“I thought it was different. I didn’t hear the breach—”
“You wouldn’t have, unless you were there when it opened.” Eammon jerked a thumb over his shoulder, toward the gate. Blood dripped sluggishly down his wrist. “Nothing in this forest is safe, especially not for you. I assumed that was abundantly clear.”
Red rubbed her ankle, banishing the ghost of his touch. “It looked . . .” Now it seemed ridiculous, but damn if she was going to tell him that. “It looked like someone I knew.”
“You thought someone you knew came traipsing through the Wilder-wood and made it all the way to my gate? Really, it’s remarkable you—”
“It looked human. More human than the thing last night.” Red stood, glaring up at him. His dark hair had come fully unbound, falling messily over his shoulders, shadowing his burning eyes. “I know it was foolish to think it was. But it looked like him.”
“Him.” Quiet, stern.
Red swallowed. “Him.”
Silence. Finally, Eammon sighed, hands hung on his hips, head angled toward the ground. “It was convincing,” he conceded. “That shadow-creature had time to make a decent mask before it reached the Keep. I don’t . . . I don’t fault you for being fooled.”
Well. That was unexpected. Red crossed her arms and worried at a loose thread in her sleeve. “Would it have gone away if I bled on it? Like you and Lyra and Fife?”
“I thought I was clear about you bleeding.”
“Answer the question.”
His jaw worked before he swiped a hand over his mouth and looked away. “No.”
Not the truth. Not the whole of it, anyway, between what Fife asked in the corridor and the shift of Eammon’s eyes. She’d known him for only two days, but the Wolf was bad at lying.
“The Wilderwood can’t last much longer like this.” Eammon reached up, began retying his hair. “Sentinels are uprooting and coming to the Keep in droves, too quickly for me to heal before the rot sets in. Breaches stay open for days. I used to be able to keep them in check, but I can’t anymore.” A tense pause, a thread set to snap. “Not alone.”
Red’s stomach twisted in on itself.
Hair now bound, Eammon’s hands dropped. He kept his gaze turned away, toward the gate. “If you use your magic—”
“I can’t use it.” Every time she entertained the thought, the memories crashed up on the shore of her mind. Branches, blood, Neve. Violence that nearly killed her sister, and all of it her fault. “I’d rather bleed. There has to be a way—”
“There isn’t.” Warmth and library scent as Eammon stepped forward, his voice strangely apologetic, eyes raised to hers through clear effort. “Believe me, Redarys. The magic is the easiest way.”
Her eyes pressed closed. Red shook her head.
“Why are you so determined to think yourself helpless?” His voice cracked over the word, like it was something he could punish. “You can’t afford that luxury—”
“Luxury? You think this is a luxury?”
“It’s a luxury to ignore it,” he snapped. “To decide you’d rather pretend it doesn’t exist, and damn everyone else.”
“It seems to me like we’re all damned anyway!”
His expression shifted, tangled, too many emotions for her to make sense of. Red’s pulse ticked in her throat. They stayed like that, bent like bowstrings, neither willing to be the first to look away.
Eammon finally broke, eyes closing as his face turned away. “So it does.” He started toward the gate, silent and stoic. “I have to go close the breach before that thing cobbles itself together again.” A press of his hand, the bloom of an opening in the iron. The gate swung out, stirring fog, and the Wolf stalked into the Wilderwood.
Red frowned after him as Eammon disappeared into the trees. Her limbs felt locked, paralyzed by fear and regret.
What Eammon wanted was impossible. Even if her power was something she could use, her mind was too shackled by fear to let her. Every time it surged, all she could see were her memories of carnage, and it froze her, choked her, focused everything in her only on lashing it down.
But the Wilderwood was darkening. Deteriorating. She’d seen the barest hint of the things it held back, and it was enough to fill her with a bone-deep terror of what else might be waiting.
If it failed— if the Shadowlands broke through completely, if monsters stalked the world like they had before— what would happen to them?
What would happen to Neve?
“Kings and shadows, I missed it.”
