Chapter Twenty-Two

Red

Both their palms were slick, pressed together so tightly Red could feel the thrum of Eammon’s pulse. She didn’t know who the sweat came from. She assumed both of them.

Neither she nor the Wolf was entirely ready to leave their forest. But for Neve, she’d do it. Sail to the Rylt, confront Kiri, do whatever she had to in order to bring her sister home.

Even if the sight of the open plain beyond the trees made her breath come shallow and her pulse run quick. She’d had three days to prepare for this as Kayu arranged their voyage, but none of it amounted to any kind of calm.

The edge of the Wilderwood loomed up ahead, autumn leaves filtering the early light of a day that hadn’t quite yet dawned in crimson and gold. When they’d healed the forest, taken it all into themselves, the border had repaired itself, too—it was no longer the broken, jagged line it’d been when Solmir and Kiri pulled out so many sentinels, like a smile with missing teeth. Now, once again, it was a firm demarcation, a wall of trees blocking them from Valleyda.

A wall neither of them had breached since that day.

She kept waiting for the Wilderwood within her to riot at the thought of leaving. For pain to spike through her, like it had the day Neve disappeared into the Shadowlands, warning her away from the border, warning her she couldn’t cross.

But there was nothing. Just the gentle sway of leaves over her spine, the creep of ivy through her hipbones.

Behind them, Fife and Lyra stood waiting. Fife was nervous to go farther than Valleyda, but he refused to show it, standing as still as he could even as his feet shifted against the dirt. Lyra stood next to him, one hand placed gently on his forearm. The two of them had apparently come to some kind of resolution, through the whispered conversations Red had seen them having in the corners of the Keep. At any rate, they didn’t seem upset with each other anymore.

The Keep was under the not-quite-watchful eyes of Lear and Loreth, who had been more enthusiastic about the prospect than Red had thought they’d be. Eammon had snorted when she said as much to him, and tilted up her chin for a kiss that left her breathless. “Newlyweds,” he murmured against her lips, “will take any privacy they can.”

There was nothing of that easy humor in him now. Eammon stared at the tree line like someone might look at a gallows.

Red jostled her shoulder against his. “The Wilderwood is being nice to me. How about you?”

He shrugged, stiff and stilted. “Can’t feel anything.”

There was a current of wariness running beneath his words, one that made her chew her lip. The Wilderwood had lived in him so much longer than it’d lived in her. Her own relationship to the forest they anchored was a mostly amiable one, wrongs forgiven. Eammon’s was more complicated, and she still didn’t quite know how to ask him about it. If he’d even have the words to answer if she did.

She squared her shoulders. Stepped forward. And though Eammon’s hand reflexively spasmed around hers, like he’d try to haul her back, he didn’t. His breath pulled in sharp, and he didn’t let it out as Red approached the trees.

One more pause. Then she stepped between the trunks.

And nothing happened.

The wind teased her ivy-threaded hair, scented with distant smoke, the acrid tang of livestock and many people living in one place. A slight hitch in the Wilderwood within her, like the deep breath of someone slipping into icy water—but no pain, no consequences.

Instead, a feeling of satisfaction, almost. A step taken in the right direction.

She held out her hand to Eammon, still in the shadows of the trees.

A heartbeat, and Eammon laid his palm in hers. He stepped out of the forest, the gold of a new-dawning day burnishing his hair. His eyes widened, then closed as he tipped his head back up to the sky.

“Welcome to the world, Wolf,” Red murmured.

Behind them, Fife and Lyra followed, Fife with a fractioned second of hesitation. The four of them stood on the edge of the world they’d known for so long and were silent.

Fife broke the quiet, crossing his arms. “It smells better in the Wilderwood, I’ll give it that. It’s a revelation every time.”

“You’d better get used to that animal smell.” Lyra gestured toward the road winding back to the village. A small carriage approached, pulled by nondescript horses, the driver with a telltale flick of long black hair. “Looks like our ride to the coast is here.”

Eammon’s back heaved, rippling beneath his dark shirt as he hung over the side of the ship. Usually, the work of his shoulders was something Red enjoyed watching, but today her nose wrinkled and her hand on his neck was tentative.

“I take it back.” He pushed up, scraping his wrist over his mouth. The green around his face wasn’t due only to the Wilderwood in him. “I hate the ocean.”

The trip to the Florish coast, while exceedingly strange, was uneventful. The carriage pulled up to the end of the road before the Wilderwood, Kayu grinning at them from the driver’s seat, wearing a tunic and trousers, with a cap pulled down over the waterfall of her hair.

Red had arched a brow. “So you drive, too?”

“I’m a woman of many talents.”

“Debatable.” Raffe’s voice, somewhat shaky from his seat next to Kayu, his head tipped back against the carriage. “Reckless doesn’t begin to cover it.”

“Hush,” Kayu said. “I might be slightly out of practice, but we got here with no injury to beast or man, so I count that a success.”

“Maybe wait to tally the injuries until we get there,” Raffe muttered.

