“Then where?”
“I don’t know.” A grimace, but it was slight, like something he was trying to hide. “Only three are missing. As long as the others stay in place, it’s manageable.”
“When did this happen? How?”
“A few days ago. As for how . . . I’m not sure.” The strangeness magic wrought in him bled out by slow degrees— eyes only amber, voice losing its echo. She watched carefully, making sure each one was gone, that the Wilderwood seeped back out of him as much as it could and left no more permanent marks. “Nothing like this has happened before.”
“How do we fix it? How do we heal them if they aren’t here?”
“We don’t.” Eammon let go of her hand, turning to stride between the trees. The emphasis was clear— whatever he planned to do, it didn’t involve Red.
“But if—”
“We heal the ones we can. We send them back where they’re supposed to be.” His voice fell into the silence like the first brick in a wall. “That’s all you can do, Red. You can’t fix holes in the Wilderwood with hands on bark.”
“Then tell me what else to do.”
“Nothing.” He turned on the word, coat flaring behind him, eyes burning down into hers. “Kings, woman, you can’t do anything about this. Trust me.”
It echoed that first night, when he’d asked for her trust, when she told him to give her a reason. He’d given them, over and over.
Still, this felt different. But the look on his face— fierce, halfway to fear— told her pushing him was pointless.
Red returned his glare. “Fine.”
A beat, then a nod. “Fine.” Twigs crunched under Eammon’s boots as he turned back around, moved farther into the fog.
“You should’ve told me,” she murmured. “Even if I can’t do anything, you should’ve told me.”
Eammon’s shoulders tensed, but he didn’t reply.
They passed no more sentinels. The fog thinned, the trees growing farther apart, bent and crooked. Up ahead, shards of light reached through the branches.
Sunlight. How long had it been since she’d seen the light of a full day, not couched in dusk?
Eammon glanced at her, like he could read the thought on her face. The corner of his mouth quirked to smile-shaped, but something sorrowful pulled down its edge. “The forest ends up ahead.”
It was still strange to her that the Wilderwood was something with an end. It was a geographic anomaly. None could catalog where it stopped, so they assumed it simply didn’t. Explorers had tried to map it— riding up the eastern border where Valleyda met the frozen expanse of the Alperan Wastes, and sailing along the western side, where it met the sea. None returned.
Now Red knew why. The Kings disappeared and the Wilderwood closed, and those who’d made their way behind it, through the sea or up the Wastes, were trapped there. She thought of Bormain and Valdrek, the people dressed in green and gray. The descendants of those lost adventurers, cut off from the world for generations.
“They have a sky,” she said softly, looking up. “The regular sky, I mean. With the sun.”
Another half smile, another darted glance with something slightly wounded in it. “They do.” Eammon started forward, shafts of thin gold cutting the fog and burnishing his hair. Sunlight looked good on him. “Endless twilight, fortunately, only plagues the Wilderwood.”
Red followed Eammon to the tree line, slipping between the trunks and out into the light beyond. She didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath in expectation of pain until it didn’t come. There was a slight pop of pressure, a soap bubble breaking against her skin, but nothing like the crushing vise she’d felt when she first crossed into the Wilderwood, the strange hum against her bones. It reminded her of what Fife told her, that day with Bormain— the borders on the northern side weren’t closed up so tightly. The Wilderwood, it seemed, felt the need for such protection only from the rest of the continent.
Still, Eammon paused next to her, a muscle feathering in his jaw, a swallow working down his throat. Pain carved lines beside his mouth and made his shoulders stiff— the roots knotted around his spine tightening, pulling him back toward the gloom of his forest. It might let him go, on its northern border, but it wouldn’t let him forget where he belonged.
Her lip worked between her teeth.
A few yards away, a large wooden wall rose up from the ground, carved with swirls and arabesques, set with massive double doors. From within, the faint sounds of a city— laughter and shouting, hawking merchants, livestock. Smoke twisted into a sky that faded from lavender to bright blue. Miles away to the west, a line of fog began on the horizon. It looked almost like an approaching storm, but as Red watched, it didn’t move.