“Is this why you’ve been gone every day?” she asked. “Going to the Edge?”
The way Eammon moved was a language to itself. The tension in his shoulders, worry. The way they bowed inward, resignation.
“I know you weren’t close, but she was your mother.” His softness was a rebuttal to her blade-edge. “I’ve complicated things enough for you there. I thought you needed time.”
“Time alone?” It was quiet, but the silence of the Wilderwood made it carry.
His head dipped forward, breath clouding the air. “I didn’t know if you’d want me around,” he murmured. “Since I was the reason for . . . for the distance between you and her.”
She’d caught his fingers before she had the conscious thought, and the contact startled him almost as much as it did her. Eammon looked from their linked hands to her face, surprise in his parted mouth.
“That,” Red said, low and fierce, “is ridiculous. What was between my mother and I . . . it was messy, complicated. And yes, it had to do with the Wilderwood. But it wasn’t your fault.” Her gaze dropped, because his eyes were wide and wondering and his hands were easier to look at, their scars easier to read. “Don’t go looking for guilt.”
Eammon swallowed. “A character flaw of mine, I’m told.”
She looked up, bent the corner of a smile. He returned it. And when he started back down the path, he let her keep holding his hand.
The talk of grief stirred it up in Red’s chest, dust that never quite settled. Her grief for Isla was strange and distant. Death didn’t gild her, it just fixed her in Red’s memory, a line with a finite beginning and ending and no chance to be more than it had been.
“I don’t think I can mourn her,” Red murmured.
Eammon glanced at her, brow furrowed.
“I mourn the idea of her, maybe. The gap between what a mother is supposed to be and what she was.” She blinked hard against the burn in her eyes, shook her head. “That probably doesn’t make sense.”
“It does. Sometimes you don’t mourn people so much as you mourn who they could’ve been.” His fingers tightened on hers. Red returned the pressure, grateful for a counterpoint. He pretended not to notice when she scrubbed the back of her wrist over her eyes.
A branch hung in their path, and Eammon let go of her hand to push it up, gesturing her past. His heat radiated like a beacon in the chill. A lock of hair had escaped his queue, fallen over his brow, and his head dipped almost low enough for it to brush Red’s cheek.
She stood for longer than she had to, rooted there by the glint of his eyes, the library smell of him.
Then Eammon’s arm came down, the low-hanging branch brushing the forest floor. He hurried forward, one stride to two of hers, and didn’t take her hand again.
Heat burned in her cheeks.
The branch Eammon dropped twitched in the corner of Red’s eye, spiny twigs curling toward her ankle. It eroded her pride enough for her to hurry until she pressed close behind him again.
Up ahead, a sentinel rose from the fog. Darkness shaded the roots, strands of shadow stretching up the white bark, nearly waist-high to Red.
Eammon stopped, eyes flickering between her and the tree. Tentatively, she took his hand, their conversation wordless.
He was rigid at first. But this was touch for a purpose, not just comfort, and his muscles relaxed into hers by slow fractions. Eammon stepped toward the tree like he had something to prove, and he nearly slammed his opposite hand to the bark, keeping the other in Red’s grip.
The buzz of the bark beneath Red’s palm was almost pleasant. She hadn’t done this since the day the mirror showed her Neve, but her body remembered— the cycle of power, the golden network of the sentinels, the way it all coalesced in Eammon.
But something was different. Pockets of darkness marked the glow behind her eyes, holes where sentinels should be. Not weak candle-flames, not like they’d come loose from their moorings to turn up at the Keep— like they were gone.
Her fingers tensed, but Eammon slid his thumb over the flutter of her wrist, a wordless request to hold her questions.
When the glow of the sentinel before them no longer guttered and the shadow-rot was gone, Red opened her eyes. “What happened?” She could see the golden map like an afterimage, the holes where sentinels should be. “The sentinels that are missing, are they at the Keep somewhere?”
“No.” Eammon’s voice echoed in the quiet, with that strange, multilayered resonance born from working forest magic. He rubbed at his green-threaded eyes, the shadows beneath them deep. “No, they’re not at the Keep.”