Lyra emerged from the fog. She frowned at the burn mark the shadow-creature left on the ground, fiddling with a vial of blood in her hand. “There’s a breach southward, right at the Valleydan border. I stayed far enough back to be safe but still managed to bloody it up. I could tell something had already escaped, but I thought I’d beat it here.”
“Eammon took care of it.” Red’s ankle tingled with the memory of his touch, incongruously gentle against his sharp anger, as she pointed beyond the gate. “He went that way, to close the breach.”
“Hmm.” A shrug of narrow shoulders as she turned into the eddying fog, headed toward the Keep. “Well. He doesn’t need me to navigate, then.”
The curved sword on Lyra’s back shone like a sickle moon. Earlier, Red had been too addled to take much notice of it, but now its shape looked somehow familiar. She studied it as she followed Lyra back to the castle, mostly to keep from thinking of Arick’s face on wrong bones, of Eammon stalking into the forest with a hand sliced to shit and barely bleeding.
Another moment of scrutiny, and the word she was searching for came to her. “Is that a tor?” Raffe had a tor, worn on his back for state functions. According to tradition, Meducian Councilors’ oldest children trained with them for a year after their parents were voted in, symbolizing that Councilors’ duty was to serve their country with all they had.
“Sure is.” She sounded almost amused.
“I thought they were ceremonial.”
“Technically.” Lyra didn’t draw the weapon, but her fingers closed gently around the hilt like a worry stone. “But they’re just as sharp as any back-alley dagger.”
They rounded the side of the Keep, approaching the ruined corridor that held Red’s room. Lyra walked down the sloping hill toward the white saplings in the rubble. Red hung back.
Roots and vines wound through the rocks at the end of the hall, clusters of moon-colored flowers twisting toward the fathomless twilight sky. There was a tilted beauty to it, the way the Keep and the forest tangled together, like one fed the other. A kind of beauty that made Red shiver, wild and feral and frightening.
Those had been leaves in Eammon’s wound, studding the edges of the cut. Tiny leaves in his green-threaded blood. She thought of the changes she’d seen in him when he worked his strange magic, bark on his forearms and shifting branches in his voice. The Wolf and the Wilderwood, tied together in ways she couldn’t quite fathom, the line between them constantly blurring.
Down by the saplings, Lyra shook her head. “Fife was right,” she called as she trudged back up the hill. “There’s more of them. Kings.” The weight of her sigh tossed one corkscrew curl up from her forehead. “Eammon will be bleeding for days.”
Red pressed her lips together.
Behind them, the door to the Keep banged open, Fife’s hair shining like the sun they couldn’t see. He looked to Lyra, mouth quirked, the first trace of pleasantry Red had seen on his face. “You’re back early.”
“Got hungry.” Both of their manners seemed to relax, like seeing the other calmed their nerves. “Did Eammon get more supplies? He said he was headed that way after healing the first breach this morning.”
“Yes, though his taste in cheese is still suspect. Next time, I’ll go, since he seems incapable of following a list.” Fife frowned down the hill at the saplings. “I told him those should be taken care of first. Before he moves the other.”
Lyra’s brow lifted. “Other?”
“There’s one in the corridor,” Fife answered grimly. “Turned up this morning.”
A pause. Lyra’s eyes flickered to Red, something unreadable in the anxious twist of her lips. “Did you see it?”
Her tone wasn’t accusing, exactly, but there was a strange surprise in it, like if Red had seen the sapling, she should’ve done something about it. The same assumption Fife had this morning.
“I saw it,” Red said carefully. “Should I have gone looking for Eammon, to let him know?”
Puzzlement creased Lyra’s brow. “I suppose you could, but why wouldn’t you just—”
“He told her to stay away from it,” Fife interrupted.
Lyra looked at him, mouth twisted in an expression that was pity and resignation at once. Fife gave a tiny shake of his head, an entire conversation happening between them without words.
Red shifted uncomfortably on her feet.
A moment, then Lyra forced a smile, eyes flickering to Red. “Eammon has a plan, I’m sure.” Her dark gaze went back to Fife, almost like she was trying to reassure him. “Always does.”
