She resolved not to let him see it.
Red was on her second cup of weak tea when Lyra walked through the broken arch of the dining room, pulling leaves from her hair. Her tor clattered to the table as she sat across from Red, wrinkling her nose at the teapot. “I hate this stuff.”
“It’s all I could find.” The blade’s edge was dark, smeared with Lyra’s blood and something like sap. “What happened?”
“More missing sentinels.” Lyra pulled a cloth from her pocket and rubbed it along the tor’s edge. It didn’t do much other than spread the muck around, and she quickly abandoned the endeavor with a low curse. “Cut up a few shadow-creatures, but I couldn’t do anything about the holes. My blood won’t touch them anymore. Doesn’t do a damn thing.”
More holes. He’d healed them all, nearly given up himself to do it, only for more to appear mere hours later. “Eammon healed them all last night. All the breaches.” Red sighed. “Didn’t take long for new ones to open.”
The other woman’s eyebrows flicked up, a thoughtful expression on her elfin face. Lyra set her tor aside. “Self-martyring bastard.” Despite her earlier protestation, she tugged over the teapot and poured herself a cup. Then she sat, peering at Red through the steam as it wreathed her dark curls. “Do you want to help him?”
“Of course I do.” The question was unexpected, but the answer was so automatic that Red didn’t have time to be caught off guard.
Lyra settled in her seat, legs crossed and tea cupped between her palms, watching Red like she was weighing something in her mind. Finally, her dark eyes closed, long lashes sweeping her cheeks. “He’s kept it from you. You know that, right?”
She did. In Red’s mind, bones wrapped around the base of a tree, tangled with vines.
“He’s done it for so long, and I don’t think he’ll stop. Especially not now.” Lyra sighed, sipped her tea. “I don’t know how it works. Not fully. The way the Wolf and the Wilderwood tangle together and how they come apart. But I know that if anything is going to change, Red, it will have to be you that does it.”
Choice. A memory of rustling leaves and cracking branches, forest sounds shaped to a word.
“If I knew what you had to do, I’d tell you. Even though Eammon would hate me for it. But I don’t.” She placed her chipped teacup on the table, next to her tor. “Something about this is different, both with you and with the Wilderwood. Something more than Eammon holding it back. And you’re the only one who can figure it out.”
Their eyes locked across the table. Red nodded.
Another beat of silence, then Red pushed back her chair, stood. “Do you want bread?”
Lyra shook her head. Red grabbed two slices— one for her, one for Eammon. A letdown of a parting gift, after he’d given her a bridal cloak and the tangled thread of his history. She trudged up the stairs like stones were tied around her feet.
Eammon sat at his desk, clothed now and mostly scrubbed of blood and sap, though a streak of green-threaded burgundy still slashed behind one ear. He’d bound his hair, messily, and was fully absorbed in an open book. Red craned her neck to see what he was reading, but she didn’t recognize the language.
“It’s rude to read over someone’s shoulder,” he muttered as he turned a page.
She tried to quip, but he was close enough to reach out and touch, and that fact filled her mind like fog in a jar. Instead she took a piece of bread and placed it on the page. He gave an affronted snort before picking it up, taking a bite with his eyes still tracking over words.
Red sat on the bed and watched him, cataloging his movements. His finger brushed back and forth over the corner of the page while he read it, then dipped behind to turn. His foot bounced beneath the desk. Hair fell over his forehead, and he pushed it back, only for it to fall again.
“I’m leaving today,” she whispered.
The line of his shoulders went rigid.
Her chest was a cage for things she couldn’t trap into language. The only words that seemed right were too vast, too heavy. A frailty would be wrought by them, and Red couldn’t afford to be frail now.
So instead, she repeated herself. “I’m coming back.”
He took a shuddering breath, closed his book. “Think about it, Red. You don’t—”
“Stop.” Red stood, went to stand in the tiny gap between him and the desk. “We aren’t having this discussion again. I’ll stop Neve, get her to reverse whatever damage she’s done. And then I will be right back here, Wolf, and you’d better be prepared to tell me what I have to do to save you from these damn woods.”