Other priestesses filtered silently into the gardens behind Kiri, bandaging their own wounds. Around each neck, a branch-shard pendant, white bark brushed with subtle shadow.
The new High Priestess reached up with copper-smeared fingers, lightly touched the matching pendant at her neck. Her eyes fluttered closed, a brief moment of calm, before opening again. A slight smile crossed her face, untouched by any sharpness, only seen in these brief moments when the blood was fresh.
Neve’s own pendant was still in the drawer of her desk. She hadn’t touched it since that day she accidentally marked it with her blood, the day she had that overwhelming sense of being watched. Kiri seemed irritated by this quiet rebellion at first, but didn’t push. Arick, who for reasons unknown to her had never received an odd necklace of his own, seemed almost . . . relieved.
But the other priestesses still wore theirs, each pendant produced by Kiri after they’d made their first blood offering, wielded the magic of the Shadowlands for the first time. Neve didn’t know where she got the wood; it wasn’t from any of the trees now crowding the Shrine. She didn’t ask.
News of the changes in the Order had trickled slowly across the continent. Not the concrete details, but how they were doing more to free the Kings than just sending Second Daughters, how the candles in the Shrine had changed from scarlet to shadowy gray. Neve had braced for backlash, but it turned out Kiri was right. Whatever Valleyda decided, the other Temples fell in line, especially as the rumors of what they’d done in Floriane Harbor spread.
None of them knew the full scope of what was happening here— Neve didn’t even know how one would begin to explain it— but some priestesses from other countries were curious enough to come to Valleyda, to be part of the movement. The Order was still smaller than it had been before banishing dissenters to the Rylt, but its growth was slow and steady.
One of the priestesses exiting the Shrine carried a bloodstained cup— Arick’s daily contribution. Neve had never known him to be squeamish, but recently he’d either sent his sacrifice with a priestess or brought the cup himself, rather than offering straight from the vein. It still worked. Blood was blood, and Arick’s was what had woken the branch shards in the first place, made them able to draw the white trees out of the forest.
“The Consort Elect will arrive shortly to observe the new arrival,” Kiri said, coming level with Neve. “Are you planning to stay?”
She wasn’t. Neve was headed to the garrison, where she would ask Noruscan, her captain of the guard, if he’d received any reports from the Wilderwood. Kiri knew this. Still, she asked, like she was daring Neve to come up with a different answer.
“I’m retiring for the evening.” Neve turned away, headed down the path. “Tell Arick to meet me in my chambers, when you’re finished.”
She needed to talk to him. Arick was uncharacteristically cautious about Red, too, warning Neve that the woman who returned might not be the woman they’d lost, that the binds of the Wilderwood were difficult to untangle. The way he spoke about her was almost cold. It made Neve wonder why he was doing this, sometimes, when she had the energy to wonder such things, but Red and Arick had always been a complicated equation. The threads binding them all were wound in inextricable knots.
She was halfway down the path when Kiri spoke again. “We made you a Queen for many reasons, Neverah. You seem to only think of one.”
Her footsteps faltered, stopped.
“Not just to bring Redarys back.” Kiri’s voice snapped on Red’s name. “Not just for revenge against the Wolf. For the restoration of our gods. I begin to worry that you might falter in your work should your sister reappear.”
Would she? Neve didn’t know. But the cold magic coiled in her palms felt like reassurance, like safety and control, and that would be hard to give up. “That won’t happen.”
“I certainly hope not.” A pause, and Kiri’s voice slanted low. “Perhaps we were too hasty, in the making of your reign. In the making of you.”
The words recalled a familiar idea, a dark shape in a dark room Neve kept carefully closed off. It haunted the corners of her mind when she couldn’t sleep, a shadow of a thought that wouldn’t leave her alone.
So Neve didn’t think. Instead, she strode to the priestess. She touched Kiri’s arm and let all that strange, dark power go.
It had been an accident, the first time she did it, touching the back of Arick’s hand to ask him to pass the wine. Cold had sparked between them, like recognizing like. It was enough to make him yelp.