He must’ve felt her watching. Hazel eyes slid to Red’s; Fife gave a slight, rueful shrug.
So he hadn’t told Lyra about the new bargain, hadn’t shown her the new Mark. He needed to, and soon—Lyra remembered enough of their battle with Solmir at the inverted grove to know she’d been badly hurt. Eventually, she’d figure out what it was that saved her.
The three of them ate in companionable silence, Fife next to Lyra and Red across from them. Meals were a much more intricate affair now that they weren’t limited to supplies only from the Edge. The villagers beyond the forest were still preparing for their great migration south—delayed by the currently quiet chaos in Valleyda—but Valdrek and Lear had already gone to the capital to scope out the new world they’d be returning to.
If they could find Neve—when we find Neve, Red thought to herself almost savagely, fingers tightening around her mug—Red knew she would help with the villagers’ resettlement. But for now, with Raffe secretly holding things together in Valleyda by willpower alone, it didn’t seem wise to try to move a whole tiny country from behind the Wilderwood. Those at the Edge agreed, and many of them were content to stay where they were, anyway. Now that the way through the forest was open and they could feasibly trade with the rest of the world, the land beyond the Wilderwood no longer seemed like a prison.
“Do you care to give this to Raffe when you see him?” Red asked, fishing the letter from her pocket.
Fife took it, cocking a brow when he felt how thin it was. “Anything new to report?”
“No.” She sighed. “But he’d want to know that. No news is bad news.”
Lyra picked up another piece of toast. “I thought it was ‘no news is good news.’”
“We’ll just leave it at ‘no news is going to make Raffe more nervous than he already is.’”
Other than the brief reminder of Arick’s birthday, the letter truly wasn’t much—just a reiteration that although Red offered to the mirror every day, it still showed her nothing of her sister. Telling him, again, that she and Eammon were looking for any possible way to open the Shadowlands and pull Neve out.
Well. Any safe possible way.
Before they’d become the Wilderwood, there’d been countless accidental doors into the Shadowlands. The breaches, the churned black dirt around falling sentinels that birthed shadow-creatures and the lesser beast they’d fought after the first time he took her to the Edge. And that, Red thought, could be the answer they were looking for.
What if there was a way to re-create a doorway to the Shadowlands? To somehow free a sentinel from within one of them, like a loose tooth, plant it back in the ground and let its distance from them rot it just enough to open a way between the worlds?
She’d mentioned the idea to Eammon only once. He’d responded poorly. Furious would be more accurate, really, Eammon fire-eyed and low-voiced, looming over her like something avenging, asking her what the fuck she thought she was doing.
She hadn’t realized until right then that it was the same way his mother had died. Gaya had attempted to open the Shadowlands and pull Solmir out, and the Wilderwood had consumed her for it, desperate to stop its own wounding.
It had to be different, this time. They held all of the forest between them, none of it attached to the earth anymore. Surely that meant it wouldn’t riot, that it would understand? But Eammon was adamant and clearly terrified, so Red dropped the subject.
But the idea wouldn’t leave her alone.
And her letter to Raffe was thin.
“Wait a minute, Fife.” Red stood, searching in her pockets for a pen—she’d taken to carrying one all the time, since Eammon was always in need of something to write with. Usually, there was a pen behind his ear, but Red preferred to let him borrow one from her and then figure that out on his own. “I have something to add.”
Maybe the dream would serve as a comfort to Raffe, somehow, since there was nothing else new to report. And the library in Valleyda was vast—if she and Eammon couldn’t find anything significant, it was possible he could.
She scribbled out the bare bones of the dream at the end of the letter, blowing on the ink to quicken its drying, and handed it back to Fife. “Tell him to write back if he has questions.”
Fife nodded, tucking the letter into his jacket pocket. “Want to come?” he asked Lyra, not quite able to make it nonchalant. “Raffe always buys and puts me up in one of the nicer inns for the night.”
“Sure.” One more bite of toast, and Lyra stood, stretching her arms over her head. She’d bought new clothes in Valleyda, a gown the color of ice that perfectly contrasted her golden-brown skin, but she still wore her tor across her back. The pairing made her look fierce and delicate at once. “Then maybe we can talk about where you want to go next.”
We stay together, him and me. She’d said that before, long before any of them knew that the forest would let them go so soon, that Red and Eammon would finally heal what had been broken. Lyra had gone off on her own at first only because Fife refused; Red wondered if he could beg off a second time. Even though Red understood his apprehension—understood that his new tie to the Wilderwood made him nervous to leave it—she hoped the next time Lyra asked, he’d choose to go.
Though part of her thought Fife was more nervous about Lyra seeing his new Mark than anything else.
All of them were still trying to navigate the labyrinth they’d made, no one quite sure how to press at its parameters. She and Eammon weren’t confined to their forest. They carried the Wilderwood within; it couldn’t hold them within a border that no longer existed. But with Neve missing and their power so new, neither of them had broached the subject of leaving. Especially now that they wore their magic so physically, so clearly. Red still didn’t want to run into anyone from Valleyda, anyone who remembered her as just the Second Daughter who’d visited once before disappearing again—right before her sister, the new queen, was reportedly stricken ill. The potential for questions she didn’t want to answer was too high, things were too fragile.
And if she was this nervous about it, she couldn’t imagine what Eammon was feeling. Eammon, who’d completely lost himself the one time he breached the southern border of the Wilderwood, who hadn’t known the world outside of it for centuries.
Well. There’d be time for all that. Once they found Neve. Red had been thinking recently of how she’d like to see the ocean again.
She saw Fife and Lyra out the door, watching the two of them amble into the gold-and-ocher expanse of the healed Wilderwood. Eammon was waiting for her down in the library. She should bring him another cup of coffee; he’d undoubtedly finished his first.