For the Wolf by Hannah F. Whitten

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Amber eyes and a soft mouth, dark hair between her fingers. Red was loath to wake, even as cold water dripped down her neck, stones digging into her back. But she roused, peeled her eyes open, pain fading in as dreams of Eammon faded out.

Damp rock walls, metal bars. A dungeon.

Logically, she’d known there were dungeons under the Valleydan palace, but she never remembered them being used. The ceiling began mere inches above her head, and a single guttering sconce provided the only light. Through the dim, she could barely make out another cell across a skinny, damp hallway. Masses of shadow lurked behind the bars.

Red dared a look at her hand. A mess of awful angles, everything bent the wrong way beneath her skin. The other hand, the one she’d sliced, was scarlet and angry and tacky with blood. Pain churned to nausea; she retched, but nothing came up.

Gritting her teeth, Red placed her lacerated hand against the wall. Behind it, she could sense the deep roots of growing things above— grasses and weeds threading through the dirt. A shuddering breath, and she bent her fingers slowly, tugging at the thin curl of her magic in her chest, seeing if she could manage enough to pull them toward her, just as a test.

The magic roused, barely. Enough to feel, not enough to use, not enough to affect the growing things beyond the wall. Her hand fell.

She squeezed her eyes shut, taking the thoughts pain shattered, piecing them together into the path that led here. Arick, asking after Neve. His boot on her temple. He’d brought her to a dungeon, where no one would think to look for her.

And he didn’t have a shadow.

Desperation thrummed at the base of her throat. Red crooked her unbroken fingers again, coaxing fruitlessly at her splintered power.

“It’s the walls.”

Arick strode down the damp hallway, lit by guttering torchlight, hands clasped behind his back. He moved differently— before, Arick walked as if the world would wait on him, loose and languid. Now his posture was at almost-military attention. The dim light told her nothing about his shadow.

Red swallowed against a bone-dry throat. “What?”

He tapped his knuckles nonchalantly on the wall beside the bars. “This deadens magic. I’m not sure how, to be honest. Valchior was a hard ruler, and he didn’t like for anyone to be better at calling power than he, back when it was free for the taking. Still doesn’t.” Another tap before he tucked his hands behind his back again, regal despite the damp. “In any case, he didn’t share his secrets with the rest of us.”

Her head ached, and his nonsense made it throb harder. “You kicked me.”

“I did.” He didn’t seem sorry. “You hurt Neve.”

Neve. Red looked up, hope sharp and sudden. “Is she alive? Did she make it out?”

Arick opened his mouth to answer, but another voice beat him to it. “No thanks to you.”

A slender figure stepped into the transient light. Kiri. Two bluish handprints marked the sides of her neck where Neve had held her, made her voice a whispery rasp. “You’ve long outlived your usefulness, Second Daughter. Now you’re nothing but a liability.”

“Kiri.” Arick’s eyes were a colorless glitter. “Hush.”

Red’s whole body was a knot of agony. She searched Arick’s face, looking for some kind of warmth, any echo of the man she’d known. But he watched her like an animal in a cage, observing her pain with nothing more than vague curiosity.

Behind him, in the half-illuminated cell, the mass of shadow shifted.

Red’s eyes squeezed shut against the throb of her wounded hands. “Neve is alive.” If she didn’t phrase it like a question, the answer couldn’t be no. “She’s all right.”

“Neve is safe.” Arick’s voice held a strange note of softness. “As safe as I can make her.”

That, at least, brought a flood of relief. “Why am I here? What is this place?”

“A place for things that work against our gods.” Kiri’s lip lifted in a sneer. “Things like you.”

Arick’s jaw tightened.

“We’ll save them.” Kiri’s eyes rose to the ceiling of the dungeon, mildewed and moldering, with the light of someone looking on holiness. Her hands rose to her chest like her heart was something she could cradle. “Now that you’re here, now that we know you are empty and the Wolf stands alone. We’ve made the Wilderwood weak, their time is soon at hand. Our Kings will finally return, and our rewards will be great.” Her unsound eyes turned to Arick, head bending to bow. “All of our Kings, in the flesh.”

Distaste lived in the set of Arick’s mouth, but he said nothing. Arick, who made it a point to think of the Wilderwood and the Five Kings as little as possible. Arick, who had no patience for things regarded as holy.

