Eammon finally broke, eyes closing as his face turned away. “So it does.” He started toward the gate, silent and stoic. “I have to go close the breach before that thing cobbles itself together again.” A press of his hand, the bloom of an opening in the iron. The gate swung out, stirring fog, and the Wolf stalked into the Wilderwood.
Red frowned after him as Eammon disappeared into the trees. Her limbs felt locked, paralyzed by fear and regret.
What Eammon wanted was impossible. Even if her power was something she could use, her mind was too shackled by fear to let her. Every time it surged, all she could see were her memories of carnage, and it froze her, choked her, focused everything in her only on lashing it down.
But the Wilderwood was darkening. Deteriorating. She’d seen the barest hint of the things it held back, and it was enough to fill her with a bone-deep terror of what else might be waiting.
If it failed— if the Shadowlands broke through completely, if monsters stalked the world like they had before— what would happen to them?
What would happen to Neve?
“Kings and shadows, I missed it.”
Lyra emerged from the fog. She frowned at the burn mark the shadow-creature left on the ground, fiddling with a vial of blood in her hand. “There’s a breach southward, right at the Valleydan border. I stayed far enough back to be safe but still managed to bloody it up. I could tell something had already escaped, but I thought I’d beat it here.”
“Eammon took care of it.” Red’s ankle tingled with the memory of his touch, incongruously gentle against his sharp anger, as she pointed beyond the gate. “He went that way, to close the breach.”
“Hmm.” A shrug of narrow shoulders as she turned into the eddying fog, headed toward the Keep. “Well. He doesn’t need me to navigate, then.”
The curved sword on Lyra’s back shone like a sickle moon. Earlier, Red had been too addled to take much notice of it, but now its shape looked somehow familiar. She studied it as she followed Lyra back to the castle, mostly to keep from thinking of Arick’s face on wrong bones, of Eammon stalking into the forest with a hand sliced to shit and barely bleeding.
Another moment of scrutiny, and the word she was searching for came to her. “Is that a tor?” Raffe had a tor, worn on his back for state functions. According to tradition, Meducian Councilors’ oldest children trained with them for a year after their parents were voted in, symbolizing that Councilors’ duty was to serve their country with all they had.
“Sure is.” She sounded almost amused.
“I thought they were ceremonial.”
“Technically.” Lyra didn’t draw the weapon, but her fingers closed gently around the hilt like a worry stone. “But they’re just as sharp as any back-alley dagger.”
They rounded the side of the Keep, approaching the ruined corridor that held Red’s room. Lyra walked down the sloping hill toward the white saplings in the rubble. Red hung back.
Roots and vines wound through the rocks at the end of the hall, clusters of moon-colored flowers twisting toward the fathomless twilight sky. There was a tilted beauty to it, the way the Keep and the forest tangled together, like one fed the other. A kind of beauty that made Red shiver, wild and feral and frightening.
Those had been leaves in Eammon’s wound, studding the edges of the cut. Tiny leaves in his green-threaded blood. She thought of the changes she’d seen in him when he worked his strange magic, bark on his forearms and shifting branches in his voice. The Wolf and the Wilderwood, tied together in ways she couldn’t quite fathom, the line between them constantly blurring.
Down by the saplings, Lyra shook her head. “Fife was right,” she called as she trudged back up the hill. “There’s more of them. Kings.” The weight of her sigh tossed one corkscrew curl up from her forehead. “Eammon will be bleeding for days.”
Red pressed her lips together.
Behind them, the door to the Keep banged open, Fife’s hair shining like the sun they couldn’t see. He looked to Lyra, mouth quirked, the first trace of pleasantry Red had seen on his face. “You’re back early.”
“Got hungry.” Both of their manners seemed to relax, like seeing the other calmed their nerves. “Did Eammon get more supplies? He said he was headed that way after healing the first breach this morning.”
“Yes, though his taste in cheese is still suspect. Next time, I’ll go, since he seems incapable of following a list.” Fife frowned down the hill at the saplings. “I told him those should be taken care of first. Before he moves the other.”