“That story is true.” He turned away, ran a hand through his long, dark hair. “But rest assured, it won’t happen again. Regardless of whether you’d come or not, I’ll never purposefully unleash anything from this damn forest, and in fact work quite hard to keep it all contained.”
Cold comfort, especially hedged by purposefully. “So where are you going, then?”
“To do Wolf-things.” Eammon grabbed the coat and swung it over his shoulders in one motion, turning toward the door.
The decision was split-second and out of her mouth before she could give it too much thought. “I’m coming with you.”
The Wolf rounded on her, teeth glinting in the light of the flames along the unburnt vine. “You most certainly are not.”
“Then give me a better answer than Wolf-things.”
Eammon’s hands tensed into knots by his sides. His mouth worked as if looking for that better answer; he swallowed whatever he found. “It’s not safe for you,” he said finally. “You know that.”
“Safe around here seems a relative concept at best. And I’d like to see for myself that you’re holding up your end of the bargain. That no monsters will be leaving the confines of your forest.”
The dim light caught his eyes, emphasized both their color and the depth of the shadows beneath. “You could just trust me.”
Her chin tipped up. “Give me a reason to.”
They stared at each other, Red and the Wolf. It could’ve been a contest of wills, if it felt like something either of them could win.
“I promise not to bleed,” Red said softly. “That’s the only way it will come for me, right? If I bleed?”
He didn’t answer. Eammon’s gaze pinned her in place, unreadable. Then he jerked his chin toward the corridor. “Go get boots. You can’t traipse through the Wilderwood barefoot.”
Her mud-caked boots were right inside her room’s door. Red knocked off the worst of the muck and laced them quickly, half convinced the Wolf would change his mind if she dallied too long. She thought of grabbing her scarlet cloak from the wardrobe, but it had suffered enough indignities today.
When she came back into the main hall, Eammon had shrugged off his coat. He held it out like an offering but didn’t meet her eyes. “It’s cold.”
After a moment’s hesitation, she took the proffered coat, swung it over her shoulders. It hung to her knees, smelled of old books and coffee and the cinnamon-bite of fallen leaves, still warm from where he’d worn it.
Brows drawn down, Eammon opened the door and stalked into the fog.
Chapter Eight
T he sky dimmed toward violet, casting the Wilderwood around them in shades of black and deep blue. The yellow light from within the Keep extended only inches into the gloom before being swallowed by shadow, like the forest wouldn’t permit too much illumination.
“Keep up.” Eammon’s stride was one to two of hers, and he didn’t seem inclined to slow. The violet light caught the edge of a dagger at his waist.
Red walked quickly, staying close to his back. The sleeves of his coat were long enough to completely hide her hands, and she balled the worn fabric into her fists as she pulled it tighter. It was damn cold in whatever passed for night around here, but if Eammon felt the chill, he didn’t show it. She supposed he was used to it by now.
“Don’t touch anything.” Fog swirled over the gate ahead of them, deepened the shadows around Eammon’s shoulders. “Stay within reach of me at all times.” He turned just enough for her to see a fierce one-eyed glare. “And remember, no bleeding.”
“Not planning on it.”
“Good.”
Eammon touched the gate. As it had when Red entered, the split in the metal bloomed from the ground, traveling up the iron until the door swung open. The Wolf stepped into the thicker fog beyond, sending it eddying around his feet.
The trees seemed to press closer as she followed him into the forest. White branches swooped through the gloom above their heads, scythes waiting for the word. Red eyed them as she inched closer behind Eammon, near enough to feel wafts of his warmth and see the work of muscle under his shirt. “We’re looking for a Shadowlands breach, correct?”
An affirmative grunt.
“And what does a breach look like, exactly?”
“Darkness.” Eammon pushed aside a tree branch; from the corner of Red’s eye, it looked like the twigs curled inward, fingers toward a fist. “Like a pool of black mud, either on its own or around a white tree, if we get to it quick enough. A place where the Wilderwood didn’t hold strong enough and the Shadowlands pushed through.”
