“What did… We both…” Red’s sentences half formed and fell away, no words sufficient, and the question was one she knew the answer to, anyway. She looked down at herself, one hand lightly feathering over her brow where her antlers had been. Her face crumpled.
What was one supposed to feel when they were dead? Rest, relief, anger? Neve didn’t know, and her chest was hollow, ready for emotion that never quite came. Instead of trying to puzzle through it, she wrapped her arms around her sister and let herself cry.
They weren’t racking sobs, didn’t bend her in half or tear at her throat. This was a slow leak of salt, a gentle letting go of everything she’d carried for so long. Warmth in her hair; Red was crying, too. They both deserved it, she thought. The tears they’d shed were always wrenched from them, storms that came harsh and too swift to escape. This, gentle and consciously allowed, was different. Necessary.
Minutes or hours later—it seemed ridiculous to try to count time when you were dead, and nothing in the flower-strewn field changed—they parted, standing beneath the boughs of the Heart Tree with their hands on each other’s shoulders. Red ran her sleeve across her nose and sniffed, peering upward. “Apples?”
“I don’t think they’re actually apples,” Neve said, breaking away to turn around beneath the laden limb. The sky through the branches was light gray, edging on blue, an eternally overcast summer day. “That voice—the one we both heard—”
“Mine.”
Both of them whirled. The voice sounded like it was right next to them, but the figure it came from strode over the distant hills, an ambling gait that ticked at the back of Neve’s thoughts, achingly familiar.
The figure stopped just outside the ring of the Heart Tree’s branches, the light from the summer sky illuminating only the ridges of their features. Aquiline nose, strong jaw. “Come on, Valedren twins,” the voice said, striving for jocularity but arriving somewhere sadder. “You didn’t think you could get rid of me that easily.”
Red’s eyes widened, her hands opening and closing on the skirt of her gown. Her mouth worked for a moment before one hoarse word left her throat. “Arick.”
As if the name made the light grow brighter, Neve could finally see his face. Handsome as ever, in a white tunic and breeches, black hair curling over green eyes. “Red.”
Their embrace was one of friendship, the other complications between them long since scrubbed away. Arick sank into Red, his eyes closing tight, then he held out an arm for Neve, lifting his green gaze in her direction. A small, sorrowful smile pricked at the corner of his mouth. “Solmir really did a number on both of us, didn’t he?”
A sobbing laugh, and Neve crumpled into their arms, the three of them holding tight to one another in the endless field death had made for them.
Arick was the one to peel away this time. He kept a hand on each of their shoulders, then nodded toward the trunk of the Tree. “This was all supposed to happen, you know. It’s been prophesied for centuries, the Golden-Veined and the Shadow Queen. Since the Shadowlands were made. Tiernan even wrote about it, though it was never widely circulated.” His brow quirked. “It got overshadowed by that whole Second Daughter bit.”
Neve thought of the book she’d burned, the letters she’d seen on the cover as it curled in the flames. T, N, Y. Tiernan Niryea Andraline. She’d burned the journal of Gaya’s sister.
She sighed. Add it to her list of sins.
Red frowned. “The voice in our dreams,” she said, expressions cycling over her face as she put something together carefully, then all at once. “That was you?”
“It was me.” But the way Arick said it sounded like he wasn’t really sure. “But not… the words weren’t mine, not always. It was the magic speaking through me, I think.”
“The Wilderwood?” Red’s face brightened, just a fraction, at the prospect of one familiar thing.
“The magic,” Arick repeated. “The Wilderwood, yes, but the Shadowlands, too. All of it.” He shrugged. “It’s really the same thing, you know. Two halves of a whole.” He dropped his hands to tuck a wayward curl behind his ear. “It’s hard to tell sometimes, though. Whether it’s the magic or me. It bleeds together.”
“We know how that goes,” Neve said. All three of them, taken and changed.
Arick nodded. “It was never meant to last,” he continued quietly. “The Wilderwood, the Shadowlands, the tying up of magic into knots to keep it contained. It wasn’t sustainable—especially once the Kings started killing the Old Ones, speeding along the Shadowlands’ dissolving. There was always going to be an end, but it had to be an equal one. Balanced.”
“So it used us,” Red murmured. She kept absently tracing a line through her palm, a faint white scar against her pale skin. “It couldn’t end itself, so it used us to do it.”
The words could’ve been blame, had her voice been harsher. Instead, it was just an explanation.
“The magic was divided into two halves, so it needed vessels that were the same.” Arick’s green gaze swung from Red to Neve. “Mirrored souls that could take in each half and hold it suspended. Keep it locked away.”
“Why?” Red shook her head. “Why would all the magic need to be locked away? Can’t it just… just be free, like it was before the Wilderwood made the Shadowlands?”
“It could be,” Arick said patiently. “But isn’t that how we ended up here in the first place? There might not be Old Ones to roam the earth and use magic to subjugate anymore, but there are always people who can access more power than others, and those people will always try to use it to evil ends. Magic corrupts; it goes rotten. You’ve seen it yourself.”
Red pressed her lips together. She looked away.
“But after what we did, maybe it wouldn’t anymore. Wouldn’t be rotten or corrupt,” Neve murmured. “It wouldn’t be… anything. Just free.”
“Free to be misused,” Arick said.
“Or not.”
He shrugged.
Tears brimmed in Red’s eyes, her arms crossed tight over her chest. “Then why take Eammon to keep itself alive, if the Wilderwood knew all along it would have to die?” A swallow, then, quietly enough to try to disguise the break: “Why take me?”
“The Wilderwood had to hold on until this moment.” It was strange to see Arick so composed, speaking so evenly. Neve still thought of him as the rumpled man under that arbor, desperate to find a way to save the woman he loved. Death had tempered him, death and all these things he’d learned as he wandered in it. “It needed you to hold it until the Shadowlands were gone, to be the counterweight. And that’s what it needs now, too, just in a different way.” He paused. “We do what we have to do.”