Chapter Forty-Three

Neve

She didn’t know how she expected dying to feel, but it wasn’t like this.

It took Neve a moment to be aware of her body—limbs, torso, head, all present and accounted for. No pain, which she didn’t realize she’d anticipated until she was startled by its absence. It all felt… mostly normal.

Neve kept her eyes closed, because as normal as this all felt, she still wasn’t quite brave enough to see what death looked like. Tentatively, she pressed a hand to her chest.

Well. There was a difference. No heartbeat.

One deep, shaking breath, into lungs that felt surprised to be used. Then Neve opened her eyes.

Death, it seemed, was a field.

Rolling and green, stretching as far as she could see in either direction. Tiny white flowers pressed up through the grass, but their scent was that of autumn leaves, biting and cinnamon-like. An incongruity of seasons that she supposed shouldn’t startle her.

She didn’t realize she’d backed up until her spine hit something solid. Neve turned around.

The Heart Tree.

It was huge, the trunk thick enough that it would take at least five grown men holding outstretched hands to encircle it fully. The white bark was riven with swirls and arabesques, gold outlined in black, light and shadow harmonizing across the entire surface. If Neve looked at it with eyes unfocused, the shapes nearly looked like… not letters, not really, but something she could read regardless. Scenes, maybe. Scenes of her own life, of Red’s. A hungry forest and a sinking grave and hands outstretched to both.

Neve stepped back, and it came to her in a rush, the poem from that book she’d found in the library right before Red disappeared into the woods. One to be the vessel, two to make the doorway. She’d burned the book in a fit of rage, thinking it told her nothing. But it told her everything. She just didn’t know how to read it yet.

Their story had already been written, and here it was, carved in the in-between. Roles she and Red had stepped into by virtue of their love and their folly and their fierceness.

And here was the story’s end.

Her gaze traveled up to the Heart Tree’s branches. No leaves, but nestled at the ends, weighing down the limbs so that she could touch them if she stretched, were apples. One black and swollen, one golden and glowing, and one crimson.

“Neve?”

Red’s voice, quiet and tentative on the other side of the Tree. Her sister climbed over roots grown large as bridges, dressed in a diaphanous white gown, and for the first time since she entered the Wilderwood, she looked just like the Red that Neve remembered—long, dark-honey hair that refused to hold a curl, deep brown eyes, a rounded face and softly curved body that held no vestiges of forest. Her veins were only blue; no ivy crown crossed her brow.

Neve looked down at her own hands, her own body, clad in the same white shroud as Red’s. Thin and pale, veins bluish, not black. No thorns. No monstrousness, no magic. Whatever they’d done—spilled their respective power into each other, fed into their opposite until it all canceled out—had left them nothing but the humans they’d once been.

Was she supposed to be thankful for that? She decided she was.

“What did… We both…” Red’s sentences half formed and fell away, no words sufficient, and the question was one she knew the answer to, anyway. She looked down at herself, one hand lightly feathering over her brow where her antlers had been. Her face crumpled.

What was one supposed to feel when they were dead? Rest, relief, anger? Neve didn’t know, and her chest was hollow, ready for emotion that never quite came. Instead of trying to puzzle through it, she wrapped her arms around her sister and let herself cry.

They weren’t racking sobs, didn’t bend her in half or tear at her throat. This was a slow leak of salt, a gentle letting go of everything she’d carried for so long. Warmth in her hair; Red was crying, too. They both deserved it, she thought. The tears they’d shed were always wrenched from them, storms that came harsh and too swift to escape. This, gentle and consciously allowed, was different. Necessary.

Minutes or hours later—it seemed ridiculous to try to count time when you were dead, and nothing in the flower-strewn field changed—they parted, standing beneath the boughs of the Heart Tree with their hands on each other’s shoulders. Red ran her sleeve across her nose and sniffed, peering upward. “Apples?”

“I don’t think they’re actually apples,” Neve said, breaking away to turn around beneath the laden limb. The sky through the branches was light gray, edging on blue, an eternally overcast summer day. “That voice—the one we both heard—”

“Mine.”

Both of them whirled. The voice sounded like it was right next to them, but the figure it came from strode over the distant hills, an ambling gait that ticked at the back of Neve’s thoughts, achingly familiar.

