For the Wolf by Hannah F. Whitten

Chapter Ten

Arick?” Emotion raked her voice over coals, made it raw and shaking. “How did you . . . why are . . .”

“Open the gate.” Tear tracks ran through the dirt on his face. “Let me in, and I’ll tell you everything.”

“You shouldn’t be here. Arick, I don’t know how you got past the border, but—”

His groan cut her off, low and animal sounding. Arick pressed a hand to his side, blood blooming through his shirt. “I came to save you.” He looked up, green eyes strangely cunning, voice stronger. “Let me in, Redarys Valedren.”

“I don’t know how. There’s some kind of enchantment on the gate, I don’t think it will open—”

“I know how.” Arick still crouched, but was motionless, like his body were a fragile thing he might jar apart if he moved. “Come to us, Second Daughter, and we’ll show you.” A smile, bright and sharp, as Arick held out his hand. There was something off about it, darkness running along the lines in his palm. “If you must be part of one of them, the shadows will give you a cleaner end.”

Red froze, prey in the endless moment before the trap closed. This was wrong. Something was terribly wrong.

With a frustrated gnash of his teeth, Arick threw himself against the gate.

His hands turned to claws as he raked them against the metal, nails elongating, darkening. The veins in his neck were black where they should’ve been blue, and black filled the whites of his eyes, building up, spilling over. “Don’t you want it?” he snarled in a voice that wasn’t his, a voice that sounded like screams down forgotten corridors, layered and latched together. “One way or another, there will be an end. It’s just a matter of which side you want to tangle with, Second Daughter.”

Panic tugged at the magic shard in Red’s center. Her mouth filled with the taste of earth, her wrists blazing green as she tried to clamp her power down and scramble backward at the same time.

The thing wearing Arick’s face lunged forward again. A black claw reached through the gate and wrapped around her ankle. “The Wilderwood is weak and desperate, the gods it holds grow stronger. The forest won’t stop looking for a way in, Redarys Valedren, and when it finds one, it’ll drain you like a wineskin, leave all those pretty bones.”

Terror finally shattered her tenuous control. Red screamed as the green veins in her wrists climbed her forearms, reaching toward her heart. Splintered magic erupted, spinning vines from the earth to wrap the creature’s clawed hand.

It howled, lurching away from the gate, but the cry of pain became a bray of laughter. “The magic is weak,” it taunted. “Stings, but it won’t do much, Second Daughter, not unless you open your skin and let it take you, root and branch and bone and blood.”

“You’ll have your blood,” came a rasping voice from behind.

The Wolf’s hand landed on Red’s shoulder, pulling her backward from the gate even as he ran forward and opened it with a touch. There were new slashes on his palms, bloodless, like they’d lost everything they had to give already. Still, Eammon reached for his dagger as he ran, mouth a rictus of expectant pain.

The shadow-thing reared up, not playing at human shapes anymore. Now it looked exactly like the thing that had emerged from the breach last night, nothing but darkness and pieces of dead things.

“Do you have any left to give, Wolf-pup?” A cackle that felt like needles in Red’s ears. “What happens once you bleed yourself dry? When you lose yourself to the forest, and it takes you just like it did your father?”

The last word arrested the Wolf’s movement, like it was a net thrown over him. A thudding heartbeat where Eammon stood frozen, dagger held steady. Then, teeth bared, he flipped his palm over and sliced into the back of his hand.

A hiss of pain as he pushed down, pushed until finally green-threaded blood seeped around the blade. To Red, still dazed, the tendrils at the edge of the cut looked studded with tiny leaves.

Eammon tugged the dagger out of his skin, blood tracing the dips of his knuckles, painting his scars. With a growl, he backhanded the shadow-creature.

The thing broke apart, scattering bones; the shards feathered into smoke before they hit the forest floor. Still, that laugh reverberated, making the very trees shudder, and it spoke again in a hissing, fading voice as the pieces dissolved. “Only a matter of time.”

Then the shadow-creature was gone, the only sign of it a burn mark scored into the earth.

The Wolf stood there a moment, staring down at the ground. Sweaty strands of black hair had escaped their queue, sticking to the side of his neck. The cuts on his hands looked inflamed, and he held them gingerly by his side as he staggered toward the gate, an opening blooming for him as soon as he touched the metal.

“Is bleeding the only way to kill them?” The question came out shaky, to match the tremor in Red’s limbs. “Because Lyra said— What are you doing?”

He’d dropped to his knees and grabbed her ankle, twisting it this way and that as if looking for wounds. “I could ask you the same thing.” Apparently satisfied, he released her, like touching her skin was as welcome as slicing his hand had been, a necessary unpleasantness. “What about last night made you think approaching anything beyond the gate would be a good idea?”

“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.