A pause. “I understand.” There was something almost puzzled in that layered, forest-laced voice. The god understood Fife’s desperate want, his willingness to do anything to save someone he loved, but didn’t quite know why.
Red bit her lip.
An emerald-veined palm reached out, fingers closing around Fife’s arm. Fife gasped, just once, then gritted his teeth. When the god’s hand dropped, a new Bargainer’s Mark bloomed on Fife’s skin.
Behind them, on the ground where Lyra lay, there came a deep breath, stirring the grass.
No words, just a sharp nod. Then Fife turned, all but running to Lyra. The freedom he’d wanted so badly, finally earned and then traded away.
The Wilderwood watched him go. Then green-drowned eyes turned to Red.
She wondered if she should approach like a supplicant, if she should kneel. Fife hadn’t, but Fife’s bargain had been more straightforward than Red’s would be.
She did neither of those things. Instead she stepped forward, looking up at him with her teeth set and her eyes narrowed, the same determination she’d once shown him in a library with a torn red cloak and a bloody cheek.
His shadow fell over her, and the form of it on the ground was a forest, the trees tall and straight. Antlers of alabaster wood sprouted from his forehead; ivy curled around his brow. His strange eyes peered down at her, amber surrounded in green, holding flickers of recognition. Like he knew her shape, but not the space she should occupy.
The Wilderwood had known her, and Eammon had known her. But when they were brought together, one made the other and indistinguishable, they’d become something new. Something that had no context for Second Daughters, no memory of embroidered cloaks and hair wrapped around bark. It was enough to make her falter, just for a moment.
Red drew herself up. Even before, she’d barely reached his shoulder, and now she had to squint to see his face.
When he spoke, his voice was vine and branch and root. “Redarys?” He said it like something forgotten, like he was straining to remember.
Red pitched her voice to carry, but still it came out small. “I’ve come to bargain with the Wilderwood.”
Silence. Something clouded his eyes, sorrow stretched to god-proportions and made unfamiliar.
In a move that might’ve been tentative, he stretched out his hand. Red placed hers in his green-veined palm. His scars were still there.
“What is it you wish?” Resonant, vibrating her bones.
She wished he’d never had to see his parents die. She wished the scars on his hands were from farming or blacksmithing or childish recklessness rather than cuts made to feed a forest. She wished that maybe they could’ve met differently, a man and a woman with no magic, no grand destiny, nothing but simple love.
And she wished to save Neve. She wished that this man she’d loved who’d become a god she didn’t know could reach down and pull her sister up from the shadows— the shadows Neve had chosen, in the end. A reclamation, a redeeming Red didn’t know the particulars of, but somehow, deeply, understood.
That same deep understanding let her know that simply bargaining to save her sister wouldn’t work. Her time tied to the Wilderwood gave her instinctive knowledge of its limitations, let her know you couldn’t just wish to pull someone from the Shadowlands. That door was closed, and opening it would take more than bargaining, would scour her heart in ways she couldn’t fathom yet.
There was so little she could do. But she could save Eammon. And maybe, together, they could find a way to save Neve.
“Give him back to me,” Red whispered.
The god cocked his head, regarding her through those eyes that were at once strange and familiar. The mouth she’d kissed parted. The hand that had been on her body tensed, and she felt everything, everything, a current of what they’d been running through them both like marrow through a bone.
“And what are you prepared to give?” he asked her in a voice that still held traces of Eammon’s, hidden in layers of thorn and leaf. “To bargain for a life requires binding.”
Red took his hand, pressed it to her heart, beating rabbit-rhythm. “I was bound once. Bind me again.”
The Wilderwood, golden and shining, looked at her through Eammon’s eyes.
“I love you, Eammon.” She pressed his hand harder, like she could imprint the knowledge on his skin. “Remember?”
And as roots spilled from his hand into her, she saw that he did.
A rush of golden light poured from Eammon’s fingers, finding holds in the gaps between her ribs, the hollows of her lungs. The network of the Wilderwood split itself neatly in two, roots stretching through her veins, blooming along her spine. It gave her itself, entire, making her the vessel instead of just the anchor, half a forest in her bones.