His voice cut on their names, but it was deliberate. Cutting was better than breaking.
“After that, I started experimenting. Giving the forest more blood, letting in more magic. Trying to hold it on my own. But then Sayetha arrived.”
Red’s fingers twitched, phantom sympathy for a woman she didn’t know. Kaldenore’s sickly elder sister had served only a year as Queen before dying childless, and Aida Thoriden, the oldest daughter of the next House in line, already had one daughter before she took the throne. Queen Aida learned she was pregnant with Sayetha within weeks of her coronation.
“I tried to keep the same thing from happening to her that happened to Kaldenore.” Eammon’s voice was barely a breath, only audible for the silence of the forest around them. “But I wasn’t strong enough. The Wilderwood drained her, too, in the end.”
A second rib cage, a second skull. Red tasted copper— she’d bitten too far into her lip.
Eammon still faced the trees, still wouldn’t look at her. Dirt patterned the bloody skin of his arms, almost delicate in the dim light. “After Sayetha, I did everything I could, studied whatever I could get my hands on, trying to keep it from calling Second Daughters, or at least from killing them once they came. Merra arrived, eventually, but I was able to keep the forest from her. For a while.”
Death piled around the Wolf, corpses of those he couldn’t save. Those the desperate Wilderwood tore through, bent only on its own survival, on the task set before it and the strength it needed to carry through.
She wanted to scream at it. Wanted to kick the sentinels until they were bloody, wanted to burn them all to the ground.
“It was my fault. I grew complacent.” He shook his head, a fall of dust scattering over bare, still-sweaty shoulders. “I stopped concentrating, after she’d been here awhile. She lived her life and I lived mine, friendly but distant. I thought it could be enough. Maybe the Wilderwood would be content with only her presence and my blood. But it wasn’t.” A snarl in his voice. “It was just waiting for me to slip.”
When they’d kissed in the tower, pressing desperately together, the Wilderwood had seen an opening. Seeping in the windows, growing slowly toward her. And Eammon had noticed, and pushed Red away, knowing that whatever longing they felt could never fully be acted on. Because it would be a distraction, pulling him from the constant work of keeping the Wilderwood shackled. Because bringing her closer to him meant bringing her closer to his hungry forest.
Everything in Eammon was for the Wilderwood— all he was, down to the bone and blood. Everything in his life was oriented around making sure he never slipped again.
Oriented around keeping her safe from the thing that had taken so much of him.
“It came for Merra, and she couldn’t take it.” Still, his voice cadenced like a tale, like he could keep himself at arm’s length from his own history. “She tried to . . . to cut it out. Died before I could stop her.”
Third skull. Third rib cage. Third set of bones, fed on by vines and white trees.
“Cut it out?” The question was a bare breath, shaky and quiet.
That made him turn, finally, his green-and-amber eyes fierce in his dirt-streaked face. “It won’t happen to you. I won’t let it.”
But she couldn’t leave it at that, not with the bones in the corner of her vision and his blood tacky between her fingers. Not with the plucked string in her heart, vibrating a frequency she almost knew.
“Tell me what it does to them,” Red whispered, even though she knew the answer. A dying man and a root-threaded body, the myth that hung over both their heads. “Please.”
Eammon freed his hand from hers, gently, and ran it over his face, eyes cast away like he was looking for answers in the starless sky. “It isn’t immediate. The Wilderwood doesn’t mean for you to die.”
Around the clearing, the white sentinels stood silent and still. Listening. That decision made in an unfathomable, inhuman mind, solidifying.
“The forest needs an anchor.” Eammon crossed his arms, hiding the new bracelets of bark on his wrists. “That’s what it’s after.”
An anchor. A living seed, a nexus for it all to stem from. Him, holding it all alone.
Must be two.
Red’s palms itched to touch him again, to find a friction to his skin. “An anchor,” she repeated. “Like the way it anchors in you. But it needs more than that. You need more than—”
“Stop it, Red.” It sliced through the air, knife-cold and just as sharp. “Stop. It’s not for you.” A ragged sigh, another pass of his bleeding hand over his face. “None of this should be for you.”
