For the Wolf by Hannah F. Whitten

Chapter Nineteen

Rustling woke her, fabric rasping over wood. Red slit her eyes against the lavender light. At the other end of the room, Eammon sat up, rubbing his hand over his face. The muscles in his back flexed as he gathered his hair at the nape of his neck and tied it in a messy knot.

She’d seen him wake up every morning for nearly two weeks now, since she’d told him he had to start sleeping more. And every morning, her cheeks heated when the firelight caught his bare skin.

Eammon stood, rolled his neck and shook out his shoulders, tense from another night on the floor. She knew this routine. He’d stand by the fire a moment, waking himself up, before pulling a shirt from the pile that never quite made it inside the wardrobe. He’d glance at the bed, face unreadable, then pad quietly down the stairs in an attempt not to wake her.

But today was apparently different. Eammon shoved his feet in his boots on the way to the wardrobe, pulling out a black shirt and coat. The top drawer squeaked as he opened it, and he cursed softly under his breath, darting a look to the bed.

Red abandoned the ruse of sleep, though she stayed curled around her pillow. “Where are you going?”

He pulled the drawer the rest of the way out. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Squeaky drawers will do that.”

Eammon snorted, reaching into said squeaky drawer to withdraw a dagger in a sheath. He strapped it to his hip. “We need supplies. I’m going to the Edge.”

Red hadn’t left the Keep since Isla died, wandering between their room and the library and sometimes the tower, waiting for a summons from Eammon that never came. She’d felt lost and insubstantial, and now the opportunity to do something— anything— made want seize her by the throat. “Take me with you.”

He paused. The intent to deny her was in his eyes, his head angling to shake.

She sat up, sheets puddling around her waist. “Please, Eammon.”

Desperation must have hung in her voice. Eammon sighed, eyes on the ceiling. “Fine.” He jerked his chin toward the wardrobe. “Get dressed. Meet me downstairs.”

Red went to the wardrobe, grabbing one of Eammon’s shirts and a pair of trousers she’d improbably found in the depths of the same closet that had held Merra’s dress. Eammon had managed to salvage her boots from her old room since the ones he’d given her were far too large— the leather was hopelessly scuffed, but serviceable. She fished her cloak out of the drawer.

Eammon eyed it with his lips pressed together. “There’s a seamstress in the Edge,” he said carefully, like he expected her to stop him at every word. “If you . . . if you wanted that mended, she could do it.”

She’d washed the thing, finally, rinsing away the dirt from her first flight through the Wilderwood. But the fabric was still thorn-ragged, the hem fringed with trailing threads. Red rubbed the rough weave of it between her fingers. “I’d like that.”

He nodded. “Find a dagger that suits you,” Eammon called as he started down the stairs. “And you’ll want a sheath.”

The sheath Red chose was meant to be worn on the thigh, strapped around the leg like a leather shackle. Choosing daggers and sheaths for them wasn’t something she was well versed in, and it rubbed awkwardly as they made their way through the Wilderwood, boots over leaves the only sound disturbing the silence.

“You can move it to your arm, if you want.” Eammon was a dark shape in the fog ahead of her. “Won’t be as easy to draw, but it’ll keep you from walking bowlegged.”

“Will I need to draw it?”

“I doubt it, but it’s best to be prepared.”

Her hand closed around the unfamiliar shape of the hilt. “I’m surprised you let me carry one at all,” she said. “What with the risk of bleeding.”

Eammon stopped, glanced at her over his shoulder. “I’m trusting you to be careful,” he said, and there was nothing playful in his tone.

Red released the hilt.

Their silence as they walked through the forest was mostly comfortable. An edge of tension remained, wrought by distance: Eammon had been scarce since her mother died, barely a presence at all. They’d exchanged a few words when they crossed paths, but nothing like the baring of truth they’d given each other the day they healed the sentinel, the day he showed her the mirror. The lay of the land between them had changed, mountains leveling to valleys, and his absence meant she hadn’t had a chance to learn the navigation.

Maybe it shouldn’t have hurt, but it did. And the careful way he held himself, like he’d measured the distance he wanted between them, was splinter-sharp and just as irritating.

“Is this why you’ve been gone every day?” she asked. “Going to the Edge?”

The way Eammon moved was a language to itself. The tension in his shoulders, worry. The way they bowed inward, resignation.

“I know you weren’t close, but she was your mother.” His softness was a rebuttal to her blade-edge. “I’ve complicated things enough for you there. I thought you needed time.”

“Time alone?” It was quiet, but the silence of the Wilderwood made it carry.

His head dipped forward, breath clouding the air. “I didn’t know if you’d want me around,” he murmured. “Since I was the reason for . . . for the distance between you and her.”

