She could still feel the bruise of Eammon’s kiss on her mouth.
Red pulled off her clothes and climbed beneath the cloak. Heedless of the time, whether dusk or day or midnight, Red let the warmth of her bridal cloak and the scent of leaves and libraries lull her to sleep.
She woke alone.
Groggily, Red pushed away the heap of blanket and cloak, swept back her unkempt hair. Someone had set a fire in the grate, blazing merrily, but Eammon’s blanket was still folded between the bed and the hearth. Her eyes narrowed.
If he expected to avoid a goodbye, he was mistaken. Red wouldn’t go quietly. Damn his reasons, he couldn’t kiss her like that—twice— and expect her to go quietly.
Her clothes lay in a heap on the floor; she pulled them on, boots and all. After a moment, she slung her new bridal cloak over her shoulders.
She was halfway to the stairs before her legs buckled.
The thorn-and-leaf darkness of a vision closed in immediately, this time an encroachment of forest that drove her to her knees. Red gasped, fingers pressing into her temples, deep-green magic blooming out of her chest to weave through her veins.
The connection between her and Eammon flared to life, even stronger than it had the day with Bormain.
Hands, again. Scarred and rough, sinking into the dirt. Veins running emerald, bark closing where skin should be. A forest between bones reached for a forest outside them, because this body had given everything else, and the barrier between man and wood was almost gone.
Her throat—Eammon’s throat— gagged up dirt. Sentinels grew around him in a perfectly circular ring, bone white and clear of rot. One stood taller, a strange, rectangular scar across its bark, like something had been stripped from it. And around its roots, a tangle of something gleaming—
The vision was gone, perception wrenched back into her own body. Red’s heart jackknifed against her ribs.
Eammon had done . . . something. Bled himself out, until only magic was left.
And the Wilderwood was taking him over.
She skidded down the stairs without a thought for trying to find Fife and Lyra— there was no time, not when Eammon was . . . was unmaking, unraveling. Red shoved open the door to the Keep, ran to the gate, pressed her hand against the iron. It opened to her touch, like it recognized her now.
The path was unknown, but her feet seemed to point toward Eammon, and she trusted the instinct. Red ran through the Wilderwood, and the beat in her veins and the prayer in her mouth was hold on, hold on, hold on.
She heard him before she saw him. Eammon’s labored breathing was echoed by the forest, the two of them heaving in sync. A ring of white trees before her opened on a clearing with the Wolf in its center. His lashed and bloody back caught the violet light, a man-shaped bruise on the world.
“Eammon!” His name snapped from her tongue like a whip crack, but he didn’t seem to hear. His head bowed so far forward his hair brushed the dirt, arms sunk in soil to the elbow, sweat gleaming in twilight. The sentinels bowed toward him, reaching, needing, worship and sacrifice at once.
Red’s knees hit the ground next to him, hands running through his hair with a tenderness her racing heart and screaming breath belied. She didn’t bother asking for an explanation. There was clarity in the way his veins burned emerald, the rings of bark closing around his arms, the whites of his eyes now wholly green around amber irises. Whatever vestiges of humanity he’d managed to salvage over centuries running out as forest ran in, because he was the only one to hold it, and one was no longer enough.
Must be two. The memory echoed, but it seemed to come more from the shard of magic she carried than her own mind.
“What can I do?” A snarl heralded the memory of his usual answer, but when she spoke it was a plea. “Don’t say nothing.”
“It’s the only way.” Sediment fell from Eammon’s hair as his head shook. His voice echoed, layered and resonant. “This is the only way to hold it, if I don’t want it to take you.”
Red dug her fingers into his temples, made him look at her. “It’s not. I’m not letting it take you from me, Eammon.”
The golden afterimage of the Wilderwood bloomed over her vision when she touched him, double-exposed. He’d spent himself to the last, magic and blood, but the forest needed more. Was taking more.
Green veins stood out in Eammon’s neck, tendons like ridges of root. “Only way.” Greater distortion in his voice, rustling leaves in autumn wind, stronger than she’d ever heard it before. “Either it takes me, or it takes you.”