For the Wolf

by Hannah Whitten

  She should leave. That was the plan, wasn’t it? Go back to Valleyda, stop Neve, do what little she could to keep the Wilderwood strong. Still, the idea of leaving Eammon didn’t sit well. She might be hurt and angry— and sad, and embarrassed, and a whole host of other emotions she couldn’t even name— but leaving him felt wrong, strange-shaped and rough-edged in her chest. Not just because of what she felt for him, but because of the power and connection they shared, the ties that bound them to the forest and each other. She was meant for the Wilderwood, and abandoning it tore at her, almost physically.

  He wouldn’t stop any of them from leaving. She knew that. If she could go to Valleyda and stay there, if Lyra and Fife could find a weak spot in the Wilderwood’s defenses and slip free, Eammon would all but chase them out. Send them away while he withered in the shadows.

  Determined to suffer alone.

  Shaking her head, Red loosened the drawstring of Fife’s bag. A glint of gold shone among the scarlet; frowning, she pulled the mended cloak from the bag, breath catching in her chest.

  Her cloak was more than mended. It was remade.

  A changing forest spread from crimson shoulder to crimson shoulder, embroidered in golden thread— summer on the left, trees lush-leaved, autumn and winter in the center, with those leaves falling, and flowering spring on the right. The trees ran from branch to root, knotting in intricate loops, before becoming an image of a wolf leaping toward the hem.

  Red pressed her knuckles against her lips until she could feel her teeth behind them. A bridal cloak.

  It was an ancient Valleydan wedding tradition, one she never thought she’d take part in. The bride would wear a cloak embroidered with depictions of her new spouse’s lands and estates, a symbol of the new home they would build. Generally, bridal cloaks were white and embroidered in silver. But her cloak was still scarlet, the thread golden, rare and rich.

  The symbol of her sacrifice, made into something that represented the new life she’d made. A future sewn together from the tatters she’d been left with.

  She could still feel the bruise of Eammon’s kiss on her mouth.

  Red pulled off her clothes and climbed beneath the cloak. Heedless of the time, whether dusk or day or midnight, Red let the warmth of her bridal cloak and the scent of leaves and libraries lull her to sleep.

  She woke alone.

  Groggily, Red pushed away the heap of blanket and cloak, swept back her unkempt hair. Someone had set a fire in the grate, blazing merrily, but Eammon’s blanket was still folded between the bed and the hearth. Her eyes narrowed.

  If he expected to avoid a goodbye, he was mistaken. Red wouldn’t go quietly. Damn his reasons, he couldn’t kiss her like that—twice— and expect her to go quietly.

  Her clothes lay in a heap on the floor; she pulled them on, boots and all. After a moment, she slung her new bridal cloak over her shoulders.

  She was halfway to the stairs before her legs buckled.

  The thorn-and-leaf darkness of a vision closed in immediately, this time an encroachment of forest that drove her to her knees. Red gasped, fingers pressing into her temples, deep-green magic blooming out of her chest to weave through her veins.

  The connection between her and Eammon flared to life, even stronger than it had the day with Bormain.

  Hands, again. Scarred and rough, sinking into the dirt. Veins running emerald, bark closing where skin should be. A forest between bones reached for a forest outside them, because this body had given everything else, and the barrier between man and wood was almost gone.

  Her throat—Eammon’s throat— gagged up dirt. Sentinels grew around him in a perfectly circular ring, bone white and clear of rot. One stood taller, a strange, rectangular scar across its bark, like something had been stripped from it. And around its roots, a tangle of something gleaming—

  The vision was gone, perception wrenched back into her own body. Red’s heart jackknifed against her ribs.

  Eammon had done . . . something. Bled himself out, until only magic was left.

  And the Wilderwood was taking him over.

  She skidded down the stairs without a thought for trying to find Fife and Lyra— there was no time, not when Eammon was . . . was unmaking, unraveling. Red shoved open the door to the Keep, ran to the gate, pressed her hand against the iron. It opened to her touch, like it recognized her now.

