Jaw set tight, Red sank into a deep, exaggerated curtsy.
A brief stutter in the dance’s rhythm. Then the courtiers started up again, sweeping past her without making eye contact.
Small favors.
A familiar form stood in the corner, next to a profusion of hothouse roses and casks of wine. Raffe ran a hand over close-shorn black hair, his fingers the color of mahogany against the gold of his goblet. For the moment, he stood alone, but it wouldn’t be that way for long. The son of a Meducian Councilor and a rather accomplished dancer, Raffe never wanted for attention at balls.
Red slid beside him, taking his goblet and draining it with practiced efficiency. Raffe’s lip quirked. “Hello to you, too.”
“There’s plenty where that came from.” Red handed back the goblet and crossed her arms, staring resolutely at the wall rather than the crowd. Their gazes needled the back of her neck.
“Quite true.” Raffe refilled his glass. “I’m surprised you’re staying, honestly. The people who needed to see you certainly have.”
She chewed the corner of her lip. “I’m hoping to see someone.” It was an admittance to herself as much as to Raffe. She shouldn’t want to see Arick. She should let this be a clean break, let him go easily . . .
But Red was a selfish creature at heart.
Raffe nodded once, understanding in the bare lift of his brow. He handed her the full wineglass before getting another for himself.
She’d known Raffe since she was fourteen— when his father took the position as a Councilor, he had to pass on his booming wine trade to his son, and there was no better place to learn about trade routes than with Valleydan tutors. Not much grew here, a tiny, cold country at the very top of the continent, notable only for the Wilderwood on its northern border and its occasional tithe of Second Daughters. Valleyda relied almost entirely on imports to keep the people fed, imports and prayer-taxes to their Temple, where the most potent entreaties to the Kings could be made.
They’d all grown up together, these past six years, years full of realizing just how different Red was from the rest of them. Years spent realizing her time was swiftly running out. But as long as she’d known him, Raffe had never treated her as anything more than a friend— not a martyr, not an effigy to burn.
Raffe’s eyes softened, gaze pitched over her head. Red followed it to Neve, sitting alone on a raised dais at the front of the room, eyes slightly bloodshot. Isla’s seat was still empty. Red didn’t have one.
Red tipped her wine toward her twin. “Ask her to dance, Raffe.”
“Can’t.” The answer came quick and clipped from behind his glass. He drained it in one swallow.
Red didn’t press.
A tap on her shoulder sent her whirling. The young lord behind her took a quick step away, eyes wide and fearful. “Uh, my . . . my lady— no, Princess—”
He clearly expected sharpness, but Red was suddenly too tired to give it to him. It was exhausting, keeping those knife-edges. “Redarys.”
“Redarys.” He nodded nervously. A blush crept up his white neck, making the spots on his face stand out. “Would you dance with me?”
Red found herself shrugging, Meducian wine muddling her thoughts into shapeless warmth. This wasn’t who she was hoping to see, but why not dance with someone brave enough to ask? She wasn’t dead yet.
The lordling swept her up into a waltz, barely touching the curve of her waist. Red could’ve laughed if her throat didn’t feel so raw. They were all so afraid to touch something that belonged to the Wolf.
“You’re to meet him in the alcove,” he whispered, voice wavering on the edge of a break. “The First Daughter said so.”
Red snapped out of wine-warmth, eyes narrowing on the young lord’s face. Her stomach churned, alcohol and shining hope. “Meet who?”
“The Consort Elect,” the boy stammered. “Lord Arick.”
He was here. He’d come.
The waltz ended with her and her unlikely partner near the alcove he’d referenced, the train of her gown almost touching the brocade curtain. “Thank you.” Red curtsied to the lordling, scarlet now from the roots of his hair to the back of his neck. He stammered something incomprehensible and took off, coltish legs a second away from running.
She took a moment to steady her hands. This was Neve’s doing, and Red knew her sister well enough to guess what she intended. Neve couldn’t convince her to run, and thought maybe Arick could.
Red would let him try.
She slipped through the curtain, and his arms were around her waist before the ball was gone from view.