“Why not?” Her voice shook with anger, with bewilderment, with something else. “You want me to just leave you here? Go back to Valleyda and forget about all of this, leave you to bleed into a forest until there’s nothing left and you become . . . whatever it wants you to become? And what about after that, if you can’t hold the Shadowlands closed anymore even once it takes all of you? How do you think this ends, Eammon?”
“I don’t know.” He said it quietly. His softness, always a contrast for her edges. “I don’t know how it’d all end, and I’m nearly past caring. But I’d know I tried to keep you safe. I’d know I did my best to keep you from going down with me.”
“You act like this is a punishment. You didn’t choose this any more than I did. This isn’t your fault.”
“It’s my fault you’re here. It’s my fault they died. I wasn’t strong enough, so the Wilderwood kept calling Second Daughters. Kept taking them.” He said it all evenly, matter-of-fact, but his eyes still burned and his hands kept twitching to fists, like he wanted to hide the scars on his palms.
So she took his hands. Wove her fingers with his. Held them so tight her knuckles blanched, so tight she could feel his scars like lace pressed against her skin. “It’s not going to take me,” she said, a low whisper. “And I won’t let it take you.”
It almost put a name to the thing growing between them, that declaration. But the name was too vast and too fragile, something that might break them to acknowledge now.
“I’m trying to protect you,” he murmured. “Red, I’d let the world burn before I hurt you.”
“It would hurt me to leave you here.” Prayer and confession. “It would hurt me to leave you all alone.”
His sigh shuddered on the end. Red tugged at his scarred and bloodied hands. “Let’s go home.”
They walked back silently, hands tightly clasped, nearly sealed together by sap and blood. The Wilderwood stayed quiet, preternaturally still. Red still had that sense of slow, unknowable thought, churning deep in the forest, rolling over what it’d heard, what it’d seen.
Choice.
She thought she heard the word again, murmured in thicket and bower, but no leaves dropped and no moss withered. Like the Wilderwood whispered it into the thin thread of its magic she carried, something for only her to hear.
When they reached the Keep, Red climbed the stairs to their room with Eammon’s arm wrapped around her, providing what little support she could when the top of her head came to only his shoulder. She led him to the bed, despite his noise of protest. “You need it more than I do.”
Eammon looked at her from under the fringe of his hair, something unreadable in the twist of his mouth.
She wanted to kiss the look away. She didn’t.
The cloak spread over her like a blanket as she stretched out on the floor. She fingered the embroidery, the gold wolves tangled in tree roots near the hem. “This is beautiful.”
Eammon was silent long enough that she wondered if he was already asleep. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said finally. “If you just want the plain cloak again, Asheyla can—”
“No.” Fierce and final. “It’s perfect.”
Another pause. “You deserve a real bridal cloak,” Eammon murmured into the ember-lit dark. “Even if it’s only a thread bond.”
Warmth rose in her fingers, curled in her middle. “It’s j
ust as binding as a marriage, you said.”
There was a question in it, one that recalled mouths and hands and other ways to bind a marriage. Things he wouldn’t let happen, because it would be a distraction from his task of keeping the Wilderwood in check, and would spell an end for them both.
His inhale was sharp. He caught her meaning. It was cruel to say it, maybe, cruel to let that heat suffuse her voice. But he’d had room for doubt, earlier, room to think she might not come back. She needed him to know she would. That whether he could answer this want or not, she would always come back.
“Just as binding.” His voice was strained.
She wasn’t sure how long they both lay there, staring up into the ceiling, painfully aware of the shape of the other. When Red finally dropped into sleep, her dreams were burning.
Valleydan Interlude VII
T he sunlight in the gardens hurt Neve’s eyes after so long in the Shrine. Unthinkingly, she lifted her hand to shade her face. Blood smeared over her cheek, the new slash in her skin tugging with a slight but aching pain.