  The path was unknown, but her feet seemed to point toward Eammon, and she trusted the instinct. Red ran through the Wilderwood, and the beat in her veins and the prayer in her mouth was hold on, hold on, hold on.

  She heard him before she saw him. Eammon’s labored breathing was echoed by the forest, the two of them heaving in sync. A ring of white trees before her opened on a clearing with the Wolf in its center. His lashed and bloody back caught the violet light, a man-shaped bruise on the world.

  “Eammon!” His name snapped from her tongue like a whip crack, but he didn’t seem to hear. His head bowed so far forward his hair brushed the dirt, arms sunk in soil to the elbow, sweat gleaming in twilight. The sentinels bowed toward him, reaching, needing, worship and sacrifice at once.

  Red’s knees hit the ground next to him, hands running through his hair with a tenderness her racing heart and screaming breath belied. She didn’t bother asking for an explanation. There was clarity in the way his veins burned emerald, the rings of bark closing around his arms, the whites of his eyes now wholly green around amber irises. Whatever vestiges of humanity he’d managed to salvage over centuries running out as forest ran in, because he was the only one to hold it, and one was no longer enough.

  Must be two. The memory echoed, but it seemed to come more from the shard of magic she carried than her own mind.

  “What can I do?” A snarl heralded the memory of his usual answer, but when she spoke it was a plea. “Don’t say nothing.”

  “It’s the only way.” Sediment fell from Eammon’s hair as his head shook. His voice echoed, layered and resonant. “This is the only way to hold it, if I don’t want it to take you.”

  Red dug her fingers into his temples, made him look at her. “It’s not. I’m not letting it take you from me, Eammon.”

  The golden afterimage of the Wilderwood bloomed over her vision when she touched him, double-exposed. He’d spent himself to the last, magic and blood, but the forest needed more. Was taking more.

  Green veins stood out in Eammon’s neck, tendons like ridges of root. “Only way.” Greater distortion in his voice, rustling leaves in autumn wind, stronger than she’d ever heard it before. “Either it takes me, or it takes you.”

  “That’s a price I’m not willing to pay.” She gripped his jaw, forced his green-haloed eyes to hers. “I’m not leaving you to this. You don’t leave me either, Eammon. Don’t you dare.”

  His full lips pressed together. His eyes stayed on hers as tiny leaves edged at their corners.

  Must be two. That memory again. An urging.

  She wrapped her hands around his shoulders, a strange echo of their embrace in the tower. A tug at her twining magic, but it slipped from her grip. It was the Wilderwood, a small shard of it lodged in her, and the Wilderwood didn’t want to obey.

  All the pieces he’d given, all the blood he’d spilled, and it still wasn’t satisfied.

  “No.” She didn’t know she’d spoken aloud until it hissed from between her teeth. “You can’t just keep taking, shadows damn it! First the Second Daughters, and now him? They didn’t belong to you, and neither does he! None of us chose this!”

  Her voice had risen until it was a scream, echoing in the trees, feral as a hunting-sound from some wild thing. And as it left her throat, the Wilderwood . . . paused. Something vast and unknowable, a consciousness that barely fit the definition of such a thing and adhered to no morality she could understand, stopped and turned to her and regarded.

  Choice.

  Quieter than she’d heard the Wilderwood speak before, more contemplative. A fall of leaves from a now-dead branch,
fluttering to the ground.

  Red didn’t have time to try to parse it out, no time to argue with a forest and hope it understood. The magic in her pulled toward Eammon, her thin thread of power wanting to follow, to go meet the rest of the Wilderwood as it flowed into him, remade him.

  The forest, reverting into its nexus. Taking Eammon and leaving itself in his place. Scouring the borders between man and forest until there was no delineation.

  But it would need all of itself to do it. Including the part of it that lived in her.

  Red clamped down on her magic with every bit of strength she could muster, that small piece of the Wilderwood that had made a home in her.

  And she tore.

  It hurt. It ripped at her veins like thorns, like taking a stem and splitting it in half. It hurt the Wilderwood, too— she could hear it, a shriek in a voice of leaf and branch, vibrating her bones. Guilt soured her stomach, guilt for harming the thing they were meant to save.