“You don’t want the Kings back.” Red shook her throbbing head. “Eammon told me—”

“Of course he did.” Arick rolled his eyes. “The boy’s just like his father, mistaking foolishness for nobility. I told Ciaran things would end badly when he and Gaya concocted their stupid plan. He never listened, either.”

It slid around in Red’s head, still, pain taking over the space she needed to parse all this into sense. But the mention of Ciaran stuck in her mind like a burr, and her eyes narrowed. Eammon’s father, spoken of like a friend.

Or a rival.

“You’re lucky the boy’s improved his control,” Arick continued. “He tried to hold the roots back from the others, but the Wilderwood had its way in the end. You’re the first who’s had a choice in the matter.” His eyes narrowed. “You could’ve left at any time, saved your sister a world of heartbreak. There was never any Wilderwood in you at all, not enough to make any difference. You’re rootless, Redarys. Nothing but bones and blood.”

Arick crouched so they were level. Surely it was just the dim light and the haze in her head, but his eyes seemed strange, not quite the right color.

“You won’t let yourself be saved.” His not-quite-right eyes searched hers. “That’s what he told me. Not by him, not by Neve. Determined to be a martyr.”

“Let her be a martyr, then.” Fervor in Kiri’s voice, in her claw-like hands. “Her only use was to keep the Queen in line, but she couldn’t even do that.” She pointed to the handprints on her throat. “She went rogue, we need to—”

“Kiri.” Her name was a slap of sound, and the High Priestess dropped her hands like a cowed child. Her eyes were ice chips.

“We’ll keep her here,” Arick continued. A pause, and his tone softened. “Neve’s already lost too much. I won’t let her lose her sister, too.”

It should’ve been comforting, but his face made it clear— Neve was the only thing saving Red. There was bitter, spiking irony to it.

“Besides,” Arick murmured, almost to himself, “she could prove useful yet. I’ll need total surrender from the Wolf for this to work.” His eyes caught the light of the sconce, glittered cold. “He’s familiar with bargaining.”

“Arick.” It was a whisper, a plea. Red’s cracked lips tasted of copper. “I don’t understand.”

Behind Arick, the shadowy mass in the other cell moved. Groaned.

Kiri whirled, poised to strike, but Arick held out an open palm. “No.” His eyes cut from the priestess to Red, considering. Then he shrugged. “Let her see. I tire of holding the illusion.”

Arick’s arm fell, and the lines of his face rearranged, seeping shadow like smoke.

Red blinked, sure her head injury affected her vision. But the drip and merge of his features continued, like water thrown over a still-wet canvas. A sharper jaw than Arick’s, edged in a short, dark beard. Long hair, past his shoulders, somewhere between brown and gold. Pale skin, blue eyes. Handsome, in a cruel way.

Not-Arick rolled his shoulders, a slight smile picking up the side of his mouth at her horrified expression. Next to him, Kiri’s teeth shone predator-bright. “Ask his name,” she whispered, fierce and low. “Ask his name, and tremble for it.”

The man grinned at Red. “I think she knows.”

“Solmir.” It came out hoarse, it came out sure.

The youngest of the Five Kings nodded. “Astute.” He stepped to the side, waved a regal hand at the cell bars behind him. “But another desires an audience, Second Daughter.”

The shadows coalesced, like he’d given them permission, and became a body. Familiar eyes blinked against torchlight. A familiar face, though grimed in blood and dirt. Arick’s hands, covered in cuts, closed around the bars. “Red?”

Red tried to make a sound, tried to call to him, but all she could muster was one sob. Her bleeding hand pressed against her mouth. “Arick,” she murmured, tear tracks clearing dirt and dust from her cheeks. “Arick, what have you done?”

“What he had to.” Solmir stood like a jailer, arms crossed and brows low. “He saw a chance, and he took it. We all do foolish things for love. To feel like we have a purpose.” He nodded to Kiri, who picked up a battered cup from the floor, the edge rusty with old blood. “Go on and tell her, Arick. I’m sure she’ll want the whole sordid tale.”

Arick’s eyes closed. He titled his forehead against the bars. “I bargained,” he said quietly as Kiri picked up his hand, as she cut into it with a tiny dagger. “I went to the Wilderwood, I found one of the white trees near the border. It . . . leaned. Leaned over, like it was about to fall, like the ground around it was close to giving way. That’s how I could touch it. Just one branch. Just barely.” He shook his head, slowly. “It hurt, the hum, like someone’d stuck a whole sawmill in my ribs. But I got close enough.”

