They’d had so many conversations about grief. Here was one more. Her hand was on his shoulder before she had the conscious thought, before she knew she’d moved forward. She half expected him to flinch away, but instead Eammon sagged into the contact.
He spoke faster, like a dam had been struck and the river was waiting. “My mother always felt guilty that Solmir shared the Kings’ fate. She didn’t think he deserved it, said he’d been caught up in their schemes without an escape. They’d been friends, apparently, before they were betrothed.” Eammon’s teeth set sharp against the word friends. “I heard Gaya and Ciaran talking about it sometimes. When they thought I wasn’t listening.” He shook his head. “Nearly a century and a half of the same circular argument.”
So nonchalant, the way he discussed centuries. His lifetime stretched over so many of hers, like the hundreds of years it took a sapling to fully grow— it made sense, when he was born to parents who made him shortly after they’d tangled themselves with a forest. Red had never thought to imagine Eammon as any different from the man she met in the library, not quite human, held in stasis by his strange relationship to the Wilderwood. But now, brushed in twilight, she could see a younger version of him. Eyes not so tired, shoulders not so rigid, unaware of the burden set to fall on them.
“Ciaran didn’t want to release Solmir,” Eammon continued. “Gaya claimed he’d been embroiled in her father’s machinations against his will, but Ciaran didn’t believe that. And with the Kings bound together the way they were, he didn’t think it’d be possible to release only one from the Shadowlands, anyway.”
A subtle change since he’d first decided to tell her the story, from my parents to Gaya and Ciaran, an artificial distance she wasn’t sure he was aware of creating. Like he wanted a separation, like he wanted a gulf. Like being close was too painful.
She understood.
Red kept her hand on his shoulder, but her eyes flickered toward the border of the Wilderwood. It stood tall and dark and fathomless, a place for losing.
Eammon ran a weary hand over his face. “Gaya decided to try anyway. She opened a breach, and Ciaran felt it happen. He went after her.” A pause, a heavy breath in. “By the time he got there, she was dead already. Consumed by the Wilderwood, to keep her from harming it further.”
The tale was easy to pick up from here. The Wolf, carrying the forest-riddled body of the Second Daughter to the edge of the woods. Figures shrouded and made less real by myth.
Except that they were the parents of the man standing before her now. Except that he’d seen it all happen.
“I saw him carrying her.” Low, expressionless, turned toward the forest that pulled him inexorably back into its darkness. “I followed him to the border. I heard what he said, but I didn’t understand what it meant. It took me so damn long to understand what he meant.”
Here his voice broke, but instead of shuddering, Eammon kept every muscle statue-still, like if he made himself less human the emotion couldn’t catch up. When he spoke again, it was a murmur. “He lasted a year after that. A year on his own, the Wilderwood eating him away the whole time. Taking everything that made him anything close to human. Breaches opened. The forest was full of shadow-creatures, but the borders stayed closed and didn’t let them out, like . . . like when something is about to die, and holds on all the tighter for it.”
“It wasn’t your fault.” She spoke as quietly as he did, a whisper against the darkening sky and the waiting, hungry wood. “None of it was your fault.”
He didn’t respond, lost in the cadence of his own horror story. “And then he died,” he said, as if it was still a startling end to the tale, all these centuries later. “He died, and in that moment, the borders opened, like that dead hand finally losing its grip. The shadow-creatures got out.” A pause, a rattling breath. “It was all instinct, after that. Cutting my hand, putting it to the ground. The Wilderwood . . . resurrected, I guess. Grew in me. It hurt.” His hand curled against his chest in memory of pain. “I’ve always wondered if it hurt me more or less than it did him. I can’t come up with an answer. He wasted away beneath it, and I’m still here.”
The last part was a whisper. They stood there, a man and a woman on the edge of the dark, both bent and shadowed beneath the weight of awful history.
“Then I was the Wolf,” Eammon said quietly. “And until Fife and Lyra arrived, I was alone.”