For the Wolf by Hannah F. Whitten

Chapter Twenty-One

She woke to the smell of a library, the rough weave of fabric pressed against her cheek. Red started, jerking in Eammon’s arms, and the top of her head collided with his chin.

“Kings,” the Wolf muttered. He put her down with one arm and raised the other, rubbing at his jaw. Most vestiges of magic were gone, other than that extra inch of height he’d gained the night the Wilderwood took the corridor. But the veins around his amber irises were still faintly green.

“Sorry.” Red’s cheeks blazed as she steadied herself, squinting against sunlight and the remaining haze in her head. They stood in the center of the Edge’s main thoroughfare, the sky slanting dark overhead. “Where’s Valdrek?”

“Still at Asheyla’s with Bormain. They thought it best not to try moving him until he wakes.”

Despite her aching head and still-watery legs, Red’s lip twitched to a hopeful smile. “He’ll wake, then? We did it?”

Eammon’s lips pressed together, strange-shaded eyes alight with some layered emotion she couldn’t quite read. “We did it,” he said quietly, pressing ahead toward the gate.

Red trailed after him, lips still curved. She’d helped. She and Eammon had healed Bormain, cleared him of shadow-rot. Maybe that meant they could heal the whole Wilderwood.

But the smile faded as fragments of memory slipped in, the things Bormain said while still riddled with darkness. A name, in particular.

Solmir.

The first time Bormain mentioned the youngest of the Five Kings, Eammon had passed it off as ravings. She’d left it at that, albeit uneasily.

But for the man to mention Solmir twice made it seem like more than ravings.

Lear gave them an appraising look when they reached the gate. Loreth stood next to him, a full canvas bag clutched in her hands. She passed it off to Eammon in a hurry before slipping into the crowd, shooting Lear a conspiratorial glance.

Eammon sighed. “I assume you heard.”

“Don’t think too ill of her.” Lear cranked the lever that opened the wooden gate, the screech of hinges soft against the sounds of the bustling city. “An attempt to heal the shadow-rot is quite a lot to expect someone to keep to themselves. What’s the verdict?”

“It worked.” Eammon’s voice sounded like his throat was raw.

The only sign of Lear’s shock was the widening of his pale-blue eyes. “Well, shadows damn me.” A chuckle as he looked from Eammon to Red. “All hail the Wolves.”

Eammon didn’t reply. He shouldered the canvas bag, full of Fife’s requested supplies.

“You know you can always call on us, Wolf,” Lear said, the humor gone out of his tone. “If you find yourself needing help.”

“I appreciate it,” Eammon said as he walked through the gate. “But I think things are beyond anyone else’s help at this point.”

Lear’s expression went pensive once Eammon passed. “Watch him, Lady,” he murmured to Red. “The Wolf and the Wilderwood twine together so, and the weakness of one is the weakness of the other. He looks like he’s worn himself to frayed seams.”

“He does that.” Red watched the Wolf, a broad shadow against the distant forest.

Beyond the gate, Eammon stood stiffly, looking toward the northern horizon, away from the Wilderwood. Every line of his body seemed to strain forward, like he wanted to run in the opposite direction of the trees. But he couldn’t. The roots around his bones might as well have been shackles.

Red gave Lear a tight-lipped smile. He nodded, cranking the gate shut, muffling the sounds of the Edge.

Slowly, she walked to Eammon’s side. He didn’t look at her, eyes still trained on the hills to the north disappearing into a haze of fog and fading sunlight. After a moment, he turned toward the forest. Above, the sky shifted toward twilight to match the Wilderwood’s horizon, the two of them fading from blue and lavender to meet somewhere in violet.

Red followed him over the moss, fingers tapping nervously at the still-unfamiliar shape of the dagger on her thigh. “He mentioned Solmir again.”

“I’m aware.” His stride barely faltered.

“That’s twice now.” She paused, waiting, but he didn’t offer to fill the silence. “It seems like more than a coincidence.”

“Does it?”

The venom in his voice caught her off guard. Red stopped, yards away from the dark maw of the Wilderwood. “It means something. You know it, and so do I.”

Eammon stopped walking, but stayed silent. A breeze ruffled his hair.

“I don’t know if you’re trying to protect me, or if you just don’t want to bother telling me anything.” Her hands curled and released, loose fists that held nothing. “But I can only help you as much as you let me, Eammon.”

