All Neve had was her grief, artless and aching and hopefully shared.
“Things can change.” Neve kept her voice from breaking, there at the end, though it was a close thing. “Just because something has always been one way doesn’t mean it has to be that way forever. Red can—”
“That’s quite enough.” But Isla’s voice rang hollow, her eyes distant from more than illness. Grief, finally, dredging up from whatever deep well the Queen of Valleyda kept it in.
So Neve pressed on. “Mother, we can bring her home.”
Pin-drop silence. Raffe looked at her with his mouth agape. Arick gave a slight, sad smile. Kiri did nothing.
The petal between Isla’s fingers trembled. Her dark eyes closed; her chest swelled with a deep breath.
Neve didn’t take one.
Glass-fragile silence, then the Queen turned away. “By our lost—”
“No.” Neve’s petal fell to the ground, her sharp retort ricocheting through the hall. According to tradition, the appointment had to be unanimous. If it wasn’t, the assembly was cloistered for hearings until they reached a decision. “If there’s more than one—”
“Neverah.” Isla’s voice sliced hers off, strong despite how frail she looked. “This has been decided.”
Shock painted Raffe’s face, petal hanging limp in his hand. Neve gave him a pleading look, though she had no idea what she was pleading for. Her hands opened and closed on her skirts, helpless. Isla was so married to tradition, so set on doing things the way they’d always been done . . . it hadn’t occurred to Neve that her mother wouldn’t follow Order strictures. That the Order would let her.
Perhaps Kiri wasn’t so far off after all. Perhaps it’d always been about power, the definitions of what passed as holy kept purposefully mutable.
Raffe inched forward, but Arick’s hand on his shoulder stopped him. Neve couldn’t read the look in either man’s eyes.
The priestesses, ever the picture of calm, stared straight ahead. Even Tealia, though visibly shaken, schooled her face to placidity. A flutter of white sleeves as the candidates put their black candles to the pyre, all those gifted riches going up in flames.
Some indecipherable emotion lived in Kiri’s pale face. Her eyes flickered to Neve and Arick for one lingering, laden moment, and then away.
When Isla spoke the confirmation, she didn’t look at Neve. “By our lost kings and the magic of bygone eras . . .”
The petals rose high, the pyre caught, and Neve’s plans ground away to dust.
The knock at her door was quick and brusque, almost furtive. Neve paused in her pacing, brows knit. Her picked-over dinner tray was already cleared, and she’d told the maid not to bother coming to help her undress.
Another furtive knock. “Neve, open the door.”
Raffe.
She pulled him inside, cheeks flushing. She and Arick alone in her room would be gossip; she and Raffe would be a scandal. “Do you have any idea how much trouble you’d be in for coming without a chaperone?”
“Probably as much as you’re in for that stunt at the confirmation.” His brow arched. “What were you doing today?”
Neve sank into the chair at her desk. She didn’t have the energy for pretense. “You know what I’m doing.”
Not the whole of it, no. But Raffe knew her enough to know that all of this had to be about Red.
Raffe swore, rubbing a hand over his closely shorn hair. “You have to let it go, Neverah. It’s eating you up, and I . . .” He trailed off, sighed. In one fluid motion, Raffe sank to a crouch before her, pulled her hands into his. Neve knew she should remind him of impropriety, of whispers. But his hands were so warm.
“Neve.” He said her name like a touchstone, a still point he could come back to. “Red is gone.”
“She’s alive,” Neve whispered to their tangled hands.
“Even if she is, she’s bound to the Wilderwood. She’s lost to us.”
So close to the truth, myth and fact a nimble dance.
Raffe’s grip tightened. “You have to stop trying to lose yourself, too.”
Neve was already lost. Her mind was a forest, full of deep shadows and tripping vines, a labyrinth of regret. And now that their plan had failed, that she’d been the one to fail . . . She didn’t realize a tear had fallen until she tasted salt.
He caught her tear on his thumb, his palm cradling her cheek. “What would you want her to do? If she’d been born first, if you’d been for the Wolf, what would you want her to do?”