Red lunged at the bars, her unbroken hand smacking against the metal. She recognized the warmth in his voice, the shape of things it didn’t say. “If you touched her,” she rasped, “I’ll kill you.”
Solmir watched her with unreadable eyes. His hands turned to fists, then relaxed. “I didn’t,” he said, quiet enough to mask whatever emotion lived in it.
Behind him, Arick pulled in a shaking breath. “We just wanted to save you.” His eyes rose, bruised and dark. “Especially once we learned what was coming. We just wanted to save you, Red.”
“You can calm down the groveling, then.” Now composed, Solmir propped his foot against the wall again. “Redarys saved herself.”
Her teeth ground together. “I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The roots.” Solmir rolled his eyes. “You haven’t taken them, though it’s clear you care for the Wolf. You’re a practical woman, apparently. You’ve learned love isn’t reason enough for ruin. You chose to save yourself.”
Choice.
She thought of the Wilderwood in the cavern, that awareness that it needed more from her, something it would no longer deign to take. She thought of Eammon, straining under the weight of the sentinels as they came for her again and again, trying to finish something started long ago. She thought of bones at the base of a tree, testaments to all the Second Daughters who came before, drained by a desperate forest that hadn’t yet learned its lesson. Hadn’t yet learned that something taken would only wither, while something given might grow.
She thought of roots.
Solmir’s lip curled. “The Wilderwood will fall. The Wolf will die. The Kings will be freed.” He shrugged, eyes narrowed, voice rueful. “And everyone will get what they wanted.”
Understanding came like the sudden bloom of a night flower, unfurling all at once in new light.
A choice had to be made, and here was hers.
“I’ll take them,” Red breathed.
Three pairs of eyes shot to her, confusion in each gaze, but Red paid no attention. Mustering up all her focus, all her will, she pulled at the thin thread of deep-green power in her center, made it bloom despite the deadening walls. It felt like it might kill her, every tug of blood through her veins a challenge, but still she pulled.
Red took a deep breath and pressed the edge of her sliced palm to the bone of her hip, pushing until the cut split farther and fresh blood seeped from her skin. With a pained gasp, she slapped her bloody hand to the floor of her cell.
Bleeding, and hoping with everything in her the trees could taste it.
“I want the roots,” she said, voice bell-clear and carrying. “I understand what it means, and I want them anyway, because I am for the Wolf, and the Wolves are for the Wilderwood.”
For a breath, the four of them froze in suspended silence. Then— a roar, a rush, as if a million stones overturned at once, as if something sped under the ground like some great beast flashing beneath the surface of the sea.
Roots, rushing from the north to flow into her waiting wound.
The floor cracked as the roots of the Wilderwood thrust up toward her hand, miles traveled in an instant at the call of her blood. The first press of it against the slice in her skin stung, but after that, the way the roots seeped in and curled around her bones felt like home.
The Wilderwood had finally learned, that night when Eammon almost lost himself to it. A Mark and words on a tree and invaded blood wouldn’t sustain it anymore. It needed her to choose it.
To choose him.
And she had been, by slow increments, ever since she met him. Choosing the black curl of his hair and the rough texture of his scars, the way the corner of his lip lifted, just so, when she said something he thought was funny. How his brows lowered when he read and how right before he fell asleep he’d let out a long, soft sigh and Kings how his mouth felt on hers, how he clung to her like ivy against the stone walls of their Keep.
It was, in the end, the easiest choice she’d ever made.
The seed in her grew and grew, unfettered by anything because it was hers, hers by word and blood.
It was a quiet storm of root and thorn and branch, the deluge of the Wilderwood finally coming for her— not as a predator, but as a missing piece, grateful to finally fit against the splintered edges it had left. The thin tendril of power she’d been given four years ago sped out to meet the rest of itself, and when she breathed deep, she tasted loam, growing things, honey.
Arick, shadow-thin, threw an arm over his face. Solmir pushed off from the wall with his teeth bared. “Shadows damn you—”