Chapter Seventeen

Red

The last time Red had seen Bormain, he’d been raving with shadow-sickness and halfway rotted, chained up beneath Asheyla’s shop across the square. Even after she and Eammon had healed him, he’d been pale and waxen, still looking half a corpse.

He’d recovered since then, and well. Now Bormain looked like a healthy young man, none the worse for wear after his brush with something far more awful than death.

“That’s me.” He nodded, almost sheepish. “Um, thank you. By the way. And I’m…” A swallow down a tight throat; he looked pained. “I’m sorry for anything I said while I was sick. I know I—I said some unkind things, according to others, and I didn’t—”

“Don’t worry about it.” The poor man looked so ashamed, and Red knew what it was like to try stringing that into words. She gave him a slight, reassuring smile. “No need for apologies.”

Eammon didn’t seem as surprised by Bormain’s transformation as Red was. Apparently, he’d known the man well enough before being shadow-sickened to recognize him now. The Wolf leaned forward, all business. “So you know what the carving means?”

Bormain shrugged, like Eammon’s attention made him slightly nervous. “I think so,” he said, picking at the edges of his playing cards. “Ever since I was shadow-sick, I’ve been able to read some of the… the stranger carvings, for lack of a better term. So if your key-grove is one of those, it stands to reason I should be able to read it, too.”

Valdrek still sat with one hip propped up on the table, but every line of his body had gone stiff. He looked at Bormain with an odd mix of grief and wariness. “You didn’t tell me that, boy.”

Another stilted shrug from Bormain. “I’ve been enough of a burden,” he murmured. “And it’s nothing, really. They give me a headache sometimes, but I can mostly ignore them.”

Silence. Eammon’s eyes flickered to Red’s, both of them making the tandem decision to stay out of this moment.

A decision Kayu did not take part in. “Makes sense. In my experience, hiding your weaknesses is the only way to survive. Someone will take advantage of them, if you don’t.” She drained her tankard, then signaled for another. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes overbright—the alcohol already at work. “Kings and shadows, it’s been ages since I had a good beer.”

A frisson of unease raced over the back of Red’s neck. The statement felt like one more piece in Kayu’s puzzle, but she still didn’t have enough to fit them into a cogent picture.

The next beer came. Kayu drained it. Across the table, Fife’s eyebrows climbed toward his hairline.

Raffe leaned closer to Bormain, ignoring Kayu’s drinking habits. “What kinds of things have you read in the other carvings?”

A reasonable enough question—if the runic marks were to record messages from the Old Ones in the Shadowlands, there could be helpful information there, no matter how obscure they might be—but Bormain paled. He glanced down at his cards again, as if they were easier to look at than Raffe’s face.

“Nothing worth repeating,” he said finally. Something that tried to be a rueful grin twitched at his mouth, but it looked more like a spasm. “It isn’t anything helpful. At least, not that I can tell. But I spend most of the time trying to block them out.” He shook his head. “They aren’t… they don’t seem like things that our minds are meant to follow, if that makes sense. It hurts to try to comprehend them, and even when I can, they’re awful.”

Red thought of godlike monsters, of things far from human in an upside-down prison world, and what something like that might try to communicate to those worshipping with suffering and blood. She swallowed.

“Are you sure you want to try reading the grove carvings, then?” This from Eammon, oddly gentle, though his face was still hard lines.

Bormain nodded. “I owe you.” Then, gathering up his cards, “And I’ve seen the carving you speak of before. It’s less… less jagged than the others. Doesn’t seem like it’s meant only to hurt.” He stood. “I remember where it is.”

Eammon looked again to Red, brows drawn into a question.

In any other circumstance, Red would’ve been apprehensive. Bormain might look healed, but he’d been ravaged by shadow-rot only a short while ago, and something about that experience had changed him irrevocably. This might be nothing more than feverish ravings from his time spent drowning in darkness. Even if he really could read the markings from the long-dead Old One worshippers, it was no guarantee it’d be anything about the Heart Tree.

But, as she’d told Eammon, beggars couldn’t be choosers. And she’d do all the begging she had to for Neve.

Lyra was the linchpin. She looked from Bormain to Red, gave a tiny nod. “I can’t sense any shadow on him,” she said, matter-of-fact, not trying to hide her words from Bormain. A slight smile. “And I haven’t quite lost the touch for it, even without a Bargainer’s Mark.”