With a curse, she rubbed the blood away, then peered at her palm. She’d taken care to slice herself in different places every time; thin, precise cuts of Kiri’s dagger. They never seemed to completely heal.
Stealing pieces of the Wilderwood was bloody work.
Bleeding on the branches pulled at the rest of the tree they’d been cut from, made them fall away from the forest to appear instead in the cavern of the Shrine. They grew strange and inverted, resisting, but they came. There were at least a dozen now, an unnatural forest encased in rock, growing from stone and watered with blood.
And if you offered the blood, you received the magic, sharp and cold as daggers of ice. Magic from the Shadowlands that left frost on your fingers, darkened your veins. Felt like winter slithering around your bones.
Magic she’d finally stopped denying herself.
She’d resisted, for a time. This strange power was never her objective— Neve didn’t care about anything other than weakening her sister’s prison, making a way for her to return. But the more she bled for it, the more it tugged at her, shadowed and seductive. Promising control, at least over this one thing.
At the end of it all, she couldn’t make Red run, and now she couldn’t make her leave the Wilderwood. But she could wrench power from it. Here was something that rested entirely in her grasp, and the more time went on, the more foolish it seemed not to wield it.
With a touch, Neve could wither a flower. A flick of her fingers could turn a leaf from green to brown, and sometimes it seemed like shadows grew longer when she drew near them, like they were waiting for her command. The delicate tracing of darkness in her veins took longer to fade away each time she used it.
And Red was still gone.
Guards were stationed in the village nearest the border, watching for her return. Kiri said they had to be cautious— even if the bonds holding Red to the Wilderwood loosened enough for her to escape, they might not let her free entirely, and there was no way to know how she might be altered by them. But nothing emerged from the edge of the trees.
Frowning, Neve gestured at a green bush by the path. Cold across her fingertips, veins running like ink. The leaf curled in on itself, brown and brittle, before dropping to the path.
Kiri emerged from the shadows of the Shrine, blue eyes avid as she deftly wrapped her bleeding palm. She always cut deep, gave more blood than necessary. Neve didn’t think it gave her any more magic than it gave the rest of them. She thought Kiri just enjoyed bloodletting.
Other priestesses filtered silently into the gardens behind Kiri, bandaging their own wounds. Around each neck, a branch-shard pendant, white bark brushed with subtle shadow.
The new High Priestess reached up with copper-smeared fingers, lightly touched the matching pendant at her neck. Her eyes fluttered closed, a brief moment of calm, before opening again. A slight smile crossed her face, untouched by any sharpness, only seen in these brief moments when the blood was fresh.
Neve’s own pendant was still in the drawer of her desk. She hadn’t touched it since that day she accidentally marked it with her blood, the day she had that overwhelming sense of being watched. Kiri seemed irritated by this quiet rebellion at first, but didn’t push. Arick, who for reasons unknown to her had never received an odd necklace of his own, seemed almost . . . relieved.
But the other priestesses still wore theirs, each pendant produced by Kiri after they’d made their first blood offering, wielded the magic of the Shadowlands for the first time. Neve didn’t know where she got the wood; it wasn’t from any of the trees now crowding the Shrine. She didn’t ask.
News of the changes in the Order had trickled slowly across the continent. Not the concrete details, but how they were doing more to free the Kings than just sending Second Daughters, how the candles in the Shrine had changed from scarlet to shadowy gray. Neve had braced for backlash, but it turned out Kiri was right. Whatever Valleyda decided, the other Temples fell in line, especially as the rumors of what they’d done in Floriane Harbor spread.
None of them knew the full scope of what was happening here— Neve didn’t even know how one would begin to explain it— but some priestesses from other countries were curious enough to come to Valleyda, to be part of the movement. The Order was still smaller than it had been before banishing dissenters to the Rylt, but its growth was slow and steady.
One of the priestesses exiting the Shrine carried a bloodstained cup— Arick’s daily contribution. Neve had never known him to be squeamish, but recently he’d either sent his sacrifice with a priestess or brought the cup himself, rather than offering straight from the vein. It still worked. Blood was blood, and Arick’s was what had woken the branch shards in the first place, made them able to draw the white trees out of the forest.
