Everything in Eammon was for the Wilderwood— all he was, down to the bone and blood. Everything in his life was oriented around making sure he never slipped again.
Oriented around keeping her safe from the thing that had taken so much of him.
“It came for Merra, and she couldn’t take it.” Still, his voice cadenced like a tale, like he could keep himself at arm’s length from his own history. “She tried to . . . to cut it out. Died before I could stop her.”
Third skull. Third rib cage. Third set of bones, fed on by vines and white trees.
“Cut it out?” The question was a bare breath, shaky and quiet.
That made him turn, finally, his green-and-amber eyes fierce in his dirt-streaked face. “It won’t happen to you. I won’t let it.”
But she couldn’t leave it at that, not with the bones in the corner of her vision and his blood tacky between her fingers. Not with the plucked string in her heart, vibrating a frequency she almost knew.
“Tell me what it does to them,” Red whispered, even though she knew the answer. A dying man and a root-threaded body, the myth that hung over both their heads. “Please.”
Eammon freed his hand from hers, gently, and ran it over his face, eyes cast away like he was looking for answers in the starless sky. “It isn’t immediate. The Wilderwood doesn’t mean for you to die.”
Around the clearing, the white sentinels stood silent and still. Listening. That decision made in an unfathomable, inhuman mind, solidifying.
“The forest needs an anchor.” Eammon crossed his arms, hiding the new bracelets of bark on his wrists. “That’s what it’s after.”
An anchor. A living seed, a nexus for it all to stem from. Him, holding it all alone.
Must be two.
Red’s palms itched to touch him again, to find a friction to his skin. “An anchor,” she repeated. “Like the way it anchors in you. But it needs more than that. You need more than—”
“Stop it, Red.” It sliced through the air, knife-cold and just as sharp. “Stop. It’s not for you.” A ragged sigh, another pass of his bleeding hand over his face. “None of this should be for you.”
“Why not?” Her voice shook with anger, with bewilderment, with something else. “You want me to just leave you here? Go back to Valleyda and forget about all of this, leave you to bleed into a forest until there’s nothing left and you become . . . whatever it wants you to become? And what about after that, if you can’t hold the Shadowlands closed anymore even once it takes all of you? How do you think this ends, Eammon?”
“I don’t know.” He said it quietly. His softness, always a contrast for her edges. “I don’t know how it’d all end, and I’m nearly past caring. But I’d know I tried to keep you safe. I’d know I did my best to keep you from going down with me.”
“You act like this is a punishment. You didn’t choose this any more than I did. This isn’t your fault.”
“It’s my fault you’re here. It’s my fault they died. I wasn’t strong enough, so the Wilderwood kept calling Second Daughters. Kept taking them.” He said it all evenly, matter-of-fact, but his eyes still burned and his hands kept twitching to fists, like he wanted to hide the scars on his palms.
So she took his hands. Wove her fingers with his. Held them so tight her knuckles blanched, so tight she could feel his scars like lace pressed against her skin. “It’s not going to take me,” she said, a low whisper. “And I won’t let it take you.”
It almost put a name to the thing growing between them, that declaration. But the name was too vast and too fragile, something that might break them to acknowledge now.
“I’m trying to protect you,” he murmured. “Red, I’d let the world burn before I hurt you.”
“It would hurt me to leave you here.” Prayer and confession. “It would hurt me to leave you all alone.”
His sigh shuddered on the end. Red tugged at his scarred and bloodied hands. “Let’s go home.”
They walked back silently, hands tightly clasped, nearly sealed together by sap and blood. The Wilderwood stayed quiet, preternaturally still. Red still had that sense of slow, unknowable thought, churning deep in the forest, rolling over what it’d heard, what it’d seen.
Choice.
She thought she heard the word again, murmured in thicket and bower, but no leaves dropped and no moss withered. Like the Wilderwood whispered it into the thin thread of its magic she carried, something for only her to hear.