But Red walked, instead, toward the tower.
Since healing the Wilderwood, the vines on the outside of the tower had grown riotous, full of lush leaves and white blooms as big as her head. It was a beautiful thing, a spot of spring in all this autumn. And her magic, the wildly blooming forest beneath her skin, was still stronger there.
Though not strong enough to make the mirror work.
One try. She’d give it one try today, one beseeching sacrifice to see if it would surrender a glimpse of her sister. Then she’d join Eammon, scouring tomes for things they might not yet know about themselves, the Wilderwood, the Shadowlands. Things that might let them free Neve from the darkness that held her fast.
One try.
As she walked over the moss, Red’s gaze—the deep brown of her irises ringed with green now, just like Eammon’s—strayed to the iron gate, to the trees beyond. Only yellows and oranges, only brown bark, with no white sentinels to interrupt them.
“There has to be a door,” Red whispered in the autumn of her wood, the words spoken aloud but also directed inward, at the forest she carried beneath her skin. “There has to be something.”
No answer. But a breeze picked up, spinning golden leaves, and she felt an answering rustle along her spine.
Red jogged up the tower steps, already pulling strands of dark-gold hair from the lumpy braid Eammon had tied. Thin tendrils of ivy tangled in the blond, growing from her head just as naturally; she plucked one of those, too. Then blood, just a tiny drop of it, drawn from digging her nail into the pad of her opposite thumb. It reminded her of those first days in the Wilderwood, what felt like lifetimes ago, working at a hangnail to try to avoid using her magic.
Strange, what she used to be afraid of.
The blood she smeared on the gilt frame; the hair and ivy she wound through its whorls. “Show me my sister,” Red commanded, in a layered voice that held clattering branches and blooming petals and whistling wind.
Nothing. Again. With a deep, shaking sigh, Red pushed up from the floor.
But something caught her eye in that matte gray surface. A shift, two crossing kinds of darkness, like something moving in a black, unlit room. She leaned forward until her nose almost touched the glass, peering at it.
The darkness in the mirror looked, almost, like a tangle of roots.
Chapter Three
Raffe
When an assassin finally came, Raffe was ready.
He’d been ready. Ever since that night at the edge of the Wilderwood—the night Neve disappeared—he’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop. It was a miracle it’d taken this long, really.
A week ago, he’d trekked to the village with Kiri slung over his back. He’d expected to run into trouble there—villagers awakened by the cosmic showdown happening at the border of the Wilderwood, a forest made a man brawling with one wreathed in shadow, ready to lash out in fear. But everyone, mysteriously, was asleep. Maybe through magic, maybe because people who chose to live so close to the Wilderwood had trained themselves not to notice strangeness, but the god-battle at the edge of the trees had apparently come and gone without comment.
Thankfully, Valleyda’s northernmost village also played fast and loose with the law. Raffe had managed to find someone who didn’t think twice about helping him cross the Florish border with a clearly injured woman, who raised barely an eyebrow when he paid for her passage to the Rylt in solid gold coins. It wasn’t cheap, despite its brevity. Sailing westward to the cluster of islands that made the Rylt was three days’ journey, usually, but he’d found a sailor who said he could make it in two. Raffe had paid enough for Kiri to have food, but not much more than that, and given the captain a story about how she was his distant aunt, raving mad. He wondered if the captain had believed him. At any rate, he’d believed his gold.
Once he returned to the capital, it’d been fairly easy to make the rest of Kiri’s Order follow their High Priestess across the sea. A letter to the Ryltish Temple accompanied the rest of the priestesses on their voyage, and though the price of such a thing made his stomach and his purse ache, it was worth it to have them gone. Easy, too, had been the lying, both to the Temple and the court—Queen Neverah was so impressed with the piety in the Rylt, she’d sent Valleyda’s own Order so they could learn from each other.
Raffe just had to trust that all the Valleydan priestesses he’d sent away were smart enough to keep their mouths shut about everything that had happened, and that any raving on Kiri’s part could be chalked up to her injuries. Thus far, luck had held. But he was canny enough not to trust that it would forever.
More than once, Raffe thought that he should’ve just killed them. Killed Kiri, killed the priestesses. But he wasn’t that bloodthirsty. Not yet.
Though it’s probably what Neve would’ve done.
Neve. Arick. He’d pushed away the grief and frustration and a whole host of other unpleasant emotions surrounding them, keeping his feelings at arm’s length through force of will—and wine when that failed. He’d remembered yesterday that Arick’s birthday was soon, his mind serving the information up seemingly at random, and though he’d drained an entire bottle afterward, he hadn’t truly grieved. He had no time. No energy. When this was all resolved, when he finally had Neve back, then they could grieve together.
Though even the context of together was an odd one for him.
He loved Neve. He had since they were children. But the shape of that love was more difficult to pin down than its mere reality—its edges and contours, how exactly it was supposed to fit in his chest. He loved Neve, but did he know her? He’d thought so, before. Before Red and the forest, before the trees in the Shrine, before he’d seen her pull in darkness and sink into the earth.
After seeing what she was capable of, what she was willing to do, he wasn’t so sure he knew her at all.
All of these myriad thoughts were far from his mind now, however, as the assassin he’d expected ever since he arrived back at the capital finally crept into his room.
Raffe lay shirtless in his bed, eyes slit against the dark as he watched a figure moving through the shadows. He’d been dreaming before the assassin broke his light sleep. An odd one: a huge, white tree, the trunk swirled in gold and black.
The dregs of the dream still clung to the corners of his mind as he tracked the assassin through the room, peering through his lashes from nearly closed eyes. Raffe kept his breaths long and even, his limbs loose. When he slipped his hand under the pillow, where he kept a short dagger, he made it look like he was just shifting in his sleep.