Chapter Two
Red
The forest gave her dreams sometimes.
It made sense. To house magic as fully as she did, one had to expect that it would leave marks inside as well as out, carve golden grooves into her thoughts as surely as it haloed her eyes green and threaded ivy through her hair. No less unsettling, but a fairly mild side effect, all things considered.
It’d started right after she became the Wilderwood. Right after Neve was dragged down into the earth. Dreams that left golden afterimages, dreams that felt more real than the firings of her weary thoughts before finally trailing into sleep. The dreams were fairly simple, didn’t last long. A mirror with no reflection. Stars wheeling in the sky, coming together to almost make the shapes of words, then spangling apart before she could read them.
But this was the most solid dream the Wilderwood had given Red yet: a tree. A white-trunked sentinel in a sea of mist, mist that obscured whatever the rest of the landscape might be. It started as a sapling, then grew—slowly, in the way of dreams, then immediately. Shooting up, spreading branches above her head, veined in swirling lines of gold and black.
Then, an apple in her hand. Warm and golden, heavier than an apple should be. She raised it to her lips, bit down. The taste of blood, and a horrible pain in her chest, as if she’d somehow torn out and eaten a vital part of herself.
Red’s eyes opened, her middle twisting, copper flooding her mouth. Her heart beat fast against the base of her throat, spiderwebbing her veins in verdant green, then ebbed to a slower rhythm as she remembered where she was.
The Black Keep. With the Wolf.
A slight breeze blew through the open windows of their bedroom, carrying with it the scent of leaves and dirt and cinnamon, wafting eternal autumn. Dim morning light filtered over the bed, burnishing Eammon’s dark hair in gold, highlighting the scars on his bare shoulders, bare abdomen.
She smiled to see them, banishing vestiges of bloody dreams as she burrowed into his side and traced one of the three white lines on his stomach with her finger. They’d rattled the forest back into linear time and out of endless twilight, and never was she so thankful for it as in the mornings. The Wolf looked very good in gray, early light.
Her trailing hand brushed the scars, his hipbone. Lower. He shifted, chin tilting up with a low, contented sigh when her fingers closed around him, but didn’t wake.
Red grinned wickedly, replaced her hand with her mouth.
That was enough to wake him up. Eammon’s eyes opened, amber ringed with a corona of deep green, immediately molten. One scarred hand slid into her hair. “Good morning.”
“Very good morning,” Red murmured against him before rising up to straddle his hips.
After, when her thoughts were no longer hazed and blazing and she was dressing for the day, Red thought back to her dream. This one felt different. Weighty, somehow.
Everything felt weighty recently, though. A week since the shadow grove, since the earth opened, since they thwarted Solmir’s plan to bring the rest of the Kings to the other side and she and Eammon had become the Wilderwood entire, held in two bodies, two souls.
A week with no idea where to even start looking. The mirror in the tower showed her nothing, hadn’t since she looked in it that last time and seen the Shadowlands, before they went to the edge of the forest and found it shattered. The forest buried in her bones gave her no clues, quiet now that it had its anchors, no longer speaking through dearly bought words but settled alongside her mind like moss on a stone. The forest outside of her, empty now of sentinels and sentience but still magic-touched, was nothing but autumn and gold.
Red was the most powerful she’d ever been. And she felt helpless.
The rough familiarity of Eammon’s hands on the nape of her neck brought her mind back to the present. Lost in thought, she’d paused in the braiding of her hair, and he gathered it in his palms, picking up where she left off. “Something new troubling you?” His voice was low and morning-graveled. “Or the same?”
“The same,” she murmured.
A soft noise of affirmation. The braid he made was lumpy, but he tied it off tight, gave it a slight tug so her neck craned up to see him behind her. He dropped a kiss on her forehead. “Maybe Raffe will have something new to tell Fife.”
