For the Wolf

by Hannah Whitten

  “Help me?” Bormain threw his head back, braying at the ceiling. The dark, swollen veins in his throat pulsed. “Sweet Wolves, poor Wolves, I’m not the one who needs saving. He’s waiting, they’re waiting, everyone will get their chance.” His head, still held at that unnatural angle, swung back and forth as he sang under his breath. “They wait and they spin, they spin nightmares new and old, remake the shadow and let the shadow remake them . . .”

  Eammon glanced down at her, a question in his eyes, the expression easy to read. If she’d changed her mind, he’d take her out of here the moment she said so.

  Red bit her lip, that sour guilt in her throat again. You begin and begin and never see it finished.

  One nod, sharp.

  With another burning look, Eammon started forward, moving almost soundlessly over the stone floor.

  Bormain’s singing dropped to a tuneless hum, his eyes closed and his head swinging gently back and forth like he’d lost interest. Red took a deep breath of the stinking air and tugged at the power curled in her middle. It spiked upward, blooming toward her fingers and Eammon holding them, veins greening and the taste of earth faint on her tongue. They stepped forward carefully, soundless as possible, Eammon’s body drawn up like a spring set to snap.

  Eyes still closed, Bormain stopped humming. “Your knotted string of death is fraying, Wolf-pup,” he said, his voice ringing clear and precise. “They have help now. They’re coming home, Solmir and all the rest.”

  The name stopped both of them cold, Eammon with his hand half outstretched. Bormain’s laugh was broken and ugly. “So many endings, Wolf-pup, and you’ve seen them all—”

  He was silenced by Eammon’s hand slamming over one of the only places on his body left untouched by shadow— his mouth.

  Tendons stood out on Eammon’s neck as Bormain thrashed beneath his palm. “Do it,” he gritted through his teeth. “Red, if you’re going to do it, do it now.”

  Her teeth drove together, and Red let forest magic cycle out of her, flowing instead into Eammon.

  Like before, when they worked together to heal the sentinel, her mind’s eye beheld what her physical sight couldn’t. Her own power was dim in comparison with Eammon’s, only a thread running through her body, snaking in and out of her bones and organs. But Eammon— a riot of gold, light shaped like roots twisting through him, blooming, growing.

  It almost made her stop, seeing how ingrained in him it was. Almost made her cut off the thin thread of her power when she remembered how it changed him, how it took him in pieces. Fear rioted, fear that somehow he’d be taken from her, and it would be her fault for making him do this and feeding power into the roots that grew beneath his skin. She opened her eyes with a gasp to see him looking at her, the shadow-sickened form of Bormain twisting on the bed beneath his green-veined hand.

  “Don’t.” Clipped, focused, but with something in it that spoke of surprise, and a kind of longing. The whites of his eyes were wholly emerald. “Red, I’ll be fine, don’t stop.”

  A deep breath, his scent of falling leaves and coffee and paper drowning out the sickroom stench. Then she closed her eyes, and gripped his hand like a lifeline, and let the power blooming out of her keep feeding into him.

  Behind her eyelids, Bormain looked like a void. A complete absence of anything, a vaguely man-shaped hole in all that golden glow. At first, the magic flowing from Eammon seemed almost eaten by it, swallowed. Each golden thread was deft and deliberate, like Eammon was sewing something up, mending a sock rather than a man. Eventually, the golden glow began to overtake the shadow, consuming it and canceling it out. She felt Eammon sway, heard Bormain’s pained gasp as, slowly, light eclipsed the dark.

  When Eammon finally let go of her hand, Red opened her eyes.

  The man on the bed looked waxen as a corpse, but his skin was no longer threaded through with darkness. The nails on his hands were short and pale, not clawed, and the bones of his skull were the right proportions again. His chest rose and fell, shallow but steady.

  Eammon hunched over the bedframe. Bark on his forearms, evident from where his sleeve had rucked up, height made greater by the magic he’d called. His veins were green, in his wrists and his neck and the bruised skin below his eyes, but darkness shot through them like heartbeats, flickering shadows.

  “Eammon?” Alarm made her voice sharp.

  He shook his head, once. Ground his teeth in his jaw. Slowly, slowly, the darkness stopped beating in his veins. They turned to green, then faded to blue, changes and shadow leaching out of him like blood from a wound. He shuddered, a grimace drawing his lips back from his teeth.

  Pain has to be transferred. Eammon had taken the shadow-rot, let it cycle into him, and drowned it out in Wilderwood magic.

  Her knees suddenly turned to water, exhaustion and relief coming like a fist to the temple. Red sagged sideways, and Eammon wrapped his arm around her, his veins now the color a man’s should be, though the whites of his eyes still held a tracery of green. “I’m fine,” he whispered into her hair. “I’m fine.”

  “You did it.” Tears streamed down Valdrek’s cheeks, and reverence lit his face. “By the Kings and all the shadows, you did it.”

  But Red didn’t hear him, because she’d fainted dead away.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  S he 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 des
perate.

  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.