Another rustle against her thoughts, the golden thread running alongside them vibrating like a plucked harp string. The Wilderwood communicating something, but she wasn’t sure what.
There was so little Red understood about what she’d become. Woman on the outside—mostly—forest within. She remembered thinking of Eammon like a scale, tipping back and forth from bone to branch, the balance hard to hold. Since they’d become the Wilderwood, it was like they’d put a brace on those scales, kept them in perfect equilibrium.
So what might happen if she tipped them again? If she let what was inside back out?
Red shook her head, dispelling the doubt that wanted to collect in her thoughts and make itself something to stumble on. This was for Neve. She’d accept the consequences.
It was the least she could do.
Her route wasn’t planned. But when Red arrived at the clearing where she’d laid the other Second Daughters’ bones to rest—where she’d found Eammon half subsumed in forest, what felt like lifetimes ago—it seemed right. Gold and ocher leaves carpeted the ground, their sharp almost-cinnamon scent thick in the air. No more sentinels lined the circular edge, but the place still felt closer to holy than anywhere else she’d ever been.
One place in particular. There was no trace of the sentinel with the scar on its bark anymore—the sentinel where the words that mandated the Second Daughter sacrifice had appeared, where Tiernan Niryea Andraline, Gaya’s older sister, had hacked them off and brought them back to Valleyda—but something in Red recognized the ground where it had been. She carried the map of the Wilderwood inside her, and this spot was marked.
After a moment of consideration, she sat the mirror on the ground where the tree had grown, faceup. The gold of her hair woven into the frame nearly matched the leaves. Red sank onto her knees beside it and pulled a short dagger from her belt.
Maybe this was foolish. Maybe it would do nothing—none of her other sacrifices to the mirror had. Or maybe this was finally the thing that would save Neve, here in the clearing where she’d saved Eammon, where magic and blood ran so closely together.
The only thing Red knew for sure was that she couldn’t leave Neve in the dark. Couldn’t leave her with the monsters.
It was what Neve would do for her.
The Wilderwood within Red was quiet. No rustling, not in her mind, not beneath her skin—usually, the run of her blood was a breeze that sent leaves stirring, the beat of her heart made branches sway. Now the forest rooted in her bones stayed frozen, waiting to see what she would do. To see how she might strike the scale.
Red took a deep breath. The dagger hovered over her palm, unsteady, and the golden line of the Wilderwood against her thoughts was still and silent.
She dropped the dagger. Blood had always been a stopgap, never a real solution—when Eammon had given her half the Wilderwood, at the edge of the forest when he was all magic, all he’d done was lay his hand on her heart.
A moment, then Red settled her hand on the autumn leaves, felt them crunch beneath her skin as she pressed her fingers toward the earth.
“I want to let one go,” she said, after a beat of silence. “One of the sentinels. I need one outside of myself, so I can get to my sister.” A noise that wasn’t a laugh and wasn’t a sob, something that lived in the wild, raw space between. “So I can open a locked door.”
She felt slightly ridiculous, stating her intentions to the ground. But she remembered the moment she took the roots, in that dank prison beneath the Valleydan palace, and how she’d had to let the forest know exactly what she wanted. Let it know that everything she did was her own choice.
At first, nothing.
Then a roar.
It took her a moment to realize that it came from her own mouth, a flare of feeling licking up from her hand, down her arm, blazing around her heart. Red’s back arched, not in pain, but something beyond it, so surpassing the binary of hurt and pleasure that it seemed of a different world than she knew.
A tearing within her, a wrenching of her spine, some vital thing ripped from her deepest places. Both more solid and more ephemeral than one of the sentinels she carried, as if her soul was detaching itself from her body.
Red was the forest inside, she was the world outside—she felt part of herself splitting off, rooting into the ground, spreading her awareness out from her own mind and into the earth and everything it touched.
Infinite. Omniscient.
She hadn’t just tipped the scale—she’d knocked it over, upended the entire thing. Her blood and intention turned her inside out, made the human recede and the forest surge forward, unraveling her into light and unfettered magic. It was beautiful, it was intoxicating.
It was going to drive her mad.
Every single one of her veins ran verdant, then blazed to gold. Roots grew out of her hands, but they didn’t split off—her skin paled, hardened, bark spreading up her arms and toward her heart.
She wasn’t just freeing a sentinel. She was becoming one. Her and this tree, one and the same, her body made a doorway.
Red felt more than saw Eammon skid into the clearing, taking in her and the mirror lying by her side, knowing in a split second what she’d done. He cursed, loud and long. “Redarys!”
A boom rattled through the forest. It vibrated in Red’s bones, through the parts of her that were sentinel and the parts that were still woman, almost like a call.
In her fingers—what had been her fingers, what were now roots, stretching through the earth—Red felt a heartbeat. Not her own, but a counterpoint, as if she’d reached for someone and grasped only part of them.
As the shock wave shot through the trees, Eammon… shifted. All the changes the Wilderwood had wrought in him blazed, obscuring his shape for a moment. Where he’d stood there was a hole, a man’s shape in the atmosphere that held nothing but golden light and tall white trees, like someone had used his body as a canvas and painted the Wilderwood over it.
The golden thread of the forest running alongside her thoughts twinged, sending a melodious sound reverberating through her head, beautiful and terrible at once. The arm that bore her Mark—now half bark—burned and ached, as if she’d caged sunlight beneath her skin.
“Call yourself back, Redarys,” Eammon snarled at her, in a voice layered in leaves and barely human at all. “Call yourself back to me.”
It seemed too simple, the thought that she could simply stop. And did she really want to? If this was what saving Neve required of her? How far was too far, when you loved someone this much?
Eammon’s eyes. Amber haloed in deepest green, aching and damp. “Please, Red.” His voice, unfettered by leaves, hoarse and low. “Don’t leave.”
Don’t you dare leave me here alone. She’d said it to him once, in this same clearing. A promise between them, before they’d admitted anything else. A promise she wouldn’t break now.