A sound ripped through the quiet. A roar.
Fife met her eyes. Simultaneously, they broke into a run.
Branches whipped past, Red barely avoiding their sharp ends, still remembering Eammon’s rule, the only one he seemed intent on her keeping—don’t bleed where the trees can taste it. Labored breath a harsh bellows in her throat, the thrash of Fife’s feet through the underbrush making a metronome. Don’t bleed don’t bleed don’t bleed.
Voices up ahead, curses made ethereal by layers of fog. Possibilities flickered through her mind and lent her speed— Eammon wounded, Eammon gored, Eammon dying in puddles of leaf-flecked blood.
But when she reached him, Eammon was whole. Whole and snarling.
He stood with his back to them, arms outstretched, precisely cut slashes in both palms leaking green-chased scarlet down his wrists. Before him, a sentinel listed to the side, covered in black rot, on the verge of collapse. Roots slashed through rotten dirt, the slow-spreading ring of darkness like a seeping wound. Bloody handprints marked the ground, and there the edge of infection receded, barely. Already, the small amount of forest floor Eammon had managed to clear was rotting again.
Instinctively, Red took a step back, colliding with a warm figure. At first, she thought it was Fife. But the arm attached to the hand clapping over her mouth was clad to the wrist in gray leather vambraces.
“Quiet,” an unfamiliar voice hissed in her ear.
Red didn’t need the directive. The creature stalking back and forth across the rotting sentinel’s roots, as if guarding it, stole any speech from her throat.
“Wolf-snarls, small snarls, snarled in the trees.” The thing might’ve been a man, once, and that made it worse. The way he moved was wrong, low and lurching, on legs with knees bent backward. His shirt hung open at the arm, a long, dark slash marking his swollen bicep. Shadow crawled from the wound, inched over his skin, rotting it as surely as it rotted the ground. “Saw the shadows,” he singsonged, pacing back and forth. “Saw the shadows and the things in the shadows, and the things in the shadows have teeth.”
Eammon’s bloody fingers twitched, trying to call forth branch and thorn. The whites of his eyes shaded greener, veins in his neck turning verdant, but other than a bare twitch of the underbrush, the Wilderwood didn’t answer.
Blood and magic, both running thin.
A fractioned moment where the look on his face was close to helpless. Then, with a snarl, Eammon sliced into his palm again.
“Why aren’t you helping him?” Red tried to lunge forward, her whisper slashing through the air, but whoever held her had an iron grip. “Help him!”
“What do you want us to do, girl?” the voice behind her hissed. “Our blood won’t do shit for the Wilderwood, and we don’t need someone else getting shadow-infected.”
Her eyes darted, searching for Fife. He stood slightly behind her, among others clad in green and gray, blending into the colors of the dying forest. These must be the villagers he spoke of.
She caught his eye, wildly jerking her chin toward the falling sentinel in its spreading pool of rot. But Fife shook his head, fear in his eyes, and Red remembered what Eammon said in the tower— that Fife coming with him was too dangerous.
That someone already fallen would be looking to pull others in.
“How long can you last?” The thing advanced toward Eammon on twisted legs. One snapped, made weak by calcifying shadow. He dropped to his knees and kept coming, crawling through the rotten earth. “Not long, not long alone. Especially not now, now that the Wilderwood smells something fresh.”
Dark circles stood out around Eammon’s eyes as he knelt, pressed his bleeding palm to the earth again. This time, the shadow-rot didn’t recede at all. It inched unceasingly forward, and the leaves it touched on the forest floor crumpled, withered.
He couldn’t stop it alone.
Her body made the decision before her mind could make her stop. Red lurched, throwing herself out of the grip of whoever held her. They were surprised enough to let her go, and she slipped on the leaves, backpedaling away from the advancing tide of rotten ground.
Eammon’s gaze snapped to her, the frustration in his eyes blazing to fear. He shook his head, sharp, but Red ignored him. She moved quietly along the edge of the shadow-pit, hands opening and closing along with the bloom of forest magic in her middle. It pulled her toward the Wolf, the bond between them making it easier to grasp, easier to direct. The specter of dark memories tried to rear up from the corners of her mind, but her fear for Eammon eclipsed it, gave it no room. Power sang down her veins, washed them green.