Movement before she could talk herself out of it, reaching up to pluck the dark orb of her soul from the branch. It weighed heavy in her hand, warm as if picked fresh from an orchard, buzzing faintly against her palm.
Neve held up the apple, half expecting Arick to try to take it back from her. “If I destroy this,” she said, using the placeholder word because she couldn’t quite make herself say the words destroy my soul, “everything in it is destroyed, too. Instead of being just… just held here, locked away, it’s gone.” She swallowed. “And I’ll be gone, too. Not here. Nowhere.”
It shouldn’t have sounded as comforting as it did. She was so tired.
“Neve.” Red stepped up, hand tight on Neve’s forearm. “No.”
“If my soul is gone,” Neve said, “then it takes all the Shadowlands magic with it. And that’s why yours is here, right? To keep mine balanced? So once my soul is gone, you can go back.” She didn’t know how she knew it was true, but she did, deeply—the knowledge running like water downhill, death whispering its secrets to her like it had to Arick. “You can live, Red.”
“Without you?” Her sister shook her head. “No. I won’t. I did all this to save you, I won’t live without you now.”
“This wasn’t your choice. It was mine.”
“Maybe not… not this, specifically. I didn’t choose to die. I didn’t choose to trap the Wilderwood in my soul so it could be a counterbalance for the Shadowlands and keep all the magic in the world contained.” Red stood up straight, hair tossed back, and even though the forest had left her body, the regal strength of it was still in her stance. “But I chose to take the roots. I chose Eammon. And I chose to find you, and save you. And if this is part of it…” She reached up, just as easily as Neve had, and plucked the golden apple from the bough. “If this is part of it, I choose it, too.”
Neve wondered if her sister felt the same conflicting things she did—the emptiness of being soulless, the realization that the emptiness wasn’t really so bad. They knew who they were, she and Red. After all this, they understood themselves.
What had their souls ever done for them, anyway?
“If we destroy them both,” Red said slowly, the same creep of knowledge that Neve felt, “then things rebalance. The magic is set loose—both sides of it. But there won’t really be sides, not anymore. It’s all the same.” She swallowed. “All the same, and all free.”
“Free to be used,” Neve said quietly. “For good or for ill.”
She tightened her grip on the black apple in her hand. She thought of Solmir, what she’d felt as she took the souls of the Kings from him—someone desperately striving to be good, someone who wanted to be better.
You are good. He’d told her that, once. She could almost believe it.
No one was wholly one or the other. Goodness was daily choice, endless possibility, a decision at every crossroads.
But she’d seen a former dark god attempt to atone, and that meant anyone could.
“You’d risk the world for another chance to live?” It was the first time Arick had sounded reproachful. She didn’t know if it was him, or the magic, or some combination of the two.
“I’d risk the world for my sister,” Neve replied. “I’ve already done it once.”
Red’s fingers dug into the skin of the golden apple in her palm. “And I’m not going without her.”
Arick looked thoughtfully at them, two women with their souls in their hands. After a moment, he reached up, plucked the crimson apple. A slight, impish smile lifted the corner of his mouth, another glimmer of the man he’d been when he was alive. He tossed the apple in the air, caught it. “Your souls made this place,” he said. “So it stands to reason that if the two of you smash your souls, all of this is gone.”
“What will that mean for you?” Neve breathed.
“I guess we’ll find out.” He nonchalantly polished the apple against his white shirt. “But I think I should hold on to this, regardless.”
One breath, pulled into three sets of dead lungs.
Then Red and Neve hurled their souls at the flower-strewn ground, where they shattered like glass, and everything went black.
Chapter Forty-Four
Neve
Coming back to life hurt worse than dying did.
It happened like a slow reverse of what she’d felt when she woke up in the field—head, then torso, then limbs, all tingling as they shuddered out of death. Her heart thumped once, enough to rattle her rib cage, then gave a flutter of smaller beats before settling back into a regular rhythm.