Red swept her hand toward Bormain. “Lead the way, then.”

They left the city, all of them trailing conspicuously behind Bormain—Valdrek up ahead, speaking in low, friendly tones with Lyra and Fife, Kayu and Raffe in the middle, and Red and Eammon bringing up the rear. The villagers watched them curiously, but none asked what they were doing. The Edge was used to Wilderwood strangeness.

Once Lear cranked the gate open for them again, Bormain swung left, toward the rolling hills in the north instead of toward the Wilderwood. Even knowing how things had changed, knowing that the forest’s roots wouldn’t hold them back, Red’s hand still tightened on Eammon’s as they turned behind the wall.

He relaxed into her touch, as if the tensing of her hand reminded him that things were different now. Eammon looked down at her. “Feel anything?”

Red shook her head. The forest woven through her didn’t stir beyond a fluttering leaf, a blooming flower. “Seems like we really can go anywhere.”

Thoughtfulness darkened Eammon’s eyes. The same thing in both their heads—here was concrete proof they could leave the forest without any ill effect. They could travel to the Rylt.

Nerves knotted in Red’s stomach.

She changed the subject, giving her husband a quizzical lift of her brow. “So how exactly did you see this marking before, if it’s all the way on the northern side of the wall?”

“Back before it got so bad, I used to test the limits of the Wilderwood. See how far it would let me go.” A stilted shrug, and Red wondered if she shouldn’t have asked, after all. It was still hard for him to talk about all that time he was the Wolf alone. “Sometime between Kaldenore and Sayetha, I made myself walk all the way around the Edge. Just to prove I could. It took a day and a half, and I didn’t stop to sleep, barely ate or drank anything.” He snorted. “I think I passed out when I was done. At any rate, I regained consciousness in the tavern, with Valdrek pouring ale down my throat. Damn near drowned me.”

In a quick, impulsive motion, Red tugged his arm, made him stoop down so she could press a fierce kiss to his mouth. Eammon returned it, a curious grin curling beneath her lips.

“What was that for?”

“Because I wanted to.”

“Fair enough.”

Ahead of them, Bormain had stopped, facing the wall with a strange, blank expression on his face. Kayu stood with her nose nearly pressed against the wood, Raffe close behind. But Lyra was at least two paces away, nostrils flared and hand gripping the hilt of her tor so tightly her knuckles blanched. Fife stood in front of her defensively, fists clenched and jaw set, expression as if they faced an oncoming army.

As they drew nearer, Red felt why. The air around this section of the wall felt strange, charged like the air before a thunderstorm. A familiar scent knifed at her nose—cold, ozone, emptiness.

Pain speared through her as she took another step forward, a shallow reflection of the pain she’d felt the night Solmir and Kiri raised the shadow grove. The Wilderwood shuddered around her spine, making her steps falter.

“Shadow-touched,” Lyra hissed. “Doesn’t look it, but it’s as shadow-touched as any breach ever was.”

“Kings on shitting horses,” Eammon cursed through his teeth, one hand pressed against his middle. The other shot toward Red, clenching around her shoulder in case he might have to hold her up.

“Did it feel like this before?” Red asked, turning to her Wolf. “When you passed the carving, that time you walked around the whole Edge?”

He shook his head, dark hair brushing over his clenched jaw. “Something’s changed.”

Oblivious to the tableau playing out behind her, Kayu glanced over her shoulder. “Are you going to come look at this or what?”

A moment’s hesitation, then Red swallowed, stepped forward. The Wilderwood within her rustled in discomfort, but it was bearable.

And there was something almost leading in that bright spark of consciousness that lived beside her own. Like the forest needed her to get closer to the carving, needed her to understand something. Like this was a necessary step.

Clearing his throat, Eammon followed her toward the wall. From the corner of her eye, Red saw him shake his head at Fife and Lyra—no need for them to come any closer than they had to.

When Eammon turned away, Lyra grabbed Fife’s hand and pulled him backward, running worried fingers over his brow. Lyra still felt the vestiges of her long connection to the forest, but she was free of it, carried none of it within her. Fife still had it buried in him, in ways none of them quite understood. His face was pale, mouth pressed flat, a sheen of sweat on his forehead.

The piece of wall Bormain stared at hosted more than one carving. Upon closer inspection, they reminded Red of the constellations painted in the tower—she could make out the rough form of what she thought was the Sisters, another smaller carving that might’ve been the Far-Flung Queen near them. But it was the carving beneath them that she knew, instinctively, was the one they were looking for.

