The Ryltish priestess seemed to finally recognize her mistake. Her eyes were wide, pretty face frozen and pale. Behind her, the other two priestesses stood still as the statue they prayed to, wax dripping over motionless hands.
She didn’t realize she’d advanced a step until the priestess lurched backward, trying to keep distance between them. Neve’s lips curled back from her teeth. “You have it so easy,” she murmured. “All you Order priestesses from far away. Safe behind your borders, miles from your sacred wood.”
The Ryltish priestess almost lost her balance when her calf bumped against Gaya’s stone feet. Crimson wax marred her hem. Still, her eyes didn’t leave Neve’s, and her cheeks were nearly the same color as her robe.
“It’s almost pathetic.” Neve cocked her head, the barest curve of an acidic smile touching her mouth but not her eyes. “Your religion asks nothing of you. You throw a girl in white and black and red into the Wilderwood every few centuries, when a Second Daughter comes around, but nothing you do is enough to bring back the Kings. Maybe they don’t want to come back to such cowardly penitents, who never do anything but send pointless sacrifices and light pointless candles.”
All three priestesses watched her silently, three pairs of wide eyes fixed on her face. The wax dripping down their fingers had to be scalding, but it wasn’t enough to make them move, wasn’t enough to break them from the terrible spell of her sadness and how it made her cruel.
Neve forced her fingers straight, uncurling them from fists. “Get out.”
They obliged without a word, taking their prayer candles with them.
Finally alone, Neve slumped, like her anger had been the only thing holding her up. She caught herself right before she leaned on Gaya’s statue. She refused to look for any kind of comfort there.
Instead, Neve walked through the dark gauzy curtain behind the stone effigy into the second room of the Shrine.
She’d been here only once before. When she was officially named as the heir to the throne on her tenth birthday, they’d wrapped her in the coronation cloak, embroidered with the names of the former Valleydan queens, and brought her here to be prayed over. To her child’s eyes, the white branches had seemed tall as trees themselves, casting needle-edged shadows on the stone walls.
That’s what she expected when she walked through the curtain— a forest like the one that had devoured her sister. But it was only a room. A room filled with branches cast in marble bases, most no higher than her shoulders. A Wilderwood in miniature. Nothing like what she’d seen when she and Red raced toward its border four years ago. Nothing like what Red had just disappeared into.
Neve’s chest burned, too heavy and hollow all at once. She couldn’t hurt that Wilderwood.
But she could hurt this one.
The limb of a branch was in her hand before she had the conscious thought, before her mind caught up with her body. She wrenched her fist to the side, and it came off the main bough with the crack of rending bone.
Neve paused for only a moment. Then, with a fierce snarl and teeth bared, she wrenched off another, relishing the snap it made as it came away, the feel of the wood giving beneath her hands.
She didn’t know how many branches she tore into before she felt a presence behind her. Neve turned with splintered wood held in her two fists like daggers, her dark hair waving against her face with the force of her breath.
A red-haired, white-skinned priestess stood in the doorway, face implacable. She looked vaguely familiar— from the Valleydan Temple, then. Neve wondered if that would matter. The vagaries of heresy weren’t something she was familiar with, but wrecking the Shrine would probably make an easy case for it. What would that punishment be for a First Daughter, the one meant for the throne? Neve tried to care, but couldn’t quite find the energy.
And yet, the priestess did nothing. She stood there, silently, cool blue eyes surveying the damage before rising to Neve.
Slowly, Neve’s breathing returned to normal. She released her fists, the two branch shards she’d held clattering down to the stone floor.
Neve and the red-haired priestess stared at each other. There was something like a dare in each gaze, a measuring of mettle, though Neve didn’t know what she was measuring for.
Finally, the priestess stepped farther into the room, picking deftly over white wooden splinters. “Come,” she said, in a voice that was brusque though not unpleasant. “If we clean up, no one will ever notice.”
