“I don’t think you’d want my pointers, considering how utterly I failed.”
It sent them into silence again. The ship rocked slowly beneath them, drawing down Neve’s eyelids despite her pronouncement that she wasn’t tired. She tried not to think about whether the gentle tip and sway was due to the water or another quake far beneath the surface, the Shadowlands slowly dissolving and breaking apart.
Above her, Solmir shifted, pulling the piece of carved wood and his knife out from his boot. The soft scrape of the blade across the grain made a gentle counterpoint to the rocking ship.
By the time he started humming—deep and sonorous, that same lullaby melody he’d hummed once before, in an abandoned cabin deep in the upside-down forest—Neve was already asleep.
She has her key already.
One of those dreams again. Fog and roots and that familiar disembodied voice. She pushed up from the oddly smooth ground, the gauzy fabric of that white, shroud-like gown shifting over her legs.
The tower of tree roots rose before her, stretching up into the mist. Tendrils of shadow seethed along the white bark, glowing dark against the white and gray.
“What do you mean?” Neve asked the voice. “What key?”
No need to ask what she the voice referred to. It could only be Red. Always her and Red.
She attempted to reach for the Tree already. Nearly lost herself, not knowing what she was doing. Same as it ever was. The voice sounded equal parts fond and frustrated. But that’s what it takes. Matched love. A willingness to lay down your life for another.
“Is she all right?” Panic crawled up her throat, made her turn in a whirl, even though she knew she’d see nothing but more fog. “Is Red all right?”
Red is fine. Soothing, with a slight ache in it, like this voice had been worried for Red, too. She has her pieces. Now you get yours.
“And that will open the Tree? Draw the Kings, so we can kill them in the real world?”
The voice was silent, long enough that her teeth ground together. “Answer me. Isn’t that why you’re here?”
Yes. Begrudging. Yes, the Tree will open. And then you make your choice. Both of you.
“What do you mean?”
There are two paths here, and while others will make choices that affect which you take, in the end the decision is yours alone. Both paths will lead you home, but only one will offer healing. Penance.
“Penance?” Her voice came out quiet, small.
A pause. Someone pays for the mistakes we make, Neve. Either we do, or we leave it to those who come after us.
A jolt snapped her out of the dream, made her eyes open to ivory ship and black water and gray horizon. Solmir stood straight next to her, no longer leaning on the railing, blue eyes narrowed.
“We’re here,” he murmured.
Neve stood in a hurry, nearly tripping over her hem. The ship had taken them into a bay, a semicircle of black ocean lapping against a stony beach. Here, the last slopes of the bone-built mountain range slumped into the sea, leaving just enough shoreline to hold an upside-down castle.
It was an impossibility, a conundrum of architecture that her mind wouldn’t let her fully take in all at once. Instead, pieces: the massive, wrong-turned doors against the outcropping of a cliff made from bone, the turrets pointing downward into the ground, holding up the entire structure like a body balanced on extended fingers. What should be the castle’s foundation was instead in the air, a shelf of stone pockmarked with the honeycomb walls of dungeons, their openings letting through slices of gray light.
And in the center of that upturned foundation, a seething mass of roots.
“Where’s the rest of it?” Neve breathed. The roots looked just like the ones in her dream, white bark traced through with glowing black lines. She couldn’t tear her eyes away.
“I assume that’s Redarys’s part.” A creak as the gangplank grew from the side of the ship again. Solmir didn’t look at her as he walked toward it. “I never saw anything but the roots, the last time I was here.”
“You mean there wasn’t a trunk, when Gaya—”
“No,” he snapped. “As we’ve established, that time, I did it wrong.”
Neve closed her mouth.
“Let’s hope you have more luck than I did, Shadow Queen.” Solmir strode down the beach, toward the inverted castle and the Heart Tree inside.
Pulse pounding in her wrists, Neve followed.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Red
Both their palms were slick, pressed together so tightly Red could feel the thrum of Eammon’s pulse. She didn’t know who the sweat came from. She assumed both of them.
Neither she nor the Wolf was entirely ready to leave their forest. But for Neve, she’d do it. Sail to the Rylt, confront Kiri, do whatever she had to in order to bring her sister home.
Even if the sight of the open plain beyond the trees made her breath come shallow and her pulse run quick. She’d had three days to prepare for this as Kayu arranged their voyage, but none of it amounted to any kind of calm.
The edge of the Wilderwood loomed up ahead, autumn leaves filtering the early light of a day that hadn’t quite yet dawned in crimson and gold. When they’d healed the forest, taken it all into themselves, the border had repaired itself, too—it was no longer the broken, jagged line it’d been when Solmir and Kiri pulled out so many sentinels, like a smile with missing teeth. Now, once again, it was a firm demarcation, a wall of trees blocking them from Valleyda.
A wall neither of them had breached since that day.
She kept waiting for the Wilderwood within her to riot at the thought of leaving. For pain to spike through her, like it had the day Neve disappeared into the Shadowlands, warning her away from the border, warning her she couldn’t cross.
But there was nothing. Just the gentle sway of leaves over her spine, the creep of ivy through her hipbones.
Behind them, Fife and Lyra stood waiting. Fife was nervous to go farther than Valleyda, but he refused to show it, standing as still as he could even as his feet shifted against the dirt. Lyra stood next to him, one hand placed gently on his forearm. The two of them had apparently come to some kind of resolution, through the whispered conversations Red had seen them having in the corners of the Keep. At any rate, they didn’t seem upset with each other anymore.
The Keep was under the not-quite-watchful eyes of Lear and Loreth, who had been more enthusiastic about the prospect than Red had thought they’d be. Eammon had snorted when she said as much to him, and tilted up her chin for a kiss that left her breathless. “Newlyweds,” he murmured against her lips, “will take any privacy they can.”
There was nothing of that easy humor in him now. Eammon stared at the tree line like someone might look at a gallows.
Red jostled her shoulder against his. “The Wilderwood is being nice to me. How about you?”