The figure stopped just outside the ring of the Heart Tree’s branches, the light from the summer sky illuminating only the ridges of their features. Aquiline nose, strong jaw. “Come on, Valedren twins,” the voice said, striving for jocularity but arriving somewhere sadder. “You didn’t think you could get rid of me that easily.”

Red’s eyes widened, her hands opening and closing on the skirt of her gown. Her mouth worked for a moment before one hoarse word left her throat. “Arick.”

As if the name made the light grow brighter, Neve could finally see his face. Handsome as ever, in a white tunic and breeches, black hair curling over green eyes. “Red.”

Their embrace was one of friendship, the other complications between them long since scrubbed away. Arick sank into Red, his eyes closing tight, then he held out an arm for Neve, lifting his green gaze in her direction. A small, sorrowful smile pricked at the corner of his mouth. “Solmir really did a number on both of us, didn’t he?”

A sobbing laugh, and Neve crumpled into their arms, the three of them holding tight to one another in the endless field death had made for them.

Arick was the one to peel away this time. He kept a hand on each of their shoulders, then nodded toward the trunk of the Tree. “This was all supposed to happen, you know. It’s been prophesied for centuries, the Golden-Veined and the Shadow Queen. Since the Shadowlands were made. Tiernan even wrote about it, though it was never widely circulated.” His brow quirked. “It got overshadowed by that whole Second Daughter bit.”

Neve thought of the book she’d burned, the letters she’d seen on the cover as it curled in the flames. T, N, Y. Tiernan Niryea Andraline. She’d burned the journal of Gaya’s sister.

She sighed. Add it to her list of sins.

Red frowned. “The voice in our dreams,” she said, expressions cycling over her face as she put something together carefully, then all at once. “That was you?”

“It was me.” But the way Arick said it sounded like he wasn’t really sure. “But not… the words weren’t mine, not always. It was the magic speaking through me, I think.”

“The Wilderwood?” Red’s face brightened, just a fraction, at the prospect of one familiar thing.

“The magic,” Arick repeated. “The Wilderwood, yes, but the Shadowlands, too. All of it.” He shrugged. “It’s really the same thing, you know. Two halves of a whole.” He dropped his hands to tuck a wayward curl behind his ear. “It’s hard to tell sometimes, though. Whether it’s the magic or me. It bleeds together.”

“We know how that goes,” Neve said. All three of them, taken and changed.

Arick nodded. “It was never meant to last,” he continued quietly. “The Wilderwood, the Shadowlands, the tying up of magic into knots to keep it contained. It wasn’t sustainable—especially once the Kings started killing the Old Ones, speeding along the Shadowlands’ dissolving. There was always going to be an end, but it had to be an equal one. Balanced.”

“So it used us,” Red murmured. She kept absently tracing a line through her palm, a faint white scar against her pale skin. “It couldn’t end itself, so it used us to do it.”

The words could’ve been blame, had her voice been harsher. Instead, it was just an explanation.

“The magic was divided into two halves, so it needed vessels that were the same.” Arick’s green gaze swung from Red to Neve. “Mirrored souls that could take in each half and hold it suspended. Keep it locked away.”

“Why?” Red shook her head. “Why would all the magic need to be locked away? Can’t it just… just be free, like it was before the Wilderwood made the Shadowlands?”

“It could be,” Arick said patiently. “But isn’t that how we ended up here in the first place? There might not be Old Ones to roam the earth and use magic to subjugate anymore, but there are always people who can access more power than others, and those people will always try to use it to evil ends. Magic corrupts; it goes rotten. You’ve seen it yourself.”

Red pressed her lips together. She looked away.

“But after what we did, maybe it wouldn’t anymore. Wouldn’t be rotten or corrupt,” Neve murmured. “It wouldn’t be… anything. Just free.”

“Free to be misused,” Arick said.

“Or not.”

He shrugged.

Tears brimmed in Red’s eyes, her arms crossed tight over her chest. “Then why take Eammon to keep itself alive, if the Wilderwood knew all along it would have to die?” A swallow, then, quietly enough to try to disguise the break: “Why take me?”