“I think I may have seen one.” The ring of darkness around the rotting white tree she’d seen when she crossed the border, the one at the very edge of the Wilderwood— that matched Eammon’s description. “When I first . . . first arrived.”
“Probably.” It was terse. “They aren’t exactly uncommon anymore.”
Red carefully stepped over knotting roots, around strange flowers and reaching thorns as she followed the Wolf through the shadows of the Wilderwood. She could almost hear the forest breathe, hear it in the rustle of branches and the slither of vines, and her skin prickled with the sense of being watched. This forest was alive, alive and sentient.
She stepped closer to Eammon’s back again.
His outstretched arm was next to invisible in the gloom, and Red ran right into it, a line of solid warmth across her chest. Her feet skidded on leaves, and she grabbed his hand to steady herself. His scars were rough under her fingers before he pulled away, shooting her a dark, unfathomable look.
A white tree stretched into the deep-violet sky before them, wide enough that three people couldn’t hold hands around it, crowned with bone-white branches. Its roots cut through the earth, threaded with black, shadowy rot, the infection climbing the trunk like rising floodwater. In a perfect circle around the roots, the earth was dark and soft, spongy, like long-dead flesh.
“Far gone,” Eammon said under his breath, “but at least we got to it before the sentinel ended up at the Keep.” He stepped up to the ring of infected ground, fingers twitching toward the dagger at his belt, as if checking to make sure it was still there. “Stay back,” he ordered as he crouched at the dark edge of the rot. “Do not move.”
Red nodded. She might not trust him, not quite yet, but that wasn’t enough to make her venture into the Wilderwood alone.
The Wolf reached for the dagger again, but his fingers faltered this time. “Too much blood today already,” he muttered to himself, drawing his hand away from the blade with a sigh. His head tipped forward, eyes closing. “Magic it is, then. Dammit.”
Eammon pushed up his sleeves, and in the dim, Red thought she saw an etching of green along the veins of his forearm, deepening as he took a breath, fading as he let it out. Slowly, some of the tightness in his shoulders bled away.
She hadn’t noticed just how tense he looked until she saw him relaxed— like he’d carried a heavy burden, and now laid it down.
Nothing moved, but Red felt as if the Wilderwood leaned closer. She crossed her arms, warily eyeing the trees. Earlier, when she’d pelted through them fear-blind and bloody, she’d had the sense of the forest as something shackled, held back.
Now she had the sense of shackles loosening.
Eammon placed his hands right at the edge of the breach, fingertips a hairbreadth away from the spongy, rotten ground. His head bowed forward, all his concentration diverted to the task at hand. Another flaring of green in his veins, this time in his neck as well as his forearms. Something dark edged through the skin of his wrists, right above the bone. It looked almost like bark.
So distracted was she by the changes, Red didn’t notice the root snaking out of the underbrush until it hooked around her ankle.
Her startled cry was quick and strangled as she hit the ground, shins barking against rocks and raised roots. Vines studded in thorns wrapped her viper-quick, tying her to the forest floor. Deep in Red’s chest,
the shard of magic the forest had left in her bloomed steadily, inexorably outward.
The Wilderwood hesitated a moment, all those white trees poised and waiting. Then they dove.
The thorns lashing Red down bit deep, bringing up blood. White roots burst from the ground around her, arched toward the ragged wounds the thorns opened in her skin. She screamed, pain and fear ripping through the silent forest.
“Redarys!”
Eammon stumbled up from the ground, legs unsteady, like whatever he’d been doing at the edge of the shadow-pit had left him a husk. Panic shone in his eyes, the whites of them once again tinted green, the veins in his fingers blazing emerald as he fumbled for the dagger at his belt. “Hold on, I—”
The Wilderwood drowned him out, shrilling triumphantly in a voice of cracking branches. The vines shackling Red opened new blooms, wide and pale in the unnatural twilight; the leaves beneath her blushed from faded autumn to summer-bright as her veins ran green and her mouth filled with the taste of earth. The splinter of magic in her middle grew up and out, stretching greedily toward the hungry white trees.
