“I’m sorry, too,” Red murmured. “I’m sorry we haven’t figured out a way to let you out of your new bargain. I’m sorry that we don’t understand much about it.”
“Not your fault.” Fife shrugged, but it was stilted. “Everything’s changed now. None of us really know what the new parameters are. And I would’ve done it anyway, no matter the cost.”
Red glanced over her shoulder. Lyra stood above them, on the platform that housed the ship’s wheel, talking animatedly with Kayu and one of the hired sailors. The wind snatched their words away and covered Red and Fife’s from being overheard.
“I understand,” Red said softly. “I’d do the same thing.”
“I know you would.”
“When you were called, there in the clearing…” Red shook her head, looking back to the sea. “Fife, I promise it was an accident. Eammon didn’t mean to do it.”
“I know. He was just trying to protect you.” A flicker of his eyes to Lyra above them. “Not one of us has ever been smart about the people we love, have we?”
Red snorted.
They lapsed into silence. Red knotted her fingers, lightly misted with salt spray. “Have you talked to Eammon about it?”
“I suppose I should, shouldn’t I?”
“I’m honored to be the first stop on your apology tour, but yes, probably.” Her lips quirked, half a smile, then pressed together. “The three of you… you’re tied together in ways I can’t even begin to understand. He loves you and Lyra, Fife. So much. It’s killed him, thinking he hurt you, but he didn’t know how to approach it. Wanted to give you space.”
She’d pushed Eammon, at first, to find Fife and apologize, to make him talk it out. But Eammon had gently refused. “I told him I was sorry,” he’d said, “and trying to make him forgive me is about my feelings, not his. We’ll talk when he’s ready.”
Fife sighed. Pushed off from the railing. A moment later, she heard the soft rumblings of Eammon’s voice behind her, a creak as Fife settled in beside him.
She smiled down at her hands.
“Is Eammon going to live?” Kayu moved gracefully down the stepladder from the crow’s nest. She still wore a tunic and trousers, both soft and cut large, and a multicolored scarf that bound her dark hair back from her face. She smiled brightly, but something in her expression was faraway, preoccupied. She kept glancing westward, toward the Rylt, almost apprehensively.
“He’s survived worse,” Red answered.
“I suppose that’s true.” Kayu turned, elbows propped on the railing, back to the sea, and eyes canted toward Red. “So. You and the Wolf.”
Red leaned back, stretching out her arms with her fingers still curled around the rail. A frisson of discomfort tightened her shoulders. “Me and the Wolf.”
“You’re immortal now, like him? Unable to die?”
Red’s brow furrowed, sudden tension in her straightened arms.
Kayu shrugged, casual despite the baldness of the question. “He can’t die, right?”
“No.” Clipped and short and not entirely true. “He can’t.” Not of natural causes, anyway, not unless he was killed. That’s how it had been when he was just the Warden. Now that he was the whole Wilderwood, that both of them were, Red didn’t really know.
But she wasn’t going to tell Kayu that.
“Quite a deal,” the other woman said. A lock of black hair had escaped her scarf to dangle by her temple; she idly twirled it around her finger. “Getting all knotted up in a forest in exchange for immortality. Especially if you get a hulking tree husband in the bargain.”
Red bit back a huff of laughter at that, though now that Kayu had mentioned the issue of immortality, her mind wouldn’t let it go. Her concentration had been on other things for the past few weeks, but it was certainly something she’d thought about, the magic of the forest in her bones extending her life like it had Eammon’s. There was joy in it—of course there was, spending an eternity with him—but trepidation, too. Everyone knew forever was a long time, but staring down into the pit of it was a special blend of awe and terror that her mind shied away from.
“I have no complaints on the tree husband front,” she said.
“I bet not. He looks at you like you’re personally responsible for the sunrise every morning.” Kayu quirked a brow. “Or, usually he does. Right now, he looks like he’s about to lose whatever is left in his stomach.”