It was simple. A group of lines carved at a curve so they looked like rays from a sun, forming a circle. Each ray of the strange sun had a few smaller markings coming off it, primitive representations that could be key teeth. The line in the middle went all the way through the circle, extending farther than the others on either side. The ends of that line were clearly meant to be keys, carved in exacting detail, one pointing up, the other down.

Slowly, working against the low hum of pain vibrating through her body, Red pulled her key from her pocket, held it up to the wall. It perfectly matched the longer line at the top of the carving, right down to every curve of the teeth.

“I still don’t understand what it’s supposed to mean,” she murmured. Her fingers tightened; she loosened them through conscious thought, afraid she might snap the key in half. “I still don’t understand how this is supposed to bring us to Neve.”

“She must come to you.”

Bormain’s voice sounded strange. Low, inflectionless. Red looked over her shoulder.

His face was blank, perfectly neutral. But for his open eyes fixed on the carving, he could’ve been asleep. “She has to find the door on her own. It’s only once she goes through and makes her choice that her key will come to her. Then the way is open.”

Raffe’s hand closed around his dagger, clearly unsettled by the change in Bormain’s demeanor. Eammon glanced at the other man, gave a slight shake of his head. Raffe didn’t let the dagger go, but neither did he draw it, instead stepping back and pulling Kayu with him, putting distance between them and Bormain. Valdrek wavered in the space left, like he was caught between wanting to go closer to his son-in-law and wanting to escape him.

“Two keys,” Bormain repeated. “Two halves of a whole, matched in power. A match in love is enough to open it, but not enough to make an end. Just because a door is open does not mean its threshold will be crossed, when there is shadow waiting.”

Red stood statue-still, scarcely daring to breathe, afraid any sudden movement might break the spell that gave them these answers, cryptic as they were. She recognized this, remembered it from the day she and Eammon had healed Bormain. Channeling messages from the Shadowlands, language from the magic that had roosted in him when he fell through the breach. But his voice didn’t sound malicious this time. It sounded almost weary.

“The door is you.” Bormain swayed slightly on his feet, eyes fixed to the carving. “You are the door.”

A beat of vast silence, all of them staring at this shadow-touched man and the shadow-touched carving.

The rumble under the ground was subtle. Welling up from the dirt like a buried heartbeat, reverberating in Red’s heels, up through her legs, rattling her bones and the forest held within them.

A tiny earthquake, there and then gone. Barely enough to mark. But to Red it seemed significant. Like something cataclysmic happening somewhere else, though she felt only the echo.

Whatever had seized Bormain let him go as abruptly as it’d come, his eyes clearing, his face rearranging itself into that sheepish half smile. He ran a hand through his pale hair. “Sorry, got lost in the clouds for a minute there.” His mouth slowly fell from half smile to confused line, brow furrowing as he took in their stares. “Did something happen?”

“You could say that,” Fife murmured.

Kayu, true to form, recovered from the strangeness more quickly than the rest of them. She gestured to the carving and the two flanking it. “These other markings… are they astrological? They look like constellations.”

“They are.” Valdrek spoke with forced good nature, trying to dispel the tightly coiled tension in the air. He tapped a finger on the carving that looked like the Sisters, oblivious to the shadow-touched wood that repelled Red, Eammon, and Fife. “This one is the Sisters. And that one, on the other side, is the Far-Flung Queen.”

“In Nioh, we call the first one the Sun-Handed and the Moon-Handed,” Kayu said. “And the other one the Blood-Handed. The story is that two rival queens harnessed the power of the sun and the moon, but the two powers were so balanced, they canceled each other out, and neither one of them could conquer the other. The Blood-Handed was another queen of a smaller territory, and she took over the other two queens’ countries without a fight after they both disappeared.” Her lip curled as she lifted a delicate shoulder in a shrug. “I assume the title was meant to be ironic.”

“Our ancestors had a similar story, but different names, though the direct translations don’t necessarily trip off the tongue or make much sense.” Valdrek moved his pointing finger to the carving on the right, the one Red had always known as the Far-Flung Queen. “This one is the Third Daughter,” Valdrek said. The ring-scabbed finger moved to the Sisters. “And they called these two the Golden-Veined and the Shadow Queen.”