It took Neve a moment to understand what she was saying, so far was it from what she expected. But the priestess bent down, gathering white splinters in her hands, and after a moment, Neve joined her.
A small pendant swung from the priestess’s neck, circling like a pendulum. It looked like a shard of wood, like the leavings of Neve’s rampage scattering the floor. The only difference was the color; where the branches were the pure, shining white of bleached bone, the priestess’s pendant was threaded through with black.
Neve frowned at it. Strange, for a priestess to wear jewelry— it wasn’t exactly forbidden, but none of them did it, going about clad only in their white robes with no further adornment.
The priestess saw her looking. A small smile tugged up her mouth as she caught the pendant, rolled it between her fingers. “Another piece of the Wilderwood,” she said, by way of explanation. “It breaks more easily than you’d think, with the right pressure. The right tools.”
Neve’s brows drew together. The priestess watched her as if she saw the shape of her questions and wanted to draw them out. Neve shut them behind her teeth.
For all her destruction, the mess she’d made fit easily in their four fists. The priestess made a bowl of her full white skirt, gathering all the shards before bundling the fabric in her hand like a pocket. “I’ll dispose of this.”
“You mean make more jewelry out of it?” Neve couldn’t keep the bite from her voice. She was tired, so tired of keeping her composure. Of pretending all of this didn’t bore beneath her skin and scour her out.
“Oh, no.” Despite the flippancy of the response, those blue, implacable eyes watched her carefully. “These aren’t right for that. Not yet.”
Disquiet thrummed under Neve’s ribs.
The red-haired priestess stood still, managing to look regal despite the awkward way she held her robe to contain the wood shards. “You’re here because of your sister?”
“Why else would I be here?” Neve wanted it to come out fierce, but it was quiet and thin. She’d spent all her fierceness. “I have no interest in praying.”
The priestess nodded, taking Neve’s blasphemy in stride. “Would you like to know what happened to her, when she crossed into the Wilderwood?”
It struck Neve silent for a moment, such a heavy question asked in such a casual manner. “You . . . you know?”
“So do you.” The priestess shrugged like they were discussing something as benign as the weather. “Your sister is tangled in the forest. Like Gaya was, like all the others. She went to the Wolf, and he bound her to it, just as he is bound.”
Neve knew the story. The Wolf bringing Gaya’s forest-riddled corpse to the edge of the wood, a macabre token of the tithe he then demanded. It made sense, that the other Second Daughters would be bound similarly. That the Wolf somehow wove the Wilderwood into their bones, knit them into its foundations, ensuring they couldn’t escape.
“But she’s alive.” A bare rasp of sound in the quiet, and Neve didn’t inhale as she waited for the answer.
The priestess nodded, turning toward the door. “But she’s alive.”
On legs that felt numb, Neve followed the red-haired priestess back through the Shrine out into the dark gardens. She took a few steps forward, passing the other woman to inhale cold, bracing air.
Midnight was close. Soon all the priestesses who’d come to see Red sacrificed would gather here, to pray throughout the night that she would be deemed acceptable by the Wolf, that he would finally free the Five Kings from their unjus
t imprisonment.
When Neve closed her eyes, she could still see that scarlet cloak disappearing into the gloom between the trees.
She’s alive.
“You’ll keep this quiet.” Neve meant it as an order, but it came out more like a question.
“Of course.” A pause, heavy. “You have the right idea, First Daughter.”
It was enough to make her eyes open, to make her gaze snap over her shoulder. The priestess stood still and placid behind her, face revealing nothing.
“The Wilderwood won’t let her go.” Her red hair fell over her shoulder as she tipped her head, as if in deference to Neve’s grief. “It has weakened, this past century, but not enough. She couldn’t escape even if she tried.” Moonlight caught her eyes, made them glitter. “At least, not right now.”
Something toothed and hopeful leapt in Neve’s chest. “What do you mean?”
The priestess lightly touched her odd wood-shard necklace. “The forest is only as strong as we let it be.”