She thought of Gaya, root-riddled, consumed. Kaldenore, Sayetha, Merra, three more this forest had drained. It’d take what it needed and damn what was left, unless she found a way to stop it, to contain it, to cut it off—
With an inner strength born of distilled panic, Red took hold of the magic rushing out of her and snapped.
The forest exploded outward with a bone-rattling boom. Roots and branches and thorns skittered as Red shoved her magic down. It was painful, this denying, making herself a cage for a wild thing, but still she pushed it away, hiding it deep. Bound, banished, slashed off like her will was a knife.
The dirt-taste faded from her tongue; the veins in her wrist ran from verdant green to blue. The Wilderwood screamed, one more keening sound, then was silent.
She expected desolation when her eyes opened, but there was none, no torn limbs or felled trees. The Wilderwood stood still as a stunned animal. Red pushed up on shaky legs, dirt falling from her torn skirt, from her borrowed coat.
Eammon’s eyes were wide, the dagger held loose and forgotten in his hand. “What was that?”
“Don’t act like you don’t know, not when I just saw you try to use it.” The way his veins greened was near a mirror to hers. “Power. Power from this fucking forest. You were there when I got it. You were there when . . . when it took hold of me, that night. I saw you.”
The panic in Eammon’s eyes bloomed slowly into horror. “No,” he whispered, shaking his head. “I . . . I tried to stop it, I thought I stopped it from—”
A deep rumble cut him off, coming from the white roots cutting through rotten ground. It struck them both into silence, eyes locking to the tree.
“Shit.” Eammon flipped the dagger around in his fist, shoving her behind him with the other hand. “Shit.”
He didn’t go to the edge of the breach again, didn’t try to call up whatever arcane forest magic he’d used before. Instead he sliced into his palm, a moment of such nonchalant and unexpected violence that Red flinched.
But he wasn’t fast enough.
The edges of the shadow-pit receded with unnatural quickness, like water draining from the bottom of a pierced bowl. Rot drained into the tree roots, turning them pitch-dark, climbing up the white trunk and covering it almost completely in churning corruption.
Eammon lunged toward the tree, bleeding fist outstretched. But before he could reach it, the last bit of darkness drained from the dirt into the roots, and the ground around them erupted. Sharp twigs and leaves shot into the air, all tinged with shadowy black, throwing Eammon backward and away from the trunk as rot surged up almost to the branches.
Red crouched, arms thrown protectively over her head. The tree, now fully rotted, slowly began to sink into the ground.
Around them, the rest of the Wilderwood watched, still and silent and somehow mournful.
With the same terrible, unnatural quickness, the shadow-touched forest detritus cobbled itself together, knitting a body out of ruin. Old bones tugged free of the forest floor, some animal, some human, some too strange-shaped to be either, all corrupted with threads of shadow that seeped up from the roots of the sinking tree.
This was it, Red knew, in the quiet part of her mind that seemed to float above her fear. Here was the shadowed monster from the fairy tale, facing off against a man changed by a forest. It was real, all of it was real.
When the chaotic roiling of bones and darkness and growing things stopped, a woman stood in its place.
Her hair was long and dark, her eyes an acidic emerald. She smiled, and mushrooms sprouted between her teeth. “You think this time will be any different?” The voice sounded nothing like a human. It was deep and somehow creeping, oscillating in the air, the lowest string plucked on an untuned harp. “This story has played out over and over again. It’s such fun watching from below, but it always comes to the same conclusion. You aren’t strong enough, Wolf-pup. Just like your father.”
Eammon bent half double, his seeping hand pressed against his battered ribs, the other brandishing the still-bloody dagger toward the creature. His breath rattled in and out of his lungs, his teeth glinting in the unchanging twilight.
The forest-and-shadow woman moved the blade aside with an almost-gentle finger, careful not to touch his blood. Lichen grew from her nailbeds. “It gets harder and harder to hold on to yourself, doesn’t it? The magic crowds you out, so you open a vein instead. But you can’t bleed enough to hold it off forever. Can’t bleed enough to keep the Shadowlands closed, can’t bleed enough to keep everything trapped.” The thing turned its eyes toward Red, soil dripping like tears down moss-scabbed cheeks. “This ends in roots and bones. For all of you. It always ends in roots and bones.”