The nerves of passing the Wilderwood’s border wore off slowly, replaced by nerves of a different kind. Red twitched at her dark cloak—her scarlet bridal one was packed into her bag, since she and Eammon had decided the more nondescript they could look, the better. “And the crew you hired? They’ll be… discreet?”

“I told them you and Eammon were cousins of mine stricken with an odd strain of gangrene,” Kayu replied. “I don’t think they’ll want to get close enough to see the veins or the eyes, but if they do, that will be our explanation.”

“Delightful,” Eammon muttered.

Kayu flicked the reins. “Come on, we want to make sure we get to the harbor before it gets busy.”

Two hours’ hard traveling after that, the four of them packed into the back of Kayu’s coach like fruit in a market box. Lyra just watched the window, but Eammon gripped Red’s hand, and Fife kept his eyes tightly closed.

“I didn’t miss this,” he said weakly, scrubbing a hand through his sandy-red curls. “I’d much rather travel on my own two feet.”

But then they stopped. And then there was the sea.

When they first disembarked, they’d just stood there, blinking in the early-morning light. Kayu and Raffe went to the dock, where a small ship listed back and forth in the tide, a handful of rough-looking figures preparing it for departure. Lyra followed after a moment, Fife trailing behind her, though his eyes kept sweeping over the ocean like he couldn’t quite fathom its size.

Red had never seen Eammon’s eyes so wide. He stared out over the water as if he was looking for its end, trying to trace it all the way to the horizon line. “It’s… huge,” he murmured. “I mean, I knew it was, but… I’ve never seen anything…”

He didn’t have to finish. Even in the brief years when he could leave it, before he was the Wolf, Eammon had never seen anything larger than his forest, never bothered to go so far as the coast.

“We’ll see how much you like it once you’re on a boat,” she’d said, pulling him toward the harbor and Kayu’s waiting galley. When they stepped on the gangplank, the sailors working over the ropes gave them a wide berth. Red bit back a bitter smile.

Now the coast was long gone behind them and the sun blazed noon-high, painting the ocean in shades of green and blue. The rocking of the ship proved not to settle well with someone who’d only ever known the solidness of forest floor.

The sailor working the sail at the stern glanced over their shoulder at Eammon. “Will he make it?”

“No,” Eammon muttered.

“He’ll be fine,” Red called, waving a hand in the sailor’s direction, hoping they wouldn’t come any closer. She still had her hood up, but Eammon’s was off. “Just not used to sailing.”

“Water with a squeeze of lemon,” the sailor said, turning back to the ropes. “Always helped me. Though it could be different with his… condition.”

Eammon swiped his wrist over his mouth again. “You have no idea.”

Red grimaced and pushed his sweaty hair from his eyes.

He leaned briefly into her hand, then waved her off, sinking to sit with his back against the ship wall and his chin tipped up. “Let me know when we’re close.”

She glanced out at the open water. “It’s a three-day voyage, remember?”

Eammon groaned.

“Go below and try to sleep. I’ll wake you for dinner.”

“I don’t think I can move, to be honest.” He cracked one eye open. “And please don’t mention food until we’re off this shadow-damned thing.”

Red tousled his hair before pulling up his hood, then walked to the prow, leaning on her elbows to look out across the water as the ship skipped over it. She’d never spent much time on boats and didn’t feel a particular affinity for the sea, but there was a freedom in it, salt-soaked and coarse. The Wilderwood in her was quiet, far more settled than she’d anticipated it being, so far away from earth and growing things. Experimentally, she flexed her fingers. The veins along them blushed emerald.

She tilted her head back and closed her eyes, letting the briny wind whip at her hair.

“I’m sorry.”

Her eyes opened. Fife stood next to her, staring down into the water, hiding his expression. He held his scarred hand close to his middle, the other gripping the railing. “I chose this, to save Lyra,” he continued, like he was afraid he wouldn’t start speaking again if he stopped now. “I chose to be bound to the Wilderwood. To you. And I shouldn’t have taken it out on you the way I did.”

Brief surprise chased itself into relief. Fife and Lyra had made up, but he hadn’t made any such overtures to Red or Eammon—though they all behaved mostly normally, it’d been a cloud over them, a tension in the air that wouldn’t dispel. Having Fife finally decide to speak to her about it felt like laying down a heavy pack she hadn’t remembered picking up.

“I’m sorry, too,” Red murmured. “I’m sorry we haven’t figured out a way to let you out of your new bargain. I’m sorry that we don’t understand much about it.”

“Not your fault.” Fife shrugged, but it was stilted. “Everything’s changed now. None of us really know what the new parameters are. And I would’ve done it anyway, no matter the cost.”

Red glanced over her shoulder. Lyra stood above them, on the platform that housed the ship’s wheel, talking animatedly with Kayu and one of the hired sailors. The wind snatched their words away and covered Red and Fife’s from being overheard.

“I understand,” Red said softly. “I’d do the same thing.”

“I know you would.”

“When you were called, there in the clearing…” Red shook her head, looking back to the sea. “Fife, I promise it was an accident. Eammon didn’t mean to do it.”

“I know. He was just trying to protect you.” A flicker of his eyes to Lyra above them. “Not one of us has ever been smart about the people we love, have we?”

