She grimaced. Her attention turned from the list to the open book.
The visible page was a table of contents. No title, but she recognized some of the chapter names— “The Great Plague,” “A Taxonomy of Lesser Beasts,” “Rites of the Old Ones.” It was tempting to sit and flip through, but Eammon’s things looked as though he’d left in a hurry. He could be back any moment.
Red turned to resume her search, but the stack of books by the desk caught her eye. Something about them seemed strange, the proportions wrong. She took a step closer, then reared back.
Legends sat at the top of the stack, the book she’d smeared with her blood the day before. And the Wilderwood had half consumed it.
Thin, snaking roots wormed their way in through the cracks in the stone wall, slithering out to latch onto the spot of blood on the cover. They stretched through the canvas, through the pages, seeping down the rest of the stack like it was the soil they were planted in.
Cursing hoarsely, Red stumbled away. But the roots were still, as if momentarily satisfied, and her heart slowly migrated back behind her ribs.
Her books. That’s why she was here. Her books, not the one she’d inadvertently marked with blood, another thing lost to this cursed, encroaching forest.
The leather bag was on the other side of the desk, hidden just outside the ring of unflickering candlelight. Red looped the strap over her shoulder, hurrying to the door.
She crouched before she pushed it open to riffle through the bag. After all that running on her twentieth birthday, she wasn’t sure if all her books had made it. One, in particular, she wanted to make sure hadn’t been lost.
A sigh of relief as her fingers closed over the familiar leather binding. Red pulled it from the bag, running her palm over the flaking gilt. A book of poems. The only gift she could ever remember receiving from her mother.
She’d been ten, already a voracious reader. It was days past her birthday when Isla entered her room, alone, no retinue to accompany her. “Here.” It hadn’t been wrapped, and Isla hadn’t quite met her eye. “This seemed like something you would like.”
It hadn’t been. Not at first. But when Isla left, nearly as soon as Red closed her hands on the book, she’d sat down at her window and read the whole thing through twice.
The poems were childish, and she knew them by heart now. She hadn’t opened the book to actually read it in years. But she liked to keep it close. Proof of one moment of warmth.
Red packed the books back in her bag and started up the stairs.
She stopped short at the sight of the figure in the hall.
A shock of reddish hair was his most identifying feature, and vaguely familiar. He knelt before the sapling she’d noticed that morning, peering at its roots. One white-skinned hand he kept tucked close to his middle, marked with violent lines of scar tissue.
This must be Fife, then.
He muttered a quiet curse, tugging something from his pocket— another vial of blood— and reached toward the tree.
“Careful!” The sight of flesh so near something she’d seen bare its teeth pulled the warning out of her before she could call it back. He lived in the Wilderwood, of course he knew he should be careful.
The figure froze before turning his head, arm still outstretched. A ginger brow raised.
Red shifted on her feet. “Sorry, I just . . . they bite, sometimes.”
The brow climbed higher. “They only bite you, Second Daughter.”
If that was meant to be comforting, it missed the mark by a mile.
Forest detritus had already grown up around the tree, vines and flowering bushes. Carefully, Fife peeled them back, peering at the base of the sapling beneath.
“Kings.” He sat back on his heels. “This is the second one in as many days to come into the Keep.” With a practiced motion, Fife uncorked his vial with one hand, the scarred and withered one still held close to his middle, and poured the blood over the roots of the sapling. Nothing changed, not that Red could see, but he took no further action. His eyes darted to her. “Did you do anything to it this morning?”
“To what? The tree?”
“Yes, the tree. Did Eammon tell you to do anything?”
“No.” Incredulity made the word sharper than she meant it. “He told me to stay away from it. From all of them, I mean. All the white trees.”
Fife’s lips pressed together, regarding her for an unreadable second before turning back to the sapling. “Well, that should hold until Eammon can get to it.” He pressed up from the floor. “Since he is apparently still determined to do this on his own.”
