“You’d know about letting others get caught up in messes they should steer clear of,” Lyra murmured.
The three of them paused, animals once more aware of the traps set around them. Red couldn’t find any anger in her, even though the wounded look on Eammon’s face sliced her insides.
She and Eammon had talked of Fife and what happened in the clearing, deep in the night, pressed together, with their legs tangled and her cheek pillowed on his chest. What he remembered from the brief moment when he’d sent out the Wilderwood’s call, everything else crowded out by panic. And what happened before, the day of the shadow grove, when he pulled in all of the forest to save her.
“I don’t really remember any of it, either time,” he’d whispered into the dark, the paneless maws of their windows letting in crisp autumn scent, crisp autumn air. “There was golden light. The feeling of being… being vast, taking up more space than should be possible. All of the parts of me scattered.” Green-haloed eyes turned to hers, made luminous in moonlight, the worry in them stark. When Eammon spoke again, it was hushed. “How badly did it hurt, when you felt the call?”
“It wasn’t that bad. Just… loud, in my head.” She traced her hand over his chest, rested it on his heart. “You didn’t hear anything at all?”
“Nothing. But the Wilderwood and I have coexisted for so long, it seems loud to me all the time.” Eammon ran a hand through his tangled hair. “Fife said I hadn’t gotten any better at listening to it. Seems like he’s right.”
“It’s a hard thing to listen to,” Red murmured. “Especially when it’s been part of you for so many years.”
“I just don’t understand the rules anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I vastly prefer this to what the Wilderwood and I were before, but part of me misses knowing exactly what the forest wanted from me.” He shifted beneath her. “Maybe I shouldn’t have let him bargain to save Lyra. She wasn’t dying, just hurt, and he was panicked. But I didn’t… I didn’t know it’d be like this.” He paused, idly twining a strand of golden hair and ivy around his finger. “It’s different,” he said finally. “This bargain is different than the one he made before, but I don’t know how. It’s like the Wilderwood knows something I don’t.”
“But you had to let him.” Red looked up, flicked a lock of dark, overlong hair out of his eyes. The point of a tiny antler brushed her fingertip. “Lyra wasn’t connected to the Wilderwood enough for you to heal her without a trade.”
“I know. I couldn’t leave her like that.” A huff, his hand coming up to capture hers and cage it against his chest. “But now I’ve left Fife like this.”
Red turned her head to press a kiss on his bare, scarred shoulder. “They’ll come around.”
“They shouldn’t have to,” he’d murmured. But it’d been low, sonorous, and soon his breathing had evened and he’d dropped into sleep.
Now, in the library, Eammon’s eyes were still shadowed with guilt. He didn’t respond to Lyra, bracing himself with knuckles against the table for one deep breath before pushing up and going to the door. She let him pass without a word.
Lips pressed together, Red moved to follow. When she reached Lyra, she paused, eyes still ahead. “He didn’t mean to get Fife tangled up in this again,” she said softly.
She thought Lyra might not respond, but after a moment, the other woman sighed, her shoulders dipping low. “I know.” A corkscrew curl hung in her eye; Lyra knuckled it back. “Fife made the choice to bargain. And Eammon…” A shrug. “Well. He wasn’t exactly in a position to refuse, I guess.”
“He would have.” Red knew her Wolf down to the bones, the way his mind worked and the things that sparked his guilt. “If he’d been himself, he would have tried to find another way. Something other than a bargain.”
“There wasn’t one,” Lyra said wearily. “We all know that.”
Red had no rebuttal.
Lyra’s nails tapped against the sleeve of her gown, her eyes still fixed on the floor. “It was to save me,” she said, so quiet it was nearly a whisper. “Fife bargained to save me, so I shouldn’t be mad, right? But all those years, those centuries longer than we ever should have lived, all he wanted was to be free of this damn forest. And I—” She caught the words and swallowed them, heaved a quiet sigh. “I don’t want to be the reason he’s not. He doesn’t resent me for it, not yet. But I can’t imagine that he won’t, eventually. And what do I do then?”