“And when she comes back, I…” He lost the words and couldn’t find any more that fit. Raffe shook his head.
“When she comes back,” Red said decisively, “you will be an excellent friend to her. You two will talk. You will figure out what kind of relationship you want to have.” She gave him a tiny, reassuring half smile. “All of this is complicated, Raffe. It always has been. You don’t have to know exactly what you’re doing all the time.”
He huffed a rueful laugh. “Even half the time would be welcome.”
The coach clattered up the road that led to the docks, Kayu driving. As the horses stopped, a rumble moved over the ground, shaking the docks, the sparse trees, making the waves in the ocean grow taller.
At the wheel, Neils boomed another laugh. “This keeps up, and I’ll be down to Karsecka in less than a week!”
Red gave him a tight smile, dread chewing at her spine. The Wilderwood sent a skitter of thorns across her ribs, a branch stretching over her collarbone, sharp and pinching.
Kayu drove fast, but the earthquakes were faster. They felt at least three in the two hours it took to travel from the Florish coast to the edge of the Wilderwood, growing in intensity the closer they got to Valleyda. By the time they crossed the border, only minutes from the Wilderwood, Kayu had to stop the carriage each time one started, the horses prancing nervously in place as the ground shook. It’d snowed while they were gone, white drifts of it lining the roadway, flakes spinning off to twirl in the air as the earth vibrated beneath them. Snow always started early this far north, barely giving summer time to fade to fall.
“The quakes are too close together.” Lyra shook her head, fawn-colored eyes glassy with worry. “How do we know the Shadowlands haven’t dissolved already?”
“We’ll know.” The forest within Red rustled, a bloom of a vine along her shoulder blades, the snaking of a root down her spine. Not for the first time, she half wished the Wilderwood could speak to her in words again, wither part of itself as a price for speech. “We’ll know when they dissolve.”
Across the carriage, Fife’s face was pale, his hand clamped tight around his forearm. Red watched him with her lips pressed into a thin line, waiting to see if the Wilderwood spoke to him in ways it wasn’t speaking to her.
It tells me the things you don’t want to hear.
But Fife stayed silent.
Another painful twist of root in Red’s sternum. Eammon’s hand tightened on her knee—he felt it, too. Not the deep, piercing pain of the sentinels being ripped out, nothing like what they’d felt the night of the shadow grove when Neve disappeared, but the ache of the forest doing… something.
Something none of them were sure of yet.
“What then?” Lyra asked. “Will it be like a breach? A million shadow-creatures erupting at once?” Her hand flexed to the hilt of her tor, its scabbard on the floor by her feet. “Do we just fling blood at them again?”
“No.”
Every head turned to Fife, all of them surprised that the answer had come from him. He kept his gaze on the floor, his jaw a ridge of discomfort, his Marked arm held close to his body. “No blood. The blood was always a bandage, it didn’t truly fix anything.”
Red slipped her hand over Eammon’s scarred one, holding tight.
Another quake shook the carriage, snow sliding from the hills at the side of the road. The horses squealed, Kayu’s soothing voice jagging up toward a shout as she sawed on the reins. The carriage lurched back and forth, tipping up onto two wheels.
“Bail out!” Raffe’s voice sliced through the sounds of the horses. “The thing’s about to flip!”
Fife shot up, levering open the door; he pushed Lyra out before jumping after her.
Eammon tugged Red with him out the door to tumble into the snow. One of the wheels broke, sending the whole structure leaning in their direction; teeth bared, he swept her up against his chest, rolling out of the way just as the entire carriage crashed to the ground exactly where they’d been.
The earth ceased its shaking as the horses galloped away, cut free by Raffe as he jumped down from the driver’s seat. He and Kayu stood at the edge of the road, breathing hard; her palms were red and welted from trying to hold on to the reins.
“Well,” Kayu said, voice surprisingly even, “I guess we’re walking.”
They were close, thankfully. The trees of the Wilderwood speared into the sky ahead of them after half an hour, more snow twirling in the air between the branches. Another low quake rumbled through the ground, calmer than the one that had crashed the carriage, but enough to make them all stop and brace against the road.
Raffe turned to look at Red after the third quake in fifteen minutes, the border of the Wilderwood visible up ahead. “What if the Shadowlands dissolve while Neve’s there?” His eyes sparked. “What if Solmir keeps her there, and she can’t get away even if she wants to?”
She shook her head. Her voice came out hoarse. “I don’t know what to tell you, Raffe. I can’t make her leave.”
He stared at her a moment, eyes glittering. When Neve first disappeared into the Shadowlands, he’d asked Red how they were going to save her. Then, too, she hadn’t known. And he’d told her that wasn’t good enough.
It still wasn’t.
Red couldn’t save Neve, any more than Neve could save her. She wondered if anyone could, really. Saving someone else was a wall you couldn’t scale unless they threw you a rope.
As they reached the tree line, Red gave an involuntary sigh of relief. A tension she hadn’t known she was carrying softened in her shoulders, the forest beneath her skin opening wider blooms, stretching out longer branches. Next to her, Eammon let out a deep breath, the sound like rustling leaves.
Fife rubbed at the Mark on his arm, flickering them a surreptitious look from beneath ginger brows.
“So we just go to the Keep?” Lyra asked. The bright light off the snow gilded her curls in silver. Even though she wasn’t connected to the Wilderwood anymore, being close to it still seemed to soothe her. “Wait for the shadows to find us?”
Another quake, this one enough to knock Red off-balance. She slid in the snow, Eammon catching her arm. Down in the village, hidden beneath all the white, she heard the sounds of frightened animals, distant calls of alarm.
The key in her hand pulsed more quickly, its heartbeat speeding up. And something about that made the dread in her middle spike higher, a connection that, once made, seemed obvious.
It was Neve’s heart. She could feel Neve’s heart in her key.
Which meant she was still alive. Still alive, and still choosing to stay in the Shadowlands, to finish the Kings in whatever way she and Solmir could.
Red pulled the key from her pocket. The threads of gold in the bark had grown, were still growing, nearly eclipsing the white. It glowed as bright as a miniature sun in her palm, glinting off the snow. The heartbeat—Neve’s heartbeat—sped and sped, nearly visible, pounding to a crescendo.