“Red,” he murmured into her hair. His lips moved to hers, fingers tightening on her hips to pull her closer. “Red, I’ve missed you.”
Her mouth was too occupied to say it back, though she made it clear she shared the sentiment. Arick’s duties as the Consort Elect and Duke of Floriane kept him often out of court. He was only here now because of Neve.
Neve had been as shocked as Red when Arick was announced as Neve’s future husband, cementing the fragile treaty that made Floriane a Valleydan province. She knew what lay between Arick and Red, but they never talked about it, unable to find the right words for one more small tragedy. Arick was a blade that drew blood two different ways, and the wounds left were best tended to alone.
Red broke away, resting her forehead against Arick’s shoulder. He smelled the same, like mint and expensive tobacco. She breathed it in until her lungs ached.
Arick held her there a moment, hands in her hair. “I love you,” he whispered against her ear.
He always said it. She never said it back. Once, she’d thought it was because she was doing him a favor, denying herself to make it easier on him when her twenty years were up and the forest’s tithe came due. But that wasn’t quite right. Red never said it because she didn’t feel it. She loved Arick, in a way, but not a way that matched his love for her. It was simpler to let the words pass without remark.
He’d never seemed upset about it before, but tonight, she could feel the way his muscles tensed beneath her cheek, hear the clench of teeth in his jaw. “Still, Red?” It came quiet, in a way that seemed like he already knew the answer.
She stayed silent.
A moment, then he tilted a pale finger under her chin, tipped it up to search her face. No candles burned in the alcove, but the moonlight through the window reflected in his eyes, as green as the ferns on the sill. “You know why I’m here.”
“And you know what I’ll say.”
“Neve was asking the wrong question,” he breathed, desperation feathering at the edges. “Just wanting you to run, not thinking about what comes next. I have. It’s all I’ve thought of.” He paused, hand tightening in her hair. “Run away with me, Red.”
Her eyes, half closed by kissing and moonlight, opened wide. Red pulled away, quickly enough to leave strands of gold woven around his fingers. “What?”
Arick gathered her hands, pulled her close again. “Run away with me,” he repeated, chafing his thumbs over her palms. “We’ll go south, to Karsecka or Elkyrath, find some backwater town where no one cares about religion or the Kings coming back, too far away from the forest to worry about any monsters. I’ll find work doing . . . doing something, and—”
“We can’t do that.” Red tugged out of his grip. The pleasant numbness of wine was rapidly giving over to a dull ache, and she pressed her fingers into her temples as she turned away. “You have responsibilities. To Floriane, to Neve . . .”
“None of that matters.” His hands framed her waist. “Red, I can’t let you go to the Wilderwood.”
She felt it again, the awakening in her veins. The ferns shuddered on the sill.
For a moment, she thought about telling him.
Telling him about the stray splinter of magic the Wilderwood left in her the night she and Neve ran to the forest’s edge. Telling him of the destruction it wrought, the blood and the violence. Telling him how every day was an exercise in figh
ting it down, keeping it contained, making sure it never hurt anyone again.
But the words wouldn’t come.
Red wasn’t going to the Wilderwood to bring back gods. She wasn’t going as insurance against monsters. It was an ancient and esoteric web she’d been born tangled in, but her reasons for not fighting free of it had nothing to do with piety, nothing to do with a religion she’d never truly believed in.
She was going to the Wilderwood to save everyone she loved from herself.
“It doesn’t have to be this way.” Arick gripped her shoulders. “We could have a life, Red. We could be just us.”
“I’m the Second Daughter. You’re the Consort Elect.” Red shook her head. “That is who we are.”
Silence. “I could make you go.”
Red’s eyes narrowed, half confusion and half wariness.
His hands slid from her shoulders, closed around her wrists. “I could take you somewhere he couldn’t get to you.” A pause, laden with sharp hurt. “Where you couldn’t get to him.”
Arick’s grip was just shy of bruising, and with an angry surge like leaves caught in a cyclone, Red’s shard of magic broke free.
