And Neve was nowhere to be seen.
Apprehension crawled up Red’s throat. She crept forward, between the carvings of Second Daughters and the Five Kings. “Neve?”
“Here.” Her sister’s voice rose from behind the statue, muffled by the curtain. It reminded Red of the day before she left. Neve rushing through the morning-lit archway, candle guttering and voice rasping, begging her one last time to run.
Red felt like running now.
Cautiously, she moved farther into the Shrine. She picked up the curtain, candlelight flickering over her hands as she lifted it away.
The cavern behind was massive, far larger than before. But that wasn’t what set shock deep in her belly, what made her mouth fall open.
It was the sentinels.
Branches cut through the stone floor while rotting, shadow-dripping roots spanned the dark ceiling, a forest growing in the wrong direction. Scarlet stains marked the bone-white bark, smears like handprints.
Anchored in rock, watered with blood. Sentinels, but inverted, twisted, so the pent-up magic that made the Shadowlands could be freed. The Wilderwood taken and turned to horror, power tainted with the darkness it held back, ripped up and harvested.
Deep within Red’s chest, her shard of the forest mourned, a soundless scream rattling her bones and making her muscles go numb.
She didn’t know she’d fallen to her knees until the stone bit into them, a sharp ache that still held no candle to the pain reverberating from the Wilderwood. A high, keening noise echoed around her ears, she and the sentinels in chorus.
“See?” Kiri’s voice was cold and clinical. Red saw her through tear-blurred vision, a slash of white skin and red hair against the sickly trees, the same colors as the bark and the blood. “I knew it’d be more apparent here, in our grove. The Wilderwood is in her still, Neverah, and if you want her back, we’ll have to cut it out.” Her eyes gleamed, fixed on Red like a predator’s. “It will weaken the cursed forest further, losing its anchor. This could be a blessing.”
Neve’s face was drawn, but her mouth was a decided line, and agonized love shone in her eyes.
It made all this so much worse, that love.
“You can’t.” Red shook her head, though the movement was agony against the rioting, twisting thread of magic in her center. “Neve, you can’t do this.”
Shadow hissed as it dripped from the roots above their heads, liquid rot. With every drop that hit the floor, the veins in Kiri’s and Neve’s wrists flared black.
And Neve didn’t answer.
A glint of silver— Kiri drew a blade from within her sleeve.
She swept forward, blade held high, then slashed it down Red’s forearm. Red had the mental clarity to roll away, to keep the knife from going deep, but the blade sliced enough of her to make her bleed. She clapped her other hand over it, Eammon’s voice echoing between her ears—don’t bleed where the trees can taste it.
Abruptly, the keening of the inverted sentinels silenced, like they’d all heard the slash.
Like they could smell her blood.
Kiri pried Red’s hand from the cut, peered at it. “That can’t be right,” she muttered, the cadence veering out of sane rhythm, her voice jagging higher. “That can’t be right! Every Second Daughter is bound!” She raised the knife again.
“Kiri!” Neve, her voice strained, like she’d had to call it up from some hidden place. Indecision was written into every line of her, her mind changing direction too quickly for her body to follow. Her hands outstretched, her eyes wide, darkness gathering in her wrists.
But Red didn’t have time to figure out if this was what Neve wanted or if it had spiraled out of her control— she was listening to the silence of the inverted sentinels, and remembering Eammon’s voice, and careening rapidly toward a plan.
Kiri raged on. “If I have to cut to your heart to find the damn roots, I—”
Red reached up, snatched the knife away too quickly for Kiri to react. Teeth bared, she ran the blade across her palm, nearly deep enough to see the gleam of bone. She’d done this only once, she didn’t know how much blood she’d need. Then, with a snarling, animal sound, she slammed her hand to the floor. “Go on!” she screamed at the Wilderwood. “Isn’t this what you wanted? Take me! Take what you fucking need!”
There was a moment of hesitation, as if the Wilderwood had to question itself, had to decide how to use what she was offering. The shard of it she carried, the seed of her magic, bloomed only to wither again in a parade of indecision.