When her eyes opened, it was snowing. Gentle drifts of white swirling from a velvet sky, blanketing the world and making it new. To someone else, the scene might’ve appeared stark black and white, but Neve’s eyes were used to monotone, and she could pick out the subtle shades of indigo in the night.
It took a moment for her to hear the shouting.
More growling than shouting, really, and all of it coming from her right. Neve turned her head, the movement slow and syrupy.
A brawl, as vicious and common as any ever seen in a tavern yard. Two tall men grappled with each other, sweat and blood flying, both of them fighting like they had nothing left to lose.
“Of course,” Red’s voice, as slow and tired as Neve felt. Her sister’s head was next to hers, the two of them laid out brow to brow in the snow, legs pointing in opposite directions. “We die, and they fistfight.”
Three more figures watched the brawl, stark against the pale expanse of the ground. When Neve realized one of them was Raffe, she shrank back, a strange alchemy of guilt and shame and relief making her body feel like her own again in one agonizing sweep.
But there was still something missing. Some kind of… of emptiness, a piece of herself that she’d left in death. Neve’s hand was halfway to her heart, ready to check again for its beat, before she realized what that emptiness was.
Her soul. A prison for magic, obliterated.
She swallowed. Her eyes turned to Red, still lying beside her, their gazes made level by the way they’d fallen in death. Long hair fanned out on either side of them, dark gold and black, two sides of a circle.
“I feel it, too,” her sister murmured. Her dark eyes were clouded and thoughtful—and only brown, with no halo of green around the irises.
Neve nodded. “I don’t…” She shifted, looked up to the falling snow. “I expected it to feel worse.”
Red shrugged. “What’s a soul but the most concentrated piece of yourself?” A tiny, tired smile lifted the side of her mouth. “We know who we are. Maybe that means we don’t need them.”
“I guess we’ll find out,” Neve said.
Red’s arms made wing shapes in the snow as she stretched, shaking out pins and needles. “Well, it’s not so—”
She stopped as abruptly as if she’d hit a wall. Red’s head turned to the opposite side, where Neve couldn’t see her face, staring at whatever her hand had hit when she stretched.
With a grimace, Neve pushed herself up on her elbows to peer over her sister.
Arick.
His body was curled on his side as if the snow were a feather bed, chest rising and falling in easy rhythm. Dark curls brushed his forehead, and a slight smile curved his mouth, like worry wasn’t something he’d ever known.
“He came back with us.” Neve’s voice sounded thin and cracked, someone waking up from a long sleep. “When we… did what we did, it must have brought him back.”
Red’s eyes were wide and glassy. “He wasn’t really dead, not in the normal way,” she murmured. “Just… caught in between. Like us. That must be why.”
The enormity of what they’d done was slow-settling, a leaf incrementally weighing down into a river. Soulless, yet still themselves. Bereft of magic, when they’d both been a home for it. Alive when they’d been dead.
Then Red gave her head a tiny shake and swung her eyes to Eammon and Solmir, still rolling over the ground with their teeth bared and fists flying. “What a way to introduce Arick to my husband.”
Neve followed her gaze, raised a brow. “Should we let them work it out, you think?”
“No.” Red pushed to sit up, shaking snow from her hair. Her face had gone stony. “Eammon might kill him, and I’d like to punch him at least once first.”
Nerves twisted in Neve’s middle, the pinch of it more pronounced from the fact she’d been dead until moments ago. They’d solved one problem—the cosmic, god-proportioned one—but she was somehow far more apprehensive about the personal ones on the horizon. Like making sure Red and Eammon didn’t kill Solmir, even though he deserved it.
Like explaining why she didn’t want them to.
Red stood, called across the snow, “If you’re fighting about us, everything is fine now! If it’s over something else, carry on!”
Everyone on the plain froze, a tableau in the churned snow as more poured from the sky. Then Eammon—looking worse for wear—staggered over the ground toward them. He wrapped Red in his arms, and she buried her face in his chest, heedless of the blood crusting his nose.