It clawed its way out of her bones, unspooling from the spaces between her ribs like ivy climbing ruins. The ferns on the sill arched toward her, called by some strange magnetism, and she felt the quickening of earth beneath her feet even through layers of marble, roots running like currents, reaching for her—
Red wrestled the power under control just before the ferns touched Arick’s shoulder, the fronds grown long and jagged in seconds. She shoved him away instead, harder than she meant to. Arick stumbled as the ferns retracted, slinking back to normal shapes.
“You can’t make me do anything, Arick.” Her hands trembled; her voice was thin. “I can’t stay here.”
“Why?” All fire, angry and low.
Red turned, picking up the edge of the brocaded curtain in a hand she hoped didn’t shake. Her mouth worked, but no words seemed right, so the quiet grew heavy and was her answer.
“This is about what happened with Neve, isn’t it?” It was an accusation, and he threw it like one. “When you went to the Wilderwood?”
Red’s heart slammed against her ribs. She ducked under the curtain and dropped it behind her, muffling Arick’s words, hiding his face. Her gown whispered over the marble as she walked down the corridor, toward the double doors of the north-facing balcony. Distantly, she wondered what the priestesses’ informants might make of her mussed hair and swollen lips.
Well. If they wanted an untouched sacrifice, that ship had long since sailed.
The cold was bracing after the hearths in the ballroom, but Red was Valleydan, and gooseflesh on her arms still felt like summer. Sweat dried in her hair, now hopelessly straight, careful curls loosened by heat and hands.
Breathe in, breathe out, steady her shaking shoulders, blink away the burn in her eyes. She could count the number of people who loved her on one hand, and they all kept begging for the only thing she couldn’t give them.
The night air froze the tears into her lashes before they could fall. She’d been damned from the moment she was born— a Second Daughter, meant for the Wolf and the Wilderwood, as etched into the bark in the Shrine— but still, sometimes, she wondered. Wondered if the damning was her own fault for what she’d done four years ago.
Reckless courage got the best of them after that disastrous ball, reckless courage and too much wine. They stole horses, rode north, two girls against a monster and an endless forest with nothing but rocks and matches and a fierce love for each other.
That love burned so brightly, it almost seemed like the power that took root in Red was a deliberate mockery. The Wilderwood, proving that it was stronger. That her ties to the forest and its waiting Wolf would always be stronger.
Red swallowed against a tight throat. Biting irony, that if it hadn’t been for that night and what it wrought, she might’ve done what Neve wanted. She might’ve run.
She looked to the north, squinting against cold wind. Somewhere, beyond the mist and the hazy lights of the capital, was the Wilderwood. The Wolf. Their long wait was almost ended.
“I’m coming,” she murmured. “Damn you, I’m coming.”
She turned in a sweep of crimson skirts and went back inside.
Chapter Two
S leep came only in fragments. By the time sunrise bled into the sky, Red stood by the window, tangling her fingers together and staring out at the Shrine.
Her room faced the interior gardens, an expanse of carefully maintained trees and flowers, specially bred for their hardiness against the cold. The Shrine was tucked into the back corner, barely visible beneath a blooming arbor. Sunrise caught the edge of the arched stone and painted it muted gold.
The Order stood scattered among the greenery, crowding the flowers, a sea of white robes and piety. Every priestess that called Valleyda home, plus all who had traveled, from the Rylt across the sea and Karsecka at the southern tip of the continent and everywhere in between. Each Temple had a white tree shard, a small splinter of the Wilderwood to pray to, but it was a special honor to trek to the Valleydan Temple, where they had a veritable grove of them. A privilege, to pray among the bone-white branches that made the prison of the Kings and beseech their return.
But this morning, none of the priestesses stepped inside the Shrine. The only person permitted to pray among the white branches today was Red.
The glass fogged with her breath. Absently, Red drew a finger through the cloud. Their nursemaids had done that long ago, illustrating stories on the windowpane. Stories of the Wilderwood as it was before the creation of the Shadowlands, when all the magic of the world was locked within it to make a prison for the god-like creatures that had reigned in terror.
Before, the forest had been a place of eternal summer, a spot of solace in a world ruled by violence. According to the nursemaids, it’d even been capable of granting boons to those who left sacrifices within its borders— bundled hair, lost teeth, paper dotted with blood. Magic had run freely in that world, available to anyone who could learn to use it.
