She was carefully climbing the stairs with her hoard when she saw him.
He stood just inside the still-open door, limned in darkening light. The Wolf’s head bowed forward, exhaustion in the slump of his shoulders, hair unbound and shadowing his eyes. One hand held his dagger, the other covered in cuts that wept some slow blood but mostly a thin, greenish sap. Bark covered the skin right above his wristbone. Though bent, she could still tell he was taller. Magic twined around him like a wreath.
Red stayed silent, but still his eyes snapped to her, like the atmosphere changed with her presence. Eammon straightened, his sliced-up hand pressing to his middle, lips lifting back from his teeth in a grimace of pain as he sheathed his dagger. His eyes glittered, rung by dark circles, the whites shaded emerald. It looked like he might collapse where he stood, like refusal to look weak in front of Red was the only thing keeping him standing.
Maybe she should’ve said something, but Red had no idea what words would be right. What was she supposed to do, ask him how his evening was going?
Connected gazes, unreadable emotions flickering across two faces. Then Eammon jerked his chin, a truncated greeting and dismissal in one, and slowly climbed the stairs up to the second floor of the Keep.
The next morning, there’d been three new sentinel saplings in the corridor. The sign of three new breaches opening in the Wilderwood, three new opportunities for monsters to escape. Three new places for Eammon to bleed as he tried to hold all the tattered edges of the forest closed.
That’d been the moment her plan started to form.
Now, in what passed for very early morning, she stood at the door to the back courtyard, her hand against the wood but not quite pushing it open. She’d briefly considered attempting this experiment with one of the saplings inside the Keep, but then she might be seen.
And Eammon had been so insistent about her not bleeding.
Her stomach churned as she finally strode out into the swirling fog, toward the crumbled end of the corridor where saplings stretched bony branches into the pale-lavender sky. The glass vial she’d nicked from the storage closet in the kitchen was slick in her hand. At the bottom, scarlet as the cloak in her closet, three drops of blood.
It wasn’t much. There’d been no weapons in her room, so Red just worked at a hangnail until she’d torn it off, squeezing her finger to drip the scant blood into the vial.
Just enough to see if it made a difference. Just enough to see if there was any other recourse than trying to use the magic that had almost killed her sister.
The memory of the Wilderwood chasing her after the thorn cut her cheek still made her pulse thunder. But, she rationalized, that blood had been straight from the vein— the only way the Wilderwood would accept blood from the Wolf, according to Lyra. And Eammon was part of the forest, tangled up in it . . . maybe giving blood the same way he did was what made the Wilderwood come for her, what made it try to worm its way beneath her skin. If she bled first into the vial, there’d be no wound for the forest to try to invade.
And she had to do something. Eammon was clearly at the end of a fraying rope; the thought of shadow-creatures breaking free of the forest was unconscionable.
Her magic wasn’t something that could be used, of that she was convinced. Fear drowned her, fear had its claws deep in her heart. Magic was a dead end, but surely there was something else she could do. There had to be.
Red stopped in front of the sentinel farthest from the gate. Mossy rock shored around its roots, mist tangled like ribbon in the thin beginnings of its branches. She didn’t touch it, but she drew closer than she had to any of the other sentinels she’d seen, and something about being close made the atmosphere change. The air seemed to hum against her skin, strange but not unpleasant, and when she blinked, she saw golden light behind her eyelids.
A deep breath. A straightened spine. It took her a couple of tries to uncork the vial, and when she did, the coppery scent of blood seemed stronger than it had right to. With a steady hand, Red held it over the roots of the sapling.
“What are you doing?”
His voice was soft. She looked over her shoulder.
Eammon stood just behind her, fog eddying around his boots and in the tendrils of his loose, too-long hair. His face betrayed nothing, eyes dark and inscrutable, full lips slightly parted.
The vial stayed steady in her hand, but she didn’t pour it out. “I think you were lying to me before,” Red said. “I think my blood can kill shadow-creatures and heal the sentinels. If Fife’s and Lyra’s and yours can because of the Mark, then so can mine, no matter how . . . how different I am from the other Second Daughters.”