“If Eammon can manage it, anyone can.”
“He seemed to recover well enough to beat me at three rounds of that game Kayu taught us,” Raffe muttered as he turned away from the railing. “You try to sleep, too.”
“At some point,” Red reassured him.
With a nod, Raffe disappeared down the ladder into the hold.
Her key weighed in her pocket, heavy against her hip. Red pulled it out, tracing the familiar contour with her fingers.
Though she’d kept it on her since it appeared, Red hadn’t looked at it since they left the Wilderwood. Part of her had almost been afraid it would change, warp, one more dead end. But the key looked exactly the same, gilded in the moonlight and touched with threads of gold.
When it pulsed in her hand, harder than it ever had before, Red nearly dropped it.
Cursing through her teeth, Red clenched her hand around the key and stepped away from the railing, determined to keep it in her grip. The key continued to beat, as if there were a heart concealed somewhere in the wood, a counterpoint rhythm to her own. Before, she’d thought it was half a hallucination, a phantom of her own pulse, but this was too strong to ignore or reason away.
Eammon. She should tell Eammon, should—
But then there was a rush of darkness, and a roar of sound, and the feeling of falling.
And when Red opened her eyes, it wasn’t to a ship. It wasn’t to a moonlit sky scattered in stars.
It was to fog.
And to the Tree.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Neve
It was different than the dreams.
There, Neve had been at the bottom of the Tree, next to the massive tower of roots that directly mirrored the ones she’d just walked into. This time, she stood on… well. She wasn’t quite sure what she stood on. Fog snaked around her feet in an obscuring billow and spill.
But whatever it was, it placed her directly in the middle of the Tree.
Roots far below, the white bark churned with threads of shadow. And branches above, those tendrils of darkness fading gradually to gold. Though she’d seen it before, something like awe still spiked in her chest.
It was real. Mythic and impossible, but real.
And that meant she could go home.
The thought was forced, what she felt should be the logical next step in the pattern of relief her mind followed. But it sat heavy, didn’t quite fit.
“Neve?”
Quiet, shaken. But she would know that voice anywhere.
A tremble started in her hands, worked all the way up her arms as she turned to face her sister.
Red looked feral. Dressed in a worn tunic and leggings beneath a dark cloak, hair loosely braided and threaded through with ivy. The veins in her hands blushed a faint green, had a slight pulse to them that perfectly echoed the gold in the branches above. A green halo surrounded the warm brown of her irises, and delicate bracelets of bark encircled her wrists.
More wood than woman. More wild, more Wolf. But the first thing Neve said to her twin was “You look beautiful.”
And Red straightened from her crouch, and her green-and-brown eyes widened, and she replied, “So do you.”
Suddenly, the lack of a solid floor in all this fog, the gold above and the black below and the massive Tree they stood beside seemed utterly inconsequential. The First and Second Daughters of Valleyda ran through the mist, across whatever substituted for the ground, and fell into each other’s arms.
Neve felt something, as she rushed to Red. The ghost of fingers across her skin, like someone else was here, someone else wanting to fall together with them, too. A sound like a sigh, echoing through the endless fog, and then it was gone.
And Neve saw, as her arms wrapped around her twin, that the veins in them were blackened, her wrists wreathed in thorns. Solmir’s parting gift. Was it because she needed it? Had he just grown tired of holding all that power?
There was an itch beneath her skin, a subtle hook in her middle. It felt like something abandoned, something left undone.
Red scraped in a breath against Neve’s shoulder. “I thought I lost you.” The breath shuddered, became a sob. “I let you go, I chose him over you, and then you were gone—”
“But I made you.” Neve put a hand on her sister’s hair. The leaves of the ivy twitched against her fingers. “I made you choose, because I wouldn’t listen.” Her own tears started, burning in her eyes, slipping down cheeks blushed with shadow. “I wanted to make your choices for you.”
“Neve,” Red started, reassurance in her tone, but Neve took a step back and held up her thorn-studded hand. The Oracle had given her a gift, when it rent through that knot she kept her emotions tied up in, brutal though it was. There were things she needed to say.
“I didn’t want to admit I was wrong. Even though I knew it.” There it was, her most damning confession. “I knew it was wrong, and I did it anyway, because I wanted some kind of control.” Her breath hitched on the last word, her fingers shaking. “I was willing to do anything to feel like I had some kind of control.”
A heartbeat, both of them standing there tearstained. Then Red’s green-veined hand closed around Neve’s thorns. “You had your reasons.”
Neve pulled in a shaking sigh.
Red dropped their hands, but kept her fingers laced with Neve’s. “I should’ve told you why I had to go. I was so… so scared, and ashamed, and I thought…” She trailed off, like whatever she’d thought didn’t lend itself easily to words. Her eyes closed. When she spoke again, it was measured and unwavering, as if she was reciting something she’d rehearsed over and over in her mind. “Neve, do you remember what happened that night?”
There was only one night they ever referred to with that kind of weight. Four years ago, turning sixteen, running under endless, star-strewn sky toward the dark trees. Toward the Wilderwood and its Shadowlands beneath, the place that would swallow them both.
“Parts of it,” Neve murmured. “But not… not whatever made you think you had to leave.” She had to force them up her closing throat, those words. How often had this sliced at her, cut her so deep she grew almost numb to it? That night had started their splintering, and there were such huge swaths Neve didn’t remember.
And the biggest question, the one that sliced deepest—was it something she’d done, that made Red feel like she could only belong to the forest? Was it somehow her fault?
This was all so much bigger than they were, but in the end, it narrowed down to her and her sister and all the things that had grown up between them, surely as roots, surely as thorns.
Red’s eyes stayed closed. “I almost killed you.”