But once the Five Kings bargained with the forest to bind away the monstrous gods— to create the Shadowlands as their prison— all that magic was gone, pulled into the Wilderwood to accomplish its monumental task.
But the forest could still bargain, even then— it bargained with Ciaran and Gaya, the original Wolf and Second Daughter. In Year One of the Binding, the same year the monsters were locked away, they’d asked the Wilderwood for shelter from Gaya’s father, Valchior, and her betrothed, Solmir— two of the fabled Five Kings. The Wilderwood granted Gaya and Ciaran’s request, giving them a place to hide, a place to be together forever. It bound them into its borders and made them something more than human.
That’s where the nursemaids stopped. They didn’t talk about how the Kings entered the Wilderwood again, fifty years after the Binding, and never returned. They didn’t talk about Ciaran bringing Gaya’s dead body to the edge of the woods, a century and a half after the Kings disappeared.
Red still knew the tale. She’d read it hundreds of times, both in books counted as holy and in those of lesser import. Every version of it she could find. Though some of the details differed, the broad strokes remained. Ciaran, bringing Gaya to the Wilderwood’s border. Her body, half rotted, wound through with vines and tree roots as if she’d been tangled in the very foundations of the forest. His words to those who saw him, a few unimportant northern villagers who suddenly found themselves part of religious history.
Send the next.
And so, a love story turned to horror, as surely as eternal summer faded to withered fall.
Red drew her hand away as the edges of her foggy canvas faded. The trails her fingers left looked like claw marks.
A knock at the door, nearly tentative. Red leaned her forehead against the window. “A moment.”
One breath, deep and cold, then Red stood up. Her ni
ghtgown stuck to the chilled sweat on her shoulder blades as she tugged it off. Almost unconsciously, her eyes strayed to the skin above her elbow. Still unmarked, and she had to fight to keep hope from sinking teeth into her chest.
There was no account of what the Marks were supposed to look like, only that they appeared on the Second Daughter’s arm sometime in her nineteenth year, exerting an inexorable pull toward the north, toward the Wilderwood. Every morning since the year turned, she’d carefully inspected her skin, peering at each mole and freckle.
Another knock. Red glared at the closed door like the force of her ire could penetrate the wood. “Unless you want me to pray naked, you’ll give me a moment.”
No more knocking.
A wrinkled gown puddled by her feet. Red pulled it on and opened the door, not bothering to comb her hair.
Three priestesses stood silently in the corridor. All were vaguely recognizable, so they must be from the Valleydan Temple, not visitors. Maybe that was meant to be comforting.
If her disheveled appearance took the priestesses aback, they didn’t show it. They only inclined their heads, hands hidden in wide white sleeves, and led her down the hall, out into the cold, bright air.
The holy throng in the gardens stood stone-still, heads bowed, flanking the flower-decked entrance to the Shrine. Each priestess she passed made Red’s heart ratchet higher in her throat. She didn’t look at any of them, kept her gaze straight ahead as she ducked into the shadows beneath the arch, alone.
The first room of the Shrine was plain and square. A small table stocked with prayer candles stood by the door, the statue of Gaya tall and proud in the center of the room. At the statue’s feet, the white bark with its inscribed sentencing, a piece of the tree where Gaya and Ciaran had made their bargain. Gaya’s sister, Tiernan, had helped the two of them escape, and she brought the bark back as proof that Solmir’s claim on Gaya was void.
Red frowned up at her predecessor. It was a deft bit of work, what made Gaya revered and the Wolf reviled, a delicate filling-in of unknown history. The Five Kings had disappeared in the Wolf’s territory, therefore he was to blame. No one quite knew what he was supposed to be accomplishing by trapping the Kings— more power, maybe. Perhaps he was just doing as monsters do, having become one himself as the forest he was tied to twisted and darkened. The Order said that Gaya had been killed trying to rescue the Kings from wherever Ciaran had hidden them, but there was really no way to know, was there? All they knew was that the Kings were gone, and Gaya was dead.
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