Vines tried for her ankles, for Solmir’s, but they were weak and skittering, made brittle by a dying forest. Branches clustered, reached as far as they could before snapping back like a spent bowstring. “Red!” Eammon’s scream scoured his throat. “Red!”
Valdrek and Lear stopped in their careful prowling through the field, Eammon’s voice cracking through the still night air. Raffe broke into a run, disappearing into the twisted grove. Valdrek cut his hand at Lear, gesturing for him to follow the other man. As Lear disappeared between the trees, figures in white shimmered into view, like they’d been hidden in the center of the grove until this moment.
Priestesses. Five of them that Red could count, through the strange, shivery clarity that hovered above her pain. Something about the number seemed portentous, awful in a way she couldn’t quite put together yet.
She thrashed in Solmir’s grip, but he held on vise-tight. Kiri walked beside them, smooth and unhurried, hands tucked primly into her sleeves.
A strained roar— Eammon, lurching across the Wilderwood’s border, pain blanching his face and raising tendons in his neck. His dagger slashed out, but Solmir jerked easily away. Kiri stepped aside with a small sound of distaste, as if Eammon was a minor inconvenience, a gnat that needed swatting.
Another lunge, but something snapped Eammon back, as if he’d hit an invisible wall. His neck twisted toward his shoulder, so far it looked like it might break, and Red’s scream had nothing to do with the way Solmir threw her aside like a cloak he’d grown tired of wearing.
“It’s to be this, then?” He sounded nearly weary. “Pointless heroics?”
Teeth bared, Eammon launched at him. One punch landed on the King’s chin, the grind of Solmir’s jaw audible as his head snapped up. The dagger in Eammon’s fist flipped sideways in his grip, then slashed out, opened Solmir’s arm.
But Solmir just stood there. Like he was waiting.
Eammon tried to lash out again, when a spasm racked through his whole body. His spine locked, bent almost backward. Strained silence, like he was holding it back, then an agonized scream burst from behind his teeth.
Vines slithered from the Wilderwood and hooked around Eammon’s arms, his ankles, his boots leaving runnels in the dirt as they dragged him backward. He called Red’s name through a throat that sounded razored, fought himself forward, but the Wilderwood pulled his thrashing body back and back and back, toward the border of the ruined forest.
Something almost like pity lit Solmir’s face. “It’s too tangled in you to let you go,” he said quietly. “The Wilderwood protects itself first.”
“Like what happened to my mother?” Eammon snarled, straining against the border and the Wilderwood’s hold. Vines wound around his legs, branches bent like fingers on his shoulders. Gentle, but inescapable. “When she tried to open the Shadowlands for you?”
Solmir’s eyes were unreadable. “Exactly.”
Kiri was halfway to the twisted grove now, a smear of white against the night-colors of the field. Something glittered in her hand. A dagger.
And another glint of silver, closer— Valdrek. Slowly, he crept toward the Wilderwood, keeping low to the dark ground between the twisted grove and the edge of the forest. His sword was drawn and at the ready, his eyes trained on Solmir’s back.
Satisfied that Eammon was held, Solmir turned to Red, eyes admonishing. “Things would’ve been over and done by now if it weren’t for you.” Solmir shook his head. His long hair shifted in the night breeze, and the moonlight caught the raised ridges of small scars on his brow, equidistant and deliberate looking. “If you’d stayed in Valleyda, he would’ve given up.”
“He wouldn’t.” Red tried to push up from the ground, but her body wouldn’t obey. “He didn’t give up before me. He wouldn’t give up after.”
His expression was one she hadn’t seen him wear before, no longer anger or boredom or contempt. It was almost sorrow, and she hated him for it.
Something shot past his head— Lyra’s tor. She and Fife had joined Eammon at the edge of the Wilderwood, as unable to leave it as he was. Lyra’s face was a snarl, her teeth bared.
“That was foolish.” Solmir sighed. “Once the Kings arrive, you’ll want a weapon.”
The Kings. Five of them, including Solmir. Five priestesses in the grove. And Kiri, headed toward them with a knife in her fist.
“Keep her from killing them!” Red yelled to whoever would listen, craning her head back just in time to see Kiri slip between the inverted trees. “You have to keep her from killing them!”