He’d half turned as she spoke, the line of his profile sketched dark against the trees and the encroaching edge of twilight— jaw rigid, a lock of escaped black hair hanging over his forehead. Red wanted to pummel him and pull him close at once, but settled for crossing her arms over her chest.

“In the old stories, Solmir was supposed to marry your mother.” She said it softly, like she could stitch the story together even with uneven seams. “She ran to the Wilderwood with Ciaran instead, and Solmir ended up trapped in the Shadowlands with the other Kings. But there’s more to it, isn’t there?”

Eammon’s sigh seemed to echo, to bounce off the trees at the edge of the Wilderwood. The battle within him was evident, to stay silent or to speak, but after one laden moment, the fists at his sides loosened, like holding them tight was suddenly too strenuous a task. A deep breath, and when the words came, they were threadbare. “He killed my parents.”

They’d had so many conversations about grief. Here was one more. Her hand was on his shoulder before she had the conscious thought, before she knew she’d moved forward. She half expected him to flinch away, but instead Eammon sagged into the contact.

He spoke faster, like a dam had been struck and the river was waiting. “My mother always felt guilty that Solmir shared the Kings’ fate. She didn’t think he deserved it, said he’d been caught up in their schemes without an escape. They’d been friends, apparently, before they were betrothed.” Eammon’s teeth set sharp against the word friends. “I heard Gaya and Ciaran talking about it sometimes. When they thought I wasn’t listening.” He shook his head. “Nearly a century and a half of the same circular argument.”

So nonchalant, the way he discussed centuries. His lifetime stretched over so many of hers, like the hundreds of years it took a sapling to fully grow— it made sense, when he was born to parents who made him shortly after they’d tangled themselves with a forest. Red had never thought to imagine Eammon as any different from the man she met in the library, not quite human, held in stasis by his strange relationship to the Wilderwood. But now, brushed in twilight, she could see a younger version of him. Eyes not so tired, shoulders not so rigid, unaware of the burden set to fall on them.

“Ciaran didn’t want to release Solmir,” Eammon continued. “Gaya claimed he’d been embroiled in her father’s machinations against his will, but Ciaran didn’t believe that. And with the Kings bound together the way they were, he didn’t think it’d be possible to release only one from the Shadowlands, anyway.”

A subtle change since he’d first decided to tell her the story, from my parents to Gaya and Ciaran, an artificial distance she wasn’t sure he was aware of creating. Like he wanted a separation, like he wanted a gulf. Like being close was too painful.

She understood.

Red kept her hand on his shoulder, but her eyes flickered toward the border of the Wilderwood. It stood tall and dark and fathomless, a place for losing.

Eammon ran a weary hand over his face. “Gaya decided to try anyway. She opened a breach, and Ciaran felt it happen. He went after her.” A pause, a heavy breath in. “By the time he got there, she was dead already. Consumed by the Wilderwood, to keep her from harming it further.”

The tale was easy to pick up from here. The Wolf, carrying the forest-riddled body of the Second Daughter to the edge of the woods. Figures shrouded and made less real by myth.

Except that they were the parents of the man standing before her now. Except that he’d seen it all happen.

“I saw him carrying her.” Low, expressionless, turned toward the forest that pulled him inexorably back into its darkness. “I followed him to the border. I heard what he said, but I didn’t understand what it meant. It took me so damn long to understand what he meant.”

Here his voice broke, but instead of shuddering, Eammon kept every muscle statue-still, like if he made himself less human the emotion couldn’t catch up. When he spoke again, it was a murmur. “He lasted a year after that. A year on his own, the Wilderwood eating him away the whole time. Taking everything that made him anything close to human. Breaches opened. The forest was full of shadow-creatures, but the borders stayed closed and didn’t let them out, like . . . like when something is about to die, and holds on all the tighter for it.”

“It wasn’t your fault.” She spoke as quietly as he did, a whisper against the darkening sky and the waiting, hungry wood. “None of it was your fault.”

He didn’t respond, lost in the cadence of his own horror story. “And then he died,” he said, as if it was still a startling end to the tale, all these centuries later. “He died, and in that moment, the borders opened, like that dead hand finally losing its grip. The shadow-creatures got out.” A pause, a rattling breath. “It was all instinct, after that. Cutting my hand, putting it to the ground. The Wilderwood . . . resurrected, I guess. Grew in me. It hurt.” His hand curled against his chest in memory of pain. “I’ve always wondered if it hurt me more or less than it did him. I can’t come up with an answer. He wasted away beneath it, and I’m still here.”

