For the Wolf by Hannah F. Whitten

Chapter Twenty-Five

She woke with her spine at odd angles and her neck aching. Red sat up with a disgruntled sound, rolling her shoulders. On the bed, Eammon’s deep, even breathing was just shy of a snore.

A smirk pulled at her mouth. She’d have to tell him the issue persisted.

Firelight combed golden highlights through his black hair, his face softened in sleep. She studied its angles, for once not hardened by exhaustion and teeth-clenching control. There was a slight scar through one dark eyebrow. Stubble shaded his jaw, a tiny nick from a careless razor right below his chin. It heartened her, strangely, to see a mark not made for the Wilderwood.

And to think, she’d once thought the Wolf too severe to be handsome.

Red pushed his hair off his forehead. He sighed, still asleep, moving the angle of his chin so his lips brushed her palm. The root-tendril Mark stood out against his pale skin, swirling to halfway down his forearm, up past his elbow. Last night, she’d been too preoccupied with saving him from the forest to concentrate on the shape of his chest, the breadth of his bare shoulders. All things she’d noticed before, obviously— it was impossible not to— but not this close, not since the night she healed him.

The sheet pooled around his waist where he’d kicked it down in the night, and the faint blush of those three scars glanced across his abdomen. Her hand was half reaching to touch them before she pulled it back.

No. She couldn’t. They couldn’t.

The dining room was empty when she went down the stairs, and so was the kitchen. A battered kettle hung over a banked fire, and she poked it into flame before scouring the shelves for tea leaves. She half hoped she wouldn’t find them, one more thing to stall the inevitable.

Red had to leave. She had to go to Valleyda.

It had been foolish to put it off as long as they had. Only a day, but she should’ve left the moment she realized what was happening. The only reason she hadn’t was because she didn’t want to leave him. He’d let himself be a distraction, let her use him as procrastination; stalling the inevitable just as much as she was. She didn’t know whether she wanted to hit him or kiss him for it.

Both, probably.

The pot whistled. Red jumped and pulled it off the hook, too quickly. A burn stung across her knuckles, and she looked at it for a moment, thinking of Eammon, how he always insisted on taking her hurt.

She resolved not to let him see it.

Red was on her second cup of weak tea when Lyra walked through the broken arch of the dining room, pulling leaves from her hair. Her tor clattered to the table as she sat across from Red, wrinkling her nose at the teapot. “I hate this stuff.”

“It’s all I could find.” The blade’s edge was dark, smeared with Lyra’s blood and something like sap. “What happened?”

“More missing sentinels.” Lyra pulled a cloth from her pocket and rubbed it along the tor’s edge. It didn’t do much other than spread the muck around, and she quickly abandoned the endeavor with a low curse. “Cut up a few shadow-creatures, but I couldn’t do anything about the holes. My blood won’t touch them anymore. Doesn’t do a damn thing.”

More holes. He’d healed them all, nearly given up himself to do it, only for more to appear mere hours later. “Eammon healed them all last night. All the breaches.” Red sighed. “Didn’t take long for new ones to open.”

The other woman’s eyebrows flicked up, a thoughtful expression on her elfin face. Lyra set her tor aside. “Self-martyring bastard.” Despite her earlier protestation, she tugged over the teapot and poured herself a cup. Then she sat, peering at Red through the steam as it wreathed her dark curls. “Do you want to help him?”

“Of course I do.” The question was unexpected, but the answer was so automatic that Red didn’t have time to be caught off guard.

Lyra settled in her seat, legs crossed and tea cupped between her palms, watching Red like she was weighing something in her mind. Finally, her dark eyes closed, long lashes sweeping her cheeks. “He’s kept it from you. You know that, right?”

She did. In Red’s mind, bones wrapped around the base of a tree, tangled with vines.

“He’s done it for so long, and I don’t think he’ll stop. Especially not now.” Lyra sighed, sipped her tea. “I don’t know how it works. Not fully. The way the Wolf and the Wilderwood tangle together and how they come apart. But I know that if anything is going to change, Red, it will have to be you that does it.”

Choice. A memory of rustling leaves and cracking branches, forest sounds shaped to a word.

“If I knew what you had to do, I’d tell you. Even though Eammon would hate me for it. But I don’t.” She placed her chipped teacup on the table, next to her tor. “Something about this is different, both with you and with the Wilderwood. Something more than Eammon holding it back. And you’re the only one who can figure it out.”

Their eyes locked across the table. Red nodded.

Another beat of silence, then Red pushed back her chair, stood. “Do you want bread?”

Lyra shook her head. Red grabbed two slices— one for her, one for Eammon. A letdown of a parting gift, after he’d given her a bridal cloak and the tangled thread of his history. She trudged up the stairs like stones were tied around her feet.

Eammon sat at his desk, clothed now and mostly scrubbed of blood and sap, though a streak of green-threaded burgundy still slashed behind one ear. He’d bound his hair, messily, and was fully absorbed in an open book. Red craned her neck to see what he was reading, but she didn’t recognize the language.

“It’s rude to read over someone’s shoulder,” he muttered as he turned a page.

