Neve pressed her eyes shut. She couldn’t hear herself speak, only knew the words came from her mouth because she could feel it move. “It has to be me. If they have you, they’ll take the world. I can hold them.”
Can you? Valchior’s smooth voice asked in her head. It felt like a worm making its way along the inside of her skull, a sliding invasion she couldn’t grab hold of. Or will you be just as terrible as he would be, only craftier about it?
There was a satisfaction to the words, something pleased. She tried not to listen, but it was impossible to drown out her own thoughts. Neve reached up and yanked the pulsing key out of her hair with clawed hands. Strands tangled around the thorns growing from her wrists and spangled out from the key like rays of a black sun.
The tendrils of shadow in the white bark had grown; they covered almost the whole of the key now, and they glowed, a strange not-light that hurt to look at. Solmir tried to grab it from her, but she held up a hand and thorns wrapped around him, held him back.
Walking was difficult with all the Kings in her head, like their souls threw her off-balance. But Neve did it anyway, following instinct and the pull of the key to the hole in the floor the Dragon’s falling skull had made, the seething dark it uncovered.
You think your sister will be able to kill you?
Valchior. It made her stop, her steps stuttering on the shaking ground.
You tried to save her, she tried to save you. He sounded so pleased, so content. It made the tiny parts of her mind that were still her own recoil, dread a freezing stone in the pit of her stomach. It doesn’t matter how terrible you are. Matched love, Neverah. All she wants is you alive.
The Kings clamored in her skull, so much horror packed into her frame, all the magic of the Shadowlands. The tendrils of it that curled up from the breaking floor flowed into her without her trying, her gravity enough to bring it in. A woman made a monster, made a home for shadows.
But she had a job to do. She’d chosen to stay here so it wouldn’t be left undone. This was her atonement, and she had to see it through.
Neve took the cold key in her hand, its pulse now rabbit-rhythm, a match for her own. She dropped it into the hole in the floor, into all that hissing dark that made the firmament of the Shadowlands.
And as the Heart Tree began to grow—the doorway she and Red had compressed into keys by the force of their matched love, by their willingness to do whatever it took to save the other—she heard Valchior laughing and laughing and laughing.
You’ve played your part to the letter, Shadow Queen.
Roots boiled up from the place where she’d dropped the key, a white trunk stretching toward the broken-bone ceiling of the Sanctum. An opening in the gray-fogged sky, a gash of color as a doorway opened.
Neve grabbed Solmir’s hand, dragging him behind her. If he protested, tried to jerk away, she couldn’t tell.
She stepped toward the Tree, trying to ignore the voice, trying to hold on to herself amid all this writhing shadow. The trunk opened, the dark inside filled with a wheel and a glimmer that looked like stars, like a place between worlds, a corridor to walk from one to the other.
As she stepped in, Valchior whispered, singing it along her bones:
I told you we welcomed it.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Red
The Wilderwood was gold.
It flowed back from where the Heart Tree grew at the fore of the forest, blazing like a branch-shaped sun, a burn of light that spread through the veins of every leaf, wound its way up every trunk. A shadow-pit in reverse, not rotting the woods, but… awakening them. Touching each piece of forest magic, pricking it into light that made the surrounding plane seem dusk-dim.
Red pushed up from the snow, shading her eyes with her hand. Still no sign of Neve.
Her heartbeat quickened, a punch of dread she could almost taste.
“Red.” Eammon’s voice, hoarse. He was beside her, grimacing as he sat up, snow dampening his hair. But he had eyes only for her hand, and he picked it up with a mix of wonder and fear.
She followed his gaze, and the thud of her heart hit harder. Red had grown used to seeing her veins a color other than blue, but this time they weren’t green—they were gold, like she’d traced her vascular system in gilt. Her eyes darted to Eammon, expecting something similar, the two of them gleaming to match their forest.
But Eammon hadn’t changed like she had. Faint glimmers shone along his wrists, his knuckles, but they were nothing compared to the lines of light that shot through Red.
The Golden-Veined. It snapped into place, all of it. The Shadow Queen, the Golden-Veined. Things written in stars, roles already made that she and Neve stepped neatly into.
As if seeing the change sparked it into action, a draw began deep in Red’s center, that same place where she’d felt the Wilderwood’s power long before she claimed it and made it part of her. A tug toward the Heart Tree, mitigated only by Eammon’s presence at her side. She felt pulled in two different directions, suspended between Eammon and the Heart Tree like they owned two halves of her soul.
Eammon’s eyes raised to hers. She hadn’t seen fear like that since the day Neve disappeared.
The others pushed themselves out of the snow, in all the places the Heart Tree had flung them when it burst from the ground. Kayu shivered, her dark hair damp with snowmelt. Raffe helped her stand, then wrapped an arm around her shoulder.
“Are we supposed to do something?” This from Lyra, standing to brush snow off her legs. Her gaze flickered to Red, then to Eammon, noting the gold in their veins, the way Red’s shone more brightly. “It’s not doing anything on its own.”
Eammon banished the fear from his face, firmed his mouth and tightened his grip on Red’s hands. Within the two of them, the Wilderwood shifted and stirred, disturbed but not in pain. Restless, waiting, anticipating.
Still not speaking.
She looked to Fife. His hand was tight on his Mark, his eyes distant. Unease prickled at the back of her neck.
Red’s spine twinged, the tightening of the roots around it reminding her of when the Wilderwood was newly sprouted and growing in that dungeon beneath the Valleydan palace. Of when it’d pulled her away from Neve and back into its borders.
Now it pulled her toward the Heart Tree. Toward her sister, instead of away.
But Eammon didn’t feel the same pull. She could see it in his eyes, the way they kept flickering from her to the Tree behind her, in the half snarl of his mouth. He could feel her being pulled away but didn’t feel the same tug himself. Red reeled toward the Tree, Eammon reeled toward Red. Her heart torn down the middle, always, her two homes never content to share.
This magic she’d braided into herself was a selfish kind. It didn’t allow for all the different strands of love she ached with.
Fife’s mouth drew into a tight, pained line. His eyes darted from Red to Eammon, someone who’d just been given an order he didn’t know how to complete. He rubbed at the Mark on his arm again.