When they reached the Keep, Red climbed the stairs to their room with Eammon’s arm wrapped around her, providing what little support she could when the top of her head came to only his shoulder. She led him to the bed, despite his noise of protest. “You need it more than I do.”
Eammon looked at her from under the fringe of his hair, something unreadable in the twist of his mouth.
She wanted to kiss the look away. She didn’t.
The cloak spread over her like a blanket as she stretched out on the floor. She fingered the embroidery, the gold wolves tangled in tree roots near the hem. “This is beautiful.”
Eammon was silent long enough that she wondered if he was already asleep. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said finally. “If you just want the plain cloak again, Asheyla can—”
“No.” Fierce and final. “It’s perfect.”
Another pause. “You deserve a real bridal cloak,” Eammon murmured into the ember-lit dark. “Even if it’s only a thread bond.”
Warmth rose in her fingers, curled in her middle. “It’s just as binding as a marriage, you said.”
There was a question in it, one that recalled mouths and hands and other ways to bind a marriage. Things he wouldn’t let happen, because it would be a distraction from his task of keeping the Wilderwood in check, and would spell an end for them both.
His inhale was sharp. He caught her meaning. It was cruel to say it, maybe, cruel to let that heat suffuse her voice. But he’d had room for doubt, earlier, room to think she might not come back. She needed him to know she would. That whether he could answer this want or not, she would always come back.
“Just as binding.” His voice was strained.
She wasn’t sure how long they both lay there, staring up into the ceiling, painfully aware of the shape of the other. When Red finally dropped into sleep, her dreams were burning.
Valleydan Interlude VII
T he sunlight in the gardens hurt Neve’s eyes after so long in the Shrine. Unthinkingly, she lifted her hand to shade her face. Blood smeared over her cheek, the new slash in her skin tugging with a slight but aching pain.
With a curse, she rubbed the blood away, then peered at her palm. She’d taken care to slice herself in different places every time; thin, precise cuts of Kiri’s dagger. They never seemed to completely heal.
Stealing pieces of the Wilderwood was bloody work.
Bleeding on the branches pulled at the rest of the tree they’d been cut from, made them fall away from the forest to appear instead in the cavern of the Shrine. They grew strange and inverted, resisting, but they came. There were at least a dozen now, an unnatural forest encased in rock, growing from stone and watered with blood.
And if you offered the blood, you received the magic, sharp and cold as daggers of ice. Magic from the Shadowlands that left frost on your fingers, darkened your veins. Felt like winter slithering around your bones.
Magic she’d finally stopped denying herself.
She’d resisted, for a time. This strange power was never her objective— Neve didn’t care about anything other than weakening her sister’s prison, making a way for her to return. But the more she bled for it, the more it tugged at her, shadowed and seductive. Promising control, at least over this one thing.
At the end of it all, she couldn’t make Red run, and now she couldn’t make her leave the Wilderwood. But she could wrench power from it. Here was something that rested entirely in her grasp, and the more time went on, the more foolish it seemed not to wield it.
With a touch, Neve could wither a flower. A flick of her fingers could turn a leaf from green to brown, and sometimes it seemed like shadows grew longer when she drew near them, like they were waiting for her command. The delicate tracing of darkness in her veins took longer to fade away each time she used it.
And Red was still gone.
Guards were stationed in the village nearest the border, watching for her return. Kiri said they had to be cautious— even if the bonds holding Red to the Wilderwood loosened enough for her to escape, they might not let her free entirely, and there was no way to know how she might be altered by them. But nothing emerged from the edge of the trees.
Frowning, Neve gestured at a green bush by the path. Cold across her fingertips, veins running like ink. The leaf curled in on itself, brown and brittle, before dropping to the path.
Kiri emerged from the shadows of the Shrine, blue eyes avid as she deftly wrapped her bleeding palm. She always cut deep, gave more blood than necessary. Neve didn’t think it gave her any more magic than it gave the rest of them. She thought Kiri just enjoyed bloodletting.