“Always does,” Fife repeated quietly.
Red tried to return Lyra’s tentative smile, but her mind was a riot— the Wilderwood coming for her, fangs in the trees, pits of shadow, and Eammon’s bleeding hands.
She shut her eyes, gave her head a tiny shake. Fife and Lyra talked quietly to each other up ahead, an ease between them that was somehow soothing even as her thoughts snared. Focusing on the cadence of their voices rather than the forest and the fog, Red followed them into the Keep.
Valleydan Interlude III
T he empty chair across the table yawned like a chasm.
It had been easier to ignore when Arick ate with them, the few times it happened before Red left. Awkward as dinners with only Arick and Queen Isla were, he’d acted as a buffer when he played the dutiful Consort Elect, a retaining wall between her land and her mother’s cold sea. But now he was gone, fled with his grief and his sudden desire for heroism, and the dining room was a tomb with only two occupants.
No dinner with the Queen had ever been comfortable, really. Neve and Red hadn’t dined with their mother often, but when they did, they sat across from each other, Isla in the middle. Though those dinners had been nearly silent, at least Neve hadn’t been completely adrift. Red had been her anchor.
Now Neve stared into her empty plate, knowing every bite of dinner would go down like lead, knowing an hour here would feel like a day. Since Red left— since Red was sacrificed— time with her mother felt like a penance. Especially since Isla appeared wholly unaffected. If she carried the same ache Neve did, the Queen kept it hidden too deep to show.
The door opened and servants appeared, rolling in a single cart stacked with dishes. Even the smell of food made Neve’s nose wrinkle.
Reverently, one of the servants lit the three tapers in the center of the table— one white, one red, and one black. Isla bowed her head. After a moment, Neve begrudgingly followed.
The Queen’s eyes flickered expectantly to her daughter. Neve’s lips tightened over her teeth.
With a sigh, Isla closed her eyes. “To the Five Kings we give thanks,” she intoned, “for our safety and our sustenance. In piety and sacrifice and absence.”
The candles were snuffed. The servants filled their plates, topped their wine, then left, quick and silent. Neve didn’t touch her fork, but grabbed her wineglass and took a hearty swallow.
“The Rite of Thanks is two sentences, Neverah.” Isla took a dainty bite. “Surely it wouldn’t hurt you to make a show of faithfulness now and then.”
“I’d rather not, thank you.” Neve drained her glass. In the corner of her eye, her mother’s hand tensed on the table.
Isla took a swallow of wine. When she put the glass down, more forcefully than necessary, it made a small, crystalline pop. “I let the two of you grow too close,” she said, so quietly her mouth barely moved. “Back when you were children, I should’ve put a stop to it. I should’ve protected you—”
“I’m not the one who needed protecting.”
The Queen flinched.
The part of Neve that wanted to be a dutiful daughter felt a twist of pain at that. The same part that wished for something to cling to, for stable ground in this sea of guilt and uncertainty. That was what a mother should be, wasn’t it? Stable ground, even once you were grown? But Isla’s role in this was indelible, her complicity shaped as a missing daughter in a red cloak and violence she quietly accepted as collateral damage.
Neve loved her mother, but her mother deserved to flinch.
Her throat was a knife-ache, her fingers arched like claws on her knees beneath the table. Silence stretched, and she wished soundlessly for her mother to fill it with something. Anything.
When Isla finally moved, it was minuscule, a slump in her shoulders as she sighed. For one moment, the mask slipped, the icy Queen suddenly tired and hollow. But then her eyes rose to Neve’s, her composure reassembling itself. “This reminds me,” she said, as if they were having a normal conversation. “We should begin wedding preparations.”
Neve’s mouth hung partially open, the change in topic so abrupt her mind had to catch up. When it did, it was a white-hot riot, and her reply was truth stripped free of politeness or preamble. “I don’t want to marry Arick. You know that.”