  Kings and shadows, it always came back to guilt.

  But it worked. Red tugged at her shard of Wilderwood magic like she was trying to pull up a weed by the root, diverting its flow, keeping it from running into Eammon. A small amount, but it was enough to keep the forest from seeping into him. To keep him as close to human as he could be.

  It fought against her, the pain of it making her eyes water, making her feel like every vein ran with coals. But Red held on, refusing to let go, caging the bit of forest within her the same way Eammon had caged his all these years.

  And then, it stopped. Stopped, and held silent for a moment that hung heavy.

  The atmosphere shifted. The Wilderwood shifted, a ripple in the roots beneath her feet, a shimmer in the leaves.

  The weight of an inhuman realization. Something, finally, understood.

  Red’s small piece of the Wilderwood ceased trying to run out of her, settled back into the places she’d made for it. It didn’t speak again. But she had a strange sense of something decided.

  And whatever it was, it meant the forest would leave Eammon be. For now.

  Slowly, Eammon and the Wilderwood untangled, as much as they were able. Root tendrils seeped out of his arms, back into the ground, leaving bloody gashes in their wake. He shuddered, coughing up dirt against her knees. Two circles of bark braceleted his wrists, showed no sign of fading— another permanent change the forest left, like that extra inch of height, like the green threads in the whites of his eyes.

  But he was her Eammon again.

  Red slumped next to him, her forehead falling against his. A moment, and Eammon shifted away, though the movement felt heavy, unwilling. “How’d you find me?”

  “Vision.” Her hands shook without his skin to steady them. “How did this happen?”

  He stood, knees watery. “I healed them all.”

  It took her a moment to catch his meaning. When she did, her eyes widened, going from his face to the bloodless, green-tinged slashes on his palms, his arms, his chest.

  Every gap where a sentinel should be, gone. And when he’d run out of blood, he’d called forest. Called the Wilderwood’s magic until it nearly crowded him out.

  “Why?” she asked hoarsely. “Why would you do that?”

  He didn’t look at her. “So when you return to Valleyda, you have no reason to come back.”

  Red’s cloak weighed on her shoulders like stones. “No,” she said, because it was the only thing her mouth could shape. “No, that doesn’t make sense. I have to come back, you need—”

  “I don’t need you.” It would’ve been cold, had his voice not shaken. “I took care of the Wilderwood on my own for a century. I can do it again, I can take it without falling. I can be stronger.”

  Stronger than Ciaran. Stronger than the man who’d started this long string of death and roots and rot, whom the forest had drained when he was left alone.

  “I gave it what it needed. Cut deep enough, deeper than I thought I could. I can be enough alone.” Eammon’s hands curled, the slashes in them bloodless, dripping only sap and edged with green. “This proves I was only being weak.”

  “And what happens when it needs that again? Eammon, it almost had you. It almost took you, made you . . .” She didn’t know what it had almost made him, not really. Something that wasn’t human, but he hadn’t ever been one, had he?

  A monster, maybe.

  “It took them,” he said. “Every Second Daughter. It only left me because it knew it needed someone living.” He held up his hand, flexed his blood-and-sap-covered fingers. “I can live. No matter what it makes me.”

  “Stop it. You can’t just—”

  “There’s nothing for you here, Red!” Eammon loomed like the trees around them, shadowed and severe. “Your sister is stealing the sentinels so you can escape, right? So do it. Escape.” His hand cut through the air as he turned away. “Be free of me with a clear conscience.”

  “Free of you? Is that what you think I want?” She swallowed, then tugged at the edge of her cloak, pulling it around so the twilight caught the golden embroidery. “Is that what you want?”

  A muscle in his back tremored under the dirt and sap-like blood. Eammon looked at the cloak, something deep and unfathomable in his eyes, then turned his face away. “It doesn’t matter what I want.”

  “What are you doing?” It sounded broken, it sounded like a plea, but she had no more steel left for it.

  There’s nothing for you here.

  Eammon still faced the trees, as if the sight of them shored his resolve. “I am trying,” he said, almost a prayer, “to do what’s best for you.”

