Her stomach flipped.
“— so I came back here for the night.” She heard him shift against the floorboards. “And that night, the Kings wounded the Wilderwood, tried to cut down the sentinel where they’d made their bargain and were pulled into the Shadowlands. The borders closed. I couldn’t go out. She couldn’t get in.” A pause. “I inherited my father’s horrific timing, I suppose.”
“That’s terrible,” Red murmured.
“It was centuries ago.” But there was still a ghost of grief in his voice, an old wound healed but well remembered. “Haven’t been with anyone since.”
“Why not?”
“Other than the obvious issue of being stuck in a forest?” A weak snort, another shift against the ground. “The Wilderwood is difficult to hold together. It takes near-constant concentration, especially when I have to keep it from . . . from doing things I don’t want it to do.” He paused, next words quieter. “There’s not much of me left to give to another person.”
Red worked her thumbnail against the weave of his sheet.
“And you?” Hushed, but with genuine curiosity. “Surely there was someone, in the twenty years before you came here.”
When she closed her eyes and tried to remember Arick’s face, all she could see was the twisted thing from the gate, built of darkness and malice. “One.”
Silence, shatter-ready. “If you didn’t have to be here,” Eammon began, barely above a whisper. “If you could do anything you wanted, what would you do?”
The question felt more complicated than it should’ve. Red’s whole life was under the shadow of the Wilderwood. Considering anything else hurt too much, so she just . . . didn’t. Now that there were options, now that a life stretched before her tied to the man across the room, she wasn’t exactly sure what wanting looked like.
“If I could do anything I wanted,” she answered, “I would let my sister know I’m safe.”
Eammon’s sigh was shaky. “I’m sorry, Red.”
She sat up on her elbow, peered through the ember glow to where Eammon lay, one hand pushing back his hair and the other on his chest. Dim light revealed only his edges— broad shoulders, crooked nose. He turned, and their gazes locked.
“I’m sorry, too,” she breathed.
The permanent line between Eammon’s brows softened. Wordlessly, he nodded.
Red lay back, rolled on her side. After a moment, she heard Eammon do the same, and his breathing slowed, evened out.
Eventually, so did hers.
Valleydan Interlude V
O rder funerals were morbid affairs. And since this one was for the High Priestess, it seemed even more somber than usual.
Neve’s black veil blanketed everything in shadow, made the pyre and the priestesses and the gathered courtiers look like they moved through thick fog. Nerves twisted in her stomach. This had happened too fast, too quickly for her plans to be fully woven. It felt like holding tight to the reins of a runaway horse.
Zophia’s body lay prostrate on the pyre, wrapped to her chin in the black cloak corpses wore for burning. The dark cloth was covered in tokens from all over the continent to signify the Order’s unity— each country with its own Temple, each Temple with its own High Priestess.
The value of the tokens the other Temples had sent for this burning was staggering. Olive oil from Karsecka, pounds of fragrant blooms from Cian, bottles of dark liquor brewed with gold flecks shipped over from the Rylt. There was far too much to actually include on the pyre, most of it packed away in the Temple’s stores with the prayer-taxes. A happy coincidence, really— the sum Belvedere had ended up paying Alpera to reroute the grain was truly astronomical, and some of the riches brought for the funeral could offset the costs.
Though the expense was vast, the grain had arrived safely. The story of Kiri and Arick’s prayers clearing the mouth of the bay were nothing but rumbles, whispered rumors in hushed tones. At first, that had puzzled Neve, but it was apparently how Kiri preferred it. A folktale of a miracle, she said, would prove more useful to them than something proclaimed by the Temple. Support from the bottom up would be more useful than from the top down. She’d clutched her wood-shard pendant as she said it, face carefully blank, like she was reciting something she’d heard rather than explaining thoughts of her own. It’d made Neve’s insides feel twitchy, and made her glad she’d never actually worn the pendant Kiri had given her. But she nodded along.