“The Wilderwood had to hold on until this moment.” It was strange to see Arick so composed, speaking so evenly. Neve still thought of him as the rumpled man under that arbor, desperate to find a way to save the woman he loved. Death had tempered him, death and all these things he’d learned as he wandered in it. “It needed you to hold it until the Shadowlands were gone, to be the counterweight. And that’s what it needs now, too, just in a different way.” He paused. “We do what we have to do.”

An echo, winding back, reverberating from a time when someone else wore Arick’s face to say the same thing.

An awful, huffing laugh burst from behind Red’s teeth. “So it was just stalling. Eammon and I splitting the Wilderwood between us, keeping it together—there was always going to be just one of us left in the end. The Wilderwood needed two on the surface to hold it, but when the Shadowlands collapsed, it only needed one soul to lock its magic up.” Her fingers curled against her sternum, like she could still feel the roots between her bones. “It was always going to be one of us.”

“Not one of you,” Arick said gently. “It was always going to be you, Red. You were the soul the Wilderwood needed, the one that could mirror Neve. It was always going to be the two of you.”

Red’s breath sounded bladed and harsh in her throat. Neve turned slightly away, closing her eyes.

Souls as anchors, scales balanced. One holding the other in place.

This is bigger than you and your sister. She’d heard it over and over again. A warning that something large and cosmic would come to rest on the two of them, a First and a Second Daughter who loved each other so fiercely that their souls could balance worlds.

“Your souls have to stay here,” Arick said quietly. “Now that the Shadowlands and the Old Ones and the Kings are gone, the purpose this magic was given has run its course. Your souls have to hold it in stasis, so it doesn’t leak out into the world again. So that there’s no chance of the cycle repeating.”

Almost absently, Neve’s hand pressed against her chest. No heartbeat, still, but that seemed like merely a symptom of something larger, something more essential that was missing from her now-dead body.

Slowly, she looked up.

Those three apples, hanging from the Heart Tree’s otherwise barren branches. The black one shone down at her, skin puckered by the points of thorns pressing out from the inside, the single black leaf extruding from the stem glossy in the strange light.

“Souls,” she said simply. “That’s what they are. Not apples. Souls, Red’s and mine.” Her eyes went from the black apple—hers—to the golden one she assumed was Red’s. Then the simple crimson one, slightly smaller.

She looked from the souls hanging on the tree to Arick. “And yours.”

A single nod. “And mine.”

Red’s brow furrowed, turning to look up at the apple-souls suspended in the Tree. “Why are you here? You should… you deserve to rest, Arick. This can’t be what your ending was supposed to be.”

“Maybe not, before.” He waved a hand. “This place didn’t really exist until the two of you got here. I was…” His lips pursed, searching for words. “I was elsewhere, out in the in-between. But now my soul is here, with the two of yours. I got just as tangled up in this as you did.” There was no anger in it, a simple stating of fact. “So were the other Wolves, the other Second Daughters. But they truly died, their lives drained away, so their souls have moved on. I was different. I was…” He stopped, faltering as he tried to frame what had happened to him—becoming Solmir’s shadow, a bargain that left him only partially alive. “I don’t think I was ever dead. Not truly. Just… gone.”

Neve’s not-beating heart contracted behind her ribs. “I’m so sorry,” she murmured, choked with guilt at what had been done to Arick and what she felt for the man who’d done it. “Arick, I am so sorry.”

His green eyes flickered to hers, understanding in them—he knew, of course he knew. “It hasn’t been so bad. It’s nice to understand everything.” That slight smile again, the one made sweeter for the sadness that tugged at its edge. “Well, everything as far as magic and forests and shadowy underworlds go. Not everything everything.”

It was the first time he’d really sounded like himself, and it made her want to laugh and cry in equal measure.

The three of them stood in silence, clad in white and heartbeat-less. Neve looked up at their souls again.

Wasn’t it supposed to feel… bad, being soulless? Wasn’t a soul the culmination of all you are? But Neve still felt like herself. She still loved her sister, loved Arick. Loved Solmir, despite herself—the first time she’d thought the word, and it being here, in a liminal space that was neither good nor bad, felt right.

She’d been prepared to die. She’d known when she chose to take the Kings into herself, to become the vessel of the Shadowlands, that the only way this could end was in her ending. Divinity wasn’t something she could carry, not something she wanted to carry.

But though she could make that choice for herself, she couldn’t make it for Red.

