Chapter Seven

Red

It changed, Eammon. I showed you yesterday, and you said to wait and see if it stayed.” She waved her hand. “It did. It has to mean something.”

Red stood next to the mirror, still fringed with strands of her split-ended hair and spotted with her blood, still with a pile of fingernail clippings as a macabre centerpiece before it. The sight of all her sacrifices discomfited Eammon, she could tell, but he didn’t comment on them. He stood next to her, arms crossed, staring into the mirror with its reflected tangle of roots. His heavy brows drew together, his mouth pressed to a thin line.

The ghost of the argument that had dogged them for days hung close. She’d been understanding yesterday, had given it time to see if he was right and the change in the mirror was a fluke. Now she was ready for action. Ready to do something. Anything.

“It might,” Eammon hedged, still reluctant. “Or it could mean the mirror just doesn’t work anymore. Now that we’re the Wilderwood, the magic has changed, the ties that made it show First Daughters altered in ways we don’t understand yet.”

“Yes, I’m aware, thank you. But your mother made the mirror to see her sister. That is its function, and that is what I am trying to do.” Red’s hand cut toward the mirror. “If it worked before, why wouldn’t it now, when the Wilderwood is the strongest it’s been in centuries?”

“Because before, Neve wasn’t in the Shadowlands.”

“But if it’s supposed to help me see her—”

“Red, the Shadowlands are wrong.” The last word was almost a growl. “It’s an upside-down world filled with monsters that are terrible and gods that are worse. Even if we knew how to open it now that the Wilderwood has changed form, you can’t just make a way into something like that, not without dire consequences. It’s dark, and it’s twisted, and it twists everything within it.”

Everything within it. Like Neve.

Eammon kept his arms crossed tight over his broad chest, his pushed-up sleeves revealing the runnels of long-healed scars, the bark-like vambraces on his forearms. “It could be a clue,” he said finally. “It could be nothing. I just don’t want you to get your hopes up, Red. I don’t want…” He trailed off, rubbed at his eyes with thumb and forefinger.

The quiet thickened around them, something that could suffocate. They’d circled this for days, and finally it was here.

Red swallowed. “You don’t want what, Eammon?”

His hand dropped, finally, green-ringed eyes turning her way. “I don’t want you to hurt yourself trying to save her,” he said, each word spoken quiet and clear.

“But that’s what she did for me.”

“And did you want her to?”

“It’s not the same. I didn’t need saving. We know Neve does.”

Eammon didn’t respond to that. But his expression remained implacable.

Red’s mouth felt like a vise from how tight she held it, as if her whole body were a bow and it the arrow. “You think we can’t bring her back.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“I think there is a good chance we can bring her back.” She knew every tone in Eammon’s voice, knew when he was lying and when he told the truth and when he lingered somewhere in between. This was truth, but a thin one. “But it’s not going to be easy, Red. She’s in a prison that’s meant to be impenetrable. It’s going to take more than… than hunches and mirrors to pull her out of that, and we need to make sure we know what we’re doing before we try anything.”

Anger made her veins blaze bright green. “So you just want to read some more,” she hissed, “while my sister is trapped with the monsters? With the Kings? I’ve seen what’s down there, Eammon, and I’m not going to leave her.”

“Of course we aren’t going to leave her. But we need to take the time—”

“She doesn’t have time!”

Red didn’t mean to scream it; her voice was hoarse, and it made the words almost a half sob. Eammon’s hands reached out, an instinct to comfort, but she backed away. His hands fell.

She held up her arm, traced in green veins, delicately braceleted in bark. “We have all the time in the world,” she whispered. “But Neve doesn’t. Neve is still human.”

Eammon stood stiffly, eyes unreadable. “And do you regret no longer being human, Redarys?”

He still used her full name sometimes—in bed or in jest. But this was formal. Distant.

Her stomach bottomed out.

“Of course not,” she breathed, but she couldn’t quite make herself reach out and touch him. “You know that.”

He didn’t respond, just kept looking at her with that level amber-and-green gaze.

Finally, Eammon sighed. “I’ll be in the library.” He turned toward the staircase. “Come when you can.” His footsteps echoed down the stairs, the door creaking at the bottom as he pushed it open.

Red crossed from the mirror over to one of the vine-carved windows, watching him trek across the courtyard to the Keep. Part of her wanted to call out to him, to reel him back, to let him take her on the floor of the tower until both of them forgot their argument.

