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.