Her voice, hoarse from pain, might as well have been a whisper. But still, it was enough to make Solmir turn, enough to make his eyes scan the tall grass. Enough to make him notice Valdrek, crouched and waiting for an opening.
Valdrek didn’t hesitate, once he knew he was caught. The silver rings in his hair glinted as he leapt, roaring, swinging wildly.
Almost casually, Solmir lifted his dagger and punched the hilt against Valdrek’s temple.
Eammon lunged against the Wilderwood, shouting, but it held him fast. Red tried to get up, tried to struggle toward Valdrek, but something that felt like a wall of ice slammed her back down.
Tears trailed into her hair, her back pressed flat to the ground. It was the same cold Kiri had attacked her with in Valleyda, that made her organs feel iced and her throat rimed in frost, but stronger and heavier, born of years in darkness rather than blood on branches— Shadowlands magic, all that power twisted up into a prison, leaching into him as he served his sentence. The same magic he’d tried to use against her in the dungeon, and this time she wasn’t full enough of golden light to fight it back.
Pain still roared through her, agonizing, contorting her muscles as the Wilderwood fell and fell. She cried out, though her mouth tried to clamp around it.
“It’s not so tangled in her as it is in you.” Solmir spoke casually, voice pitched to carry over the yards between him and Eammon as if it was a tavern table. “The forest in your Lady is new, easy to uproot. You know how to fix this. How to stop her pain.”
“No!” Red arched up off the ground, nearly in half, craning so her eyes could meet Eammon’s. “No.”
A rumble, a deep reverberation that make her teeth clatter together. Red tried to aim her blurry eyes toward the grove, just enough to make out a white-robed figure falling to the ground, trailing scarlet.
The first priestess, dead. Four to go.
“She’ll die if you don’t.” Solmir gestured toward the grove behind them, the distant horror happening on its roots. As he did, another priestess fell.
Two down.
“Bringing them through— what they’ve become— will kill the Wilderwood and everything attached to it. It’s been part of you too long, Eammon. There’s no way for you to escape it.” Solmir’s hand touched Red’s hair, lightly, and she flinched away as much as she could, when her body was a battleground for the rip of the roots and the cold weight of shadowed magic. “But she can.”
Eammon’s chest heaved. His eyes shone above the agonized rictus of his mouth. Fife had pulled Lyra away, had an arm wrapped around her shoulders as they stood and watched in horrified, helpless silence.
“Why?” Eammon’s voice sounded shredded. “Why bring the rest of them through? They brought you down with them! They’re the reason for all of it!”
Solmir’s eyes were like chips of ice. For a moment, his mouth worked, like he might actually offer an explanation. But then he shook his head, almost defeated. “Because it’s inevitable. Their return is inevitable.” A pause, his voice growing serrated edges. “And the longer they have to prepare, the worse it will be.”
Another bone-rattling rumble, shaking the earth. Then another, louder.
Four down.
Across the gulf of the border, Eammon’s eyes bored into hers, a promise burning in amber and green. I’d let the world burn before I hurt you.
She read his intention, like she could read everything with Eammon. Red s
et her teeth, snarled at him. “No—”
Eammon’s head wrenched to the side as he pulled the Wilderwood out of her, as the forest within her body uprooted. He roared agony at the sky, and she realized that wasn’t the whole of it, what he’d said about the world burning.
He may let the world burn, but he’d let himself burn with it.
Red screamed, digging her fingers in the dirt. “Give them back! Damn you, give them back!”
The Wilderwood didn’t listen. She coughed up bloody leaves, knots of roots. Desperately, she thought of stuffing them in her mouth and swallowing them back down, but it was useless. She was nothing but human again, nothing but bone and organ and blood.
The branches and roots and vines around Eammon tensed once, like a closing fist, then opened. A spasm, bending his spine, and Eammon fell to his knees, shuddering. Tendons stood out like tree roots in his neck, his shoulders, visible through the ripped fabric of his shirt. His fingers clawed into the ground as golden light, dim but visible, pulsed through his veins.
“Give up, Eammon,” Solmir muttered, not paying attention to Red at all. This was between the King and the Wolf. “Give up.”