Neve’s brow knit. The night air chilled them into a frozen tableau.
“Your secrets are safe with me, Neverah.” The priestess gave a small bow then glided away, her pale robe disappearing into the dark garden.
Cool breeze on her arms, the scent of early-summer flowers heady in her nose. Neve concentrated on these things, grounded herself with them. In her head, a scarlet cloak flickered in and out of a dark, dark forest.
Chapter Seven
T he water in the tub was cold enough to make her teeth chatter when she dipped in her hand, but Red was too filthy to care. She pulled off her tattered white dress and black sash, kicking them into a pile on the floor— those, someone could burn. Shivering, she sank quickly into the tub before the cold could change her mind, and scrubbed at her hair until her nailbeds turned blue, extracting twigs one by one and letting them clatter to the floor.
Leaves matted her hair, too. As she pulled them out, Red noticed they were each blushed with green along the veins.
She frowned at one of them, tracing the lines with a fingertip. Addled by fear and confusion, her memories of the Wilderwood were probably less than reliable. But she’d swear that every leaf she saw outside the protection of the Wolf’s gate was gray and withered, the colors of autumn leaching rapidly into winter.
Red flicked the leaf from her wet fingers with more force than necessary.
When her nails were free of dirt and her hair free of forest, Red stepped from the tub, teeth clenched against the cold. Naked, she skulked across the room, feeling strangely exposed to the vines on the window, and grabbed the dark-green gown off the bed. She pulled it on without bothering to dry off, fabric sticking to her wet skin.
As she stood in front of the age-spotted mirror and attempted to untangle her hair, her stomach rumbled.
There’d been breakfast, before the procession left the Valleydan capital, but Red hadn’t managed to eat much, and couldn’t even remember what it was. Since then: a bloodthirsty forest, a surly Wolf, miles run on adrenaline alone.
Red set her teeth. This room was clean and safe and isolated; the last thing she wanted was to go wandering through the ruined Keep on the off chance she might find some toast. But her stomach twisted again, its growl more insistent.
During her earlier exploration, there’d been that small door with rusty hinges at the back of the dining room. The one behind which she’d heard the curse and the laugh. Red still didn’t feel quite brave enough to face who-or whatever made those noises, but she was pretty sure that room was a kitchen. And maybe the things she’d heard in it were elsewhere by now.
Thief-furtive, Red crept from her room. It was too cold to forgo shoes, really, a pervasive chill in the air that the half-forest walls didn’t cut, but her boots were still caked in enough mud to make her clumsy. She wanted to be able to run if she needed to.
The sky through the cracked, domed window above the foyer was mostly unchanged. Maybe slightly darker, if she squinted, but still twilight. The Wilderwood seemed caught in a perpetual gloaming, trapped between day and dusk.
A murmur came through the broken arch across the hall, too muffled to make out, but the cadence and low, graveled tone were familiar. The Wolf.
Red kept her back against the wall as she inched closer to the arch. Feeling the stone behind her was somehow reassuring, even moss-furred as it was, a solid thing to hold on to.
“She’s here?” A different voice, answering Eammon’s indistinct mutter. It at least sounded human, touched with a melodious accent that reminded her of Raffe’s. The laugher from before? “So that’s why the Wilderwood seemed so restless.”
“Restless is one way to put it,” Eammon grumbled.
“I would’ve gone with desperate.” This from a new voice, masculine and deep, but not as rough as Eammon’s. The voice she’d heard from behind the door, cursing after the clatter. “The Wilderwood needs two, and it knows she’s here now. You’ve held it alone for too long.”
A pause. “We’ve had this discussion,” Eammon said, clipped and stern.
No answer, though Red thought she heard a sigh. A moment, then the musical voice spoke again. “Well, did she find you?”
“In the library,” Eammon answered. “How’d she know to go to the damn library?”
“It’s not like there’s anywhere else to go, really. You can’t hide from her, Eammon, no more than you could from the others. What’d you expect?”