She tried to quip, but he was close enough to reach out and touch, and that fact filled her mind like fog in a jar. Instead she took a piece of bread and placed it on the page. He gave an affronted snort before picking it up, taking a bite with his eyes still tracking over words.

Red sat on the bed and watched him, cataloging his movements. His finger brushed back and forth over the corner of the page while he read it, then dipped behind to turn. His foot bounced beneath the desk. Hair fell over his forehead, and he pushed it back, only for it to fall again.

“I’m leaving today,” she whispered.

The line of his shoulders went rigid.

Her chest was a cage for things she couldn’t trap into language. The only words that seemed right were too vast, too heavy. A frailty would be wrought by them, and Red couldn’t afford to be frail now.

So instead, she repeated herself. “I’m coming back.”

He took a shuddering breath, closed his book. “Think about it, Red. You don’t—”

“Stop.” Red stood, went to stand in the tiny gap between him and the desk. “We aren’t having this discussion again. I’ll stop Neve, get her to reverse whatever damage she’s done. And then I will be right back here, Wolf, and you’d better be prepared to tell me what I have to do to save you from these damn woods.”

He finally looked at her, their eyes almost level, heat in the green and amber. His sigh was ragged.

“Eammon?” Fife’s voice, calling up the stairs. “Lyra’s back. Another one is gone.”

It froze him, turned all that heat in his eyes to something cold and resigned. Eammon’s hands clenched his knees, gaze shifting away from hers to the middle distance beyond. He spoke without moving. “When do you leave?”

“Now.” No use putting it off. No use hoping he’d touch her. He held himself carefully away, even after everything, after two kisses and three skulls and countless words they locked behind their teeth.

Eammon nodded. “I won’t keep you, then.” He stood and walked toward the stairs, leaving her alone.

Lyra and Fife were as skeptical of her plan as Eammon was.

“Your sister is the reason the sentinels are disappearing? She’s hell-bent on killing the Wilderwood, so you’re just going to go present yourself to her?” Fife’s brow arched. “And I’m the only one who thinks this sounds like a bad idea?”

“What she’s doing is for me. I have to find out what it is, a way to stop it. She’s trying to bring me home.”

“It would appear she’s been successful.”

“I’m not staying.” It came out almost a hiss, and it took Fife aback— his crossed arms slackened, and a line drew between his brows.

Red closed her eyes, took a breath. “I’m coming back, Fife.”

His reddish hair caught the dim light as his incredulous gaze swung from Red to Eammon. “And you’re fine with this?”

“It isn’t my decision.” Eammon leaned against the staircase, feigning nonchalance, but his spine was rigid.

Fife’s sigh deflated his shoulders. “I hope you know what you’re doing.” His eyes slid from Eammon to Red. “Both of you.”

“Fife.” Lyra’s tone was warning, though worry lived in the downward curve of her mouth. Her eyes flickered to Red’s. “I can take you as far as the border. Make sure you don’t get lost.”

“Give me a moment.” Red hurried up the stairs. “I forgot something.”

When she reached their room, Red was out of breath. Her bridal cloak spread across the floor where she’d slept beneath it, the same colors as the fire in the grate. The embroidery glinted as she picked it up.

A pen lay on the desk, next to a haphazard stack of papers and books in languages she couldn’t read. She tested the sharp end with her finger before dipping it in the inkwell.

Three days, she scrawled. And then I want the bed back.

Eammon’s eyes slipped cursorily over the cloak when she came back down the stairs, settling on her face. He said nothing. Red pressed her lips together, hitched her bag on her shoulder.

Lyra glanced quickly between them before turning to the door. “At the gate, when you’re ready.”

Fife’s mouth opened, but he closed it on silence. Lifting one hand in an awkward wave, he passed through the broken arch into the dining room.

Then she and the Wolf were alone.

Eammon was silent. He still half believed this would be forever— she could see it in the way his hands tightened on his arms, the work of his swallowing throat.

So many words caught between them, and goodbye was the only one he would say.

She didn’t let him. “Three days.” Red turned, pulled up her scarlet hood, and slipped through the door, leaving the Wolf in the shadows.

The tor glinted on Lyra’s back like a sickle moon. She wove deftly through the Wilderwood, Red following close behind.

They walked a few minutes in silence before Red heard it. A slight but unmistakable boom, reverberating through the forest.

Another breach, opening.

“Shit.” Lyra unsheathed her tor, pulled a vial of blood from the bag at her waist with a practiced motion. “We’ll keep moving, but keep a close eye on the ground.”

Red nodded, hands curled to claws. The thread of magic in her chest spiraled, ready for use.

They crept forward. Finally, the dark edge of a hole where a sentinel should have been stretched from a pool of fog.

At the edge of the pit, a tiny cyclone of leaves and twigs swirled. Lyra unstoppered the vial of blood and poured it out over the twisting column. With a whine, it broke apart, leaves fluttering to the ground only slightly touched with shadow on the edges.

“Got to it quick enough.” But she still didn’t sheath her tor. “Eammon will have to—”

The next one cobbled itself together quickly, like it’d learned a lesson from its slow-moving counterpart. A whirl of dead twigs and leaves and pulled-up bones, not bothering to make a humanoid shape, bursting up from the ground and hurtling toward them.