She’d caught his fingers before she had the conscious thought, and the contact startled him almost as much as it did her. Eammon looked from their linked hands to her face, surprise in his parted mouth.

“That,” Red said, low and fierce, “is ridiculous. What was between my mother and I . . . it was messy, complicated. And yes, it had to do with the Wilderwood. But it wasn’t your fault.” Her gaze dropped, because his eyes were wide and wondering and his hands were easier to look at, their scars easier to read. “Don’t go looking for guilt.”

Eammon swallowed. “A character flaw of mine, I’m told.”

She looked up, bent the corner of a smile. He returned it. And when he started back down the path, he let her keep holding his hand.

The talk of grief stirred it up in Red’s chest, dust that never quite settled. Her grief for Isla was strange and distant. Death didn’t gild her, it just fixed her in Red’s memory, a line with a finite beginning and ending and no chance to be more than it had been.

“I don’t think I can mourn her,” Red murmured.

Eammon glanced at her, brow furrowed.

“I mourn the idea of her, maybe. The gap between what a mother is supposed to be and what she was.” She blinked hard against the burn in her eyes, shook her head. “That probably doesn’t make sense.”

“It does. Sometimes you don’t mourn people so much as you mourn who they could’ve been.” His fingers tightened on hers. Red returned the pressure, grateful for a counterpoint. He pretended not to notice when she scrubbed the back of her wrist over her eyes.

A branch hung in their path, and Eammon let go of her hand to push it up, gesturing her past. His heat radiated like a beacon in the chill. A lock of hair had escaped his queue, fallen over his brow, and his head dipped almost low enough for it to brush Red’s cheek.

She stood for longer than she had to, rooted there by the glint of his eyes, the library smell of him.

Then Eammon’s arm came down, the low-hanging branch brushing the forest floor. He hurried forward, one stride to two of hers, and didn’t take her hand again.

Heat burned in her cheeks.

The branch Eammon dropped twitched in the corner of Red’s eye, spiny twigs curling toward her ankle. It eroded her pride enough for her to hurry until she pressed close behind him again.

Up ahead, a sentinel rose from the fog. Darkness shaded the roots, strands of shadow stretching up the white bark, nearly waist-high to Red.

Eammon stopped, eyes flickering between her and the tree. Tentatively, she took his hand, their conversation wordless.

He was rigid at first. But this was touch for a purpose, not just comfort, and his muscles relaxed into hers by slow fractions. Eammon stepped toward the tree like he had something to prove, and he nearly slammed his opposite hand to the bark, keeping the other in Red’s grip.

The buzz of the bark beneath Red’s palm was almost pleasant. She hadn’t done this since the day the mirror showed her Neve, but her body remembered— the cycle of power, the golden network of the sentinels, the way it all coalesced in Eammon.

But something was different. Pockets of darkness marked the glow behind her eyes, holes where sentinels should be. Not weak candle-flames, not like they’d come loose from their moorings to turn up at the Keep— like they were gone.

Her fingers tensed, but Eammon slid his thumb over the flutter of her wrist, a wordless request to hold her questions.

When the glow of the sentinel before them no longer guttered and the shadow-rot was gone, Red opened her eyes. “What happened?” She could see the golden map like an afterimage, the holes where sentinels should be. “The sentinels that are missing, are they at the Keep somewhere?”

“No.” Eammon’s voice echoed in the quiet, with that strange, multilayered resonance born from working forest magic. He rubbed at his green-threaded eyes, the shadows beneath them deep. “No, they’re not at the Keep.”

“Then where?”

“I don’t know.” A grimace, but it was slight, like something he was trying to hide. “Only three are missing. As long as the others stay in place, it’s manageable.”

“When did this happen? How?”

“A few days ago. As for how . . . I’m not sure.” The strangeness magic wrought in him bled out by slow degrees— eyes only amber, voice losing its echo. She watched carefully, making sure each one was gone, that the Wilderwood seeped back out of him as much as it could and left no more permanent marks. “Nothing like this has happened before.”

“How do we fix it? How do we heal them if they aren’t here?”

“We don’t.” Eammon let go of her hand, turning to stride between the trees. The emphasis was clear— whatever he planned to do, it didn’t involve Red.

“But if—”

“We heal the ones we can. We send them back where they’re supposed to be.” His voice fell into the silence like the first brick in a wall. “That’s all you can do, Red. You can’t fix holes in the Wilderwood with hands on bark.”

“Then tell me what else to do.”

“Nothing.” He turned on the word, coat flaring behind him, eyes burning down into hers. “Kings, woman, you can’t do anything about this. Trust me.”