The last part was a whisper. They stood there, a man and a woman on the edge of the dark, both bent and shadowed beneath the weight of awful history.

“Then I was the Wolf,” Eammon said quietly. “And until Fife and Lyra arrived, I was alone.”

Red didn’t know what to say. This story had haunted her whole life— he’d lived it, had to exist under the shadow of its happening and the ghost it left. She wanted to comfort him; every line of his body said he didn’t want to be comforted.

“The forest was in so bad a state, getting a new Wolf didn’t heal all the breaches.” He’d gone back to neutral tones now. Tucking emotion away, burying it. “So some of the shadow-creatures that had escaped when the Wilderwood briefly died still lingered.”

“Until Kaldenore came,” Red said, piecing it together. “And the Wilderwood drained her to heal itself as best it could.” Not good, not bad. But hungry. And desperate.

A broken sigh. “No ending here has ever been happy, Red.”

He shrugged off her hand. He turned toward the Wilderwood.

Red’s fingers closed on empty space as he strode between the trees.

Alone. Determined, always, to be alone, even when she was standing next to him.

After a moment, she followed, light pressure fizzing over her skin when she passed the border. They moved through the fog in silence.

Eammon’s hand shooting out of the gloom to seize her arm made her grunt in surprise. Red’s boots tripped over the leaves, and she saw what he’d pulled her from— a perfectly circular piece of shadow-rotten ground, nearly hidden in the dim. It looked like a circle of spilled paint over the canvas of the forest, with no listing tree to mark its center.

A missing sentinel. A hole.

Eammon’s lips pulled tight. The hand on her arm tremored.

Magic bloomed to Red’s fingers, ready for use. “What do we do?”

“I told you before.” Eammon shook his head. “There’s nothing you can do, Red.”

“There has to be something. Or are you just determined to leave me out of it?”

He froze, and that was answer enough.

Red drew her dagger. Eammon’s grip went from her elbow to her wrist, lightning-fast, pulling her close enough that her nose nearly notched into his sternum. She didn’t try to jerk away, but neither did she let go of the hilt, holding the blade sideways between their chests.

“No,” he nearly snarled. “Not yours.”

“It worked once—”

“And the Wilderwood almost had you.” His voice was harsh, amber eyes burning, green encroaching where the whites should be. “I won’t let it happen again.”

“So I’m just supposed to let you bleed out, then? Give yourself over to the Wilderwood completely when you don’t have enough blood left to satisfy it?”

A tremble in their locked-together hands. She couldn’t tell which one of them it came from. “If that’s what it takes.”

The sound was quiet. If they weren’t caught in fraught silence of their own, they wouldn’t have heard it— a thin screech, like tearing metal. Red’s teeth snapped together, a low, strange discomfort creeping up from her feet, through her bones.

Eammon’s face blanched. His hand curled around the hilt of his dagger, the other still on her wrist. His eyes went to the pitted, rotten ground as he stepped slightly away from her, moving like prey in a predator’s sight line.

The sound came again, louder. The surface of the pit undulated, something stirring beneath.

“Red.” Nearly a whisper, and Eammon’s eyes were wide. “Run.”

The pit ruptured before she had the chance.

It was darkness solidifying, shooting upward. Different from that first night— not some formless thing cobbling a counterfeit body from bone and shadow. This had a body, a wrong and terrible one, a tube of black scales and clinging rot. The tearing-metal noise came from an open mouth, wide as Eammon was tall, ringed with layers upon layers of carrion-caked teeth. The thing wove from side to side, towering in the air, circular jaws gnashing at the twilight sky.

The eruption tossed her backward, the edges of her vision dark and hazy. Red didn’t come fully back to herself until she felt Eammon beside her, ripping her dagger from her hand. Whether to use it himself or to keep her from it, she didn’t know.

“Go!” He jumped to his feet, whipping around in front of her with his teeth bared, facing the thing that had wrenched itself from the breach. Not a shadow-creature, nothing so insubstantial— one of the other monsters the Shadowlands held?

It seemed taller now, like it’d pulled more of itself free of the hole. Eammon held both daggers in one hand and swiped at the palm of the other, twin slices across a dirt-crusted lifeline. “Red, go!”

