“This wasn’t your choice. It was mine.”
“Maybe not… not this, specifically. I didn’t choose to die. I didn’t choose to trap the Wilderwood in my soul so it could be a counterbalance for the Shadowlands and keep all the magic in the world contained.” Red stood up straight, hair tossed back, and even though the forest had left her body, the regal strength of it was still in her stance. “But I chose to take the roots. I chose Eammon. And I chose to find you, and save you. And if this is part of it…” She reached up, just as easily as Neve had, and plucked the golden apple from the bough. “If this is part of it, I choose it, too.”
Neve wondered if her sister felt the same conflicting things she did—the emptiness of being soulless, the realization that the emptiness wasn’t really so bad. They knew who they were, she and Red. After all this, they understood themselves.
What had their souls ever done for them, anyway?
“If we destroy them both,” Red said slowly, the same creep of knowledge that Neve felt, “then things rebalance. The magic is set loose—both sides of it. But there won’t really be sides, not anymore. It’s all the same.” She swallowed. “All the same, and all free.”
“Free to be used,” Neve said quietly. “For good or for ill.”
She tightened her grip on the black apple in her hand. She thought of Solmir, what she’d felt as she took the souls of the Kings from him—someone desperately striving to be good, someone who wanted to be better.
You are good. He’d told her that, once. She could almost believe it.
No one was wholly one or the other. Goodness was daily choice, endless possibility, a decision at every crossroads.
But she’d seen a former dark god attempt to atone, and that meant anyone could.
“You’d risk the world for another chance to live?” It was the first time Arick had sounded reproachful. She didn’t know if it was him, or the magic, or some combination of the two.
“I’d risk the world for my sister,” Neve replied. “I’ve already done it once.”
Red’s fingers dug into the skin of the golden apple in her palm. “And I’m not going without her.”
Arick looked thoughtfully at them, two women with their souls in their hands. After a moment, he reached up, plucked the crimson apple. A slight, impish smile lifted the corner of his mouth, another glimmer of the man he’d been when he was alive. He tossed the apple in the air, caught it. “Your souls made this place,” he said. “So it stands to reason that if the two of you smash your souls, all of this is gone.”
“What will that mean for you?” Neve breathed.
“I guess we’ll find out.” He nonchalantly polished the apple against his white shirt. “But I think I should hold on to this, regardless.”
One breath, pulled into three sets of dead lungs.
Then Red and Neve hurled their souls at the flower-strewn ground, where they shattered like glass, and everything went black.
Chapter Forty-Four
Neve
Coming back to life hurt worse than dying did.
It happened like a slow reverse of what she’d felt when she woke up in the field—head, then torso, then limbs, all tingling as they shuddered out of death. Her heart thumped once, enough to rattle her rib cage, then gave a flutter of smaller beats before settling back into a regular rhythm.
When her eyes opened, it was snowing. Gentle drifts of white swirling from a velvet sky, blanketing the world and making it new. To someone else, the scene might’ve appeared stark black and white, but Neve’s eyes were used to monotone, and she could pick out the subtle shades of indigo in the night.
It took a moment for her to hear the shouting.
More growling than shouting, really, and all of it coming from her right. Neve turned her head, the movement slow and syrupy.
A brawl, as vicious and common as any ever seen in a tavern yard. Two tall men grappled with each other, sweat and blood flying, both of them fighting like they had nothing left to lose.
“Of course,” Red’s voice, as slow and tired as Neve felt. Her sister’s head was next to hers, the two of them laid out brow to brow in the snow, legs pointing in opposite directions. “We die, and they fistfight.”
Three more figures watched the brawl, stark against the pale expanse of the ground. When Neve realized one of them was Raffe, she shrank back, a strange alchemy of guilt and shame and relief making her body feel like her own again in one agonizing sweep.
But there was still something missing. Some kind of… of emptiness, a piece of herself that she’d left in death. Neve’s hand was halfway to her heart, ready to check again for its beat, before she realized what that emptiness was.
Her soul. A prison for magic, obliterated.
She swallowed. Her eyes turned to Red, still lying beside her, their gazes made level by the way they’d fallen in death. Long hair fanned out on either side of them, dark gold and black, two sides of a circle.
“I feel it, too,” her sister murmured. Her dark eyes were clouded and thoughtful—and only brown, with no halo of green around the irises.
Neve nodded. “I don’t…” She shifted, looked up to the falling snow. “I expected it to feel worse.”
Red shrugged. “What’s a soul but the most concentrated piece of yourself?” A tiny, tired smile lifted the side of her mouth. “We know who we are. Maybe that means we don’t need them.”
“I guess we’ll find out,” Neve said.
Red’s arms made wing shapes in the snow as she stretched, shaking out pins and needles. “Well, it’s not so—”
She stopped as abruptly as if she’d hit a wall. Red’s head turned to the opposite side, where Neve couldn’t see her face, staring at whatever her hand had hit when she stretched.
With a grimace, Neve pushed herself up on her elbows to peer over her sister.
Arick.
His body was curled on his side as if the snow were a feather bed, chest rising and falling in easy rhythm. Dark curls brushed his forehead, and a slight smile curved his mouth, like worry wasn’t something he’d ever known.
“He came back with us.” Neve’s voice sounded thin and cracked, someone waking up from a long sleep. “When we… did what we did, it must have brought him back.”
Red’s eyes were wide and glassy. “He wasn’t really dead, not in the normal way,” she murmured. “Just… caught in between. Like us. That must be why.”
The enormity of what they’d done was slow-settling, a leaf incrementally weighing down into a river. Soulless, yet still themselves. Bereft of magic, when they’d both been a home for it. Alive when they’d been dead.
Then Red gave her head a tiny shake and swung her eyes to Eammon and Solmir, still rolling over the ground with their teeth bared and fists flying. “What a way to introduce Arick to my husband.”
Neve followed her gaze, raised a brow. “Should we let them work it out, you think?”