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.”