She sighed, leaning farther so the back of her head rested against the plane of Eammon’s stomach. “Maybe.” This would be the second time Fife had gone to the Valleydan capital, no longer constrained by the boundaries of the Wilderwood, though still bound in different ways—by the bargain he’d made for Lyra’s life, in those few minutes when Eammon wasn’t really Eammon but eclipsed by magic and forest. He met with Raffe in a tavern, the latter wearing the most nondescript clothes he could find, and they tried to figure out ways they might use the things at Raffe’s disposal to find Neve.
Well. At his disposal for now. Before anyone figured out that the Queen was not actually recuperating from illness in a Florish holding, that her betrothed was not visiting Alpera, and that the High Priestess was not attending him.
If and when those things came to light, Raffe’s use of the palace library and close watch over the Shrine might not be so easy.
Thus far, Valleyda’s isolation had worked in their favor. The very things that made them notable made them undesirable as a territory to conquer—the Wilderwood on the northern border, the Second Daughter tithe, the poor soil and climate that never let warmth last long. And though two of those things were no longer deterrents, news traveled slowly, especially as the weather turned colder and courtiers holed up at home or abroad in preparation for the coming winter.
If they moved quietly, quickly, there’d never be any reason for the nobles to know Neve was gone. Red was too busy trying to bring her sister back from the underworld to fight over her throne, too.
She had half a mind to let it go, if it came to that. What good had a throne done either of them? Red certainly didn’t want it.
Her eyes fluttered closed as she leaned back against Eammon, breathing in his library smell. Still the same, though the scent of leaves was more prominent now. “I had a dream. One from the Wilderwood.” She opened one eye to peer up at him. “Did you?”
His hand strayed to her hair, tucking flyaway pieces behind her ears as his brows drew down and he thought back over the sleep she’d interrupted. “Not that I can recall, no.” A flicker of heat in his eyes. “Though I did wake up rather compromised, so my memory is not as sharp as it could be.”
Her lips twisted as she poked him hard in the stomach. She’d told him about the forest dreams when they first started happening. They happened to him, too—the quick flashes of image and feeling, too brief to make much sense of. Usually, if Red had a forest dream, so did Eammon, the thread of magic that twined through them both igniting in sync.
But this one, apparently, had been only for her. Red frowned. “It was stranger than the others. Longer. There was a tree. A sentinel. And an apple. When I took a bite out of it, it was bloody.”
Eammon’s hand stilled. Mentions of blood still made him tense, even now that the forest didn’t require it of him anymore. Lyra teasingly called him squeamish, but it was with a sympathetic light in her eyes. The Wolf had faced enough blood for several lifetimes.
The momentary stiffness passed, his thumb tracing her jaw before his hand fell away. “Do you think it means something? The dreams the Wilderwood gives us generally don’t, at least for me, but if you think it did…”
“It could.” Red sighed. “Or it could mean that the spices Lyra brought us last night did a number on my head.”
He snorted. “I’ll check the library. See if there’s anything that sounds similar in the histories, just to make sure. Mentions of bloody apples should be few and fairly specific, I’d think.”
“I’ll help after I see Fife off. I have a letter for Raffe.”
“Another one?”
She shrugged, picking at a loose thread on the hem of her tunic. “If I was in his position, I’d want to know absolutely everything we were trying. If it was you that was lost.”
The Wolf gave a low rumble of assent.
Red’s fingers tapped against her leg, apprehensive. “If Raffe doesn’t have anything new,” she said finally, “we should talk about what to do next.”
She didn’t look up, but she heard the hitch in Eammon’s sigh. It skirted close to a not-quite-argument, one that had been hanging in the air around them for days. They were searching two libraries and had come up with nothing so far to help them find Neve. Red’s patience, a worn-thin thing to begin with, was nearly frayed through. Who knew what Neve was enduring while they wasted time with old books and caution?
The atmosphere crackled, waiting. Finally, Eammon nodded. “We’ll talk about it,” he said. Then he dropped another kiss on her forehead and disappeared down the stairs.