Red’s brows drew together, looking from Fife’s retreating back to the sentinel sapling. A twist of her lips, and she turned to follow him down the corridor. “I’m Redarys. But you knew that.”
“Correct.”
“And you’re Fife.”
“Two for two.”
“So your blood doesn’t just kill shadow-creatures, then. It does something to the trees?” Lyra had mentioned that in the kitchen, something about holding saplings steady.
The question finally made him stop his march down the hall, giving Red a sidelong glance. “Keeps them stable,” he answered after a laden moment. “Holds off the worst of the shadow-rot until Eammon can move them back where they’re supposed to go.” The march to the foyer resumed.
Red followed, though the quick look he gave her said he wished she wouldn’t. “Thank you for breakfast,” she ventured, dropping her bag of books at the corner.
“Best cook in the Keep.” Fife headed for a door behind the once-grand staircase. “Not that it’s saying much. Eammon thinks bread and cheese are acceptable for every meal, and Lyra’s culinary skills begin and end at tea.”
He reached up to push the door open. As he did, his sleeve fell back from his arm. Another Mark, the mirror image of Lyra’s.
Fife saw her looking. “We all have one around here. Gaya and Ciaran weren’t the only ones foolish enough to make bargains.”
Red’s hand drifted to her own Mark, hidden beneath her dark-blue sleeve. “I made no bargain.”
“Neither did Eammon.” He shoved open the door. “But the original Wolf and Second Daughter are gone, so the Wilderwood makes do with the next best thing.”
The door spilled them into the back courtyard, with its crumbling stone wall and strange forest-wreathed tower. Fife went left, following the path of Red’s broken corridor. Three more white saplings pushed up from the rubble at the end, stretching into the fog.
She hung back as Fife approached them. “I take it those aren’t supposed to be here, either?”
“A quick study, aren’t you?” Fife peered closely at the sapling’s roots. Black rot boiled over them, though the surrounding earth still looked solid, not like the rotten sponginess she’d seen the night before. “He’ll have to heal these first,” he muttered, uncorking another vial of blood and pouring it over the ground. The rot receded incrementally, so small a difference Red wouldn’t have noticed if she hadn’t been watching. “They’re already weakening. The one inside can wait, it isn’t shadow-rotted yet.”
“Shadow-rotted?”
Another arch look, like her questions irritated him. But Fife pointed through the fog, to the forest beyond the gate. “See that?”
Right at the edge of the tree line was a black spot on the forest floor— the same dark, damp ground that produced the creature from last night. Red nodded.
“That,” said Fife, “is an empty place where one of these sentinels is supposed to be. It felt the Shadowlands pushing through, so it came loose and regrew here, closer to Eammon, so he could heal it. Only the stronger ones can do that. The others just rot where they stand, leaving breaches we have to find and close.”
“Like the one last night. It was rotting when we found it, but he said it would’ve ended up at the Keep in ten more minutes.”
Hazel eyes snapped to hers. “He let you go with him?”
Incredulity in his voice,
thick enough that Red wondered if she shouldn’t have said anything. She shrugged. “He wasn’t happy about it, but yes.”
“Hmm.” Fife studied her a moment longer, brow furrowed, before facing the forest again. “He must’ve really wanted to convince you of his trustworthiness, then.”
Red shifted on her feet.
Fife gestured to the lines of rot on the sapling’s trunk. “The more the shadow-rot eats through the saplings once they’re here, the harder they are to send back. Sentinels are like bricks in a wall, each placed strategically. Move one, and the whole thing gets weaker.”
“The whole what?”
“The whole Wilderwood.”
Red tightened her arms over her chest, peering nervously at the still, white trees. The sentinels. They looked like shards of bone thrust into the earth. “So they’re . . . good.”
“The sentinels aren’t good.” He said it like the notion was ridiculous. “But they aren’t bad, either. The Wilderwood has a job to do, and it takes what it has to in order to do it.”
“And what it has to take is blood.”
A covert glance. “Right now,” Fife said carefully, “yes.”
