She thought of the wood shards in the library she’d first assumed were candles, how they also carried flame but stayed unburnt. Wood and vine, both growing things, locked in some strange symbiotic relationship. The splintered power in her chest felt restless.
Red backed away, venturing into the center of the ruined foyer. Above her, lavender sky shone through the cracked solarium glass, neither any brighter nor any darker than before she’d fled down the stairs. No moon, no stars, nothing to give any indication of time passed. Just endless twilight.
Though somewhat dim, the light from the burning vine and the solarium window was steady, and Red could see the remains of carpet on the mossy floor, shreds of something that had once been grand. The threads of nearly rotted tapestries hung on the walls, tangled with vines and thin roots. Too muddied to tell what the pictures might’ve been, for the most part, though she could pick out the vague shape of faces in one of them.
She frowned at it, eyes narrowed to put together the patterns. A man and a woman, it looked like. Holding hands, maybe. Her hair was long. His eyes were dark.
Gaya and Ciaran. Eammon’s parents. If she needed further proof that he was who he said, this would be it. Even though the tapestry was worn nearly to ruin, she could tell the man depicted here was not the man she’d just met in the library. His face was softer, more classically handsome. His chin canted upward at an angle that dared the viewer to try him, an expression she knew just by looking at it wouldn’t be worn naturally on Eammon’s face.
And Gaya . . . she was more muddied than Ciaran, the shape of her harder to make out. Beautiful, aloof in a way that the smudged tapestry highlighted rather than obscured.
That frustrated Red on some deep level, a knotted emotion she couldn’t quite parse out to its composite parts. All the Second Daughters, more icon than individual. Defined by what they were instead of who.
She frowned a moment longer at the tapestry before walking over to the broken archway at the other side of the stairs.
The arch led into what looked like a sunken dining room, one chipped stone step at the edge of the threshold. A large window framed the courtyard on the right side, the glass choked with climbing greenery and thin, spiderwebbed cracks. A scuffed wooden table sat in the center of the room, with three chairs clustered haphazardly at one end. On the back wall, another, smaller door on rusted hinges led to what she assumed was the kitchen. Other than that, the room was empty.
Three chairs. Her brows drew together. The tales told of no one here but the Wolf, but then again, the tales also hadn’t said there was more than one Wolf, and the current one was a tall young man with scarred hands and a sour disposition. It seemed the tales weren’t exactly reliable. Really, she had no idea who else—what else— might be lurking in the Keep.
One of us will burn it, the Wolf had said when he saw her torn cloak. Implying there was more than one inhabitant of this ruin.
As if in answer, there was a sudden clatter, like a dropped armful of pots and pans. Red heard a brief, muttered curse from behind that smaller door at the back of the room, and then a laugh from another voice, light and musical.
Her courage wasn’t quite steeled enough to investigate. Red’s mind crowded with thoughts of twisted poppets made of sticks and thorns, crafted from the Wilderwood and set to servitude by the same strange magic that kept the vine unburning. After the fanged trees, nothing seemed out of the realm of awful possibility.
She backed away from the broken arch, not stopping until the small of her back hit the staircase rail in the main foyer. Her shoulder jostled the dark coat hanging on the knob of the newel post, sending up a faint whiff of fallen leaves and coffee grounds.
Red turned, peering upward. The landing at the top of the staircase was still hidden in shadow, a darkness that had scared her away before. Now that she felt somewhat less skittish, the upstairs seemed more intriguing than foreboding.
Despite being partially covered in moss, the stairs looked sturdy enough. She placed her mud-caked boot on the first step.
The moss moved under her feet like she’d stepped on a snake, seeping farther up the stairs, collecting toadstools and thin roots in its wake. The greenery gathered together, an army amassing, and became a solid wall of growing things, blocking her path.
Red stumbled backward, shaking off the weed tendrils knotting around her ankles. “Five Kings,” she cursed quietly. “Point taken.”
Dirt streaked the hand that reached up to push sweaty, leaf-matted hair from her eyes. She needed a bath, and badly, though she’d have to put her dirty clothes back on afterward. She hadn’t brought more. Hadn’t expected to need them.
The thought sank into her mind with serrated teeth. The fierceness with which she’d run for her life in the Wilderwood had been gut instinct, primal force. Now the consequences: a life. Already she was hours older than she ever expected to be.
She had no idea how to start coming to terms with that.
Red pressed her fingers to her eyes until the sharp feeling behind them dissipated. Once she was calmer, she shook her head, straightened. The Wolf said her room was in the corridor, and there was only one she could see, though it ended in a riot of ruin.
The oddly lit vine provided the light here, too, though the flames were smaller and more sporadic. Moss covered the floor and grew halfway up the walls. Blooming things she couldn’t name threaded through the ruined jumble at the hall’s end, a tangle of
