It had to be different, this time. They held all of the forest between them, none of it attached to the earth anymore. Surely that meant it wouldn’t riot, that it would understand? But Eammon was adamant and clearly terrified, so Red dropped the subject.
But the idea wouldn’t leave her alone.
And her letter to Raffe was thin.
“Wait a minute, Fife.” Red stood, searching in her pockets for a pen—she’d taken to carrying one all the time, since Eammon was always in need of something to write with. Usually, there was a pen behind his ear, but Red preferred to let him borrow one from her and then figure that out on his own. “I have something to add.”
Maybe the dream would serve as a comfort to Raffe, somehow, since there was nothing else new to report. And the library in Valleyda was vast—if she and Eammon couldn’t find anything significant, it was possible he could.
She scribbled out the bare bones of the dream at the end of the letter, blowing on the ink to quicken its drying, and handed it back to Fife. “Tell him to write back if he has questions.”
Fife nodded, tucking the letter into his jacket pocket. “Want to come?” he asked Lyra, not quite able to make it nonchalant. “Raffe always buys and puts me up in one of the nicer inns for the night.”
“Sure.” One more bite of toast, and Lyra stood, stretching her arms over her head. She’d bought new clothes in Valleyda, a gown the color of ice that perfectly contrasted her golden-brown skin, but she still wore her tor across her back. The pairing made her look fierce and delicate at once. “Then maybe we can talk about where you want to go next.”
We stay together, him and me. She’d said that before, long before any of them knew that the forest would let them go so soon, that Red and Eammon would finally heal what had been broken. Lyra had gone off on her own at first only because Fife refused; Red wondered if he could beg off a second time. Even though Red understood his apprehension—understood that his new tie to the Wilderwood made him nervous to leave it—she hoped the next time Lyra asked, he’d choose to go.
Though part of her thought Fife was more nervous about Lyra seeing his new Mark than anything else.
All of them were still trying to navigate the labyrinth they’d made, no one quite sure how to press at its parameters. She and Eammon weren’t confined to their forest. They carried the Wilderwood within; it couldn’t hold them within a border that no longer existed. But with Neve missing and their power so new, neither of them had broached the subject of leaving. Especially now that they wore their magic so physically, so clearly. Red still didn’t want to run into anyone from Valleyda, anyone who remembered her as just the Second Daughter who’d visited once before disappearing again—right before her sister, the new queen, was reportedly stricken ill. The potential for questions she didn’t want to answer was too high, things were too fragile.
And if she was this nervous about it, she couldn’t imagine what Eammon was feeling. Eammon, who’d completely lost himself the one time he breached the southern border of the Wilderwood, who hadn’t known the world outside of it for centuries.
Well. There’d be time for all that. Once they found Neve. Red had been thinking recently of how she’d like to see the ocean again.
She saw Fife and Lyra out the door, watching the two of them amble into the gold-and-ocher expanse of the healed Wilderwood. Eammon was waiting for her down in the library. She should bring him another cup of coffee; he’d undoubtedly finished his first.
But Red walked, instead, toward the tower.
Since healing the Wilderwood, the vines on the outside of the tower had grown riotous, full of lush leaves and white blooms as big as her head. It was a beautiful thing, a spot of spring in all this autumn. And her magic, the wildly blooming forest beneath her skin, was still stronger there.
Though not strong enough to make the mirror work.
One try. She’d give it one try today, one beseeching sacrifice to see if it would surrender a glimpse of her sister. Then she’d join Eammon, scouring tomes for things they might not yet know about themselves, the Wilderwood, the Shadowlands. Things that might let them free Neve from the darkness that held her fast.
One try.
As she walked over the moss, Red’s gaze—the deep brown of her irises ringed with green now, just like Eammon’s—strayed to the iron gate, to the trees beyond. Only yellows and oranges, only brown bark, with no white sentinels to interrupt them.
“There has to be a door,” Red whispered in the autumn of her wood, the words spoken aloud but also directed inward, at the forest she carried beneath her skin. “There has to be something.”