Red stood, stretching her arms above her head to work out the last of her morning stiffness. Delicious smells already wafted up from the kitchen—Lyra had arrived the night before after a brief jaunt south, the first of many trips around the continent she planned to take now that she was no longer beholden to the Wilderwood. Fife had gone all out for dinner the night before, and apparently he’d done the same for breakfast this morning.
The letter to Raffe sat on the desk, just one page, folded small. Red looked at it with her bottom lip between her teeth. There was more in it than just a relating of their lack of progress. A few lines scribbled at the end. Arick’s birthday was soon. Raffe would remember without her reminding him, but Red felt she should mention it anyway. Proof that she remembered, too.
Grief for Arick was a strange thing, probably the strangest she’d felt in all of her uncanny sadnesses. She wasn’t sorry she killed him; of all the strange emotions he stirred up, guilt wasn’t one. She would’ve done much worse to save Eammon, to save Neve. Arick had made his choice when he called up Solmir, gave him his shadow and his life.
But she was still sorry he was gone.
Her mouth pressed to a thin, hard line as she picked up the letter and slipped it into her pocket. The next time she saw Solmir, she was going to kill him. Much more slowly than she’d killed Arick.
She walked down the stairs, thoughts turning from Arick and Solmir to closer concerns as she listened to Fife’s and Lyra’s voices in the dining room. Eammon had told Fife he could go with Lyra on her treks around the continent if he wanted; now that he and Red were the Wilderwood, and there was no real border to bind him into, it stood to reason he could travel as far and wide as she did. But Fife hadn’t tried, going only as far as the Valleydan capital to meet with Raffe. Red wasn’t sure what held him back, and she didn’t feel comfortable asking, not when everything was still new, still raw. Not when none of them quite understood what Fife had gotten himself into when he bargained with the god Eammon had briefly become.
The new bargain he’d made with the Wilderwood—with Eammon—was different. She could feel it in the forest she carried, though she wasn’t certain how. The Wilderwood had needed something from Fife that wasn’t blood, wasn’t fealty. The Mark on his arm was larger and more intricate than it’d been before, a tangle of roots beneath the skin that spanned nearly from his elbow to the middle of his forearm. The forest asked nothing of him; there were no shadow-creatures or breaches to throw blood at, hoping it might seal them closed.
Even in that thread of congruent forest-thought that ran parallel to her own, so close she could barely differentiate it, Red could discern nothing of what Fife’s new bargain was supposed to mean.
It made them nervous, all three of them. Made them move cautiously around each other. And if that was painful for Red, she couldn’t imagine how it must be for Fife and Eammon, who’d spent so long together in a small world of their own.
When she arrived in the dining room, Lyra was already seated, a steaming cup of coffee in her hand and a smile on her elfin face. Time in the sun outside of the forest had lightened the tips of her tightly coiled black hair, giving it a coppery shimmer. She raised her chipped mug in salute as Red walked through the door. “Are you actually going to sit and eat, or will you go the way of your husband and steal a slice of toast with barely a hello?”
“I’ll sit.” Red slid into her chair and took the cup Lyra offered, giving her a thankful grin when she saw the other woman had already doused her coffee with cream. “This smells far better than usual.”
“Did you know coffee doesn’t have to taste like limp bean water? I learned this when I took a detour into Meducia. They know their way around a beverage, between the wine and the coffee.”
“I’m choosing not to be offended.” Fife emerged from the kitchen, carrying what looked like a whole ham and setting it down next to the toast. “I’m choosing not to comment on the fact that you called my coffee limp bean water.”
Lyra wrinkled her nose and patted his reddish hair. “The very best limp bean water.”
Fife smiled at her. It was the first true smile Red had seen from him in a week. He wore his long sleeves pulled down, hiding his Bargainer’s Mark, and when Lyra turned back to her breakfast, he fiddled with the cuff, making sure it was still at his wrist.