She didn’t.

Instead, she thought of all the trees within her, the Wilderwood she carried beneath her skin. The sentinels she and Eammon had absorbed, the sentinels whose rotting had opened doors into the Shadowlands.

Eammon wanted to wait. Wanted to find a way to Neve that was perfectly safe, one that didn’t carry any risk. Red knew that wasn’t possible. She understood his fear—the thought of losing him twisted everything in her middle into barbed knots—but Eammon didn’t have a sibling. A twin. He couldn’t understand this, the unique pain of it.

Red couldn’t leave Neve in the Shadowlands any longer. She couldn’t wait for Eammon to find his mythical perfect plan that didn’t risk anything.

And she couldn’t let him keep her from trying something that might work.

A rustle in her head, like wind through trees. A warning? A benediction? She didn’t care. Her plan was loose and ill formed, but it was the only thing Red could think of that had a chance of working, and desperation covered a multitude of holes.

Down in the courtyard, Eammon paused at the door of the Keep. He turned, looked back up at her, eyes shadowed by noonday sun. Then he disappeared inside.

If she told him, he would stop her—might go so far as to lock her in the damn library. If Red was going to do this, it had to be now, and it had to be alone.

So as the door of the Keep closed behind Eammon, Red made her way to the stairs.

There was no threat to her in the Wilderwood now, but going beyond the gate still made her heart kick up against her throat. Red closed it quietly behind her, though she knew no one was listening. Eammon would be nose-deep in a book by now, as much to forget about their argument as to find anything useful, and Fife and Lyra would still be on their way back from meeting Raffe after spending last night in the capital.

Still, she watched the trees warily as she slipped between them. Old habits were hard to break.

Moving quickly was a challenge with the mirror clutched to her chest. Red tilted it away from her abdomen, frowning into the surface. Still clogged with that strange and layered root-darkness, nearly impossible to make out if you didn’t squint.

Surely, the roots meant she needed a sentinel. Needed to tug one from within herself, make a doorway to pull Neve through. What else could it mean?

Another rustle against her thoughts, the golden thread running alongside them vibrating like a plucked harp string. The Wilderwood communicating something, but she wasn’t sure what.

There was so little Red understood about what she’d become. Woman on the outside—mostly—forest within. She remembered thinking of Eammon like a scale, tipping back and forth from bone to branch, the balance hard to hold. Since they’d become the Wilderwood, it was like they’d put a brace on those scales, kept them in perfect equilibrium.

So what might happen if she tipped them again? If she let what was inside back out?

Red shook her head, dispelling the doubt that wanted to collect in her thoughts and make itself something to stumble on. This was for Neve. She’d accept the consequences.

It was the least she could do.

Her route wasn’t planned. But when Red arrived at the clearing where she’d laid the other Second Daughters’ bones to rest—where she’d found Eammon half subsumed in forest, what felt like lifetimes ago—it seemed right. Gold and ocher leaves carpeted the ground, their sharp almost-cinnamon scent thick in the air. No more sentinels lined the circular edge, but the place still felt closer to holy than anywhere else she’d ever been.

One place in particular. There was no trace of the sentinel with the scar on its bark anymore—the sentinel where the words that mandated the Second Daughter sacrifice had appeared, where Tiernan Niryea Andraline, Gaya’s older sister, had hacked them off and brought them back to Valleyda—but something in Red recognized the ground where it had been. She carried the map of the Wilderwood inside her, and this spot was marked.

After a moment of consideration, she sat the mirror on the ground where the tree had grown, faceup. The gold of her hair woven into the frame nearly matched the leaves. Red sank onto her knees beside it and pulled a short dagger from her belt.

Maybe this was foolish. Maybe it would do nothing—none of her other sacrifices to the mirror had. Or maybe this was finally the thing that would save Neve, here in the clearing where she’d saved Eammon, where magic and blood ran so closely together.

The only thing Red knew for sure was that she couldn’t leave Neve in the dark. Couldn’t leave her with the monsters.

It was what Neve would do for her.

The Wilderwood within Red was quiet. No rustling, not in her mind, not beneath her skin—usually, the run of her blood was a breeze that sent leaves stirring, the beat of her heart made branches sway. Now the forest rooted in her bones stayed frozen, waiting to see what she would do. To see how she might strike the scale.

