“That’s a price I’m not willing to pay.” She gripped his jaw, forced his green-haloed eyes to hers. “I’m not leaving you to this. You don’t leave me either, Eammon. Don’t you dare.”
His full lips pressed together. His eyes stayed on hers as tiny leaves edged at their corners.
Must be two. That memory again. An urging.
She wrapped her hands around his shoulders, a strange echo of their embrace in the tower. A tug at her twining magic, but it slipped from her grip. It was the Wilderwood, a small shard of it lodged in her, and the Wilderwood didn’t want to obey.
All the pieces he’d given, all the blood he’d spilled, and it still wasn’t satisfied.
“No.” She didn’t know she’d spoken aloud until it hissed from between her teeth. “You can’t just keep taking, shadows damn it! First the Second Daughters, and now him? They didn’t belong to you, and neither does he! None of us chose this!”
Her voice had risen until it was a scream, echoing in the trees, feral as a hunting-sound from some wild thing. And as it left her throat, the Wilderwood . . . paused. Something vast and unknowable, a consciousness that barely fit the definition of such a thing and adhered to no morality she could understand, stopped and turned to her and regarded.
Choice.
Quieter than she’d heard the Wilderwood speak before, more contemplative. A fall of leaves from a now-dead branch, fluttering to the ground.
Red didn’t have time to try to parse it out, no time to argue with a forest and hope it understood. The magic in her pulled toward Eammon, her thin thread of power wanting to follow, to go meet the rest of the Wilderwood as it flowed into him, remade him.
The forest, reverting into its nexus. Taking Eammon and leaving itself in his place. Scouring the borders between man and forest until there was no delineation.
But it would need all of itself to do it. Including the part of it that lived in her.
Red clamped down on her magic with every bit of strength she could muster, that small piece of the Wilderwood that had made a home in her.
And she tore.
It hurt. It ripped at her veins like thorns, like taking a stem and splitting it in half. It hurt the Wilderwood, too— she could hear it, a shriek in a voice of leaf and branch, vibrating her bones. Guilt soured her stomach, guilt for harming the thing they were meant to save.
Kings and shadows, it always came back to guilt.
But it worked. Red tugged at her shard of Wilderwood magic like she was trying to pull up a weed by the root, diverting its flow, keeping it from running into Eammon. A small amount, but it was enough to keep the forest from seeping into him. To keep him as close to human as he could be.
It fought against her, the pain of it making her eyes water, making her feel like every vein ran with coals. But Red held on, refusing to let go, caging the bit of forest within her the same way Eammon had caged his all these years.
And then, it stopped. Stopped, and held silent for a moment that hung heavy.
The atmosphere shifted. The Wilderwood shifted, a ripple in the roots beneath her feet, a shimmer in the leaves.
The weight of an inhuman realization. Something, finally, understood.
Red’s small piece of the Wilderwood ceased trying to run out of her, settled back into the places she’d made for it. It didn’t speak again. But she had a strange sense of something decided.
And whatever it was, it meant the forest would leave Eammon be. For now.
Slowly, Eammon and the Wilderwood untangled, as much as they were able. Root tendrils seeped out of his arms, back into the ground, leaving bloody gashes in their wake. He shuddered, coughing up dirt against her knees. Two circles of bark braceleted his wrists, showed no sign of fading— another permanent change the forest left, like that extra inch of height, like the green threads in the whites of his eyes.
But he was her Eammon again.
Red slumped next to him, her forehead falling against his. A moment, and Eammon shifted away, though the movement felt heavy, unwilling. “How’d you find me?”
“Vision.” Her hands shook without his skin to steady them. “How did this happen?”
He stood, knees watery. “I healed them all.”
It took her a moment to catch his meaning. When she did, her eyes widened, going from his face to the bloodless, green-tinged slashes on his palms, his arms, his chest.
Every gap where a sentinel should be, gone. And when he’d run out of blood, he’d called forest. Called the Wilderwood’s magic until it nearly crowded him out.
“Why?” she asked hoarsely. “Why would you do that?”