She scuttled backward across the ground, boot heels churning up roots and rock. A scream hung in the back of her throat, one she wouldn’t let loose, and her eyes couldn’t leave Eammon. Power curled up from her center, blooming like a vine, nearly solid. Nearly a weapon.

Eammon slammed his sliced hand to the shadow-churned dirt. The monster’s sharp teeth came down, and he backhanded it away, the desperate movement sending blood drops flying. Where they fell, the darkness on the ground healed for a moment, but it was like rain on a house fire, too little and too weak. The thing roared.

Red stopped, hair tangled in branches, teeth set and chest burning. It wasn’t fear that drummed her heartbeat, not anymore— it was anger, anger to see Eammon bleeding himself dry, anger that he had to.

Shatter-edged magic climbed through her veins like ivy.

Every movement was unthinking instinct. Red stood, arched her fingers, and the Wilderwood arched with her, synced to her movements. With a snarl, she thrust her hands forward, the taste of earth in her mouth and green in her veins, gathering every bit of magic she could from the thin thread of it winding through her frame.

The forest followed her lead.

That tearing-metal scream reached a crescendo as vines wrapped the beast’s awful length, squeezing until the gore-caked sides split, opened. The creature whipped from side to side, tangling in reaching branches, ripping itself on thorns grown long and sword-sharp until it fell with a sound like a thunderclap, pieces of it breaking away as it hit the ground, stinking of decay. The parts that landed in the shadow-pit sank slowly down; the parts that landed outside the ring of darkness sat like lumps of meat. Unattached to the whole, rot set in quickly, eating through the flesh like acid.

One more screech, one more thrash, and the monster was gone.

Slowly, Red straightened her fingers, and as she did, the Wilderwood sheathed its weapons. Thorns shrank, branches bent back, vines slithered into the underbrush. The forest settled and was silent.

The shadow-pit still marred the ground, but nothing rippled beneath it. Next to the edge, Eammon slumped on his knees, eyes wide. But then he looked to her, and pushed himself up, and walked across the forest floor like he was a compass needle with her as north star.

Her whole body felt numb. Red nearly swayed toward Eammon’s waiting warmth, caught herself. “What was that?”

“I told you to run.” His bloody hand raised, like he might touch her, then fell away empty. “You don’t know what could’ve happened, you could—”

Red grabbed his sliced hand, jerked it toward her so he would follow. “And leave you alone? You keep asking me to do that, and I won’t, Eammon.”

His eyes on her mouth, his non-bloodied hand curling to touch her cheek, like his body couldn’t keep up with his words. “It’s for your own good.”

“I won’t,” she murmured again, and there was so little space between them that she barely had to move to press her lips to his.

One beat of surprise, both of them frozen. Then they melted together, easy as water running downhill, as breath pulled into waiting lungs.

One of Eammon’s hands gripped her hip, the other coming up to cup the back of her neck. She pulled his bottom lip between her teeth like it was something she could claim; he made a low noise in his throat, arm cinching around her waist, pulling her so close there was no room for light between. Red’s fingers sank into his hair, pulling it loose from its knot to sweep softly against her wrists. When her nails brushed his scalp, his breath hitched.

Red pressed as close as she could, something deep and desperate pulling at her. She’d kissed and more than kissed, but never with this need— like they were two pieces fitting back together, like her edges were meant for his hollows. His fingers dug into her hips, the ground fell away, then her back pressed against tree bark. Her only lucid thought was sharp disappointment when his mouth briefly left hers, and savage satisfaction when it came back.

Then— a harsh breath against her collarbone as Eammon straightened. “No.”

Confusion pushed through the warm muddle of her thoughts. Her feet were on the ground again, and she had no memory of how it happened. Her lips felt tender, his blood was in her hair. Around them, the growth of the forest seemed to arch in their direction, the edges of ferns and leaves greening.

Eammon’s jacket lay on the ground; he bent to pick it up, his back to her. His hand hung by his side, the palm still lacerated, but his fingers bent in and outward, casting off the memory of her skin.

“Why?” Her throat felt tight, only enough space for one word.

He looked back, just once, eyes full of guilt and something else.

“Trust me.”

Eammon swung his jacket over his shoulders, ran a hand through his mussed hair, and turned to march into the Wilderwood. Cheeks burning, Red followed. They stayed carefully apart, and silent.

Later, Red stood at the door to the tower, frowning up into the open windows.