“The Consort Elect will arrive shortly to observe the new arrival,” Kiri said, coming level with Neve. “Are you planning to stay?”
She wasn’t. Neve was headed to the garrison, where she would ask Noruscan, her captain of the guard, if he’d received any reports from the Wilderwood. Kiri knew this. Still, she asked, like she was daring Neve to come up with a different answer.
“I’m retiring for the evening.” Neve turned away, headed down the path. “Tell Arick to meet me in my chambers, when you’re finished.”
She needed to talk to him. Arick was uncharacteristically cautious about Red, too, warning Neve that the woman who returned might not be the woman they’d lost, that the binds of the Wilderwood were difficult to untangle. The way he spoke about her was almost cold. It made Neve wonder why he was doing this, sometimes, when she had the energy to wonder such things, but Red and Arick had always been a complicated equation. The threads binding them all were wound in inextricable knots.
She was halfway down the path when Kiri spoke again. “We made you a Queen for many reasons, Neverah. You seem to only think of one.”
Her footsteps faltered, stopped.
“Not just to bring Redarys back.” Kiri’s voice snapped on Red’s name. “Not just for revenge against the Wolf. For the restoration of our gods. I begin to worry that you might falter in your work should your sister reappear.”
Would she? Neve didn’t know. But the cold magic coiled in her palms felt like reassurance, like safety and control, and that would be hard to give up. “That won’t happen.”
“I certainly hope not.” A pause, and Kiri’s voice slanted low. “Perhaps we were too hasty, in the making of your reign. In the making of you.”
The words recalled a familiar idea, a dark shape in a dark room Neve kept carefully closed off. It haunted the corners of her mind when she couldn’t sleep, a shadow of a thought that wouldn’t leave her alone.
So Neve didn’t think. Instead, she strode to the priestess. She touched Kiri’s arm and let all that strange, dark power go.
It had been an accident, the first time she did it, touching the back of Arick’s hand to ask him to p
ass the wine. Cold had sparked between them, like recognizing like. It was enough to make him yelp.
She’d tried to apologize. He’d shaken his head. “Nothing to be sorry for.” His fingers had twitched on the stem of his wineglass. “You’ve taken to this in ways I couldn’t have imagined, Neverah.”
Her cheeks had flushed, inexplicably. Neve turned to her own wine, but she’d felt his eyes on her, glinting with an emotion she couldn’t read.
Now she meant the release of this cold magic to hurt. And the hiss of breath between Kiri’s teeth said it did.
“You didn’t make me.” Neve curled her fingers like claws. Frost crusted her palms, her veins inked black. “Whatever else you’ve done, you didn’t make me.”
Blue eyes narrowed. “I gave you power, Neverah. Don’t forget that.”
“You showed me where it was. I took it myself.” Her grip tightened. “There was no giving, there was only taking.”
She let go of the priestess’s arm. A bluish handprint was left behind, like frostbite.
Kiri covered the mark with her other hand. “Don’t presume to take too much, Your Majesty,” she murmured. “This is bigger than you. Bigger than your sister. And even if she does return, she’ll be tied to the Wilderwood in ways you don’t understand. If you want her back— fully— you need me.”
It worked a shudder through her spine, to know Kiri was right. “We’ll see.” Neve turned sharply on her heel, pulling the hood of her black cloak over her head, and left the High Priestess behind.
The garrison was nearly empty. Half the fighting force was in Floriane, guarding against the eternal threat of uprising, and more were at the border of the Wilderwood, watching for any sign of Red’s return. It was probably foolish to leave the capital so lightly guarded.
Neve flexed her hands. The grass growing through the cracks in the cobblestones browned as frost limned her fingers. Not so lightly guarded after all, perhaps.
Noruscan waited near the door, like always. Neve peered up at him from beneath her hood— a poor attempt at disguise, but enough for the short distance. “Anything?”
For the Wolf Page 30