lie sit there with its back straight. Relief flooded my chest so fast it made me lightheaded.
“Can we do it here before he changes his mind?” Twobble asked.
“Afraid not,” Nova said, shaking her head. “No rituals of such scale are to be held at or near the Hollows. This is sacred ground, and things can go wrong with rituals.”
I flinched at that last statement. It hadn’t occurred to me that something could go wrong when we closed the circle, but this was magic so…
Keegan exhaled in one slow, deliberate breath. He didn’t look at Gideon when he did it; he looked at me, and there was pride in that look and worry nailed down very neatly beside it.
Skonk punched the air and then tried to pretend he had just been stretching.
“Ha! I mean—hmm. Sensible choice. Obviously.”
Bella’s fox form shook out in a flour-sparkle halo, and she came upright on two legs with a grin that made me hope the Hollows understood mischief was a kind of faith. “About time someone with claws decided to use them for good.”
“Careful,” Stella murmured. “They’ll think we expected it and start charging.”
The bramble mule, perhaps swayed by the general mood, rested his chin on Gideon’s shoulder with a saintly sigh and dropped a single piece of confetti onto his coat like a benediction. Gideon didn’t brush it off.
For a heartbeat, or three, the room felt
Luna’s eyes shone with the kind of tired joy that made me realize how long she had been standing upright on our behalf. Lady Limora’s mouth made the tiniest pleased shape. Opal’s hands loosened on the travel spike case. Vivienne tucked a vial back into her basket and let the clasp catch.
Then the floor moved.
It wasn’t dramatic at first, more like the ground clearing its throat under the snow.
The spiral etched into the packed white shivered, lifted a fraction as if breathing, then dropped.
A hairline crack ran from one pillar of the hexagon to the next and stitched itself shut before I could gasp.
The shroud rippled, a sound like silk lines strummed in warning.
Keegan pulled me behind the table in the same motion that brought him between me and the nearest seam.
Nova lifted her staff, eyes narrowing to fine-needle green.
Stella’s bracelets chimed once as she placed herself an exact pace to my left, where her particular brand of charm turned into a protective magic faster than anyone expected.
The ground shook harder.
“What??” Skonk began, already reaching for Twobble, who had gone very still in the way only goblins who have seen avalanches can.
Ice crystals began to fall.
Not snow. Crystals. The first few tinkled against the shroud and slid down like lazy, glittering rain. Pretty, I thought for a foolish second. It was almost like a sparkly snow globe.
Then the next wave hit with weight as long, thin spicules that sliced the air and sang as they spun. The sound went through my teeth and into my bones. Where the crystals struck the floor, they embedded.
“Down,” Keegan snapped, and we dropped, pulling Luna with us, dragging the mule into the crook behind a pillar where even he understood to tuck his garlanded head.
Gideon’s face went sharper. He hissed, not at the crystals but at what threw them.
“The high priestess,” he said, voice flat and furious. He angled his forearm to shield his face and still spoke clearly enough for the Hollows to record it. “She’s testing the circle. Spite wrapped in etiquette.”
“That’s not possible,” I said, half to him, half to the room that had promised neutrality. “This is sacred ground.”
A constellation of crystals hit the nearest shroud and turned in midair. They elongated, thinned, and fell like a scatter of glass daggers. The nearest one hit the table, sank, and quivered…still a knife, but briefly indecisive about who to belong to.
Gideon didn’t take his eyes off the rain.
“Shadows curl,” he said, and the words sounded older than he meant them to be, like a line someone else had taught him. “They delight in calm. Give them silence, and they’ll throw pebbles to hear what kind of echo they can make.”
“Prophetic pronouncements make me itchy,” Stella said, somehow managing to sound bored while keeping her body between Luna and the worst of the fall. “Can we make it stop?”
“Yes,” Nova said, no drama..
She stepped into the center of the hexagon with the calm of someone walking into a church to pinch out a candle that had burned beyond its wick. The crystals thickened as if in defiance. She set the ferrule of her staff down in the spiral, halfway along its turn, and exhaled.
The room exhaled with her. The Hollows were grateful for her help as she hummed in a language I could only describe as ancient, possibly Elfin.
The crystals slowed their spin as if embarrassed by how much noise they’d been making and fell straight down, shattering into harmless glitter before they touched the floor.
The quivering knives went soft as thin strips of frost that melted into the spiral and fed it light instead of malice.
The shroud gave a last silvery shiver and stilled.
The trembling stopped.
The Hollows prevailed.
Silence settled back into the room as if it had been waiting with its coat on. I hadn’t realized until then how high I’d held my shoulders. They were nearly to my ears.
Nova remained very still for a count of ten. Then she lifted her staff and stepped out of the spiral, expression smooth, breath steady.
“She should know better,” Nova said at last, voice like a pale blade rather than a loud one. “Than to dabble in places she doesn’t belong.”
Stella’s smile turned predatory. “Oh, she knows. She simply hoped the Hollows might be in the mood for a flirtation.”
“Let’s not ascribe romance to reckless weather,” Lady Limora said dryly, but the line in her brow had not left.
Gideon looked worried in a way I’d never seen sit on his face. Not performative. Not calculated. The worry of someone who has been found by a thing they would very much like to avoid.
“She knows I’m here,” he said quietly.
The bramble mule leaned harder into him, as if to say he had known it all along and had merely waited for the human to catch up. Twobble popped up from behind the table, checked for falling weaponry, and then stuck a lollipop against his lower lip like a talisman of bravery.
“She also knows we’re here,” I said, wiping a smear of frost from my cheek with the back of my glove. “I can’t tell if that’s the problem or the solution.”
“Both,” Gideon said. “But my presence is the pebble she threw. Yours is the pond she wishes to own.”
The words shouldn’t have shivered through me the way they did. But the way the ice had turned to needles when it hit the shroud felt personal. The Hollows had flattened the attack into weather, but the intent had started aggressively.
Keegan rose, offered me a hand up, and didn’t let go when I took it. “You all right?”
“I will be when my heart remembers we’re not in a snow globe being shaken by someone spiteful.” He squeezed once, and some part of me uncrumpled.
Stella smoothed her cloak as if straightening the hem could straighten the world.
“Darlings,” she said, bright again because choosing brightness is a form of war, “we are not fleeing a parlor because of rude precipitation. Nova has restored the decor. Someone boil water. If the priestess insists on throwing a tantrum, we will answer with sweetness.”
Skonk already had a match out and was trying to light a travel kettle with a look of religious concentration. “I’m on it,” he said, and the match flared obligingly. The bramble mule tried to eat the flame and was sternly denied.
Luna brushed tiny shards of harmless glitter from her shawl. She looked calmer than I felt, which either meant she was braver or had made her peace with danger in a different year.
“She was measuring,” Luna said softly. “Not striking. She wanted to know if the Hollows would let her touch the room.”
“And it won’t,” Nova said, as certain as the frost-writ circle at our feet.
“For now,” Gideon said, and that was the part that worried me.
I turned the line of thought around with cold, careful fingers.
Was it Gideon who pulled her attention? Or me?
Or both of us in a geometry that made her want to correct the chalk lines?
The Hollows had stopped the tantrum, yes, but it had also acknowledged the hand that shook the globe.
That acknowledgment sat in the air like the ghost of a bell.