Red snorted.

They lapsed into silence. Red knotted her fingers, lightly misted with salt spray. “Have you talked to Eammon about it?”

“I suppose I should, shouldn’t I?”

“I’m honored to be the first stop on your apology tour, but yes, probably.” Her lips quirked, half a smile, then pressed together. “The three of you… you’re tied together in ways I can’t even begin to understand. He loves you and Lyra, Fife. So much. It’s killed him, thinking he hurt you, but he didn’t know how to approach it. Wanted to give you space.”

She’d pushed Eammon, at first, to find Fife and apologize, to make him talk it out. But Eammon had gently refused. “I told him I was sorry,” he’d said, “and trying to make him forgive me is about my feelings, not his. We’ll talk when he’s ready.”

Fife sighed. Pushed off from the railing. A moment later, she heard the soft rumblings of Eammon’s voice behind her, a creak as Fife settled in beside him.

She smiled down at her hands.

“Is Eammon going to live?” Kayu moved gracefully down the stepladder from the crow’s nest. She still wore a tunic and trousers, both soft and cut large, and a multicolored scarf that bound her dark hair back from her face. She smiled brightly, but something in her expression was faraway, preoccupied. She kept glancing westward, toward the Rylt, almost apprehensively.

“He’s survived worse,” Red answered.

“I suppose that’s true.” Kayu turned, elbows propped on the railing, back to the sea, and eyes canted toward Red. “So. You and the Wolf.”

Red leaned back, stretching out her arms with her fingers still curled around the rail. A frisson of discomfort tightened her shoulders. “Me and the Wolf.”

“You’re immortal now, like him? Unable to die?”

Red’s brow furrowed, sudden tension in her straightened arms.

Kayu shrugged, casual despite the baldness of the question. “He can’t die, right?”

“No.” Clipped and short and not entirely true. “He can’t.” Not of natural causes, anyway, not unless he was killed. That’s how it had been when he was just the Warden. Now that he was the whole Wilderwood, that both of them were, Red didn’t really know.

But she wasn’t going to tell Kayu that.

“Quite a deal,” the other woman said. A lock of black hair had escaped her scarf to dangle by her temple; she idly twirled it around her finger. “Getting all knotted up in a forest in exchange for immortality. Especially if you get a hulking tree husband in the bargain.”

Red bit back a huff of laughter at that, though now that Kayu had mentioned the issue of immortality, her mind wouldn’t let it go. Her concentration had been on other things for the past few weeks, but it was certainly something she’d thought about, the magic of the forest in her bones extending her life like it had Eammon’s. There was joy in it—of course there was, spending an eternity with him—but trepidation, too. Everyone knew forever was a long time, but staring down into the pit of it was a special blend of awe and terror that her mind shied away from.

“I have no complaints on the tree husband front,” she said.

“I bet not. He looks at you like you’re personally responsible for the sunrise every morning.” Kayu quirked a brow. “Or, usually he does. Right now, he looks like he’s about to lose whatever is left in his stomach.”

Red grimaced. “Hopefully he gets used to it.”

“For all our sakes.”

Kayu stared off into space, but when Red followed her gaze, space was Raffe. He stood at the opposite end of the ship, much like they did at the prow, leaning on his elbows and gazing at the receding horizon. At Valleyda.

Her eyes swung between them, her childhood friend and the far-flung princess, lips twisted.

“He loves your sister.” A statement rather than a question, as if Kayu had seen the play of thoughts across Red’s face. She shifted against the railing, face unreadable. “Always has.”

A pause before speaking—it might not have been phrased as a question, but it still wanted an answer, one Red didn’t quite feel qualified to give. “Raffe and Neve grew up together,” she said carefully, eyes on her dry knuckles. “And yes, they love each other. But it’s… it’s complicated.”

Kayu snorted. “I don’t expect anything to be simple with you lot. All tangled up in forests and gods.” She shook her head. “More fool me, I guess.”

Red made a rueful nose of assent.

A moment, and Kayu pushed off from the railing. “I’m going below to see about some food. Dinner should be soon.”

As she walked away, Red went back to Eammon. He and Fife sat beside the wall of the ship in comfortable silence, apologies having been made and accepted. She smiled to see it and felt a subtle rustling of leaves in her ribs, like the Wilderwood had wanted them to make up, too.

“I think I feel better,” Eammon said as she came to stand in front of him. He looked up at her, squinting, half a tired smile picking up his mouth. “As long as I don’t have to move.”

She settled in next to him. “Do you plan to sit there for the entire voyage?”

“Yes.”

“Noted.”

Lyra climbed down from the steering platform and ambled over, clearly the one of them with the best-adjusted sea legs. “Food in ten minutes,” she said. “Kayu is getting everything sorted.”

A grimace spasmed on Eammon’s face at the mention of food. “Perhaps I spoke too soon.”

Fife arched a brow. “I’m not seasick, and yet I am still not excited by the prospect of hard tack and questionable dried beef.”

“Come on, where’s your sense of adventure?” Lyra teased, sitting next to Fife so the four of them were in a line. “Sea rations are part of the experience.”

Three groans answered in chorus.