His hand strayed to her hair, tucking flyaway pieces behind her ears as his brows drew down and he thought back over the sleep she’d interrupted. “Not that I can recall, no.” A flicker of heat in his eyes. “Though I did wake up rather compromised, so my memory is not as sharp as it could be.”
Her lips twisted as she poked him hard in the stomach. She’d told him about the forest dreams when they first started happening. They happened to him, too—the quick flashes of image and feeling, too brief to make much sense of. Usually, if Red had a forest dream, so did Eammon, the thread of magic that twined through them both igniting in sync.
But this one, apparently, had been only for her. Red frowned. “It was stranger than the others. Longer. There was a tree. A sentinel. And an apple. When I took a bite out of it, it was bloody.”
Eammon’s hand stilled. Mentions of blood still made him tense, even now that the forest didn’t require it of him anymore. Lyra teasingly called him squeamish, but it was with a sympathetic light in her eyes. The Wolf had faced enough blood for several lifetimes.
The momentary stiffness passed, his thumb tracing her jaw before his hand fell away. “Do you think it means something? The dreams the Wilderwood gives us generally don’t, at least for me, but if you think it did…”
“It could.” Red sighed. “Or it could mean that the spices Lyra brought us last night did a number on my head.”
He snorted. “I’ll check the library. See if there’s anything that sounds similar in the histories, just to make sure. Mentions of bloody apples should be few and fairly specific, I’d think.”
“I’ll help after I see Fife off. I have a letter for Raffe.”
“Another one?”
She shrugged, picking at a loose thread on the hem of her tunic. “If I was in his position, I’d want to know absolutely everything we were trying. If it was you that was lost.”
The Wolf gave a low rumble of assent.
Red’s fingers tapped against her leg, apprehensive. “If Raffe doesn’t have anything new,” she said finally, “we should talk about what to do next.”
She didn’t look up, but she heard the hitch in Eammon’s sigh. It skirted close to a not-quite-argument, one that had been hanging in the air around them for days. They were searching two libraries and had come up with nothing so far to help them find Neve. Red’s patience, a worn-thin thing to begin with, was nearly frayed through. Who knew what Neve was enduring while they wasted time with old books and caution?
The atmosphere crackled, waiting. Finally, Eammon nodded. “We’ll talk about it,” he said. Then he dropped another kiss on her forehead and disappeared down the stairs.
Red stood, stretching her arms above her head to work out the last of her morning stiffness. Delicious smells already wafted up from the kitchen—Lyra had arrived the night before after a brief jaunt south, the first of many trips around the continent she planned to take now that she was no longer beholden to the Wilderwood. Fife had gone all out for dinner the night before, and apparently he’d done the same for breakfast this morning.
The letter to Raffe sat on the desk, just one page, folded small. Red looked at it with her bottom lip between her teeth. There was more in it than just a relating of their lack of progress. A few lines scribbled at the end. Arick’s birthday was soon. Raffe would remember without her reminding him, but Red felt she should mention it anyway. Proof that she remembered, too.
Grief for Arick was a strange thing, probably the strangest she’d felt in all of her uncanny sadnesses. She wasn’t sorry she killed him; of all the strange emotions he stirred up, guilt wasn’t one. She would’ve done much worse to save Eammon, to save Neve. Arick had made his choice when he called up Solmir, gave him his shadow and his life.
But she was still sorry he was gone.
Her mouth pressed to a thin, hard line as she picked up the letter and slipped it into her pocket. The next time she saw Solmir, she was going to kill him. Much more slowly than she’d killed Arick.
She walked down the stairs, thoughts turning from Arick and Solmir to closer concerns as she listened to Fife’s and Lyra’s voices in the dining room. Eammon had told Fife he could go with Lyra on her treks around the continent if he wanted; now that he and Red were the Wilderwood, and there was no real border to bind him into, it stood to reason he could travel as far and wide as she did. But Fife hadn’t tried, going only as far as the Valleydan capital to meet with Raffe. Red wasn’t sure what held him back, and she didn’t feel comfortable asking, not when everything was still new, still raw. Not when none of them quite understood what Fife had gotten himself into when he bargained with the god Eammon had briefly become.
The new bargain he’d made with the Wilderwood—with Eammon—was different. She could feel it in the forest she carried, though she wasn’t certain how. The Wilderwood had needed something from Fife that wasn’t blood, wasn’t fealty. The Mark on his arm was larger and more intricate than it’d been before, a tangle of roots beneath the skin that spanned nearly from his elbow to the middle of his forearm. The forest asked nothing of him; there were no shadow-creatures or breaches to throw blood at, hoping it might seal them closed.
Even in that thread of congruent forest-thought that ran parallel to her own, so close she could barely differentiate it, Red could discern nothing of what Fife’s new bargain was supposed to mean.
It made them nervous, all three of them. Made them move cautiously around each other. And if that was painful for Red, she couldn’t imagine how it must be for Fife and Eammon, who’d spent so long together in a small world of their own.
When she arrived in the dining room, Lyra was already seated, a steaming cup of coffee in her hand and a smile on her elfin face. Time in the sun outside of the forest had lightened the tips of her tightly coiled black hair, giving it a coppery shimmer. She raised her chipped mug in salute as Red walked through the door. “Are you actually going to sit and eat, or will you go the way of your husband and steal a slice of toast with barely a hello?”
“I’ll sit.” Red slid into her chair and took the cup Lyra offered, giving her a thankful grin when she saw the other woman had already doused her coffee with cream. “This smells far better than usual.”
“Did you know coffee doesn’t have to taste like limp bean water? I learned this when I took a detour into Meducia. They know their way around a beverage, between the wine and the coffee.”
“I’m choosing not to be offended.” Fife emerged from the kitchen, carrying what looked like a whole ham and setting it down next to the toast. “I’m choosing not to comment on the fact that you called my coffee limp bean water.”
Lyra wrinkled her nose and patted his reddish hair. “The very best limp bean water.”
Fife smiled at her. It was the first true smile Red had seen from him in a week. He wore his long sleeves pulled down, hiding his Bargainer’s Mark, and when Lyra turned back to her breakfast, he fiddled with the cuff, making sure it was still at his wrist.