The captain of the guard takes Red to the palace and delivers her to Kiri. Red notices Kiri’s pendant, “a piece of white wood touched with threads of darkness” (332). Kiri uses a cold, awful magic to inflict pain on Red. She muses whether Red can serve a purpose.

Red asks to see Neve. Neve is elated to see Red and embraces her, but Kiri warns Neve that their work has not yet come to fruition.

While Neve is glad to have her back, others receive Red awkwardly, worried about how she might have changed. Red thinks, “The path here was complex, littered with traps, and putting a foot wrong could bloody them both” (338). Neve and Red converse, but Neve doesn’t understand why Red would want to go back to the Wilderwood. Neve asks Red what she has done, and Red thinks, “She’d married the Wolf of the Wilderwood. It was a massive, frightening thing, and one she’d do again in a heartbeat” (341).

Arick joins them for dinner, and Red notices a strange, cold scent to him. The dinner is awkward, and Red feels like a puzzle piece that doesn’t fit.

The next morning, Red dresses in a forest-green gown and goes outside to the shrine. She notices that it seems like winter has come early, and the plants are almost dead.

As they talk, Neve realizes that hurting the Wilderwood hurts Red. Red enters the inner room of the shrine and sees it is full of sentinels. They are inverted, so their roots reach toward the ceiling, and they are marked with blood. Kiri cuts Red’s arm and says she is looking for the roots. Neve grabs Kiri by the throat to stop her. Red thinks she can use her blood to send the sentinels back, but they don’t go. Red realizes, “[The Wilderwood] waited for her choice, and that choice must be made in full knowledge of what it meant, not in a moment of panicked desperation” (355).

The sentinels move and pull apart the ceiling. Stones hit Kiri and Neve, and one breaks Red’s hand. Arick enters the room, and Red notices he doesn’t have a shadow.

Red wakes in a dungeon. She feels that her magic is coiled and small. Kiri and Arick reveal that their plan is to tear down the Wilderwood and release the Kings. Arick says Neve is safe and he won’t kill Red because it would hurt Neve. Red realizes there is another prisoner in the cell opposite hers. She guesses the shadowless man who looks like Arick is Solmir. When Arick tried to bargain with the Wilderwood, Solmir used Arick to escape the Shadowlands. Arick only wanted to get Red back, but that first bargain began Kiri and Solmir’s harvest of power from the Shadowlands.

Solmir says Red has saved herself because she didn’t take the roots; she doesn’t love the Wolf enough to sacrifice herself for him. Red realizes the choice the Wilderwood has been waiting for her to make, because “something taken would only wither, while something given might grow” (366). Red pulls on her magic and calls out that she wants the roots, saying, “I am for the Wolf, and the Wolves are for the Wilderwood” (366). She hears a roar and feels the roots of the forest make a home in her. The sensation is one of something growing inside.

Red uses her magic to subdue Kiri and Solmir. She asks Arick to come with her, but he says he can’t. Red uses her newfound power to break apart her prison and leave.

Red returns to find the Wilderwood full of autumn color. Though she hates to leave Neve, she knows, “Her place had always been the forest” (372).

Red returns to Eammon, who is upset at what she’s done. He takes on the pain of her wounded hands, healing them. Red reflects that her taking half of the roots has helped balance his humaneness. She insists that having a choice makes the difference, and the forest cannot drain either of them now. She explains that Arick made a bargain and freed Solmir. She and Eammon spend the night together.

In the morning, Red looks outside to see that the Wilderwood is growing more vibrant with color. She and Eammon have made the Wilderwood whole. She walks to the sentinel with the bones of the Second Daughters, the tree where Ciaran and Gaya made their bargain to become Wolves. She understands the Wilderwood was just trying to survive. She lays the bones to rest. Eammon comes to tell her that Raffe is at the Keep.

Raffe has come to tell Red that he can’t find Neve. Raffe is hostile to Fife and Eammon, but when he sees Lyra, he refers to her as the “Plaguebreaker” in a reverent voice. Lyra explains that when the plague came to her country, her younger brother was infected, and Lyra bargained with the Wilderwood for a cure. Red says she knows how to find Neve.

Red tries looking in her mirror for Neve. She sees a dark, blurry vision of Neve lying somewhere. Kiri and Solmir are nearby. Red and Eammon both feel an enormous pain and realize a number of sentinels have been taken. Red fears that Solmir is trying to free the rest of the Kings from the Shadowlands. Raffe, Lyra, Fife, Eammon, and Red travel to the border of the Wilderwood, and Valdrek and Lear, who have traveled from the Edge, join them.

They find that a copse of white trees has been created outside the border, growing upside down as in the shrine. Red thinks she hears Neve calling for her and follows the sound. Kiri and Solmir capture Red and pull her out of the forest.

Red sees that five priestesses have gathered in the grove. Eammon tries to fight Solmir, but the forest holds him. Solmir knocks Valdrek down while Kiri begins killing the other priestesses, which will free the Kings from the Shadowlands. To protect Red, Eammon pulls the Wilderwood out of her and takes it all into himself, “[a] forest made a man made a god” (405).

Eammon attacks Solmir, but none of the blows affect him because Solmir is still a shadow anchored to Arick. Lyra and Fife try to fight Solmir but are also hurt. Red sees that all of their Marks have disappeared.

Red runs into the grove. Kiri tries to attack her again, but Raffe knocks Kiri unconscious. Neve is enclosed in a coffin in the center of the grove, part of the sacrifice to bring the Kings. Red cannot wake her.

Red finds Arick, who understands what must be done to stop Solmir. Red holds the knife while Arick presses his throat against it. Neve wakes up and pulls the magic into herself to wreck the grove, but her coffin sinks into the ground and is buried. When Arick dies, Solmir takes form, and Eammon is able to subdue him.

Neve is alive but trapped in the Shadowlands, and Red doesn’t know how to bring her back. Red realizes that all the power of the Wilderwood is in Eammon now. Fife bargains with Eammon to save Lyra. Red worries that Eammon won’t want to return to himself for her, but she asks anyway. He shares the roots again, and they both become the gods of the Wilderwood, guardians of the magic. Red notices she has gained a new Mark, “altered to represent the bargain she didn’t make as well as the one she did” (423).

Valdrek and Lear recover and realize they can travel anywhere now. Red vows she will find Neve. She, Eammon, Lyra, and Fife decide to return to the Keep, and “for now, just for a moment, Red let herself feel content. She let herself feel done” (426).

One section of the Epilogue is from Red’s point of view and shows her looking into the mirror trying to see Neve. Eammon promises to help Red locate her sister. The Wilderwood glows with autumn color, and they walk through it together.

In the second section of the Epilogue, told from Neve’s point of view, Neve wakes up in a strange, quiet place where all the colors are gray. A man greets her and says he’s been waiting.