It echoed that first night, when he’d asked for her trust, when she told him to give her a reason. He’d given them, over and over.

Still, this felt different. But the look on his face— fierce, halfway to fear— told her pushing him was pointless.

Red returned his glare. “Fine.”

A beat, then a nod. “Fine.” Twigs crunched under Eammon’s boots as he turned back around, moved farther into the fog.

“You should’ve told me,” she murmured. “Even if I can’t do anything, you should’ve told me.”

Eammon’s shoulders tensed, but he didn’t reply.

They passed no more sentinels. The fog thinned, the trees growing farther apart, bent and crooked. Up ahead, shards of light reached through the branches.

Sunlight. How long had it been since she’d seen the light of a full day, not couched in dusk?

Eammon glanced at her, like he could read the thought on her face. The corner of his mouth quirked to smile-shaped, but something sorrowful pulled down its edge. “The forest ends up ahead.”

It was still strange to her that the Wilderwood was something with an end. It was a geographic anomaly. None could catalog where it stopped, so they assumed it simply didn’t. Explorers had tried to map it— riding up the eastern border where Valleyda met the frozen expanse of the Alperan Wastes, and sailing along the western side, where it met the sea. None returned.

Now Red knew why. The Kings disappeared and the Wilderwood closed, and those who’d made their way behind it, through the sea or up the Wastes, were trapped there. She thought of Bormain and Valdrek, the people dressed in green and gray. The descendants of those lost adventurers, cut off from the world for generations.

“They have a sky,” she said softly, looking up. “The regular sky, I mean. With the sun.”

Another half smile, another darted glance with something slightly wounded in it. “They do.” Eammon started forward, shafts of thin gold cutting the fog and burnishing his hair. Sunlight looked good on him. “Endless twilight, fortunately, only plagues the Wilderwood.”

Red followed Eammon to the tree line, slipping between the trunks and out into the light beyond. She didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath in expectation of pain until it didn’t come. There was a slight pop of pressure, a soap bubble breaking against her skin, but nothing like the crushing vise she’d felt when she first crossed into the Wilderwood, the strange hum against her bones. It reminded her of what Fife told her, that day with Bormain— the borders on the northern side weren’t closed up so tightly. The Wilderwood, it seemed, felt the need for such protection only from the rest of the continent.

Still, Eammon paused next to her, a muscle feathering in his jaw, a swallow working down his throat. Pain carved lines beside his mouth and made his shoulders stiff— the roots knotted around his spine tightening, pulling him back toward the gloom of his forest. It might let him go, on its northern border, but it wouldn’t let him forget where he belonged.

Her lip worked between her teeth.

A few yards away, a large wooden wall rose up from the ground, carved with swirls and arabesques, set with massive double doors. From within, the faint sounds of a city— laughter and shouting, hawking merchants, livestock. Smoke twisted into a sky that faded from lavender to bright blue. Miles away to the west, a line of fog began on the horizon. It looked almost like an approaching storm, but as Red watched, it didn’t move.

Eammon followed her gaze. “The sea is that way,” he said. “The fog is so thick you can’t see more than two inches from your eyes. Apparently, anyone who sails in it gets hopelessly lost, turned around in circles.”

“Has anyone tried?”

“Not in ages.” He jerked a finger over his shoulder in the opposite direction. “Same thing to the east, it’s just too far away to see. Endless fog.”

“And you can’t pass through that, either?”

Eammon shook his head. “The Wilderwood was very thorough, after the Kings wounded it. Everyone unlucky enough to be stuck back here has no way to get out.” His hand pressed against his side, mouth thinning as he turned to stride toward the city walls. “Come on. We need to make this quick.”

Red watched him go with a line between her brows, the rigid way he moved at odds with his usual stalking grace. Bones wrapped in vines, a tether pulling him back. Another reminder— much as he might look human, he wasn’t.

Still, her hand was warm where he’d held it.

Eammon rapped against the wooden doors. Red winced, used to the crushing quiet of the Wilderwood, but against the backdrop of village noises, Eammon’s knock was barely heard.

The door creaked open, just a crack. A scrutinizing blue eye peered out. “Name?”

“Who do you think it is, Lear?” Eammon rolled his eyes, but it was with a grin. “I brought a guest.”

The gatekeeper’s eyes widened, as did the crack. Beyond, Red could see a bustling village, not unlike the Valleydan capital.

“My lady.” The man had hair the dark auburn of autumn leaves and a handsome, clean-shaven face. She recognized him— he’d been in the forest the day she saw the vision and came after Eammon.

Lear pushed the door open wide. “Welcome, Wolves.”