Neither she nor Eammon had spoken when they reached the Keep, though they’d stood in the foyer a moment, silent and watching. Eammon had turned away first, headed toward the library, and Red had watched him until even his shadow was gone.

She’d taken her bag of new clothes up to their room. There were two gowns, a few shirts, and thick leggings, and as Red packed them into the drawer, she’d made up her mind.

Now, standing at the tower door, she still wore Eammon’s shirt.

That first time the mirror had shown her Neve kept tugging at her thoughts, the strange conversation she’d overheard— something about escape, something about weakening. She couldn’t shake the notion it might have something to do with the Wilderwood.

Shoulders set, Red pushed the door open.

The stairs were dark and cold, the room above colder still. Red’s breath fogged as she walked to the mirror against the wall, its surface matte and gray.

She yanked a hair from her braid, touched with dirt from their earlier battle, tangled from Eammon’s hands. Red wound the strand around the whorls of the frame, sat back on her knees, and waited.

For a heartbeat, nothing. Then, that silver shine, that roll of smoke, that feeling of pressing up against a window. The mirror showed one clear figure in a blurred landscape.

Neve.

Her twin sat on a bench, staring at something in her hand. A flower, large as a dinner plate. A twitch of motion, and the flower wilted, petals sagging, brown decay threading through them.

Neve dropped the bloom, peering at her palm. Crystals of frost clung to the edges of her fingers, and across her hand, a slash bisected life and love and heart lines, not quite scabbed over. The veins in her wrist shaded dark before clearing, quick enough to almost be a trick of the light.

Even in the suspended state the mirror left her in, Red’s stomach dropped. Something about Neve’s hand— the cold, the bleeding line— echoed her own magic. An inverse, a dark reflection.

“The more trees we pull out of the Wilderwood, the more power we can harness from the Shadowlands. And the weaker the forest’s hold will become.” The voice was as blurry as the figure it came from, barely clear enough to make out the words. Red could see only a flash of white, a smudge of auburn.

“And she should be able to escape?” Neve glanced at her companion. “The Shrine is full of these experiments, Kiri, and yet my sister still isn’t here.”

“That is not our only goal, Neverah.” Exasperated, like this had been repeated over and over. “And we should exercise caution. If she comes—”

“When she comes.”

No response.

More smoke, and the mirror was flat and gray again.

Red’s breath burned when she pulled it in, like she’d been sprinting rather than sitting. When she stood, her knees creaked against the cold.

The curl of unease in her gut had been right. Neve was the reason for the missing sentinels. She wasn’t quite sure how, not positive of the mechanics, but what she’d seen was enough to know it was true.

Her sister was still trying to bring her home. And she was killing the Wilderwood to do it.

Red stumbled from the tower on numb legs. She pushed open the door to the Keep, staring blankly ahead, mind stuttering over plans that came together and broke apart.

Neve.

Lyra strode from beneath the broken arch of the dining room, a steaming bowl and a crust of bread in her hands. She arched a slender brow. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

It felt like she had. “Where’s Eammon?”

“Your room, I think.” Lyra took a bite of bread. “Fife says thank you for getting sweet bread instead of the usual. In his words, it tastes more like food and less like a brick.”

“He should thank Loreth.” Red gave Lyra a tiny smile before mounting the stairs, doing her best not to run.

In their room, Eammon leaned over a book on his desk, brow in hand, fingers stained with ink. He looked up when she topped the stairs, eyes underscored by dark circles.

The sight of him was enough to scatter her thoughts again. The kiss she’d pushed to the back of her mind rushed forward, memories of hands and mouths and warm, ragged breath. He gripped the pen like he’d gripped her hair, the line of his body bent over the table like he’d bent over her.

It made it harder to tell him she had to leave.

Red cleared her throat. “Is this what you’re always doing in the library?”

“Mostly.” He put down his pen, pushed his hair away. A streak of ink marred his forehead. “I’m translating from old Meducian.”

“For fun?”

“We all have our own ideas of fun, Redarys.”

She quirked a smile at that, though it fell before she could finish the curve. “Why’d you bring it up here?”

His eyes pinned her in place. “You rarely come to the library when I’m in it.”

Heat curled low in her stomach.

Eammon took a deep breath, leaned forward like he might stand. “Red, I—” A wince interrupted him as his hand moved carelessly across the desk, leaving a trail of that thin, sap-like blood.

