“Of course we aren’t going to leave her. But we need to take the time—”
“She doesn’t have time!”
Red didn’t mean to scream it; her voice was hoarse, and it made the words almost a half sob. Eammon’s hands reached out, an instinct to comfort, but she backed away. His hands fell.
She held up her arm, traced in green veins, delicately braceleted in bark. “We have all the time in the world,” she whispered. “But Neve doesn’t. Neve is still human.”
Eammon stood stiffly, eyes unreadable. “And do you regret no longer being human, Redarys?”
He still used her full name sometimes—in bed or in jest. But this was formal. Distant.
Her stomach bottomed out.
“Of course not,” she breathed, but she couldn’t quite make herself reach out and touch him. “You know that.”
He didn’t respond, just kept looking at her with that level amber-and-green gaze.
Finally, Eammon sighed. “I’ll be in the library.” He turned toward the staircase. “Come when you can.” His footsteps echoed down the stairs, the door creaking at the bottom as he pushed it open.
Red crossed from the mirror over to one of the vine-carved windows, watching him trek across the courtyard to the Keep. Part of her wanted to call out to him, to reel him back, to let him take her on the floor of the tower until both of them forgot their argument.
She didn’t.
Instead, she thought of all the trees within her, the Wilderwood she carried beneath her skin. The sentinels she and Eammon had absorbed, the sentinels whose rotting had opened doors into the Shadowlands.
Eammon wanted to wait. Wanted to find a way to Neve that was perfectly safe, one that didn’t carry any risk. Red knew that wasn’t possible. She understood his fear—the thought of losing him twisted everything in her middle into barbed knots—but Eammon didn’t have a sibling. A twin. He couldn’t understand this, the unique pain of it.
Red couldn’t leave Neve in the Shadowlands any longer. She couldn’t wait for Eammon to find his mythical perfect plan that didn’t risk anything.
And she couldn’t let him keep her from trying something that might work.
A rustle in her head, like wind through trees. A warning? A benediction? She didn’t care. Her plan was loose and ill formed, but it was the only thing Red could think of that had a chance of working, and desperation covered a multitude of holes.
Down in the courtyard, Eammon paused at the door of the Keep. He turned, looked back up at her, eyes shadowed by noonday sun. Then he disappeared inside.
If she told him, he would stop her—might go so far as to lock her in the damn library. If Red was going to do this, it had to be now, and it had to be alone.
So as the door of the Keep closed behind Eammon, Red made her way to the stairs.
There was no threat to her in the Wilderwood now, but going beyond the gate still made her heart kick up against her throat. Red closed it quietly behind her, though she knew no one was listening. Eammon would be nose-deep in a book by now, as much to forget about their argument as to find anything useful, and Fife and Lyra would still be on their way back from meeting Raffe after spending last night in the capital.
Still, she watched the trees warily as she slipped between them. Old habits were hard to break.
Moving quickly was a challenge with the mirror clutched to her chest. Red tilted it away from her abdomen, frowning into the surface. Still clogged with that strange and layered root-darkness, nearly impossible to make out if you didn’t squint.
Surely, the roots meant she needed a sentinel. Needed to tug one from within herself, make a doorway to pull Neve through. What else could it mean?
Another rustle against her thoughts, the golden thread running alongside them vibrating like a plucked harp string. The Wilderwood communicating something, but she wasn’t sure what.
There was so little Red understood about what she’d become. Woman on the outside—mostly—forest within. She remembered thinking of Eammon like a scale, tipping back and forth from bone to branch, the balance hard to hold. Since they’d become the Wilderwood, it was like they’d put a brace on those scales, kept them in perfect equilibrium.
So what might happen if she tipped them again? If she let what was inside back out?
Red shook her head, dispelling the doubt that wanted to collect in her thoughts and make itself something to stumble on. This was for Neve. She’d accept the consequences.
It was the least she could do.
Her route wasn’t planned. But when Red arrived at the clearing where she’d laid the other Second Daughters’ bones to rest—where she’d found Eammon half subsumed in forest, what felt like lifetimes ago—it seemed right. Gold and ocher leaves carpeted the ground, their sharp almost-cinnamon scent thick in the air. No more sentinels lined the circular edge, but the place still felt closer to holy than anywhere else she’d ever been.