And after a moment, the Wolf lay still.
The world froze, poised on a knife’s edge. Fife and Lyra stood like statues, tear tracks gleaming on Lyra’s cheeks.
A moment of stillness.
A choice, made.
A surge.
The forest rose up behind Eammon like a wave, a cresting tide of root and branch and vine and thorn. The sentinels arched toward him, stretching sharp white fingers. They pierced his skin and flowed inward, turning to light, making star-tracks of his veins, gold-to-green. The Wolf was corpse-still, but the things that made the Wilderwood pumped into him like rain to a river. It came and came, a wave breaking against his back, a forest seeping back to seed.
Then Eammon stood.
He pulled himself to his full height, then higher, topping seven feet, eight. His eyes changed as his shadow grew longer on the ground, the whites around his amber irises turning to pure, bright emerald. Ivy wreathed his wrists, a garland of it growing in his too-long black hair as swirls of bark armored his arms, as branches like antlers grew from his forehead.
All those small changes— the splinters the Wilderwood left when he used its magic alone, the pieces of himself he’d given up, everything he’d tried to stop by offering his blood— it was all just a ghost of this.
A forest made a man made a god.
Eammon— what had been Eammon— turned his strange god-eyes to Red, cowering in the dirt, and she understood. He’d finally given up. Given up on being man and forest, given up on the impossible binary of bone and branch. He’d pulled all of it into him, the shining network of the Wilderwood crowding out everything of who he’d been before.
This time, he’d let it take him over. He’d given himself up, to save her. And those inhuman eyes held nothing of the man she loved.
Red’s sob tasted like blood.
A low, rueful laugh rolled from Solmir’s mouth. “Wolves and their sacrifices.”
A final crack, like the earth itself sundered. In her tear-blurred vision, Red saw the fifth priestess fall, Kiri’s knife glinting blood-tinged light before she darted into the grove. At the same moment, Lear threw himself out from between the trees, landing in an unmoving huddle. Shadows burst from the ground around the twisted sentinels, a ring of writhing darkness.
Solmir made that strange shape with his hand again. The shadows rolled over the ground like a black tide, flocked to him like birds, making mad skittering noises. They built Solmir up, made him taller, surrounded him in darkness.
Grinning, seething shadows, he beckoned.
And the Wilderwood—Eammon— charged forward with a roar.
Chapter Thirty-Four
T he Wilderwood was no longer a forest. It had uprooted itself, taken a different form. Its boundaries were the boundaries of Eammon’s body, wreathed in thorn and vine. Eammon was gone, and the Wilderwood stood in the shape of a man in his place.
When he ran toward Solmir, the earth shook.
Red crouched, no longer pressed down by cold magic, sorrow and horror drying her mouth. The forest-god still looked like Eammon, still had his angular face and dark hair. But the way he moved was alien, fog shifting through branches, leaves twisting in wind. He was golden light to Solmir’s shadow, and both were terrible.
Eammon— what had been Eammon but wasn’t anymore and, Kings, she was going to lose it— cracked his fist into Solmir’s jaw. Bark and leaves burst from the contact, Solmir’s head snapping sideways even as a sharp, exulting grin curved his lips.
“You could’ve had such a peaceful death.” Solmir wiped blood from his mouth with the back of a shadow-gauntleted wrist. “Wolves die easier than gods do.”
Lyra stood at the edge of the forest, eyes wide and disbelieving. Then, snarling, she rushed forward and snatched her tor from the ground, no longer held back by the border of a Wilderwood that wasn’t there. Fife followed her with no hesitation. Trees still stretched behind them, but they were different— the colors muted, the sky above star-strewn, the colors of night instead of twilight.
Just a forest, like any other forest. Everything that made it the Wilderwood was in Eammon now.
The bodies of the priestesses lay in white-robed, scarlet-stained huddles between the inverted sentinels in the twisted grove, their blood leaking onto the roots. Kiri was nowhere to be seen. Lear had roused, inching away from the trees with a gash in his forehead that dripped steadily into his eyes.
The gulf of shadow that ringed the grove grew wider and wider, darkness eddying into the air like smoke. The earth around it rumbled, the rattling of a locked door.
