Red slipped her hand into his, curled her fingers around his scarred ones. “Eammon?”
He’d conceded to her in the foyer, told her without words that the things having to do with Neve were hers to decide. But she didn’t want to make this decision for him.
His hand tightened around hers. Eammon looked up at Kayu and nodded.
Kayu clapped her hands, dark eyes sparkling. “Wonderful! I’ll make the arrangements. We should be able to leave within a few days. It’s a three-day journey, so pack accordingly.” She looked to Lyra and Fife, inclining her head. “Raffe assumed you two would want to go, as well. The whole gang.”
The fact that she included herself in the whole gang went without saying.
Chagrin and resignation chased themselves over Raffe’s face, but there was something else there, too. He looked almost grateful. When Kayu moved, his eyes followed, a mix of irritation and wariness and begrudging respect.
“If we’re going to ask Valdrek about that carving, we should do it today,” Eammon said. He pushed up from the table, eager to be headed toward something that might hold answers.
Red nodded. “But I… I want to check the mirror again first.”
Eammon froze. One hand spasmed by his side.
They hadn’t looked at the mirror—hadn’t spoken of it—since that day in the clearing. Eammon had brought it back to the tower, and there it had stayed. Red had made herself stay away from it, but now something in her felt pulled there.
She kept thinking about Neve, how she had to look for a key. What if she’d found it but couldn’t communicate with Red until she looked in the mirror? What if something in the glass surface had changed, giving them another clue? She couldn’t leave it to chance.
Red grabbed Eammon’s hand, squeezed it. “I just want to make sure.”
He looked at her with his lips pressed together. A laden moment, then he nodded.
“That damn mirror gives me the shivers,” Raffe muttered.
Eammon snorted.
It was an awkward trek across the courtyard to the tower, the sky darkening steadily toward night and casting everything in dusky purple shadow. Kayu’s eyes were round and wondering, trying to take in everything at once. Every time she reached out like she might touch something, moss on the wall or a flower woven into the rubble, Raffe would bat away her hand. The third time he did it, she batted back. “It’s bad form to treat your moneylender like a child.”
“It’s dangerous here.”
“Not anymore.” Red glanced at them over her shoulder. “Eammon and I have the forest well in hand.”
Eammon pushed open the tower door, and they caravanned up the stairs, into the circular room with its four windows and paper sun. Books spilled over the table, left from when Red and Eammon had desperately needed a change of scenery from the library.
The Wolf crouched, crooking his fingers at the fireplace—a moment, then flames caught along the logs, hovering right over the wood without actually burning it. Kayu’s eyes widened.
The mirror was propped against the wall between two of the windows, covered with one of Eammon’s old cloaks. He pulled it away, mouth a displeased line, and dropped the cloak onto the floor.
At first, it appeared as if nothing had changed from the last time Red looked. The surface of the mirror was still choked with tree roots, crowding against the glass, their shape barely visible as more than twisted darkness.
Cautiously, Red stepped forward, reaching up and pulling a strand of hair from her braid. She knelt, wrapped the hair into the whorls of the frame.
A moment. Then the roots pressed against the mirror glass began to slowly unfurl.
They unraveled like a thread from a hem, and Red stared until her vision went blurry, expecting something to be revealed behind their shift. But one by one, they fell back, revealing still nothing—just an endless expanse of featureless gray. No Neve, no Shadowlands. No clues.
Slowly, the matte gray peeled away, like a snake shedding its skin, leaving silver reflectiveness behind. Just a mirror.
Just a mirror, beaming her reflection back to her, a wild woman with ivy in her hair and a ring of green around her irises. Magic, power seeping through her skin to show itself.
Slowly, her reflection changed. Mist billowed in from the edges of the frame, covering her form, making it gray and amorphous. It reminded her of her dream, being somewhere in between.
When the voice came, it reminded her of the dream, too. The same voice, vaguely familiar. The golden thread of the Wilderwood running next to her thoughts vibrated with it, underscoring it like a harp, the two of them in harmony.
She’s taken the first step in becoming your mirror. Taken the power of a dark god, taken shadow where you took light. The two of you are too strong for mere glass to connect you anymore.
Her brows knit. “I don’t—”
And then the mirror shattered.
She screamed as it happened, the sound of her cry mingling with the ice-crack of breaking glass. The shards exploded out from the worn gilt frame in a storm of needles; Eammon lunged in front of her, throwing up a forearm in front of his eyes. Fife cursed, Kayu gasped. Red barely registered any of it, limbs gone limp, thoughts gone hazy.
She’s taken the first step in becoming your mirror.
Red sat down on the worn wooden floor, gaze miles away, her body feeling as distant as Neve did. Eammon crouched next to her, cradled her hand. There was glass in it. He carefully picked the slivers out.
“I don’t understand.” Raffe shook his head, glass crunching beneath his boots as he stepped toward the now-empty frame. “It just… just shattered, after telling us nothing…”
“It told me something,” Red murmured.
Eammon’s eyes darted up to hers, worry darkening the green and amber.
“I heard the voice from my dream,” Red said. Blood leaked slowly from her hand. “And it told me Neve had taken the first step in becoming my mirror.”
“But what does that mean?” Raffe sounded somewhere between panicked and angry.
Red didn’t get a chance to answer. Her vision grayed, her muscles slackening, every ounce of energy drained from her like water through a sieve. She was vaguely aware of her head slumping onto Eammon’s shoulder, her hand trailing through the shards of mirror on the floor, and then she knew nothing.
Chapter Thirteen
Neve
She didn’t remember the return to the surface, not really. There were snatches of lucidity—the crumble of rock against her boots, the way her bedraggled hem slid along the stone floor, the feel of cave wall beneath one palm and Solmir’s skin against the other—but for the most part, Neve was drifting, caught in twists of shadows that coursed through her veins to join the knot of cold in her middle, spinning like a black sun.