Red took a deep breath. The dagger hovered over her palm, unsteady, and the golden line of the Wilderwood against her thoughts was still and silent.

She dropped the dagger. Blood had always been a stopgap, never a real solution—when Eammon had given her half the Wilderwood, at the edge of the forest when he was all magic, all he’d done was lay his hand on her heart.

A moment, then Red settled her hand on the autumn leaves, felt them crunch beneath her skin as she pressed her fingers toward the earth.

“I want to let one go,” she said, after a beat of silence. “One of the sentinels. I need one outside of myself, so I can get to my sister.” A noise that wasn’t a laugh and wasn’t a sob, something that lived in the wild, raw space between. “So I can open a locked door.”

She felt slightly ridiculous, stating her intentions to the ground. But she remembered the moment she took the roots, in that dank prison beneath the Valleydan palace, and how she’d had to let the forest know exactly what she wanted. Let it know that everything she did was her own choice.

At first, nothing.

Then a roar.

It took her a moment to realize that it came from her own mouth, a flare of feeling licking up from her hand, down her arm, blazing around her heart. Red’s back arched, not in pain, but something beyond it, so surpassing the binary of hurt and pleasure that it seemed of a different world than she knew.

A tearing within her, a wrenching of her spine, some vital thing ripped from her deepest places. Both more solid and more ephemeral than one of the sentinels she carried, as if her soul was detaching itself from her body.

Red was the forest inside, she was the world outside—she felt part of herself splitting off, rooting into the ground, spreading her awareness out from her own mind and into the earth and everything it touched.

Infinite. Omniscient.

She hadn’t just tipped the scale—she’d knocked it over, upended the entire thing. Her blood and intention turned her inside out, made the human recede and the forest surge forward, unraveling her into light and unfettered magic. It was beautiful, it was intoxicating.

It was going to drive her mad.

Every single one of her veins ran verdant, then blazed to gold. Roots grew out of her hands, but they didn’t split off—her skin paled, hardened, bark spreading up her arms and toward her heart.

She wasn’t just freeing a sentinel. She was becoming one. Her and this tree, one and the same, her body made a doorway.

Red felt more than saw Eammon skid into the clearing, taking in her and the mirror lying by her side, knowing in a split second what she’d done. He cursed, loud and long. “Redarys!”

A boom rattled through the forest. It vibrated in Red’s bones, through the parts of her that were sentinel and the parts that were still woman, almost like a call.

In her fingers—what had been her fingers, what were now roots, stretching through the earth—Red felt a heartbeat. Not her own, but a counterpoint, as if she’d reached for someone and grasped only part of them.

As the shock wave shot through the trees, Eammon… shifted. All the changes the Wilderwood had wrought in him blazed, obscuring his shape for a moment. Where he’d stood there was a hole, a man’s shape in the atmosphere that held nothing but golden light and tall white trees, like someone had used his body as a canvas and painted the Wilderwood over it.

The golden thread of the forest running alongside her thoughts twinged, sending a melodious sound reverberating through her head, beautiful and terrible at once. The arm that bore her Mark—now half bark—burned and ached, as if she’d caged sunlight beneath her skin.

“Call yourself back, Redarys,” Eammon snarled at her, in a voice layered in leaves and barely human at all. “Call yourself back to me.”

It seemed too simple, the thought that she could simply stop. And did she really want to? If this was what saving Neve required of her? How far was too far, when you loved someone this much?

Eammon’s eyes. Amber haloed in deepest green, aching and damp. “Please, Red.” His voice, unfettered by leaves, hoarse and low. “Don’t leave.”

Don’t you dare leave me here alone. She’d said it to him once, in this same clearing. A promise between them, before they’d admitted anything else. A promise she wouldn’t break now.

Gritting teeth that felt like bark and tasted like sap, Red tugged at the Wilderwood, spearing her intention back into the ground just as she’d done when she began.

Not like this, she thought, sending the words like arrows. Give me another way.

And the Wilderwood sighed, as if it’d been wanting that all along.

Her consciousness collapsed back into a humanlike shape as Red pulled herself from the earth. At first, her fingers were still roots, white and thin, but slowly they retracted into the form of a hand, skin instead of bark. It hurt, and she shuddered.