They both acted on instinct. Red curled her fingers, pulling at magic, sending vines whipping out from the underbrush. They passed through the half-formed shadow-creature enough to break it apart, slow it down, but it hurled itself back together in their wake.

Lyra was ready. Another unstoppered vial, poured along the edge of her blade in a graceful arc, then she launched herself at the shadow-creature.

The curved shine of the tor bit through the dim light, spinning blood and sap. The sword was an extension of Lyra herself, the curve of it like a dancer’s arm as she twirled in the gloom. Red’s vines kept whipping through the thing, breaking it into pieces, and Lyra went after each bit, slicing with her bloodied blade so the parts that made it fell uselessly to the forest floor. It took only seconds, then the shadow-creature was gone, nothing but a mess of rotting, dark-touched detritus on the ground.

They both stood still for a moment, breathing hard. Red straightened her hands, and vines slithered back into the underbrush. She swallowed the taste of dirt as her veins ran from green to blue again. It was the most successful wielding of Wilderwood magic she’d managed since helping Eammon fight off the worm-like beast on the way back from the Edge, but it didn’t feel like much of an accomplishment. They couldn’t close the breach, and as long as it stayed open, any victory was temporary.

A moment of silence, both of them waiting to see if the breach would birth something else. Then Lyra sheathed her tor, not bothering to wipe it clean. “This breach is small. The shadow-creature won’t have time to reanimate before Eammon can get to it. Hopefully.” She turned, heading back through the forest again. “I would bloody it up, but I don’t want to waste what I have. It wouldn’t make a difference, anyway.”

Red lingered a moment longer, staring at the pit of shadow, dark and rotten on the ground. Cursing softly, she spun to follow Lyra.

The trees thinned as they grew closer to the border. Thick fog served almost as a wall between the Wilderwood and the outside world, but shards of a blue sky shone through the haze. Valleyda, close enough to touch, and the only emotions Red felt were apprehension and preemptive homesickness.

Too soon, they’d reached the tree line. “Three days,” Red announced, just as she’d told Eammon, like the Wilderwood could hear her and mark the time as well as he could. “This shouldn’t take longer than three days. Then I’ll be back.”

The snatches of sunlight between the branches caught copper strands in Lyra’s tight-coiled hair as she nodded. “Three days.” She headed back into the fog, back toward the Keep. Back toward home.

“Look after him,” Red murmured. “Please.”

“Always have.” Lyra looked over her shoulder, dark eyes honeyed in the dim. “Remember what I said.”

Red nodded. Forest magic bloomed in her chest, waiting.

When Lyra was gone, Red faced the trees she’d slipped through on her twentieth birthday. With a deep breath, she slipped through again.

Daylight was a physical weight on her shoulders, a knife-shine in her eyes. For a moment she stood there, blinking, a woman in crimson on the edge of the world. Autumn painted the sky a crisp blue, and she caught the scent of bonfire smoke on the wind.

Behind her, a murmur. Red turned, peering into the shadows of the Wilderwood as it whispered in its strange language of leaf and thorn.

We will wait for your choice.

A branch broke away from a trunk, dried and desiccated as it tumbled to the forest floor. A thicket of small bushes withered, curled in like a dying beetle.

But we’ll have him, if we must.

Her jaw clenched against the rattle of the words in her bones, the sharp-splinter piece of the Wilderwood’s power she carried speaking into her hollow places. “Fuck you,” she muttered.

The Wilderwood didn’t respond.

She hurried down the grassy slope, toward the road and the village beyond. Her lungs buzzed, like the air outside the forest was different from what she’d been breathing, and it made her head too light.

When Red reached the road, she stopped, squinting. A tall, spindly structure stood at the edge of the village, just close enough to make out. A guard tower.

Red allowed herself only a moment to puzzle over it, mind overtaken by practical concerns. It was half a day’s ride by carriage to the capital, and she didn’t have money for a horse. Walking would—

A high, sharp whistle interrupted her thoughts, loud enough to make her wince. Distant shouts rang around the hills, a sound like thundering hoofbeats. A cloud of dust rose near the guard tower.

Panic dropped her stomach, but it was momentary. The tower must be watching the Wilderwood— there was nothing else to see in this direction. Which meant they’d seen her, which made it pointless to hide.

Instead Red stood at the turn of the road, chin tilted upward, scarlet cloak on her shoulders. She didn’t cringe away when the band of riders reached her, out of breath, swords drawn.

One of them pointed his blade in her direction, over bright in daylight she wasn’t used to.

Red raised her hands in a posture of surrender. “I understand your alarm, but—”

“Don’t come any closer.” The blade shivered, broadcasting his shudder.

“Hold.” Another guard, with the silver stripe of a commander across his shoulder, held up his hand. He leaned forward, frowning at Red’s face. “I know you.”

“You should.”

His gaze followed the folds of her cloak, then widened. “Second Daughter.”

She wasn’t in a position to be particular. Still, Red’s lips lifted, teeth glinting in unfamiliar sunlight.

“Lady Wolf,” she corrected.