“Why everyone’s blood? It seems like the Wolf’s is the only thing that does much.”
Another pause, another unreadable look. “Eammon has the strongest connection to the forest,” he said after a moment, weighing out his words. “Only his blood can heal the breaches, his blood or his magic. Whichever he feels safest using at the time.”
She thought of last night, how Eammon had put his hands to the ground before resorting to his dagger, the bark edging through his skin, his veins running green. Magic, and it changed him, tipped the balance of his body more toward forest than man.
Dread spiked in her stomach, though she wasn’t sure exactly why.
“Lyra and I have connections to the forest, by virtue of this damn thing”— Fife pointed his chin at his Mark— “but it’s weak. We can slow shadow-creatures down, kill them if they’re weak enough, stabilize the sentinels until Eammon can get to them. But he’s the only one who can really fix anything.” A quick flicker of his eyes. “Him, and you.”
Red swallowed. Tension weighed in the air, as palpable as the fog around their feet.
She turned away, facing the tower and the Keep. “Where is Eammon?” She’d expected to run into him at some point; it wasn’t like there were many places to hide in the crumbling ruin. The fact that she hadn’t made something almost like worry itch at her, especially after what she’d seen last night.
“He went out to heal another breach Lyra found this morning. He’ll be back.”
If Eammon was already healing more breaches, he must be in fine enough shape. The faint itch of worry faded, though not completely.
They reached the Keep door at the top of the sloping hill. It creaked when Fife pushed it open. “I’m going to find some food.” Almost begrudgingly, he added: “Do you want to come?”
A split-second decision, and Red shook her head.
He looked at her a moment, brows drawn down. “Stay within the gate,” he finally cautioned before pulling the door shut with a snap.
She probably should’ve followed. But now that she was outside, the idea of being within those ruined walls again was suffocating. Red turned away, wandered farther into the courtyard.
The air of the Wilderwood was chilly, and fog coiled low over the ground, crawling up her skirt. The sky was a wide expanse of lavender, clear of moon and star and cloud. Pretty, in a strange, uncanny way. Giving the saplings at the bottom of the hill another wary glance, Red walked in the opposite direction, vaulting over the short stone wall to go around the Keep’s side. Piles of stone rose out of the fog, sleeping giants.
Something caught her eye beyond the gate. A shape, rising from the mist, falling back into fog before she could quite make sense of it. Red stopped, narrowing her eyes.
The shape bobbed up again, like someone who’d stumbled forcing themselves back to their feet. Cautiously, Red stepped forward, her feet silent on the mossy ground.
The figure rose once more, close enough now for her to make out a face. High cheekbones, aquiline nose. Eyes green as summer.
Her breath went icy in her lungs, her heart paused in her chest. Surely not. None but the Second Daughter could pass into the Wilderwood, none but her could cross over. Impossible, but—
The fog eddied around a form she knew.
Red was in control of herself enough not to run, but only just. She wound through the mist and the broken stones of the fallen Keep like someone in a trance, scarcely daring to breathe until she was an arm’s length away, looking down on a familiar dark head, familiar shoulders, familiar green eyes in a scratched and bleeding face. He looked spent and bloody, eyes ringed in shadows, clothes torn by his flight through a hostile forest.
“Red,” Arick gasped.
Chapter Ten
A rick?” Emotion raked her voice over coals, made it raw and shaking. “How did you . . . why are . . .”
“Open the gate.” Tear tracks ran through the dirt on his face. “Let me in, and I’ll tell you everything.”
“You shouldn’t be here. Arick, I don’t know how you got past the border, but—”
His groan cut her off, low and animal sounding. Arick pressed a hand to his side, blood blooming through his shirt. “I came to save you.” He looked up, green eyes strangely cunning, voice stronger. “Let me in, Redarys Valedren.”