A shape lay in her palm. Too clumped in dirt to make it out, as if she’d tugged something from within the earth. She didn’t have time to puzzle over what it was—the ground rumbled beneath her, lurching like the back of a waking beast. It was enough to toss her off-balance; Red shoved the shape into the pocket of her tunic and braced her hands on the ground.

As soon as it had begun, the rumbling stopped.

And in the mirror, there was still nothing but dark tree roots.

The bitter tang of dirt in her mouth tasted like failure.

Across the clearing, Eammon’s eyes blazed, brown and green, the veins above his bark-armored forearms standing stark against scarred skin. He looked more like a forest god than a man. They stared at each other, the air between them crackling.

“What are you doing?” It gritted through his teeth like a curse. “What are you doing, Red?”

“This made the most sense.” She stood on shaking legs. “It’s how the Shadowlands have always been opened before. I knew you would stop me if I told you.”

“Damn right I would.” He stepped forward, moving like a predator. “Damn right I would stop you from coming apart for no reason. From doing the absolute most dangerous thing you could, when you don’t even know it will work.”

“She’s my sister, Eammon.”

“And you’re my wife.” Almost a snarl, and his hands curled into claws. “You expect me to just sit by while you unravel?”

“It’s what you expected of me, wasn’t it?”

His mouth snapped shut.

Red closed her eyes, took a deep, shuddering breath. “I couldn’t just not try.”

Eammon shook his head. “You should’ve told—”

“What do you want?” A new voice, pierced through with so much vitriol it distracted both of them from their fury. Two pairs of forest-altered eyes turned to the edge of the clearing.

Fife, teeth bared and face stormy. One sleeve pushed up, his opposite hand clasped around his forearm. Beneath his fingers, the Bargainer’s Mark blazed like a beacon.

The noise in her head, the burn in her arm. Fife must’ve felt it, too, Eammon’s desperation making the Wilderwood send out its call.

Lyra stood behind Fife, expression unreadable, fawn-brown eyes wide. She looked at Red and Eammon, pressed her lips together, and turned away.

“Fife?” Confusion laced Eammon’s voice. His hand wasn’t on his Mark; he didn’t look like he’d felt the call, though it’d struck through Fife and Red like an arrow.

She’d never seen Fife look quite so angry. Freckles stood out on his pale face, and his chest heaved as if he’d run miles.

“You called.” A snarl through his clenched teeth, like the word was something he could bite in two. “We were almost to the Keep, but you called, and I had to come. So here I am.” His hand slashed toward the surrounding forest. “What the fuck do you want, Eammon?”

Red swallowed. “It’s my fault,” she said quietly, moving to stand between Fife and Eammon. “I did something foolish, and it… Eammon panicked.”

Lyra still faced away from them. But at the word panic, her shoulders stiffened, and Red heard her let out a single, rattling sigh.

“It was an accident,” Eammon rumbled behind her. Red looked over her shoulder—his mouth was held that particular way that meant he was angry, but at himself, and his eyes were shaded in the sunlight. “That’s not an excuse, but I promise, Fife, it wasn’t intentional. You know—I hope you know I would never command you that way.”

“And yet you did.” Fife let go of his arm; the throbbing of the Mark seemed to have subsided, though pain still lived in the line of his jaw. “You, the Wilderwood, whatever you and it have become reeled me in. And it hurts, Eammon. Kings and shadows, it—”

“He knows it hurts.” Red’s voice cut across his, jagged and angry, at herself, at Fife, at Eammon, at everything. “No one knows how much the Wilderwood hurts better than Eammon does, Fife. He told you he didn’t mean to.”

“Did you feel it, too?” Fife’s hazel eyes swung to Red. “Or are you exempt? Is it just those of us that aren’t magic who get the pain?”

“I felt it,” Red said, and in the corner of her eye, she saw Eammon’s shoulders slump.

Still, he stepped forward. “We’re all trying to figure out how this works now—”

“How it seems to work is that the Wilderwood hasn’t gotten any better at communication, and you haven’t gotten any better at listening.”

Lyra’s hand landed on Fife’s arm, cutting him off before things could devolve further. “We’re going back to the Keep.” She glanced over her shoulder at Red and Eammon. “I don’t think you should follow. Not for a while, at least.”

Her voice was steady, but there was steel in it. She was upset, Red could tell, rattled and barely held together. There was a faraway look in her eyes, like she was turning over something new in her mind, some piece of information she hadn’t yet had time to square with.

