No white trees grew past the gate.
The tremble in her legs steadied. Red wasn’t sure what safety looked like here, but for now being away from the trees was enough.
The slice on her cheekbone still stung. Hissing, Red gingerly touched the cut. Her fingertips came away stained with watery blood. Ahead of her, the weathered door loomed.
He was somewhere in there. She could feel it, almost, an awareness that pricked at the back of her neck, plucked at the Mark on her arm. The Wolf, the keeper of the Wilderwood and alleged jailer of gods. She had no idea what he’d do with her now that she was here. Maybe she’d escaped his forest only to be thrown back in, the Wolf making sure the bloodthirsty trees finished whatever they’d started.
But the only other option was to stay out here, in a chilled, unnatural twilight, waiting to see if the iron gate would be enough to hold the Wilderwood back.
Well, damn the myths. She was just as much a part of those stories as he was, and if her destruction was imminent, she’d rather be the architect than a bystander. Hitching her bag on her shoulder, Red strode forward and shoved the door open.
She expected darkness and rot, for the inside of the castle to look as uninhabited as the outside. And it would have, were it not for the sconces.
No, not quite sconces— what she’d thought was a sconce was actually a woody vine, snaking around the nearly circular walls. Flames burned at equidistant points along its length, but the vine itself wasn’t consumed, and the flames didn’t spread farther. She couldn’t even see char marks, as if the flames were simply being held there, anchored to the wood through some invisible bond.
However strange the light was, it illuminated her surroundings. She stood in a cavernous foyer under a high, domed ceiling. A cracked solarium window filtered twilight over her feet. Emerald moss carpeted the floor, clustered with toadstools. Before her, a staircase, moss covering the first few steps, leading up to a balcony ringing the top of the tower. She could barely make out the impression of vines through the shadows, twining over the railing, dripping toward the floor. The corridor she’d seen from outside stretched to the left of the staircase, and the sunken room to the right, its arched entrance broken at the top.
All of it was empty.
Red’s boots made soft shushing noises against the moss as she stepped forward. When she looked more closely, there were signs of occupancy— a dark cloak hung on the knob of the staircase, three pairs of scuffed boots sat by the broken archway into the other room. But nothing moved in the ruin, and everything was unnaturally silent. Red frowned.
Behind her, a light blinked out. Slowly, Red looked over her shoulder.
Another flame along the strange vine extinguished.
She almost tripped in her haste toward the staircase, noting as she put her foot on the bottom step that there was no light up there at all. Red backpedaled, changed direction, wheeling around the stairs. Light glimmered ahead of her, flames lining another staircase, this one leading down instead of up. Red ran toward it, the room around her plunging rapidly into twilight.
The last flame blinked out as she reached the stairs. She paused, breathing hard, waiting to see if the lights before her would do the same. But the flames remained upright and glowing, lit along another strange, unburnt vine.
The carpet of moss covered the first few steps here, too, but soon it gave way to thin roots, crisscrossing over the stone like veins. Red kept her eyes on her feet to keep from tripping, counting her steps as a mainstay against panic.
The stairs ended on a small landing, housing a wooden door and nothing else. Red pushed it open before she could talk herself out of it.
It didn’t creak. Warm, friendly light flooded the edges of the door, seeped onto the landing like a rising sun. Red stepped in as silently as she could. She froze, familiarity first a blade, then a balm.
A library.
Back— she stopped herself before she thought the word home; it would hurt too badly and didn’t feel wholly accurate, anyway— back in Valleyda, the library had been one of the places she spent the majority of her time. Neve had lessons most days, things beyond the simple writing and arithmetic Red had been taught, so Red was left largely to herself. She’d read most everything in the palace library, some things twice. It was one of the few ways to soothe her mind when it started churning and spilling over itself, connecting fears in spiderwebs she couldn’t disentangle. The scent of paper, the orderliness of printed words, the sensation of page edges beneath her fingers smoothed the waves of her thoughts to placidity.
Most of the time, anyway.