He must’ve felt her watching. Hazel eyes slid to Red’s; Fife gave a slight, rueful shrug.
So he hadn’t told Lyra about the new bargain, hadn’t shown her the new Mark. He needed to, and soon—Lyra remembered enough of their battle with Solmir at the inverted grove to know she’d been badly hurt. Eventually, she’d figure out what it was that saved her.
The three of them ate in companionable silence, Fife next to Lyra and Red across from them. Meals were a much more intricate affair now that they weren’t limited to supplies only from the Edge. The villagers beyond the forest were still preparing for their great migration south—delayed by the currently quiet chaos in Valleyda—but Valdrek and Lear had already gone to the capital to scope out the new world they’d be returning to.
If they could find Neve—when we find Neve, Red thought to herself almost savagely, fingers tightening around her mug—Red knew she would help with the villagers’ resettlement. But for now, with Raffe secretly holding things together in Valleyda by willpower alone, it didn’t seem wise to try to move a whole tiny country from behind the Wilderwood. Those at the Edge agreed, and many of them were content to stay where they were, anyway. Now that the way through the forest was open and they could feasibly trade with the rest of the world, the land beyond the Wilderwood no longer seemed like a prison.
“Do you care to give this to Raffe when you see him?” Red asked, fishing the letter from her pocket.
Fife took it, cocking a brow when he felt how thin it was. “Anything new to report?”
“No.” She sighed. “But he’d want to know that. No news is bad news.”
Lyra picked up another piece of toast. “I thought it was ‘no news is good news.’”
“We’ll just leave it at ‘no news is going to make Raffe more nervous than he already is.’”
Other than the brief reminder of Arick’s birthday, the letter truly wasn’t much—just a reiteration that although Red offered to the mirror every day, it still showed her nothing of her sister. Telling him, again, that she and Eammon were looking for any possible way to open the Shadowlands and pull Neve out.
Well. Any safe possible way.
Before they’d become the Wilderwood, there’d been countless accidental doors into the Shadowlands. The breaches, the churned black dirt around falling sentinels that birthed shadow-creatures and the lesser beast they’d fought after the first time he took her to the Edge. And that, Red thought, could be the answer they were looking for.
What if there was a way to re-create a doorway to the Shadowlands? To somehow free a sentinel from within one of them, like a loose tooth, plant it back in the ground and let its distance from them rot it just enough to open a way between the worlds?
She’d mentioned the idea to Eammon only once. He’d responded poorly. Furious would be more accurate, really, Eammon fire-eyed and low-voiced, looming over her like something avenging, asking her what the fuck she thought she was doing.
She hadn’t realized until right then that it was the same way his mother had died. Gaya had attempted to open the Shadowlands and pull Solmir out, and the Wilderwood had consumed her for it, desperate to stop its own wounding.
It had to be different, this time. They held all of the forest between them, none of it attached to the earth anymore. Surely that meant it wouldn’t riot, that it would understand? But Eammon was adamant and clearly terrified, so Red dropped the subject.
But the idea wouldn’t leave her alone.
And her letter to Raffe was thin.
“Wait a minute, Fife.” Red stood, searching in her pockets for a pen—she’d taken to carrying one all the time, since Eammon was always in need of something to write with. Usually, there was a pen behind his ear, but Red preferred to let him borrow one from her and then figure that out on his own. “I have something to add.”
Maybe the dream would serve as a comfort to Raffe, somehow, since there was nothing else new to report. And the library in Valleyda was vast—if she and Eammon couldn’t find anything significant, it was possible he could.
She scribbled out the bare bones of the dream at the end of the letter, blowing on the ink to quicken its drying, and handed it back to Fife. “Tell him to write back if he has questions.”
Fife nodded, tucking the letter into his jacket pocket. “Want to come?” he asked Lyra, not quite able to make it nonchalant. “Raffe always buys and puts me up in one of the nicer inns for the night.”