  “Horseshit.” Frustrated tears blurred her vision; Red savagely wiped them away. “Horseshit. You don’t get to decide what’s best for me, Eammon.”

  He flinched.

  “Why?” It came out shivery, the ghost of a question she’d been asking for weeks. “Why do you insist on being alone when I am right here?”

  His answer came quiet. “Alone is safer for both of us.”

  “You can’t just—”

  “I killed them.”

  It was snarled through bared, wolf-like teeth; he’d turned like a predator. On instinct, she took a step back.

  “The Wilderwood drained the others because I didn’t hold it back.” Fierceness was in every line of his frame, but he couldn’t hide his eyes— they were lost, they were hollow, they were glad she’d backed away. “I let myself be weak, I didn’t bear it alone, and it killed them. Shadows damn me if I let it happen to you.”

  Red’s head shook, a slow, sorrowful back and forth.

  His hand cut toward the mass of gleaming white at the base of that tall sentinel with the scarred bark. The thing she’d seen in her vision, when she peered through his eyes, the thing she’d been too panicked to examine closely. Now her gaze followed his hand, and the shapes were impossible not to recognize.

  Bones. Bones tangled in roots, in vines. Three rib cages, three skulls, a chaos of others she didn’t know the names for.

  What was left of the Second Daughters.

  Eammon’s voice was hoarse and rasping. “Don’t you want to escape now, Red?”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  A ir was a slippery thing, too thin to hold in her lungs. Red’s hands opened and closed on her cloak. He’d told her what happened to the others, to Kaldenore and Sayetha and Merra, but seeing it struck her cold, an icy chill of fear that ran from her temples and slowly down her spine.

  Eammon turned away, shoulders a hunched ridge. “Go.” He rubbed a weary hand over his face, smearing blood. “Please, go.”

  “No.” Red grabbed Eammon’s hand, laced her fingers tightly with his, pressing their palms together and daring him to pull away. “Tell me what happened to them. Exactly what happened, no more half answers.” Her nails bit into his skin, and she thought of myths and how they made terrible things somewhat easier to bear. “Tell me the story, Eammon.”

  That stiffened him further, made his jaw clench and his eyes arc a
way from her, to the waiting Wilderwood beyond their ring of cleared ground. “I warned you before. None of the stories here have happy endings.”

  “I don’t care about happy endings. I care about you.”

  His breath rattled in and out of his lungs. She thought he’d pull away, but instead his hand relaxed into hers, like he didn’t have the energy to resist. When he finally spoke, the words were clouds of fog, with the low, measured cadence of a remembered tale.

  “I’d been the Wolf for nearly ten years when Kaldenore came. By then I’d figured out how to use blood to keep the forest mostly together, when . . . when it wanted to take more than I was willing to give. Got the idea from Fife and Lyra.” He faced the tree line, away from her, but the memory of Ciaran’s awful death still drew tension into his shoulders. “I didn’t know what to make of it, not at first. But then I remembered what I’d heard Ciaran say, and Kaldenore showed me the Mark, told me how it called her north.” Shame lowered his tone, made his head dip farther, black hair obscuring his face. “I should’ve sent her back, but the Wilderwood . . . it already had her. It’d tangled itself in her when she first crossed the border.”

  The thorn on her cheek, the drop of blood, fanged sentinels chasing her through the fog. “Like it tried to do to me.”

  Eammon jerked a nod. “I didn’t know how to stop it. Not then.”

  He’d done it for her, though. Shackled the forest through white-knuckle, all-consuming concentration, keeping the wild thing leashed.

  Rustling in the leaves around them, almost like a sigh.

  “Kaldenore didn’t last long,” he said hoarsely, barely a breath in the chilly air. “The Wilderwood was desperate. It drained her quick.”

  “And once it did,” Red murmured, “you were alone with it again.”

  “I was alone with it again.” Bitterness laced his voice, bitterness and shame and exhaustion. “I still didn’t fully understand what had happened, not really. But I started to put the pieces together— the bargain, how it’d been worded so there would be Wardens even if Ciaran and Gaya died. Worded so it would pass on.”