“I don’t know how. There’s some kind of enchantment on the gate, I don’t think it will open—”
“I know how.” Arick still crouched, but was motionless, like his body were a fragile thing he might jar apart if he moved. “Come to us, Second Daughter, and we’ll show you.” A smile, bright and sharp, as Arick held out his hand. There was something off about it, darkness running along the lines in his palm. “If you must be part of one of them, the shadows will give you a cleaner end.”
Red froze, prey in the endless moment before the trap closed. This was wrong. Something was terribly wrong.
With a frustrated gnash of his teeth, Arick threw himself against the gate.
His hands turned to claws as he raked them against the metal, nails elongating, darkening. The veins in his neck were black where they should’ve been blue, and black filled the whites of his eyes, building up, spilling over. “Don’t you want it?” he snarled in a voice that wasn’t his, a voice that sounded like screams down forgotten corridors, layered and latched together. “One way or another, there will be an end. It’s just a matter of which side you want to tangle with, Second Daughter.”
Panic tugged at the magic shard in Red’s center. Her mouth filled with the taste of earth, her wrists blazing green as she tried to clamp her power down and scramble backward at the same time.
The thing wearing Arick’s face lunged forward again. A black claw reached through the gate and wrapped around her ankle. “The Wilderwood is weak and desperate, the gods it holds grow stronger. The forest won’t stop looking for a way in, Redarys Valedren, and when it finds one, it’ll drain you like a wineskin, leave all those pretty bones.”
Terror finally shattered her tenuous control. Red screamed as the green veins in her wrists climbed her forearms, reaching toward her heart. Splintered magic erupted, spinning vines from the earth to wrap the creature’s clawed hand.
It howled, lurching away from the gate, but the cry of pain became a bray of laughter. “The magic is weak,” it taunted. “Stings, but it won’t do much, Second Daughter, not unless you open your skin and let it take you, root and branch and bone and blood.”
“You’ll have your blood,” came a rasping voice from behind.
The Wolf’s hand landed on Red’s shoulder, pulling her backward from the gate even as he ran forward and opened it with a touch. There were new slashes on his palms, bloodless, like they’d lost everything they had to give already. Still, Eammon reached for his dagger as he ran, mouth a rictus of expectant pain.
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The shadow-thing reared up, not playing at human shapes anymore. Now it looked exactly like the thing that had emerged from the breach last night, nothing but darkness and pieces of dead things.
“Do you have any left to give, Wolf-pup?” A cackle that felt like needles in Red’s ears. “What happens once you bleed yourself dry? When you lose yourself to the forest, and it takes you just like it did your father?”
The last word arrested the Wolf’s movement, like it was a net thrown over him. A thudding heartbeat where Eammon stood frozen, dagger held steady. Then, teeth bared, he flipped his palm over and sliced into the back of his hand.
A hiss of pain as he pushed down, pushed until finally green-threaded blood seeped around the blade. To Red, still dazed, the tendrils at the edge of the cut looked studded with tiny leaves.
Eammon tugged the dagger out of his skin, blood tracing the dips of his knuckles, painting his scars. With a growl, he backhanded the shadow-creature.
The thing broke apart, scattering bones; the shards feathered into smoke before they hit the forest floor. Still, that laugh reverberated, making the very trees shudder, and it spoke again in a hissing, fading voice as the pieces dissolved. “Only a matter of time.”
Then the shadow-creature was gone, the only sign of it a burn mark scored into the earth.
The Wolf stood there a moment, staring down at the ground. Sweaty strands of black hair had escaped their queue, sticking to the side of his neck. The cuts on his hands looked inflamed, and he held them gingerly by his side as he staggered toward the gate, an opening blooming for him as soon as he touched the metal.
“Is bleeding the only way to kill them?” The question came out shaky, to match the tremor in Red’s limbs. “Because Lyra said— What are you doing?”
He’d dropped to his knees and grabbed her ankle, twisting it this way and that as if looking for wounds. “I could ask you the same thing.” Apparently satisfied, he released her, like touching her skin was as welcome as slicing his hand had been, a necessary unpleasantness. “What about last night made you think approaching anything beyond the gate would be a good idea?”
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