Neve pitched sideways, slamming her knees onto the stairs, though this quake was minor compared to the first. Solmir didn’t make for the doorway, instead bracing in a crouch with practiced fluidity. How long had this world been shaking apart, for him to look nearly used to it?
When the earth was still again, Solmir straightened, turning to walk up the stairs toward the circular room where she’d awoken. “You’ve probably put together that time is short,” he called over his shoulder. “So I’d suggest you keep up.”
Chapter Two
Red
The forest gave her dreams sometimes.
It made sense. To house magic as fully as she did, one had to expect that it would leave marks inside as well as out, carve golden grooves into her thoughts as surely as it haloed her eyes green and threaded ivy through her hair. No less unsettling, but a fairly mild side effect, all things considered.
It’d started right after she became the Wilderwood. Right after Neve was dragged down into the earth. Dreams that left golden afterimages, dreams that felt more real than the firings of her weary thoughts before finally trailing into sleep. The dreams were fairly simple, didn’t last long. A mirror with no reflection. Stars wheeling in the sky, coming together to almost make the shapes of words, then spangling apart before she could read them.
But this was the most solid dream the Wilderwood had given Red yet: a tree. A white-trunked sentinel in a sea of mist, mist that obscured whatever the rest of the landscape might be. It started as a sapling, then grew—slowly, in the way of dreams, then immediately. Shooting up, spreading branches above her head, veined in swirling lines of gold and black.
Then, an apple in her hand. Warm and golden, heavier than an apple should be. She raised it to her lips, bit down. The taste of blood, and a horrible pain in her chest, as if she’d somehow torn out and eaten a vital part of herself.
Red’s eyes opened, her middle twisting, copper flooding her mouth. Her heart beat fast against the base of her throat, spiderwebbing her veins in verdant green, then ebbed to a slower rhythm as she remembered where she was.
The Black Keep. With the Wolf.
A slight breeze blew through the open windows of their bedroom, carrying with it the scent of leaves and dirt and cinnamon, wafting eternal autumn. Dim morning light filtered over the bed, burnishing Eammon’s dark hair in gold, highlighting the scars on his bare shoulders, bare abdomen.
She smiled to see them, banishing vestiges of bloody dreams as she burrowed into his side and traced one of the three white lines on his stomach with her finger. They’d rattled the forest back into linear time and out of endless twilight, and never was she so thankful for it as in the mornings. The Wolf looked very good in gray, early light.
Her trailing hand brushed the scars, his hipbone. Lower. He shifted, chin tilting up with a low, contented sigh when her fingers closed around him, but didn’t wake.
Red grinned wickedly, replaced her hand with her mouth.
That was enough to wake him up. Eammon’s eyes opened, amber ringed with a corona of deep green, immediately molten. One scarred hand slid into her hair. “Good morning.”
“Very good morning,” Red murmured against him before rising up to straddle his hips.
After, when her thoughts were no longer hazed and blazing and she was dressing for the day, Red thought back to her dream. This one felt different. Weighty, somehow.
Everything felt weighty recently, though. A week since the shadow grove, since the earth opened, since they thwarted Solmir’s plan to bring the rest of the Kings to the other side and she and Eammon had become the Wilderwood entire, held in two bodies, two souls.
A week with no sign of Neve.
A week with no idea where to even start looking. The mirror in the tower showed her nothing, hadn’t since she looked in it that last time and seen the Shadowlands, before they went to the edge of the forest and found it shattered. The forest buried in her bones gave her no clues, quiet now that it had its anchors, no longer speaking through dearly bought words but settled alongside her mind like moss on a stone. The forest outside of her, empty now of sentinels and sentience but still magic-touched, was nothing but autumn and gold.
Red was the most powerful she’d ever been. And she felt helpless.
The rough familiarity of Eammon’s hands on the nape of her neck brought her mind back to the present. Lost in thought, she’d paused in the braiding of her hair, and he gathered it in his palms, picking up where she left off. “Something new troubling you?” His voice was low and morning-graveled. “Or the same?”
“The same,” she murmured.
A soft noise of affirmation. The braid he made was lumpy, but he tied it off tight, gave it a slight tug so her neck craned up to see him behind her. He dropped a kiss on her forehead. “Maybe Raffe will have something new to tell Fife.”
She sighed, leaning farther so the back of her head rested against the plane of Eammon’s stomach. “Maybe.” This would be the second time Fife had gone to the Valleydan capital, no longer constrained by the boundaries of the Wilderwood, though still bound in different ways—by the bargain he’d made for Lyra’s life, in those few minutes when Eammon wasn’t really Eammon but eclipsed by magic and forest. He met with Raffe in a tavern, the latter wearing the most nondescript clothes he could find, and they tried to figure out ways they might use the things at Raffe’s disposal to find Neve.
Well. At his disposal for now. Before anyone figured out that the Queen was not actually recuperating from illness in a Florish holding, that her betrothed was not visiting Alpera, and that the High Priestess was not attending him.
If and when those things came to light, Raffe’s use of the palace library and close watch over the Shrine might not be so easy.
Thus far, Valleyda’s isolation had worked in their favor. The very things that made them notable made them undesirable as a territory to conquer—the Wilderwood on the northern border, the Second Daughter tithe, the poor soil and climate that never let warmth last long. And though two of those things were no longer deterrents, news traveled slowly, especially as the weather turned colder and courtiers holed up at home or abroad in preparation for the coming winter.
If they moved quietly, quickly, there’d never be any reason for the nobles to know Neve was gone. Red was too busy trying to bring her sister back from the underworld to fight over her throne, too.
She had half a mind to let it go, if it came to that. What good had a throne done either of them? Red certainly didn’t want it.
Her eyes fluttered closed as she leaned back against Eammon, breathing in his library smell. Still the same, though the scent of leaves was more prominent now. “I had a dream. One from the Wilderwood.” She opened one eye to peer up at him. “Did you?”