And she knew, somehow, that this wasn’t everything the Wilderwood needed. That this was more complicated than a sliced hand on its roots. There was still a piece she hadn’t quite grasped, a necessity beyond mere healing— a new factor in the tangled, complex equation of trees and Second Daughters. Something the forest wouldn’t take unless she understood exactly what it was, what it would cost, and offered it anyway.
We will wait for your choice, it’d said as she slipped out between the trees. The decision it’d made, that night in the clearing. The Wilderwood had taken before, taken what wasn’t its own, and it was never enough. It waited for her choice, and that choice must be made in full knowledge of what it meant, not in a moment of panicked desperation.
The seed of her magic coiled deeper, down and away from the forest outside. It would wait.
All of this in a torrent, a rush of knowledge from the shard of strange power she’d carried for four years. Red couldn’t make sense of it, not now, so she just pressed her bloody hand to the floor hard enough to feel rock dust in her veins.
“Blasphemy.” Kiri didn’t go for the knife. She stretched her hands out, cold and darkness gathering in her veins. “Godless, heretical thing.”
Red clenched her eyes shut, hand still pressed to the ground, and waited for that frozen, inverted magic.
But nothing came. Only a gurgle.
She looked behind her— Kiri, held suspended, Neve’s hands clasped on either side of her throat. The same darkness she’d seen Kiri use gathered in her sister’s hands, cold enough to chill.
“Neve?” Red’s voice sounded so small.
Her twin’s face was not apologetic. Darkness had overtaken the whites of her eyes, swallowing her irises in black; the veins below her lids ran inky. “I won’t leave you,” she snarled, showing her teeth. “I won’t leave you to him, Red, but I can’t . . . not like this.”
Stillness. Red’s hand still pressed to the ground, blood pumping out of her and into the twisted sentinels, and she and her sister stared at each other, veins lined in black and green.
Then, a rumble.
The roots in the ceiling vibrated, breaking through the rock that held them, scattering dust. Golden phosphorescence swirled under shadow-rotted bark, gathering the darkness like a bandage soaking up blood as the sentinels sank down from swollen, misshapen trees to the branches they’d been before. A drop of shadow froze before Red’s face, shuddering in suspended motion, before reversing direction and seeping back into the roots above— inverted magic, righting itself.
It weakened Neve’s grip, made the dark veins beneath her skin stutter. Her hands dropped, and Kiri, now freed from her frozen hold, rounded on her with a shriek.
“You won’t stop this!” Kiri screamed it, eyes alight, everything in them mad and empty. “You won’t keep us godless!”
She raised her hand to strike, gathering shards of that stuttering dark power, but then a rock fell from above, knocking her prone and out of sight. Neve disappeared in a cloud of dust, slumping sideways, her eyes rolling up in her head.
Roots pulled out of the ceiling, destabilizing it; the floor shuddered as the barren branches cutting through the rock shrank away. It sounded like an earthquake, it felt like an apocalypse. Red’s vision dimmed at the edges, her cheek pressed against the breaking stone as her hand trailed blood across the floor. All she wanted was to rest, to lie still . . .
Another rock fell, landed on Red’s uncut hand. She screamed as the bones shattered, but it was enough of a shock to make her move. Adrenaline helped her push the rock away, rise to staggering feet. Lurching, she tried to move toward where she’d last seen her sister. “Neve!”
No answer but breaking floor, no sound but cracking stone. “Neve!” A sob built in her throat, sharp as the bones in her mangled hand.
The ceiling wouldn’t hold much longer. Larger pieces fell, cracking against the floor, and the doorway grew rapidly smaller as ruin piled around it. Swallowing another sob, Red dashed for the narrow opening, spilling past stone Second Daughters and burning candles, bloody and broken.
Her knees hit the cobblestones outside the Shrine. She tried to rise, failed. A scream hissed through her teeth, pain hitting her in waves.
“Redarys?”
Arick’s boots filled her vision as he crouched in the autumn sun. His voice was harsh, jagged. “What have you done? Where’s Neve?”
Red didn’t answer. Instead, she focused on the cobblestones behind him. On what wasn’t there. Her pain brought clarity, stripped the truth bare in her voice. “You don’t have a shadow.”