Neve felt at peace. She felt like she could wander these fields and lose herself and be just fine. But Red… the tears leaking from her eyes hadn’t stopped, and she kept tracing that scar in her palm. Neve knew she was thinking about her Wolf.

It wasn’t fair for Red to be dead because of a choice Neve had made. She was through making decisions for her sister.

She turned to Arick. “Can someone live without a soul?”

His eyes widened, the first bit of true surprise he’d shown in all this bizarre time together. “I don’t think anyone has ever tried.”

That had never stopped her before.

Neve gestured up to the souls on the limb, black and red and gold. “Those are what holds us here, right? Our souls. So if we…”

Movement before she could talk herself out of it, reaching up to pluck the dark orb of her soul from the branch. It weighed heavy in her hand, warm as if picked fresh from an orchard, buzzing faintly against her palm.

Neve held up the apple, half expecting Arick to try to take it back from her. “If I destroy this,” she said, using the placeholder word because she couldn’t quite make herself say the words destroy my soul, “everything in it is destroyed, too. Instead of being just… just held here, locked away, it’s gone.” She swallowed. “And I’ll be gone, too. Not here. Nowhere.”

It shouldn’t have sounded as comforting as it did. She was so tired.

“Neve.” Red stepped up, hand tight on Neve’s forearm. “No.”

“If my soul is gone,” Neve said, “then it takes all the Shadowlands magic with it. And that’s why yours is here, right? To keep mine balanced? So once my soul is gone, you can go back.” She didn’t know how she knew it was true, but she did, deeply—the knowledge running like water downhill, death whispering its secrets to her like it had to Arick. “You can live, Red.”

“Without you?” Her sister shook her head. “No. I won’t. I did all this to save you, I won’t live without you now.”

“This wasn’t your choice. It was mine.”

“Maybe not… not this, specifically. I didn’t choose to die. I didn’t choose to trap the Wilderwood in my soul so it could be a counterbalance for the Shadowlands and keep all the magic in the world contained.” Red stood up straight, hair tossed back, and even though the forest had left her body, the regal strength of it was still in her stance. “But I chose to take the roots. I chose Eammon. And I chose to find you, and save you. And if this is part of it…” She reached up, just as easily as Neve had, and plucked the golden apple from the bough. “If this is part of it, I choose it, too.”

Neve wondered if her sister felt the same conflicting things she did—the emptiness of being soulless, the realization that the emptiness wasn’t really so bad. They knew who they were, she and Red. After all this, they understood themselves.

What had their souls ever done for them, anyway?

“If we destroy them both,” Red said slowly, the same creep of knowledge that Neve felt, “then things rebalance. The magic is set loose—both sides of it. But there won’t really be sides, not anymore. It’s all the same.” She swallowed. “All the same, and all free.”

“Free to be used,” Neve said quietly. “For good or for ill.”

She tightened her grip on the black apple in her hand. She thought of Solmir, what she’d felt as she took the souls of the Kings from him—someone desperately striving to be good, someone who wanted to be better.

You are good. He’d told her that, once. She could almost believe it.

No one was wholly one or the other. Goodness was daily choice, endless possibility, a decision at every crossroads.

But she’d seen a former dark god attempt to atone, and that meant anyone could.

“You’d risk the world for another chance to live?” It was the first time Arick had sounded reproachful. She didn’t know if it was him, or the magic, or some combination of the two.

“I’d risk the world for my sister,” Neve replied. “I’ve already done it once.”

Red’s fingers dug into the skin of the golden apple in her palm. “And I’m not going without her.”

Arick looked thoughtfully at them, two women with their souls in their hands. After a moment, he reached up, plucked the crimson apple. A slight, impish smile lifted the corner of his mouth, another glimmer of the man he’d been when he was alive. He tossed the apple in the air, caught it. “Your souls made this place,” he said. “So it stands to reason that if the two of you smash your souls, all of this is gone.”

“What will that mean for you?” Neve breathed.

“I guess we’ll find out.” He nonchalantly polished the apple against his white shirt. “But I think I should hold on to this, regardless.”

One breath, pulled into three sets of dead lungs.

Then Red and Neve hurled their souls at the flower-strewn ground, where they shattered like glass, and everything went black.