“And you know it doesn’t matter.” Isla straightened, eyes reflecting candle-flames. “You think I wanted to marry your father? A man twice my age who only remained in court long enough to make an heir, and died before he knew he’d made two? The First Daughter’s marriage is always political. There are precedents. You are not the exception.” Isla drained the rest of her wine. “Neither of you could be the exception.”
“Arick is in love with Red.” Neve wanted to throw it down like a gauntlet, but it came out too brittle to be a weapon.
Still, some chord seemed to strike in her mother, drumming beneath her veneer of indifference. Isla’s eyes closed, her hands slackened on the tablecloth. The breath she pulled in was shallow.
Then her eyes opened, trained on empty air. “He’s more foolish than I thought, then.” She stood, slowly, like every movement was an effort. “That could be good for you, Neverah. Foolish men are easy to rule.”
The Queen left, gliding out the door with her ice-blue skirts trailing over the marble floor. She moved stiffly, but no one other than Neve would notice. She’d been trained in that same glide, the one that spoke of graceful power, and she could see the fault lines where it cracked.
A full wine bottle sat in the center of the table, uncorked and ready for pouring. Neve didn’t bother, drinking straight from the neck.
When nothing was left but lees, she stood on unsteady legs. The room pitched and spun, but no one offered an elbow for her to genteelly clasp— the dining hall was empty, and no servants waited just outside to attend to any royal needs. She must’ve scared them off with her unqueenly manners, her uncouth conversation.
In her inebriated state, it was almost funny.
Neve walked slowly out into the hall, hand tensed to steady herself on a wall if the need arose. She didn’t know the hour, other than it was late; the paned windows were velvet-dark, scattered with stars.
The windows faced north, toward the Wilderwood. With a motion made sloppy by too much wine, Neve spit on the floor in front of the glass.
Something caught her eye, disappearing around a corner. A flash of red and white, familiar in a way that would probably be obvious if she weren’t drunk. Brows knit, Neve walked forward, around the corner where whatever it was had disappeared.
Priestesses. Maybe two dozen, a few more than she’d seen when she argued with Raffe yesterday. Each of them held a candle, which wasn’t odd in itself— Order priestesses often carried scarlet prayer candles. At first, Neve thought the candles in their hands were black, like she’d stumbled on some late-night funerary procession or leave-taking rite.
Her eyes n
arrowed. No, not black. These candles were colored light charcoal. The same gray as a shadow.
The group glided silently down the hall, headed toward the gardens. Leading them, the red-haired priestess. Kiri.
Of course.
“You!”
Neve barely recognized the voice as hers at first. Even the single exclamation was somehow slurred, which probably should’ve been embarrassing, if she could muster the feeling.
The priestesses’ shoulders went rigid, each one, like children caught stealing sugar cubes. They looked to Kiri for instruction, but she seemed unbothered. Slowly, she turned around, the movement made syrupy in Neve’s wine-addled perception. Her small branch-shard pendant swung from her neck, the strands of darkness on the white bark nearly invisible in the gloom.
They stared at each other a moment. Then Kiri glanced at one of the others, nodded. A small, sharp smile turned up the corner of her lip.
Cool blue eyes flicked to Neve as the rest of the priestesses continued soundlessly down the corridor. “Can I help you, Your Highness?”
Her momentary ire had cooled, smothered by the strangeness of the priestesses in the dark, their silence and shadow-colored candles. “I saw you yesterday,” Neve murmured, more curious now than angry. “You were talking to Arick.”
“I was.” The flickering light twisted the lines of Kiri’s face.
“What did he want?”
The priestess’s face remained implacable, the flame from her shadow-gray candle dancing in her eyes. “The same thing you did, that night in the Shrine.”
A shiver rolled through Neve’s shoulders. “You told him how to save her.”
No answer. Just silence, just jittering shadows on the wall from Kiri’s gray candle.
“But how do you know?” Her voice sounded so small in the dark. “How do you know what happened to Red, how do you know how to get her back?” A shaky swallow. “Why didn’t you tell me first?”
For the Wolf (The Wilderwood Books Book 1) Page 12