Apples. A cluster of three, one gold, one black, and one bloodred.
The Tree is the key is the mirror, came the voice, reverberating in the fog. The Tree exists and doesn’t exist. It is you, and it is the piece you carry.
“I don’t understand,” Red murmured, eyes still on the apples.
Mirrored power and mirrored love, the voice answered. That’s what opens the Shadowlands. Opens the Heart Tree. Opens you.
“That cleared up exactly nothing,” Red muttered, but the rest of a salty retort died in her throat when her eyes slid sideways.
When she saw the mirror growing from the trunk of the tree.
The same mirror she’d brought with her, the mirror she’d been trying so hard to force to show her Neve. She saw her own reflection in it, half forest and half woman, wild-eyed and kiss-bruised. But then there was a shimmer, a gray-scale world reflected for half a moment. A woman both like her and not, with long black hair and black-welled eyes and thorns along her wrists.
Neve.
But as Red tried to run forward, heedless of the branch she stood on and the endless drop below, the dream slipped, became more like something her tired mind would form and less like its own reality. Her steps stretched too long and too slow, her grasping fingers couldn’t touch the mirror’s frame. It fell back, disappeared, and she followed it into the dark.
“Red?”
Eammon had rolled on his side, bracing one hand on the other side of her head and caging her in his arms, worry in his eyes. “You cried out.”
She reached up and smoothed the line between his brows. “Sorry,” she said. “Strange dream.”
He frowned. “Again?”
Red nodded, pushing to sit up, hair mussed from sleep and sex. “It felt different this time.” She searched for her hastily discarded tunic, stricken with the sudden need to find the thing she’d pulled from the earth. “Does the term Heart Tree mean anything to you?”
Eammon’s frown deepened. “Not off the top of my head, no.”
Her tunic was a few yards away—damn, he really threw the thing—tangled in a bush’s low brambles. Red didn’t bother disentangling it before reaching into the pocket, pulling out the mystery object that had been left in her hand when she almost became a sentinel. She knocked it against her knee to clear the dirt.
A key. Made of white wood and threaded with veins of gold, but unmistakably a key. And when she closed her hand tight around it, she felt the faint rhythm of a heartbeat, as if the key were a living thing, or at least connected to one.
She turned back to a still-confused Eammon, holding it aloft. “Whatever it is,” she said, “it apparently has a lock.”
Chapter Eight
Neve
Because Neve’s most well-honed talent was torturing herself, she thought of Raffe as they walked.
The ever-present cold of the Shadowlands made his warmth easy to call to mind. Warm brown eyes, warm smile, warm mouth on hers for the one kiss they’d shared, there in her room with her mother dead and her hands iced from magic and Red still gone.
He’d kissed her like he wanted to pull her back from a cliff’s edge.
But there’d been more to it than that, hadn’t there? More than just wanting to save her and defaulting to what he thought might work?
Neve’s lips pressed together, trying to remember, to replay that kiss in her mind. At the time, she hadn’t thought of much beyond the feel of him, the purely physical rush of having something you thought was unattainable, even if only for a moment. That was the crux of what had always lived between them, potent and heady: the knowledge that it could never happen. But then it did, and what even was it?
A rescuing. Raffe throwing her a lifeline, something to cling to, as what she kept grabbing for slipped out of her hands.
It made her frown, to think of it in such stark terms. To try to recall emotion, when desperation was the only one she could name.
Long before she and Raffe had started orbiting each other like stars that might collide, he’d been her friend. And in the end, that’s what she’d felt in that kiss, as heat-filled and thorough as it was. The desperation of a friend, faced with the possibility of losing someone to a darkness they didn’t understand.
There is nothing you could do to make me stop loving you.
That was the way he told her he loved her. A confession, maybe, but not a surprise—of course they loved each other, that was never in question. But the specifications of it, the parameters and ways the corners fit… that was more complicated.
She hadn’t said it back. She’d thought of that more than once since it happened. She hadn’t said it back, and should she feel bad for that? It wouldn’t have been a lie, but it would’ve been a truth without context, and was that worse than no response at all?