“Sure.” One more bite of toast, and Lyra stood, stretching her arms over her head. She’d bought new clothes in Valleyda, a gown the color of ice that perfectly contrasted her golden-brown skin, but she still wore her tor across her back. The pairing made her look fierce and delicate at once. “Then maybe we can talk about where you want to go next.”
We stay together, him and me. She’d said that before, long before any of them knew that the forest would let them go so soon, that Red and Eammon would finally heal what had been broken. Lyra had gone off on her own at first only because Fife refused; Red wondered if he could beg off a second time. Even though Red understood his apprehension—understood that his new tie to the Wilderwood made him nervous to leave it—she hoped the next time Lyra asked, he’d choose to go.
Though part of her thought Fife was more nervous about Lyra seeing his new Mark than anything else.
All of them were still trying to navigate the labyrinth they’d made, no one quite sure how to press at its parameters. She and Eammon weren’t confined to their forest. They carried the Wilderwood within; it couldn’t hold them within a border that no longer existed. But with Neve missing and their power so new, neither of them had broached the subject of leaving. Especially now that they wore their magic so physically, so clearly. Red still didn’t want to run into anyone from Valleyda, anyone who remembered her as just the Second Daughter who’d visited once before disappearing again—right before her sister, the new queen, was reportedly stricken ill. The potential for questions she didn’t want to answer was too high, things were too fragile.
And if she was this nervous about it, she couldn’t imagine what Eammon was feeling. Eammon, who’d completely lost himself the one time he breached the southern border of the Wilderwood, who hadn’t known the world outside of it for centuries.
Well. There’d be time for all that. Once they found Neve. Red had been thinking recently of how she’d like to see the ocean again.
She saw Fife and Lyra out the door, watching the two of them amble into the gold-and-ocher expanse of the healed Wilderwood. Eammon was waiting for her down in the library. She should bring him another cup of coffee; he’d undoubtedly finished his first.
But Red walked, instead, toward the tower.
Since healing the Wilderwood, the vines on the outside of the tower had grown riotous, full of lush leaves and white blooms as big as her head. It was a beautiful thing, a spot of spring in all this autumn. And her magic, the wildly blooming forest beneath her skin, was still stronger there.
Though not strong enough to make the mirror work.
One try. She’d give it one try today, one beseeching sacrifice to see if it would surrender a glimpse of her sister. Then she’d join Eammon, scouring tomes for things they might not yet know about themselves, the Wilderwood, the Shadowlands. Things that might let them free Neve from the darkness that held her fast.
One try.
As she walked over the moss, Red’s gaze—the deep brown of her irises ringed with green now, just like Eammon’s—strayed to the iron gate, to the trees beyond. Only yellows and oranges, only brown bark, with no white sentinels to interrupt them.
“There has to be a door,” Red whispered in the autumn of her wood, the words spoken aloud but also directed inward, at the forest she carried beneath her skin. “There has to be something.”
No answer. But a breeze picked up, spinning golden leaves, and she felt an answering rustle along her spine.
Red jogged up the tower steps, already pulling strands of dark-gold hair from the lumpy braid Eammon had tied. Thin tendrils of ivy tangled in the blond, growing from her head just as naturally; she plucked one of those, too. Then blood, just a tiny drop of it, drawn from digging her nail into the pad of her opposite thumb. It reminded her of those first days in the Wilderwood, what felt like lifetimes ago, working at a hangnail to try to avoid using her magic.
Strange, what she used to be afraid of.
The blood she smeared on the gilt frame; the hair and ivy she wound through its whorls. “Show me my sister,” Red commanded, in a layered voice that held clattering branches and blooming petals and whistling wind.
Nothing. Again. With a deep, shaking sigh, Red pushed up from the floor.
But something caught her eye in that matte gray surface. A shift, two crossing kinds of darkness, like something moving in a black, unlit room. She leaned forward until her nose almost touched the glass, peering at it.
The darkness in the mirror looked, almost, like a tangle of roots.