Inside Neve’s head, in her hollow places, the souls of the Kings rattled her bones like prison bars. The power of the Old Ones they’d killed swirled and spun, darkness that eclipsed everything else. She held all the power of the Shadowlands, the perfect dark mirror to her sister’s Wilderwood light.
You are ours, Neverah, Valchior said. How did you ever think you could be something different? You’ve been ours since you bled on the branches in the Shrine. Ours since you decided you were always right.
Neve closed her eyes, gasping like she’d run miles, blood still dripping down her forehead as the iron crown grew from her brow. She wanted to collapse into Red, wanted to tell her sister she was sorry, but her control was so tenuous. She was so close to breaking.
And when Red reached out, her golden-veined hand cupping her cheek, Neve did.
Her jaw opened to scream, but instead it was a rush of shadow, pluming from her like she’d held a mouthful of black smoke. The shadows whirled around them like a cyclone, like the force of her grief and her regret and her rage held them in perfect orbit, fast enough to whip their hair and tear at their clothes.
“Red!” The Wolf was fully awake now; through eyes that wept black-ink tears and a blur of shadows, Neve could see him staggering toward them, face twisted in horror. “Redarys!”
His shouting woke Solmir, outside the barrier of her shadowed wall. The former King pressed up from the ground, hair wet with melting snow, blue eyes dim and then brightening with fear and rage. He ran toward them with a snarl on his mouth, like he expected the darkness to part for him.
It didn’t. Not for him, not for the Wolf, blocking both of them out, sending them sprawling when they tried to run forward again. The only ruler the darkness acknowledged was Neve, and she knew that she couldn’t allow anyone to stop them now.
She didn’t know if Red understood, or if Red merely acted at the behest of the Wilderwood. Either way, it was what had to happen. The Wilderwood and the Shadowlands, two halves of a whole, just as they were.
And if Neve had this right, there would be only one left in the end. Only the Wilderwood, golden and shining, all the dark snuffed out.
Red closed her hands around Neve’s, golden veins against shadowed. Teeth bared, she held on tight, and let her magic go.
At first, it acted like a dam. The rushing of both powers stopped, golden and dark, each frozen at the onslaught of the other. Even the swirling shadows around them paused, arrested mid-motion.
Then the magic crashed.
It was a wave meeting a shoreline, lightning breaking against the ground. Two opposites, feeding endlessly into each other, making a void between them that neither could fill. Canceling each other out.
And when both of them simultaneously fell to their knees, each held up only by the other’s death grip on their hands, Neve realized the truth of it.
One couldn’t live without the other. Both of them were part of this magic, two points of the same arrow. Their souls were so steeped in it that neither could sustain being drowned in opposite power.
This would kill them both.
In Neve’s head, Valchior raged, his calculations proven incorrect, his plan not accounting for all variables. He’d thought Red couldn’t bear to kill her sister. And maybe that was true—Neve hoped it was—but Red was the Wilderwood now, all of it in its entirety, and the Wilderwood knew what had to be done.
Neve tried to pull away, animal instinct opting toward self-preservation, but it was too late. Her hands stayed in Red’s like they’d been shackled there, this outpouring of magic too overwhelming for either of them to stand against. Around them, the very atmosphere roared with swirling streaks of golden light and deepest dark, the two of them the eye of their own hurricane.
Red’s green-haloed gaze said she understood. Said she wasn’t angry. She tipped her forehead against Neve’s, ivy-threaded hair whipping. “I love you.” It was so quiet, lost in the chaos, but Neve heard it bell-clear.
She swallowed. Her body felt brittle and weak, draining magic into her sister and life into the wind. “I love you.”
Her vision was hazy. Her heart was a drumbeat thud in her chest, slowing, slowing. The howl of the Kings in her head faded to whispers, all of them realizing this was it, they were done, their host’s soul fading and taking theirs with it, here in the true world where death couldn’t be cheated.
Then she knew nothing.
Chapter Forty-One
Eammon
No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no
Everything hurt, his body different in ways he couldn’t catalog. Lighter, like he carried less, but all that meant was that he could run toward her faster.