Worry eclipsed the warmth, worry and the memory of the mirror. Her voice came bare and fumbling. “I have to go back.”

Eammon froze. Then his eyes pressed shut, and he sank back into his chair, resignation tightening the line of his jaw. “I understand. You should—”

“No, you don’t understand.” The words cracked, graceless. She wanted to tell him it had nothing to do with that kiss, but it wasn’t quite the truth. It did have to with that kiss, but not the way he thought. Not in any way that even resembled regret. “You think I wouldn’t have left before if that’s what I wanted? You think I wouldn’t have tried to run already?”

“You came here because you had no choice.” He said it to the desk, to the paper now crumpled in his hand. “Because you were forced to. I should’ve made you leave the minute you—”

“I came here because I thought I had to save the people I loved from myself. I came here because I thought the power I had was something evil. You showed me it wasn’t, that it’s not good or bad, it just is.” She swallowed. “I’ve known the whole time you wouldn’t stop me, Eammon. Every moment I have spent here, I’ve chosen to.”

He said nothing. But his fist closed tighter, like he had to restrain it from reaching.

Red sank to the edge of the bed. “I looked in the mirror.” Changing course, leaving all the reasons for staying and leaving and choices hanging in the air. “It was just a hunch, to see if Neve might have something to do with . . . with what’s been happening.”

His brows lowered.

“I was right. She’s the cause of it. The missing sentinels. I don’t know how, but it’s her.”

“That’s impossible.”

“The mirror showed me the truth before, it’s showing me the truth now. I have to find out what she’s doing, see if I can stop it. And maybe if she sees me, sees I’m fine, she’ll reverse the damage somehow.” Her fingers knotted in the hem of his shirt she wore. “I have to try, especially if I can’t do anything else. If you won’t let me do anything else. The last thing I want to do is leave you alone, but—”

“I’ve been alone a long time.” Low, roughened. Almost pleading.

She bit the corner of her lip like she could still taste him on it. “But you don’t have to be.”

A moment, iron-heavy, glass-fragile. Finally, Eammon looked away, shattering it into something that didn’t shine so brightly. “When will you leave?”

“A few days. I’d like to practice some more first. Make sure I have my power under control.” She swallowed. “Getting married helped, but it seems like I can only make it do what I want when . . . when I’m close to you.”

Something unnamed flickered in Eammon’s eyes. “Is that so?”

“From my observations, yes.”

There was a challenge in the gaze they shared— each daring the other to talk about it. To attempt naming the warmth between them.

“We’ll practice tomorrow, then.” Eammon jerked his chin toward the bed. “But first, sleep.”

He broke eye contact, turning toward his crumpled blanket against the wall. Even with the fire, the air was cold, and a shiver rolled through his shoulders.

“You don’t have to sleep all the way over there.”

Eammon’s spine locked.

Red hadn’t meant to speak the thought, and she blinked hard, hands tightening on her sheets. Too late to take it back, and Eammon’s shoulders kept ratcheting up, the intention to flee in every line—

“I mean,” she said quickly, “if you want to pull the blanket over by the fire, you can. It’s cold. No sense in freezing.”

She cursed herself silently, sure she’d shattered everything they’d built—whatever it was they’d managed to piece together—with her careless want. After the way he’d stopped their kiss, the way he’d kept such careful distance, she wasn’t sure where she stood with him anymore.

There’s not much of me left to give to another person, he’d said. After today, she wasn’t sure how to tell him she’d take what she could get. Wasn’t sure when the knowing crept up on her, somewhere between their odd marriage and magic lessons and a swapping back and forth of saving each other.

Maybe, if she could go to Neve— if she could find out what her sister was doing, find out how to stop it, hem the frayed edges of their sisterhood— after, she and Eammon could figure out what this was. What it could be.

Eammon’s head turned in that way he had, just enough to fix her in place with one eye. Then he grabbed the edge of his blanket.

He pulled it between the bed and the fireplace, closer to the latter than the former. Red busied herself with climbing beneath her covers, aware of his every movement— how he shifted his head to find a comfortable angle, how his long, scarred fingers folded on his chest.

“I’m coming back,” Red said to the ceiling, because it was the only thing she could fit her tangled emotions to. “I don’t want to stay in Valleyda.”

Eammon didn’t respond. Slowly, she drifted, eyes closing, time stretching languid.

“Maybe you should,” Eammon murmured in the dark.