Nerves knotted in Red’s stomach.
She changed the subject, giving her husband a quizzical lift of her brow. “So how exactly did you see this marking before, if it’s all the way on the northern side of the wall?”
“Back before it got so bad, I used to test the limits of the Wilderwood. See how far it would let me go.” A stilted shrug, and Red wondered if she shouldn’t have asked, after all. It was still hard for him to talk about all that time he was the Wolf alone. “Sometime between Kaldenore and Sayetha, I made myself walk all the way around the Edge. Just to prove I could. It took a day and a half, and I didn’t stop to sleep, barely ate or drank anything.” He snorted. “I think I passed out when I was done. At any rate, I regained consciousness in the tavern, with Valdrek pouring ale down my throat. Damn near drowned me.”
In a quick, impulsive motion, Red tugged his arm, made him stoop down so she could press a fierce kiss to his mouth. Eammon returned it, a curious grin curling beneath her lips.
“What was that for?”
“Because I wanted to.”
“Fair enough.”
Ahead of them, Bormain had stopped, facing the wall with a strange, blank expression on his face. Kayu stood with her nose nearly pressed against the wood, Raffe close behind. But Lyra was at least two paces away, nostrils flared and hand gripping the hilt of her tor so tightly her knuckles blanched. Fife stood in front of her defensively, fists clenched and jaw set, expression as if they faced an oncoming army.
As they drew nearer, Red felt why. The air around this section of the wall felt strange, charged like the air before a thunderstorm. A familiar scent knifed at her nose—cold, ozone, emptiness.
Pain speared through her as she took another step forward, a shallow reflection of the pain she’d felt the night Solmir and Kiri raised the shadow grove. The Wilderwood shuddered around her spine, making her steps falter.
“Shadow-touched,” Lyra hissed. “Doesn’t look it, but it’s as shadow-touched as any breach ever was.”
“Kings on shitting horses,” Eammon cursed through his teeth, one hand pressed against his middle. The other shot toward Red, clenching around her shoulder in case he might have to hold her up.
“Did it feel like this before?” Red asked, turning to her Wolf. “When you passed the carving, that time you walked around the whole Edge?”
He shook his head, dark hair brushing over his clenched jaw. “Something’s changed.”
Oblivious to the tableau playing out behind her, Kayu glanced over her shoulder. “Are you going to come look at this or what?”
A moment’s hesitation, then Red swallowed, stepped forward. The Wilderwood within her rustled in discomfort, but it was bearable.
And there was something almost leading in that bright spark of consciousness that lived beside her own. Like the forest needed her to get closer to the carving, needed her to understand something. Like this was a necessary step.
Clearing his throat, Eammon followed her toward the wall. From the corner of her eye, Red saw him shake his head at Fife and Lyra—no need for them to come any closer than they had to.
When Eammon turned away, Lyra grabbed Fife’s hand and pulled him backward, running worried fingers over his brow. Lyra still felt the vestiges of her long connection to the forest, but she was free of it, carried none of it within her. Fife still had it buried in him, in ways none of them quite understood. His face was pale, mouth pressed flat, a sheen of sweat on his forehead.
The piece of wall Bormain stared at hosted more than one carving. Upon closer inspection, they reminded Red of the constellations painted in the tower—she could make out the rough form of what she thought was the Sisters, another smaller carving that might’ve been the Far-Flung Queen near them. But it was the carving beneath them that she knew, instinctively, was the one they were looking for.
It was simple. A group of lines carved at a curve so they looked like rays from a sun, forming a circle. Each ray of the strange sun had a few smaller markings coming off it, primitive representations that could be key teeth. The line in the middle went all the way through the circle, extending farther than the others on either side. The ends of that line were clearly meant to be keys, carved in exacting detail, one pointing up, the other down.
Slowly, working against the low hum of pain vibrating through her body, Red pulled her key from her pocket, held it up to the wall. It perfectly matched the longer line at the top of the carving, right down to every curve of the teeth.
“I still don’t understand what it’s supposed to mean,” she murmured. Her fingers tightened; she loosened them through conscious thought, afraid she might snap the key in half. “I still don’t understand how this is supposed to bring us to Neve.”
“She must come to you.”
Bormain’s voice sounded strange. Low, inflectionless. Red looked over her shoulder.
His face was blank, perfectly neutral. But for his open eyes fixed on the carving, he could’ve been asleep. “She has to find the door on her own. It’s only once she goes through and makes her choice that her key will come to her. Then the way is open.”
Raffe’s hand closed around his dagger, clearly unsettled by the change in Bormain’s demeanor. Eammon glanced at the other man, gave a slight shake of his head. Raffe didn’t let the dagger go, but neither did he draw it, instead stepping back and pulling Kayu with him, putting distance between them and Bormain. Valdrek wavered in the space left, like he was caught between wanting to go closer to his son-in-law and wanting to escape him.
“Two keys,” Bormain repeated. “Two halves of a whole, matched in power. A match in love is enough to open it, but not enough to make an end. Just because a door is open does not mean its threshold will be crossed, when there is shadow waiting.”
Red stood statue-still, scarcely daring to breathe, afraid any sudden movement might break the spell that gave them these answers, cryptic as they were. She recognized this, remembered it from the day she and Eammon had healed Bormain. Channeling messages from the Shadowlands, language from the magic that had roosted in him when he fell through the breach. But his voice didn’t sound malicious this time. It sounded almost weary.
“The door is you.” Bormain swayed slightly on his feet, eyes fixed to the carving. “You are the door.”
A beat of vast silence, all of them staring at this shadow-touched man and the shadow-touched carving.
The rumble under the ground was subtle. Welling up from the dirt like a buried heartbeat, reverberating in Red’s heels, up through her legs, rattling her bones and the forest held within them.