Understanding came quick. Fife still hadn’t told Lyra about his bargain. It seemed that Fife’s being called by his new Mark was the first Lyra had heard of it. The two of them needed a minute alone. And from the venomous looks Fife and Eammon kept shooting each other, they needed some space, too.

“We’ll talk later,” Red said quietly. Lyra would need someone to talk to. Red knew what it was like, to have someone you loved make difficult decisions on your behalf.

She knew it twice over.

With one last burning look, Fife followed Lyra into the forest. Before they disappeared into the shadows, Red saw Lyra take his hand.

Sighing, she turned to face her Wolf.

Eammon loomed over her, eyes sparking, the veins in his neck blazing green. His voice was all leaf-layered resonance now, one she felt as well as heard, and she knew he did it on purpose. “That was exceedingly stupid, Redarys.”

“I couldn’t just leave it, not knowing whether it might work.” She couldn’t loom like he could, but she matched his glare, and felt the brush of leaves over her scalp as the ivy threading through her hair unfurled. “I can’t leave a path untaken just because it might be too hard, not like you can.”

“That’s not fair.”

“No, it’s not. But she’s my twin.” She shook her head, voice climbing. “You don’t understand what that kind of loss is like, losing someone who’s a part of you!”

“Don’t I?” One hand hooked on her hip, pulling her closer as the other cupped her face. His thumb dragged roughly over her cheek, pulling down her bottom lip. “I lost my parents. I almost lost you.” A tremor went through his scarred fingers. “I know what that fear is like, and you will not make me feel it again.”

Heat flared in her middle, stoked higher by anger. “So you’re ordering me around now?”

“I certainly am.” And his lips crashed into hers, and she dug her nails into his shoulders hard enough to hurt, and it was exactly what both of them wanted. A release. A reprieve. Anger and lust and lostness tangled together, and this was an outlet for it, a way to fight and heal in equal measure. His teeth sank into her bottom lip, and Red gasped, tangling her hands in his hair.

He pulled back just enough to look at her, one hand on the back of her neck, the other running up her side as he dragged her tunic off. Burning mouth moving down her throat, over her collarbone, closing over her breast until her back arched and her gasp became a moan.

Eammon licked her, hard and rough, then moved down. He kissed her hipbone, pulled at the waist of her leggings, mouth on every inch of skin he revealed. When he’d pulled them off, Red anchoring her hands on his shoulders to kick them into the underbrush, he looked up at her, kneeling on the golden leaves like a penitent, his eyes bright and his dark hair mussed.

“You never let me lose myself, Red.” His voice came out hoarse, his hands moving over her even as he spoke, as if she were something he couldn’t quite believe he could hold. “You dragged me back every time, even when I wanted to kill you for it. So I won’t let you lose yourself, either.”

“I won’t.” She tugged at his shirt, pulled it over his head, threw it into the trees. Went to her knees, too, because that way she could touch more of his skin, press herself into his chest until his scars traced themselves onto her. “I won’t lose myself.”

“No, you fucking won’t.” His mouth pressed open against hers. “You don’t get to make me need you this much and then go kill yourself trying to tear open a door. Understand?”

She didn’t say it, but the way she moved against him, the way she pressed him down onto the earth and settled over his hips showed it instead.

He didn’t let her stay there. She rode long enough to feel that familiar coiling in her middle, for sweat to sheen both their brows despite the chill of eternal fall, before Eammon gripped her waist and rolled her over, her back against the dirt and him above.

“Too quick,” he said, bending down for a kiss as he pulled out of her. His mouth dragged against her hip, the tender skin where her thighs ended. “It’ll be over too quick like that, and I want you to remember this.”

She was going to tell him she always remembered, but then his mouth was on her and coherent speech was impossible.

When Eammon did this, he didn’t stop until she saw stars, until the coiling heat within her exploded more than once. And only then did he rise over her, into her, arms braced on either side of her head and shoulders blocking out the sun.

They didn’t speak. No need. And when they both peaked, he kissed her through it.

Later, they lay naked in the forest, pillowed on her cloak. Red rested her cheek against Eammon’s chest, listening to the forest-chased thud of his heart. Her thoughts stretched, languid, nearing the syrup-slow of sleep.

And she saw fog.

She’d been lying down with Eammon, and now she stood, but she could still feel his skin against hers, still feel the weave of her cloak pressing into her side. A glance around revealed Eammon wasn’t there, though—Red was alone, just her and the mist. A half dream, then, somewhere between awake and asleep.