In response, Eammon grumbled a long and mostly unintelligible curse, something about the Five Kings and what they could do with certain appendages.
“Where is she now?” the second, masculine voice asked. “Do you know? Or did you just turn her out of the library and hope for the best?”
“I told her to stay in the gate and away from the trees,” Eammon answered. He neglected to mention the third rule, Red noticed, the one about staying out of his way. The omission seemed deliberate.
The masculine voice, admonishing: “Do you think that will change anything?”
Silence, tense as a bowstring. Red found herself holding her breath.
“There’s a breach to the east.” The other, melodic voice gently changed the subject. “Nothing’s come through from the Shadowlands yet, but I’m sure it won’t be long. The sentinel tree was half covered in rot when I saw it earlier, and sinking fast. I threw some blood on it, but it didn’t make much difference.” A light sigh. “There’s been more breaches than usual lately.”
Shadowlands. Here was another fairy tale suddenly made concrete. The Shadowlands were the prison the Wilderwood created, a place to trap monsters. Dread prickled at the back of Red’s neck.
“Far more breaches,” the deep voice agreed. “I haven’t found a sentinel tree free of shadow-rot in days. Some of them aren’t very far gone, but it won’t take long before they show up here. That’s a lot of potential holes for something to come through.”
The forest had been empty of monsters when Red entered. At least, empty of the kind that had supposedly come from the Wilderwood before Kaldenore went to the Wolf— shape-shifting things made of shadow, formed from scraps of forest and bone. Red hadn’t thought much of it, preoccupied with running from fanged trees that wanted her blood. But this mention of the Shadowlands, of a breach, of something coming through . . .
“The Wilderwood is weak.” Eammon, tired. “But I can fix it.”
“Not without a knife.” The musical voice, shaded dark. “Not without a knife, or without becoming—”
“It doesn’t matter how I do it, so long as it’s done.”
“If she’s here, it’s because she’s needed, Eammon.” The second, deeper voice, brusque. “Whether you want that or not.”
“Getting one more person tangled in this mess has never helped before. Not in a way that lasts.” The sound of a chair scraping across the floor. “You know that, Fife. It never has, and it never will.”
Red’s heartbeat thudded in the hollow of her throat.
The Wolf
rounded the edge of the archway with fire sparking in amber eyes, his jaw clenched tight. Red pushed off the wall to meet him, hands balled into fists at her sides. Behind Eammon, she saw fleeting glimpses of two other people— a small, delicately featured woman with golden-brown skin, and a pale, lanky figure with a shock of reddish-gold hair— but all her attention was commanded by the Wolf, by the terrible possibilities of what she’d overheard and what it could mean. “What’s breached?”
He backpedaled when he saw her, his hands once again rising like she was something to be warded off. The Wolf’s eyebrows slashed downward. “Eavesdropping is rude.”
“You’re one to talk about rude.” She matched his narrowed eyes. “I repeat, what’s breached?”
His hands, still held defensively between them, slowly fell. Eammon stared at her for a minute, some internal debate weighing his gaze. Then he tried to shoulder past. “None of your concern.”
Red turned with him. “I beg to differ.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“Is it the monsters?”
He froze, hand half outstretched for the coat hanging on the knob of the moss-covered stair railing. “What do you know about the monsters?”
“I know they came from the forest before Kaldenore went in, and they disappeared afterward.” To say she knew that seemed strange, after so many years of thinking it little more than a tale to frighten children. But in the past day she’d spent here, old doubts had been scrubbed away with the same speed as new ones had surfaced. “I know that you supposedly would’ve unleashed them on the world again if I hadn’t arrived.”
He’d blanched at the mention of Kaldenore’s name, those long, scarred fingers falling back to his thigh as he turned to face her. “I didn’t send the monsters.” He swallowed, a visible tic in his throat. “They weren’t . . . they weren’t on purpose.”
For the Wolf (The Wilderwood Books Book 1) Page 7