One way or another. One last sigh, wind rippling through the cavern. Now make it quick.
The beat of its massive heart thrummed through its scales. Neve’s palms were cold against them. She closed her eyes.
Then Neve lifted the bone and plunged the sharp end into the Serpent’s side.
It didn’t take all that long, the dying of a god. The massive shape she couldn’t see jerked, displacing cold air; she stepped backward to avoid being flung aside. Another heave, the movement sending skitters of rock across the toes of her boots, making the atmosphere shudder.
And as magic began to seep out of its body, first in a trickle, then a torrent, Neve lifted her hands.
Chapter Twelve
Red
Raffe’s here.”
Red’s head jerked up from the book she’d been reading, fast enough to set a crick into her neck. “Raffe?”
Lyra leaned against the doorjamb of the library. Her arms crossed over her gown, a deep green that set off the golden flecks in her dark eyes. “He brought a guest, too.”
That made Red’s brow climb, her head swing to Eammon. He sat beside her, slouched behind a stack of heretofore-useless books, face tired and hair mussed. They’d been here for nearly the whole of the four days since the clearing, searching volume by volume through everything in the library. So far, they’d found nothing.
Still, Eammon pored endlessly over his books until his eyes drooped, and she often had to prod him awake to get him to come upstairs and sleep in their bed instead of slumped over the table.
But most nights, she waited. And when he was asleep, Red picked up the books he’d discarded as useless and kept looking for more mentions of voices in dreams.
She’d told him most of her strange dream, of course. The fog, the blood-warm apple, the Heart Tree, that there’d been a voice that spoke in cryptic loops. But she kept it vague, didn’t tell him everything about the voice itself. Didn’t tell him how familiar it felt, how personal.
That was part of it, somehow. She could tell, with the deep resonance of an unquestioned truth—whatever had to happen in order to save Neve would be personal, would reach into her in a way Eammon ultimately couldn’t help with.
She knew he’d hate that, so she kept it to herself.
Red’s hand stole into her pocket, to the key she kept there. Eammon didn’t like looking at it, had only given it one cursory glance when she first showed it to him. But Red carried it everywhere, tracing her fingers over it like it was a worry stone, twisting it in her palm. It felt like a tangible link to Neve, the only thing she had to hold on to.
The Wolf closed his book, brows drawn low. His eyes flickered to Red’s, a question—she shrugged. There hadn’t been anything in her note that would’ve made Raffe think he needed to come here, at least not that she could figure. Especially when they all agreed it was best to try to keep the Wilderwood out of Valleyda’s collective thoughts as much as possible right now.
Eammon stood, shoving a piece of scrap paper into the spine of his book to keep his place. “Won’t do to keep them waiting.” A weary hand rubbed over his mouth. “Why in all the shadows would he bring someone else into all this?”
“You’d know about letting others get caught up in messes they should steer clear of,” Lyra murmured.
The three of them paused, animals once more aware of the traps set around them. Red couldn’t find any anger in her, even though the wounded look on Eammon’s face sliced her insides.
She and Eammon had talked of Fife and what happened in the clearing, deep in the night, pressed together, with their legs tangled and her cheek pillowed on his chest. What he remembered from the brief moment when he’d sent out the Wilderwood’s call, everything else crowded out by panic. And what happened before, the day of the shadow grove, when he pulled in all of the forest to save her.
“I don’t really remember any of it, either time,” he’d whispered into the dark, the paneless maws of their windows letting in crisp autumn scent, crisp autumn air. “There was golden light. The feeling of being… being vast, taking up more space than should be possible. All of the parts of me scattered.” Green-haloed eyes turned to hers, made luminous in moonlight, the worry in them stark. When Eammon spoke again, it was hushed. “How badly did it hurt, when you felt the call?”
“It wasn’t that bad. Just… loud, in my head.” She traced her hand over his chest, rested it on his heart. “You didn’t hear anything at all?”
“Nothing. But the Wilderwood and I have coexisted for so long, it seems loud to me all the time.” Eammon ran a hand through his tangled hair. “Fife said I hadn’t gotten any better at listening to it. Seems like he’s right.”
“It’s a hard thing to listen to,” Red murmured. “Especially when it’s been part of you for so many years.”
“I just don’t understand the rules anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I vastly prefer this to what the Wilderwood and I were before, but part of me misses knowing exactly what the forest wanted from me.” He shifted beneath her. “Maybe I shouldn’t have let him bargain to save Lyra. She wasn’t dying, just hurt, and he was panicked. But I didn’t… I didn’t know it’d be like this.” He paused, idly twining a strand of golden hair and ivy around his finger. “It’s different,” he said finally. “This bargain is different than the one he made before, but I don’t know how. It’s like the Wilderwood knows something I don’t.”
“But you had to let him.” Red looked up, flicked a lock of dark, overlong hair out of his eyes. The point of a tiny antler brushed her fingertip. “Lyra wasn’t connected to the Wilderwood enough for you to heal her without a trade.”
“I know. I couldn’t leave her like that.” A huff, his hand coming up to capture hers and cage it against his chest. “But now I’ve left Fife like this.”
Red turned her head to press a kiss on his bare, scarred shoulder. “They’ll come around.”
“They shouldn’t have to,” he’d murmured. But it’d been low, sonorous, and soon his breathing had evened and he’d dropped into sleep.
Now, in the library, Eammon’s eyes were still shadowed with guilt. He didn’t respond to Lyra, bracing himself with knuckles against the table for one deep breath before pushing up and going to the door. She let him pass without a word.
Lips pressed together, Red moved to follow. When she reached Lyra, she paused, eyes still ahead. “He didn’t mean to get Fife tangled up in this again,” she said softly.
She thought Lyra might not respond, but after a moment, the other woman sighed, her shoulders dipping low. “I know.” A corkscrew curl hung in her eye; Lyra knuckled it back. “Fife made the choice to bargain. And Eammon…” A shrug. “Well. He wasn’t exactly in a position to refuse, I guess.”
“He would have.” Red knew her Wolf down to the bones, the way his mind worked and the things that sparked his guilt. “If he’d been himself, he would have tried to find another way. Something other than a bargain.”
“There wasn’t one,” Lyra said wearily. “We all know that.”