“Rather difficult around here.”
“It’s the best I can do at the moment.” Eammon turned, the movement twisting the wounds in his middle. A curse gritted through his teeth, blood and sap seeping into the fabric of his shirt. He leaned back against a tree, like he suddenly couldn’t keep himself upright.
“That looks bad, Eammon.”
His eyes darted up at the sound of his name— cheeks coloring, she realized it was the first time she’d addressed him directly with it, in over a week of knowing each other.
Well, he was her husband now. She couldn’t call him Wolf forever.
“Can you heal it?” she asked hurriedly, chasing the echo of his name away. “Like you did my hand?”
“Can’t heal yourself.” His eyes closed, head tilting back against the tree trunk. “Balance, remember? Pain going somewhere?”
Her step forward was tentative, her reach more so. “I could . . .”
“No.” His eyes snapped open. “You could not. You’ve done quite enough for one day, Redarys. Let’s not add further mangling of my insides to the list.”
That stung more than she cared to admit. Red snatched back her hand. “You’d rather I’d left you to be mangled alone, then?”
“Has it occurred to you that I wouldn’t have been mangled if I hadn’t had to protect you?”
“You needed me.”
It hung heavy as an executioner’s ax. The Wolf looked away. “I suppose I did.”
Red arched a sardonic brow, though the tick of her pulse seemed to land a fraction harder. “Now, that wasn’t so hard, was it?”
His rueful laugh turned to a grimace, hand pressing harder against his abdomen. Red peered worriedly at the blood outlining his fingers. “Are you—”
“It’s fine.”
Lips pressed to a tight line, Red directed her attention to the site of her own injury, since he seemed determined to ignore his. “It didn’t hurt when I first cut it,” she mused, flexing her fingers. “Just after.” She paused. “That’s happened before, too.”
The night she’d tried to defy the Wilderwood, the night of Neve and blood and a vision she didn’t understand. After they’d been collected from the carnage, her hand had felt bathed in flame, a sharp and stabbing pain that couldn’t have come from the thin slice across her palm. The physicians were baffled and didn’t know what to do other than give her watered wine until the pain subsided. It did, eventually, but it took two days.
Eammon shifted, still leaning against the tree. “It’s the Wilderwood,” he said finally. “Something about connecting with it through blood.” The answer seemed truncated, like there should be more tacked onto the end, but the Wolf didn’t offer anything else, face turned slightly away so she could see only the line of his profile.
Red frowned, scrubbing a spot of dried blood off her wrist. “Probably something about it being upset, too.” Meant to be leading, but the only sign that Eammon might take the bait was the bob of his throat as he swallowed. “The Wilderwood doesn’t seem pleased that we haven’t let it do . . . whatever it is it wants to do.”
The Wolf still didn’t look at her. “That, too.”
Hands mostly clean, Red crossed her arms, arched a brow. “Does it hurt you that badly? Every time?”
“It used to.” With a grimace, Eammon pushed away from the tree trunk, took a lurching step forward. “Come on.”
Red fell into step behind him, and for a minute, the only sound in the Wilderwood was the unsteady tromp of their boots. “He mentioned the name of one of the Five Kings,” she said finally, because she couldn’t think of a way to finesse her confusion into delicate questions. “Solmir. The one who was supposed to marry Gaya. Why?”
Ahead of her, Eammon half turned to fix her with one amber eye. A long sigh, then he pivoted to weave through the underbrush again. “How much do you know about what’s in the Shadowlands?”
“Nothing. Much like every-damn-thing else, I know nothing other than the myths, and thus far, it seems like those are mostly horseshit.”
“They get the broad strokes, but yes, mostly horseshit. The Shadowlands imprison shadow-creatures and mythic beasts and the Old Ones— those are the things that were more like gods than monsters.” He discussed monsters so mildly, did the Wolf, pushing aside branches to clear their path through the dark wood. “But the Five Kings are in there, too.”