Pain laced Eammon’s features. The ragged hem of his shirt showed a stripe of blood-muddied skin. He opened his mouth, closed it again, throat working an empty swallow. Red, with nothing to feed into the waiting silence, just pressed her lips together.
Behind them, the shadow-infected man muttered nonsense under his breath. Red looked back over her shoulder, and his blind, milky eyes stared right at them.
“Solmir says hello, Wolf,” Bormain murmured.
Chapter Fourteen
E ammon stood frozen, staring wide-eyed across the churn of dirt and forest debris the clearing had become with a look halfway between terror and rage. Then his hand locked around Red’s elbow, vise-like, and he led her into the trees, so fast she almost stumbled.
Solmir. It took Red a moment to place the name, to find its meaning among the mental images it conjured of candles and stone. When she did, her steps stuttered.
Valchior, Byriand, Malchrosite, Calryes, Solmir. The Five Kings.
Her mouth opened to ask Eammon why in all the shadows Bormain would’ve mentioned one of the Five Kings, but her muffled sound of pain eclipsed the question. Her hand felt like it was on fire beneath the makeshift wrapping they’d made of his shirt, and Red’s knees buckled as she clutched it to her chest.
Soft shushing noises, warm hands unwrapping her palm. The cut she’d made was a line of livid scarlet, as if a month of infection had sped through in moments. Pain thrummed with her pulse, an echo of it hammering just below her elbow, around the ring of her Bargainer’s Mark.
One thought, fleeting but clear: The Wilderwood isn’t pleased with me. She’d stopped something from happening, something it wanted. The same thing it’d wanted four years ago, the first time her blood met the forest floor.
Eammon had stopped it then, and he’d stopped it again now, and the Wilderwood was growing more and more impatient with them both.
Those warm hands covered hers. A breath, and the stabbing pain was gone, both in her hand and in her Mark. Another slice opened Eammon’s lacerated palm, a twin to the one she’d cut on her own, turning heart and lifelines into messy crossroads. A curse gnashed through his teeth, his uncut hand pressing against his forearm, where his Bargainer’s Mark was hidden beneath a torn and bloody sleeve.
Taking her pain, again. Hurting for her, again.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Red murmured, suddenly embarrassed. She pushed herself to stand, though her legs wobbled, and turned over her palm to see whole, unbroken skin. Rusty streaks of blood crusted on her wrists.
“I was going to say the same thing.” Eammon paced away from her, the rush of pain he’d taken apparently manageable now, one hand on the jut of his hip and the other running shakily through his hair. It had all come unbound and hung down his back like an ink spill. “What in all the shadows did you not understand about staying in the tower, Redarys?”
Red crossed her arms, the skin he’d healed smooth and somehow tender. “I saw you.”
“You saw me?”
“I had a . . . a vision, I guess.”
His brow arched incredulously. “A vision.”
“It was like that first time. The night I cut my hand, bled in the forest, but stronger. More vivid. Like our connection is . . .” She trailed off and turned her head, cheeks suddenly burning. Her fingers picked at the fabric of her sleeve covering her Mark. “Like it’s deeper now, after the thread bond.”
Calling it a thread bond rather than a marriage was supposed to feel less awkward, even though they meant the same thing. Still, her tongue nearly stumbled over it, this fragile thing she was never supposed to have.
Silence hung heavy in the cold air. Finally, Eammon sighed, rubbing a hand over his face. “Well,” he murmured, “that’s something.”
Red’s lips twisted.
“So this”— his hand waved between them— “makes it so we can see each other.” A snort. “In times of distress.”
“Apparently.”
“Wonderful.” Eammon rubbed at his eyes again. “What did you see, exactly?”
“Your hands.” Red untangled a leaf from her hair, grateful for something to look at other than the Wolf. “Like last time. But also Bormain, and the sentinel.” She paused. “That’s why I knew you needed help. I saw you cut yourself, and saw that it wasn’t working.”
The leaf Red freed from her hair twisted to the ground, brittle brown brushed with green. When it touched the forest floor, the color slowly leached away.
“I suppose we should try to keep the distress to a minimum, then,” Eammon said, eyes on the leaf.