Something like understanding began to unfurl in Red’s mind, along the blooming branches of the forest she held.
The ground rumbled again, shaking hard enough to disturb the snow, to make them all brace against falling. Down in the village, voices raised. Red half expected them to come up the hill with torches and pitchforks, but apparently whatever magic had kept them from seeing the shadow grove also guarded the Heart Tree. The Wilderwood took care of its own business and didn’t desire an audience.
It burned within her, twisting along her bones, the forest’s magic sun-bright and shining. Red felt like she housed embers, like if she opened her mouth she’d spill out light. She didn’t realize she’d stepped closer to the Tree until Eammon’s hand caught her wrist, the pattern of his scars against her skin like home.
“Red,” he murmured, worry and fear and wariness all tangled in his throat. “Wait—”
Another boom, teeth-clattering, earth-shaking. The air around the Tree vibrated, made nearly visible in its force.
The center of the Tree opened, the trunk arcing gracefully away from itself to reveal the hollow within. Shimmering, endless light filled the space, like a telescope dialed in to focus solely on the sun. It was beautiful and terrible and it hurt her eyes and drew her closer at once, the light of the Tree singing to the light in her.
The hollow darkened, slowly, as if something rose up from the depths, from the giant Tree’s roots. Something huge, something awful.
But all Red could think as that immense shadow rose was Neve is coming home.
Thin traceries of darkness climbed the Heart Tree, sinuous lines of shadow following the veins of gold as the hollow went dark. But the darkness didn’t overtake the gold—instead, the two of them twined together, one the inverse of the other, light and shadow in a twirling dance that painted the trunk in arabesques, mimicked the carvings on the walls of the Edge. For one beacon-bright moment, the Heart Tree stood tall, patterned in gold and black, a perfect nexus of the Wilderwood and the Shadowlands and the space in between. Red felt like a beacon, too, a lighthouse on the edge of a coastline, glowing to call her sister home.
Beneath her, the ground shuddered and heaved, something about to erupt. Shadow fully filled the hollow space in the Tree’s trunk, seeped in until it drowned out all the gold—
Then another boom as all that darkness in the center of the Tree shot out.
Red flew backward, landing on her back, the breath knocked out of her lungs. The burn of the Wilderwood in her body grew white-hot, though not necessarily painful—it begged movement, a wild, kinetic energy that bloomed flowers around her heart and grew vines around her ribs only for them to wither away and start the cycle anew, an endless circle of life and death.
Inverses and mirrors, walking gyres of grief and loss. Her losing Neve, losing Eammon, and now them losing her.
The certainty of it bloomed along with the flowers, and a branch stretched across her shoulder blades in agreement. Not speaking but finally telling her the thing she hadn’t wanted to hear, finally letting her understand what this would take.
To save Neve would be to lose herself somehow. Maybe death. Maybe something different, something stranger, an afterlife wrought by the forest she’d made a home, the magic as suffused into her as roots into ground.
With the realization ringing in her ears, Red sat up and looked at the Tree.
She couldn’t see it. The Heart Tree was blocked by a wall of writhing smoke. At first Red thought they were shadow-creatures, an amalgam of them formed to keep Neve from her, but these shadows weren’t black—they were the charcoal of a snuffed candle, and silent. Weak, somehow, as if they’d been drained of power.
Next to her, Eammon crouched, a snarl on his mouth and green-amber eyes narrowed at the shadows. With a grunt, he ran at the wall, and was immediately knocked backward, repelled by twisting smoke.
But Red felt pulled toward it. Beckoned.
Lyra’s eyes were wide, tracking from where Eammon was once again pushing up from the ground to the dark, writhing wall where the Tree had been. Her gaze flickered to Red’s, went from concerned to very near alarmed. “Red…”
She looked down at her hands.
Her veins grew steadily brighter, a strengthening glow. At the same time, the forest behind the shadows lost its luster, the gleam of golden light seeping out of the magic-touched trees, flowing into Red instead. As if the gold had gone to gather up all the stray magic and now delivered it back to its proper vessel.
Eammon looked from the forest to her, jaw tight, hands clenched into fists. He moved to stand between Red and the Wilderwood, like he could shield her from it one last time.
Too late for that.
“It won’t take you.” Eammon murmured it like an echo from the past, a battle already fought that had come to their doorstep again. “We didn’t do all this just for the fucking woods to take you, Red.”
But she felt the knowledge that it would take her humming between her bones, all the places the Wilderwood had seeped in and made her something else—not really a god, not really a monster, not really human. Red had never felt the weight of staring down the well of possible eternity, like she knew Eammon had. She’d assumed it would come with time, that the countless years would come to rest on her the same way they rested on her Wolf as they walked hand in hand into the belly of forever.
Their forever had been so short.
Kings, it hurt. Tears sprang to her eyes at the idea of leaving Eammon, of sending him back to solitude. It felt like a hole punched in her chest, like floating in the dark without a tether.
Is that what it would be like? Endless dark, and no one to be lonely with?
“Red, stop!”
Arms around her waist, strong and familiar, anchoring her to the ground—Red hadn’t even realized she was moving toward the wall of shadow until Eammon caught her.
“Stay with me,” he murmured, low and hoarse and pleading. “Red, stay with me.”
He understood now. He knew. The Wilderwood rustled in Red’s chest, another bloom of recognition—she needed it all. All of the forest, all of the magic. Saving Neve would require becoming what Eammon had become to save her, a circle coming back around to the point where it began.
The Wilderwood, entire. Girl made god.
At the edge of her vision, across the snow, Fife stiffened.
It would be different this time, someone becoming the whole of the Wilderwood, taking in every bit of its magic. She’d have to gather it all up, then walk into the shadow that was its antithesis and face whatever Neve had become in the dark.
Eammon didn’t care about the magic—he knew he could call her back, just like she’d called him, love a line they could always follow back to each other.
But that darkness. That shadow. Neve changed, Neve waiting.
That was where he didn’t want her to go. That was where she had to.