It was only a panicked flash, vague and unclear, shrouded in branch-shaped shadows. Up until this moment, she’d almost thought she’d imagined it. But now . . .
Now she’d seen them in the flesh. Now she knew whom those hands belonged to, and knew no part of that night had been imagined.
The hands she’d seen were the Wolf’s.
Chapter Six
R ed gripped at the roots of her hair until her fingers felt numb, forehead pressed against the heels of her hands. That night still etched in her mind with crystal clarity, at least up to a point. Once the thieves who’d followed them attacked and the bloodshed began, she’d blocked parts of it out.
But the flash behind her eyelids of something happening elsewhere, of scarred hands and immediate panic . . . she remembered that, now, remembered it with such detail she couldn’t believe she’d once thought it imagined. A moment of connection to someone other than herself, and that someone had been the Wolf.
He’d been there, somehow— been there when magic rioted out of the Wilderwood, when it climbed through the wound in her palm and made its home in her chest. Was it his fault, then? Had the forest shattered magic into her at his direction?
Gently, she laid her fingertips against her cheek, still blood-smeared from the wound he’d taken. If the Wolf had given her this damn power on purpose, surely he wouldn’t have tried to send her back? Wouldn’t have given her rules that were supposed to keep her safe from his forest?
Red groaned against her palms.
She was tempted to stay seated on the staircase until Eammon deigned to emerge from his library, to see if she could wrench more answers out of him. But Red was weary, and the floor was cold, and the idea of waiting for someone who explicitly wanted to avoid her was exhausting.
He’d told her not to leave the Keep, so logically, the Keep was safe. And it was her new home. As unwieldy as that thought felt, she might as well explore it.
Wearily, Red stood and started back up the long, root-threaded staircase.
There was light at the top of the stairs, as if someone had come along and reignited the fires jeweling the unburning vine in the foyer. Red paused on the landing, peering at the strange, makeshift sconce.
The flames were anchored on the vine. It should be burning. But through the bright, yellow-white hearts of the flames, she could see that the vine itself appeared wholly unharmed.
She thought of the wood shards in the library she’d first assumed were candles, how they also carried flame but stayed unburnt. Wood and vine, both growing things, locked in some strange symbiotic relationship. The splintered power in her chest felt restless.
Red backed away, venturing into the center of the ruined foyer. Above her, lavender sky shone through the cracked solarium glass, neither any brighter nor any darker than before she’d fled down the stairs. No moon, no stars, nothing to give any indication of time passed. Just endless twilight.
Though somewhat dim, the light from the burning vine and the solarium window was steady, and Red could see the remains of carpet on the mossy floor, shreds of something that had once been grand. The threads of nearly rotted tapestries hung on the walls, tangled with vines and thin roots. Too muddied to tell what the pictures might’ve been, for the most part, though she could pick out the vague shape of faces in one of them.
She frowned at it, eyes narrowed to put together the patterns. A man and a woman, it looked like. Holding hands, maybe. Her hair was long. His eyes were dark.
Gaya and Ciaran. Eammon’s parents. If she needed further proof that he was who he said, this would be it. Even though the tapestry was worn nearly to ruin, she could tell the man depicted here was not the man she’d just met in the library. His face was softer, more classically handsome. His chin canted upward at an angle that dared the viewer to try him, an expression she knew just by looking at it wouldn’t be worn naturally on Eammon’s face.
And Gaya . . . she was more muddied than Ciaran, the shape of her harder to make out. Beautiful, aloof in a way that the smudged tapestry highlighted rather than obscured.
That frustrated Red on some deep level, a knotted emotion she couldn’t quite parse out to its composite parts. All the Second Daughters, more icon than individual. Defined by what they were instead of who.
She frowned a moment longer at the tapestry before walking over to the broken archway at the other side of the stairs.
The arch led into what looked like a sunken dining room, one chipped stone step at the edge of the threshold. A large window framed the courtyard on the right side, the glass choked with climbing greenery and thin, spiderwebbed cracks. A scuffed wooden table sat in the center of the room, with three chairs clustered haphazardly at one end. On the back wall, another, smaller door on rusted hinges led to what she assumed was the kitchen. Other than that, the room was empty.