Thief-furtive, Red crept from her room. It was too cold to forgo shoes, really, a pervasive chill in the air that the half-forest walls didn’t cut, but her boots were still caked in enough mud to make her clumsy. She wanted to be able to run if she needed to.
The sky through the cracked, domed window above the foyer was mostly unchanged. Maybe slightly darker, if she squinted, but still twilight. The Wilderwood seemed caught in a perpetual gloaming, trapped between day and dusk.
A murmur came through the broken arch across the hall, too muffled to make out, but the cadence and low, graveled tone were familiar. The Wolf.
Red kept her back against the wall as she inched closer to the arch. Feeling the stone behind her was somehow reassuring, even moss-furred as it was, a solid thing to hold on to.
“She’s here?” A different voice, answering Eammon’s indistinct mutter. It at least sounded human, touched with a melodious accent that reminded her of Raffe’s. The laugher from before? “So that’s why the Wilderwood seemed so restless.”
“Restless is one way to put it,” Eammon grumbled.
“I would’ve gone with desperate.” This from a new voice, masculine and deep, but not as rough as Eammon’s. The voice she’d heard from behind the door, cursing after the clatter. “The Wilderwood needs two, and it knows she’s here now. You’ve held it alone for too long.”
A pause. “We’ve had this discussion,” Eammon said, clipped and stern.
No answer, though Red thought she heard a sigh. A moment, then the musical voice spoke again. “Well, did she find you?”
“In the library,” Eammon answered. “How’d she know to go to the damn library?”
“It’s not like there’s anywhere else to go, really. You can’t hide from her, Eammon, no more than you could from the others. What’d you expect?”
In response, Eammon grumbled a long and mostly unintelligible curse, something about the Five Kings and what they could do with certain appendages.
“Where is she now?” the second, masculine voice asked. “Do you know? Or did you just turn her out of the library and hope for the best?”
“I told her to stay in the gate and away from the trees,” Eammon answered. He neglected to mention the third rule, Red noticed, the one about staying out of his way. The omission seemed deliberate.
The masculine voice, admonishing: “Do you think that will change anything?”
Silence, tense as a bowstring. Red found herself holding her breath.
“There’s a breach to the east.” The other, melodic voice gently changed the subject. “Nothing’s come through from the Shadowlands yet, but I’m sure it won’t be long. The sentinel tree was half covered in rot when I saw it earlier, and sinking fast. I threw some blood on it, but it didn’t make much difference.” A light sigh. “There’s been more breaches than usual lately.”
Shadowlands. Here was another fairy tale suddenly made concrete. The Shadowlands were the prison the Wilderwood created, a place to trap monsters. Dread prickled at the back of Red’s neck.
“Far more breaches,” the deep voice agreed. “I haven’t found a sentinel tree free of shadow-rot in days. Some of them aren’t very far gone, but it won’t take long before they show up here. That’s a lot of potential holes for something to come through.”
The forest had been empty of monsters when Red entered. At least, empty of the kind that had supposedly come from the Wilderwood before Kaldenore went to the Wolf— shape-shifting things made of shadow, formed from scraps of forest and bone. Red hadn’t thought much of it, preoccupied with running from fanged trees that wanted her blood. But this mention of the Shadowlands, of a breach, of something coming through . . .
“The Wilderwood is weak.” Eammon, tired. “But I can fix it.”
“Not without a knife.” The musical voice, shaded dark. “Not without a knife, or without becoming—”
“It doesn’t matter how I do it, so long as it’s done.”
“If she’s here, it’s because she’s needed, Eammon.” The second, deeper voice, brusque. “Whether you want that or not.”
“Getting one more person tangled in this mess has never helped before. Not in a way that lasts.” The sound of a chair scraping across the floor. “You know that, Fife. It never has, and it never will.”
Red’s heartbeat thudded in the hollow of her throat.
The Wolf rounded the edge of the archway with fire sparking in amber eyes, his jaw clenched tight. Red pushed off the wall to meet him, hands balled into fists at her sides. Behind Eammon, she saw fleeting glimpses of two other people— a small, delicately featured woman with golden-brown skin, and a pale, lanky figure with a shock of reddish-gold hair— but all her attention was commanded by the Wolf, by the terrible possibilities of what she’d overheard and what it could mean. “What’s breached?”