“Very good morning,” Red murmured against him before rising up to straddle his hips.
After, when her thoughts were no longer hazed and blazing and she was dressing for the day, Red thought back to her dream. This one felt different. Weighty, somehow.
Everything felt weighty recently, though. A week since the shadow grove, since the earth opened, since they thwarted Solmir’s plan to bring the rest of the Kings to the other side and she and Eammon had become the Wilderwood entire, held in two bodies, two souls.
A week with no sign of Neve.
A week with no idea where to even start looking. The mirror in the tower showed her nothing, hadn’t since she looked in it that last time and seen the Shadowlands, before they went to the edge of the forest and found it shattered. The forest buried in her bones gave her no clues, quiet now that it had its anchors, no longer speaking through dearly bought words but settled alongside her mind like moss on a stone. The forest outside of her, empty now of sentinels and sentience but still magic-touched, was nothing but autumn and gold.
Red was the most powerful she’d ever been. And she felt helpless.
The rough familiarity of Eammon’s hands on the nape of her neck brought her mind back to the present. Lost in thought, she’d paused in the braiding of her hair, and he gathered it in his palms, picking up where she left off. “Something new troubling you?” His voice was low and morning-graveled. “Or the same?”
“The same,” she murmured.
A soft noise of affirmation. The braid he made was lumpy, but he tied it off tight, gave it a slight tug so her neck craned up to see him behind her. He dropped a kiss on her forehead. “Maybe Raffe will have something new to tell Fife.”
She sighed, leaning farther so the back of her head rested against the plane of Eammon’s stomach. “Maybe.” This would be the second time Fife had gone to the Valleydan capital, no longer constrained by the boundaries of the Wilderwood, though still bound in different ways—by the bargain he’d made for Lyra’s life, in those few minutes when Eammon wasn’t really Eammon but eclipsed by magic and forest. He met with Raffe in a tavern, the latter wearing the most nondescript clothes he could find, and they tried to figure out ways they might use the things at Raffe’s disposal to find Neve.
Well. At his disposal for now. Before anyone figured out that the Queen was not actually recuperating from illness in a Florish holding, that her betrothed was not visiting Alpera, and that the High Priestess was not attending him.
If and when those things came to light, Raffe’s use of the palace library and close watch over the Shrine might not be so easy.
Thus far, Valleyda’s isolation had worked in their favor. The very things that made them notable made them undesirable as a territory to conquer—the Wilderwood on the northern border, the Second Daughter tithe, the poor soil and climate that never let warmth last long. And though two of those things were no longer deterrents, news traveled slowly, especially as the weather turned colder and courtiers holed up at home or abroad in preparation for the coming winter.
If they moved quietly, quickly, there’d never be any reason for the nobles to know Neve was gone. Red was too busy trying to bring her sister back from the underworld to fight over her throne, too.
She had half a mind to let it go, if it came to that. What good had a throne done either of them? Red certainly didn’t want it.
Her eyes fluttered closed as she leaned back against Eammon, breathing in his library smell. Still the same, though the scent of leaves was more prominent now. “I had a dream. One from the Wilderwood.” She opened one eye to peer up at him. “Did you?”
His hand strayed to her hair, tucking flyaway pieces behind her ears as his brows drew down and he thought back over the sleep she’d interrupted. “Not that I can recall, no.” A flicker of heat in his eyes. “Though I did wake up rather compromised, so my memory is not as sharp as it could be.”
Her lips twisted as she poked him hard in the stomach. She’d told him about the forest dreams when they first started happening. They happened to him, too—the quick flashes of image and feeling, too brief to make much sense of. Usually, if Red had a forest dream, so did Eammon, the thread of magic that twined through them both igniting in sync.
But this one, apparently, had been only for her. Red frowned. “It was stranger than the others. Longer. There was a tree. A sentinel. And an apple. When I took a bite out of it, it was bloody.”
Eammon’s hand stilled. Mentions of blood still made him tense, even now that the forest didn’t require it of him anymore. Lyra teasingly called him squeamish, but it was with a sympathetic light in her eyes. The Wolf had faced enough blood for several lifetimes.