A door that would soon be forced open.
Eammon’s hands shot forward, and trunks erupted spear-sharp from the ground. They passed through Solmir like he was smoke, darkness curling away and curling back. Solmir’s fingers crooked, and shadows shackled around Eammon’s arm, twisting it behind his back. A roar, a sound like cracking branches, like a forest burning. When Eammon wrenched free of the shadow’s grip, dark burn marks scored his skin.
Despite the emptiness in her chest, the knowledge that every trace of the Wilderwood was gone from her, Red’s fingers still curled into claws. She shot up from the ground, stumbled toward the warring gods.
It wasn’t shadow that threw her back. It was a vine, blooming, wrapping her waist to set her gently but firmly down. Inhuman eyes she didn’t know peered at her, in a face she’d kissed. There was no recognition in them.
She stayed still on the ground, every breath feeling like a swallowed knife.
A slight form, rushing over the ground. Lyra, tor gripped in her fist and teeth glinting moonlight. The blade sliced through Solmir’s shadow-sheathed leg, a blow that should’ve left a stump, but his body dissipated and came together again. Sneering, he batted Lyra away, sending her flying. She landed next to Red and was still.
“Lyra!” Behind her, Fife screamed it full-throated. His dagger was in his hand as he turned to Solmir, dwarfed by his shadow-wreathed height.
“Fife, don’t!” Red crawled to Lyra, put shaking fingers against her neck. Her pulse was light but steady, her breath shallow but there. “It’s pointless!”
She could see in his snarl that he knew it, and also that he didn’t care. Solmir hurt Lyra, so he’d hurt Solmir, an easy equation. But it couldn’t be now. A strangled roar, and he sheathed his dagger, rushing over to where they lay.
Behind him, Eammon and Solmir raged on, oblivious, a cosmic battle in microcosm.
“She’s alive,” Red said as Fife stumbled forward, moving her hand on Lyra’s pulse so his could replace it. “She’s breathing.”
A sob of relief as he felt her heartbeat, his head bowing low enough for sandy-red curls to brush Lyra’s forehead. Made clumsy by fear, Fife pulled off his jacket to tuck it around her, like it could be a shield.
Then sat froz
en, eyes glued to his now-bared forearm.
To what wasn’t there.
“The Mark.” He stopped, swallowed. Then, gently, he pushed up Lyra’s sleeve. Brown, unmarked skin where the Bargainer’s Mark had been, gilded in starlight and unblemished by roots.
His eyes met Red’s, wide with wonder and no small bit of fear.
A weight on her shoulders, a heavy regard that pricked the skin of her neck. Red looked over her shoulder, throat tight, knowing what she’d see.
Eammon—not Eammon— gazed at her with luminous green-and-amber eyes for half a second, almost puzzled. Then the heavy gaze went to Fife. One nod, perfunctory and business-like.
“Shit.” Fife’s hand closed around his forearm.
The forest-god turned back to his battle, the whole pause taking barely a breath. Jagged branches grew from his fingers, sweeping for Solmir’s face.
The dark giant Solmir had become didn’t try to dodge. The branches swept through him like he was shadow, and he coalesced back into form in their wake.
Shadow.
Red’s mind tripped over the thought, then latched. When she’d seen Arick outside the Shrine, Arick who was Solmir, there’d been no shadow on the ground behind him. And Kiri’s words in the dungeon—one the man, one the shadow.
Five priestesses lay dead, five lives to free five kings. Solmir, already half here, should be condensing into flesh, should be using the sacrifice to manifest fully in this world. But still he held on to the connection with Arick, staying the shadow as long as he fought Eammon.
As long as Solmir fought Eammon, Arick would stay the man.
Fife crouched between Lyra and the war between shadow and forest, hand on his dagger. When he spoke, it was with his characteristic bluntness. “I don’t know what your next move is. But I’m staying with Lyra.”
“I’d never ask you to do anything different.”
Still brusque, but with affection in it. “I know.”
Red knew what had to happen now. But it was a heavy weight in her middle, one she didn’t want to look at too closely. Not until it was clear there was no other choice.
For the Wolf Page 39