She wasn’t naked anymore, either. Instead, she wore something long and pale and gauzy, similar to the gown she’d worn when she was blessed as a sacrifice to the Wolf. Her mouth twisted wryly as she plucked at the fabric. Another dream-thing, taking pieces of life and desire and memory and stitching them together in odd ways.

But the fog sliding over her felt… palpable, almost. And Red knew, with crystal clarity, that she was being watched.

That’s the kind of love you needed. Feral and fierce and capable of drawing blood.

She whipped around—as much as one can in a dream—peering narrow-eyed through the mist. No shapes appeared, nothing to give her a clue as to what might be speaking, though the voice sounded masculine and nearly familiar.

This was a dream, she was sure, but it was a damn strange one.

Unease prickled along her shoulder blades. She crossed her arms. “Who are you?”

A long-enough pause that she didn’t think she’d get an answer. Then: I don’t know, really.

The fog parted slowly, drifting away like breaths on cold air. Its leaving revealed where she was.

A tree. But Red was in the branches of it, perched on a bough as wide as she was tall with thin golden veins winding through the white bark. Below her, endless mist, a trunk stretching downward for what looked like miles. If she squinted, she could see tangles of roots down there at the base of the impossibly tall trunk, touched with darkness.

Almost like what she’d seen in the mirror.

Red fell to her knees, leaning as far over the side of the branch as she dared, screaming down into the dark, “Neve!”

Not yet.

The voice sounded weary but firm, like a tired parent admonishing a rambunctious child. You have your key. Your half of the Tree was within yourself, but she has to journey to her half and find her key there. You must be patient.

She frowned. The voice came from everywhere at once, like the fog itself was whispering. Still, that sense of familiarity, a memory that wouldn’t quite lock into place but might if she just saw who was speaking. Slowly, Red stood, tentatively walked forward along the branch.

Something caught her eye on another branch, a glimmer of incongruously bright color. Red frowned.

Apples. A cluster of three, one gold, one black, and one bloodred.

The Tree is the key is the mirror, came the voice, reverberating in the fog. The Tree exists and doesn’t exist. It is you, and it is the piece you carry.

“I don’t understand,” Red murmured, eyes still on the apples.

Mirrored power and mirrored love, the voice answered. That’s what opens the Shadowlands. Opens the Heart Tree. Opens you.

“That cleared up exactly nothing,” Red muttered, but the rest of a salty retort died in her throat when her eyes slid sideways.

When she saw the mirror growing from the trunk of the tree.

The same mirror she’d brought with her, the mirror she’d been trying so hard to force to show her Neve. She saw her own reflection in it, half forest and half woman, wild-eyed and kiss-bruised. But then there was a shimmer, a gray-scale world reflected for half a moment. A woman both like her and not, with long black hair and black-welled eyes and thorns along her wrists.

Neve.

But as Red tried to run forward, heedless of the branch she stood on and the endless drop below, the dream slipped, became more like something her tired mind would form and less like its own reality. Her steps stretched too long and too slow, her grasping fingers couldn’t touch the mirror’s frame. It fell back, disappeared, and she followed it into the dark.

“Red?”

Eammon had rolled on his side, bracing one hand on the other side of her head and caging her in his arms, worry in his eyes. “You cried out.”

She reached up and smoothed the line between his brows. “Sorry,” she said. “Strange dream.”

He frowned. “Again?”

Red nodded, pushing to sit up, hair mussed from sleep and sex. “It felt different this time.” She searched for her hastily discarded tunic, stricken with the sudden need to find the thing she’d pulled from the earth. “Does the term Heart Tree mean anything to you?”

Eammon’s frown deepened. “Not off the top of my head, no.”

Her tunic was a few yards away—damn, he really threw the thing—tangled in a bush’s low brambles. Red didn’t bother disentangling it before reaching into the pocket, pulling out the mystery object that had been left in her hand when she almost became a sentinel. She knocked it against her knee to clear the dirt.

A key. Made of white wood and threaded with veins of gold, but unmistakably a key. And when she closed her hand tight around it, she felt the faint rhythm of a heartbeat, as if the key were a living thing, or at least connected to one.

She turned back to a still-confused Eammon, holding it aloft. “Whatever it is,” she said, “it apparently has a lock.”