Suddenly the specter of the girl changed. In an instant, she was prostrate on the ground, the terrible pieces that made her hidden away. Instead she looked like a corpse, the regular corpse of a young woman.
Red recognized her, though it took a moment. She’d seen the portrait in one of the books in the library.
Merra.
A blink, and Merra’s stomach ripped, the sound visceral enough to make Red’s gorge rise. Tree roots spilled from the hole, flowing out of the bloody cavity in a mess of gore.
Merra’s corpse stayed still a moment. Then it let loose a sound that could’ve been a cackle or a scream, standing again, hands outstretched toward Eammon in a posture of near-surrender. Skin decayed into forest; moss ate at fingers formed of wrong bones.
It shook Eammon loose from whatever horror had held him frozen. Mouth twisted, he lurched forward, swiping at the creature not with the dagger but with his bleeding hand. The girl-shaped thing laughed again, a thin, reedy sound this time, and crumbled apart at his blow. Eammon turned and rushed toward the tree, running over raised roots like stones in a river, dagger slicing into his palm anew.
But the creature wasn’t gone, not yet— like as long as the breach remained open, it could regenerate itself. It melted out of Merra’s shape, churning its bones and leaves to make amalgamations of more faces, half forming and falling away. One feminine, heart-shaped, sweetness turned to terrible. Another narrow-chinned and full-lipped. A woman with Eammon’s amber eyes, a man with his angular jaw.
“Why even try?” The thing turned to watch Eammon, making sure he saw every facet of its changing face. “A forest in your bones, a graveyard beneath your feet. There are no heroes here.”
Eammon snarled, teeth bared as his palm wept the same too-dark, green-threaded blood Red had seen when he took her wound in the library. He slapped his hand against the tree trunk, pressed until blood seeped between his fingers, dripped down his knuckles. The tree was half sunken now, the branches nearly scraping the top of his head.
Slowly, the rot receded, fading down the tree and back into its roots, like Eammon’s blood was something it had to escape, then out of the roots and back into the ground. The sinkin
g reversed as the rot disappeared, the tree righting itself by incremental degrees. Eammon bled and bled, his eyes closing, knees beginning to buckle.
The creature twitched, melting as the tree regrew, features running back into forest and shadow. “You know what happens to heroes, Wolf-pup?” The thing reared back, no longer trying at human shapes, just a lick of darkness studded in bones and twigs. “They die.”
Eammon’s eyes opened as the creature surged forward. He turned and slammed into it with his bleeding palm.
The thing pooled into the spongy, rotten dirt. Eammon kept his hand pressed against it as it shrank down, jaw clenched like holding it there took monumental effort, the rot on the ground disappearing at the same rate as the white tree behind him grew. Finally, the creature disappeared into the earth, and Eammon’s hand touched only the forest floor. The cuts on his palms didn’t drip when he lifted them away from the now-healed breach.
Still kneeling, Eammon looked up, met Red’s eyes. For a moment that felt like years, they stared across the gulf between them, and neither had the words to fill it.
Eammon stood on shaking legs. He edged past her, careful not to touch, and stalked into the Wilderwood.
Red stood gape-mouthed, staring at the now-healed tree. The rot was gone, chased out by Eammon’s blood. But when she looked down at the roots cutting through the ground, she thought she could see minuscule threads of darkness already creeping back up the pale bark. The Shadowlands, pressing through again.
She whirled, following the Wolf into the gloom.
He didn’t speak, their silence growing colder the longer it lingered. Red pulled his coat around her again, wafting the scent of books and coffee and leaves. “Who was that?”
“A shadow-creature. The breach got big enough for it to slip through. Ten minutes, and that sentinel tree would’ve shown up as a sapling at the Keep, and it would’ve needed far more blood to send it back to where it’s supposed to be. Healing them before they move is far easier, if you can catch them.”
For the Wolf Page 8