Eammon placed his hands right at the edge of the breach, fingertips a hairbreadth away from the spongy, rotten ground. His head bowed forward, all his concentration diverted to the task at hand. Another flaring of green in his veins, this time in his neck as well as his forearms. Something dark edged through the skin of his wrists, right above the bone. It looked almost like bark.
So distracted was she by the changes, Red didn’t notice the root snaking out of the underbrush until it hooked around her ankle.
Her startled cry was quick and strangled as she hit the ground, shins barking against rocks and raised roots. Vines studded in thorns wrapped her viper-quick, tying her to the forest floor. Deep in Red’s chest, the shard of magic the forest had left in her bloomed steadily, inexorably outward.
The Wilderwood hesitated a moment, all those white trees poised and waiting. Then they dove.
The thorns lashing Red down bit deep, bringing up blood. White roots burst from the ground around her, arched toward the ragged wounds the thorns opened in her skin. She screamed, pain and fear ripping through the silent forest.
“Redarys!”
Eammon stumbled up from the ground, legs unsteady, like whatever he’d been doing at the edge of the shadow-pit had left him a husk. Panic shone in his eyes, the whites of them once again tinted green, the veins in his fingers blazing emerald as he fumbled for the dagger at his belt. “Hold on, I—”
The Wilderwood drowned him out, shrilling triumphantly in a voice of cracking branches. The vines shackling Red opened new blooms, wide and pale in the unnatural twilight; the leaves beneath her blushed from faded autumn to summer-bright as her veins ran green and her mouth filled with the taste of earth. The splinter of magic in her middle grew up and out, stretching greedily toward the hungry white trees.
She thought of Gaya, root-riddled, consumed. Kaldenore, Sayetha, Merra, three more this forest had drained. It’d take what it needed and damn what was left, unless she found a way to stop it, to contain it, to cut it off—
With an inner strength born of distilled panic, Red took hold of the magic rushing out of her and snapped.
The forest exploded outward with a bone-rattling boom. Roots and branches and thorns skittered as Red shoved her magic down. It was painful, this denying, making herself a cage for a wild thing, but still she pushed it away, hiding it deep. Bound, banished, slashed off like her will was a knife.
The dirt-taste faded from her tongue; the veins in her wrist ran from verdant green to blue. The Wilderwood screamed, one more keening sound, then was silent.
She expected desolation when her eyes opened, but there was none, no torn limbs or felled trees. The Wilderwood stood still as a stunned animal. Red pushed up on shaky legs, dirt falling from her torn skirt, from her borrowed coat.
Eammon’s eyes were wide, the dagger held loose and forgotten in his hand. “What was that?”
“Don’t act like you don’t know, not when I just saw you try to use it.” The way his veins greened was near a mirror to hers. “Power. Power from this fucking forest. You were there when I got it. You were there when . . . when it took hold of me, that night. I saw you.”
The panic in Eammon’s eyes bloomed slowly into horror. “No,” he whispered, shaking his head. “I . . . I tried to stop it, I thought I stopped it from—”
A deep rumble cut him off, coming from the white roots cutting through rotten ground. It struck them both into silence, eyes locking to the tree.
“Shit.” Eammon flipped the dagger around in his fist, shoving her behind him with the other hand. “Shit.”
He didn’t go to the edge of the breach again, didn’t try to call up whatever arcane forest magic he’d used before. Instead he sliced into his palm, a moment of such nonchalant and unexpected violence that Red flinched.
But he wasn’t fast enough.
The edges of the shadow-pit receded with unnatural quickness, like water draining from the bottom of a pierced bowl. Rot drained into the tree roots, turning them pitch-dark, climbing up the white trunk and covering it almost completely in churning corruption.
Eammon lunged toward the tree, bleeding fist outstretched. But before he could reach it, the last bit of darkness drained from the dirt into the roots, and the ground around them erupted. Sharp twigs and leaves shot into the air, all tinged with shadowy black, throwing Eammon backward and away from the trunk as rot surged up almost to the branches.
Red crouched, arms thrown protectively over her head. The tree, now fully rotted, slowly began to sink into the ground.
Around them, the rest of the Wilderwood watched, still and silent and somehow mournful.