“Yes,” Neve said, waspish. “Loudly.”
The snap of her tone wasn’t lost on him. Solmir straightened, wiped his thumb on his shirt, picked up the carved wood, and stuck it in his pocket. “Forgive me, Your Majesty. One whiles away the hours as they can.”
“By singing and… whittling?”
“It would be drinking and bedsport, but the Shadowlands are woefully empty of wine and I’ll wait for you to ask me for the other.”
An angry flush ran from her forehead to her chest. “I’d sooner ask you to throw me into the mouth of the next lesser beast we come across.”
“Don’t threaten me with a good time.” He stood, swept a hand toward the lolling door. “Now that we’re both well rested, let’s go destroy a god.”
Chapter Seven
Red
It changed, Eammon. I showed you yesterday, and you said to wait and see if it stayed.” She waved her hand. “It did. It has to mean something.”
Red stood next to the mirror, still fringed with strands of her split-ended hair and spotted with her blood, still with a pile of fingernail clippings as a macabre centerpiece before it. The sight of all her sacrifices discomfited Eammon, she could tell, but he didn’t comment on them. He stood next to her, arms crossed, staring into the mirror with its reflected tangle of roots. His heavy brows drew together, his mouth pressed to a thin line.
The ghost of the argument that had dogged them for days hung close. She’d been understanding yesterday, had given it time to see if he was right and the change in the mirror was a fluke. Now she was ready for action. Ready to do something. Anything.
“It might,” Eammon hedged, still reluctant. “Or it could mean the mirror just doesn’t work anymore. Now that we’re the Wilderwood, the magic has changed, the ties that made it show First Daughters altered in ways we don’t understand yet.”
“Yes, I’m aware, thank you. But your mother made the mirror to see her sister. That is its function, and that is what I am trying to do.” Red’s hand cut toward the mirror. “If it worked before, why wouldn’t it now, when the Wilderwood is the strongest it’s been in centuries?”
“Because before, Neve wasn’t in the Shadowlands.”
“But if it’s supposed to help me see her—”
“Red, the Shadowlands are wrong.” The last word was almost a growl. “It’s an upside-down world filled with monsters that are terrible and gods that are worse. Even if we knew how to open it now that the Wilderwood has changed form, you can’t just make a way into something like that, not without dire consequences. It’s dark, and it’s twisted, and it twists everything within it.”
Everything within it. Like Neve.
Eammon kept his arms crossed tight over his broad chest, his pushed-up sleeves revealing the runnels of long-healed scars, the bark-like vambraces on his forearms. “It could be a clue,” he said finally. “It could be nothing. I just don’t want you to get your hopes up, Red. I don’t want…” He trailed off, rubbed at his eyes with thumb and forefinger.
The quiet thickened around them, something that could suffocate. They’d circled this for days, and finally it was here.
Red swallowed. “You don’t want what, Eammon?”
His hand dropped, finally, green-ringed eyes turning her way. “I don’t want you to hurt yourself trying to save her,” he said, each word spoken quiet and clear.
“But that’s what she did for me.”
“And did you want her to?”
“It’s not the same. I didn’t need saving. We know Neve does.”
Eammon didn’t respond to that. But his expression remained implacable.
Red’s mouth felt like a vise from how tight she held it, as if her whole body were a bow and it the arrow. “You think we can’t bring her back.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“I think there is a good chance we can bring her back.” She knew every tone in Eammon’s voice, knew when he was lying and when he told the truth and when he lingered somewhere in between. This was truth, but a thin one. “But it’s not going to be easy, Red. She’s in a prison that’s meant to be impenetrable. It’s going to take more than… than hunches and mirrors to pull her out of that, and we need to make sure we know what we’re doing before we try anything.”
Anger made her veins blaze bright green. “So you just want to read some more,” she hissed, “while my sister is trapped with the monsters? With the Kings? I’ve seen what’s down there, Eammon, and I’m not going to leave her.”