“Neve,” Red started, reassurance in her tone, but Neve took a step back and held up her thorn-studded hand. The Oracle had given her a gift, when it rent through that knot she kept her emotions tied up in, brutal though it was. There were things she needed to say.
“I didn’t want to admit I was wrong. Even though I knew it.” There it was, her most damning confession. “I knew it was wrong, and I did it anyway, because I wanted some kind of control.” Her breath hitched on the last word, her fingers shaking. “I was willing to do anything to feel like I had some kind of control.”
A heartbeat, both of them standing there tearstained. Then Red’s green-veined hand closed around Neve’s thorns. “You had your reasons.”
Neve pulled in a shaking sigh.
Red dropped their hands, but kept her fingers laced with Neve’s. “I should’ve told you why I had to go. I was so… so scared, and ashamed, and I thought…” She trailed off, like whatever she’d thought didn’t lend itself easily to words. Her eyes closed. When she spoke again, it was measured and unwavering, as if she was reciting something she’d rehearsed over and over in her mind. “Neve, do you remember what happened that night?”
There was only one night they ever referred to with that kind of weight. Four years ago, turning sixteen, running under endless, star-strewn sky toward the dark trees. Toward the Wilderwood and its Shadowlands beneath, the place that would swallow them both.
“Parts of it,” Neve murmured. “But not… not whatever made you think you had to leave.” She had to force them up her closing throat, those words. How often had this sliced at her, cut her so deep she grew almost numb to it? That night had started their splintering, and there were such huge swaths Neve didn’t remember.
And the biggest question, the one that sliced deepest—was it something she’d done, that made Red feel like she could only belong to the forest? Was it somehow her fault?
This was all so much bigger than they were, but in the end, it narrowed down to her and her sister and all the things that had grown up between them, surely as roots, surely as thorns.
Red’s eyes stayed closed. “I almost killed you.”
Whatever Neve had expected, it wasn’t that. “What?”
“The power of the Wilderwood, its magic… it came into me, partly, when I bled within the forest’s border. And I didn’t know how to control it, and when the thieves came, I… I killed them… but the power wasn’t under my control, not fully. I didn’t know how to rein it in, and it almost killed you.” Her eyes opened, green glowing around the brown. “That’s why I wanted to go to the Wilderwood, Neve. Not to get away from you. To protect you.”
Even in that, they were mirrors.
“I thought the only way to keep all of you safe, from me, from the monsters”—Red snorted, a quick acknowledgment that they both now knew the monsters were real, that they’d become them—“was to leave.” She sighed, flicked her eyes up to Neve. “But then I met Eammon.”
Not so long ago, that name—one she didn’t even know existed until she heard it on Red’s lips—had sparked visceral rage in her. Anger that the monster’s name made Red light up, proof that he’d made her care. Made her think that she belonged to him, to the Wilderwood.
Now it just sounded like a name. She knew monsters, and he wasn’t one.
And it wasn’t like she really had a leg to stand on anymore where that was concerned.
“So all we ever wanted to do was save each other,” Neve said.
The corner of a smile on Red’s mouth, as fierce and wild as the rest of her. “And we’ve done such an excellent job.”
A moment of silence. Then, improbably, they both started laughing. Shouts of it rang through the mist and off the massive trunk next to them as they fell together, tears streaming from their eyes, caught in paroxysms somewhere between joy and sobbing.
“Kings.” Red mopped at her streaming eyes. “Kings, Neve, what did we do?”
Neve shook her head, banishing tears with a swipe of her wrist. “If what every Old One in the Shadowlands has told me is true, nothing the stars didn’t lay out for us.”
“Old Ones?”
“The monsters. The gods the Kings imprisoned.” Neve waved a thorny hand. “Long story, and you already know the important parts.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” Red shook her head, crossing her legs beneath her with a thoughtful look in her eyes. “Stars, though… when we went to the Edge, to see the carving of the key grove, there were carvings of constellations, too.”