“Why?” She shook her head, stars spangling in her eyes. “How? The Wilderwood doesn’t bargain anymore, it’s not strong enough.”

“But the things in the Shadowlands are.” It didn’t sound like a boast. It sounded weary. Solmir leaned his back against the wall.

“A living sacrifice.” Kiri smiled beatifically. “A living sacrifice, fresh from the vein.”

Black and scarlet welled from Arick’s palm, shadow swirling through his blood as it dripped into the cup.

“And once blood has been used to bargain with the Shadowlands,” Kiri continued, “it can be used to invert the Wilderwood. The boy’s shadow-tainted blood awakened the branches in the Shrine, set them to a nobler purpose. And all who offered more blood afterward reaped a harvest of power, just as promised to me in my long years of praying.” Apparently satisfied, she shoved Arick’s limp and bleeding hand back through the bars, rounded on Red. “You think you’ve won by defiling our grove, cursed thing? You know nothing. Five lives are—”

“Shadows damn us, woman, do you ever stop talking?” One long-fingered hand covered Solmir’s eyes. Kiri’s teeth snapped shut.

“That’s why you don’t have a shadow.” Instinct made her hands curl despite her injuries, and a new wave of pain drove Red’s teeth together. “You’re Arick’s shadow. And he’s yours, when he has to be.” She shook her throbbing head. “All this, and you aren’t really here.”

“Oh, I’m here.” Solmir’s hand dropped, eyes glittering. “Here enough.”

“The white tree was easy to see.” Arick spoke low and almost slurred, like he was recounting a dream. An exorcism, the whole bloody tale spinning out of him now that he’d started. “So pale against the rest, like bone.” The hand Kiri had cut flexed open convulsively. The deep puncture wound in his palm blazed lurid scarlet, a black spot of rot blooming in its center, sending sickened tendrils through his skin. “I bled on it. Living sacrifice. Just like she told me.”

Kiri smiled.

“And it . . . opened.” Even now, Arick sounded horrified, like he couldn’t believe what he’d done. “The branch reared back, like . . . like something alive, like a startled horse. There was this sound, this awful tearing sound, and a boom. And then he was there, standing right at the edge of the trees, shadows curled around him like chains. And he asked what I wanted, and what I would give for it.”

“What did you want?” She knew. She asked anyway.

Arick didn’t answer, but his head bowed lower.

“He wanted a way to save you.” Solmir said it like it bored him. “And he said he would give everything.”

Oh, Arick. Arick, telling her he loved her over and over, even when she never said it back. Arick, building a castle in the air where they could have a happy ending, mortaring it with blood and empty promises.

“At first he was just my shadow.” Arick recounted the tale to the damp floor, like looking at Red hurt. “But then . . . when things . . .”

“He couldn’t stomach it.” Kiri swirled the cup of his blood under her nose like wine, breathing deep. “He couldn’t handle when we realized they needed killing, the High Priestess and the Queen. So they changed places. One the shadow, one the man.”

“I’ll have you remember that you were the only one who decided they needed killing,” Solmir murmured. “But once it happened, Arick wanted . . . distance from the situation.”

Red could taste her heartbeat. Her stomach twisted on itself. “How could you?” It was a breath of sound, a wound in the air. “How could you do that to Neve?”

“It was for Neve.” Solmir pushed off the wall, mouth a snarl. “Kiri may have overstepped, but this is what Neve wanted, whether she’ll admit it or not. She was just as desperate to save you as Arick was. She would do anything for you, Redarys. You don’t deserve a tenth of her love.”

Red lunged at the bars, her unbroken hand smacking against the metal. She recognized the warmth in his voice, the shape of things it didn’t say. “If you touched her,” she rasped, “I’ll kill you.”

Solmir watched her with unreadable eyes. His hands turned to fists, then relaxed. “I didn’t,” he said, quiet enough to mask whatever emotion lived in it.

Behind him, Arick pulled in a shaking breath. “We just wanted to save you.” His eyes rose, bruised and dark. “Especially once we learned what was coming. We just wanted to save you, Red.”

“You can calm down the groveling, then.” Now composed, Solmir propped his foot against the wall again. “Redarys saved herself.”

Her teeth ground together. “I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The roots.” Solmir rolled his eyes. “You haven’t taken them, though it’s clear you care for the Wolf. You’re a practical woman, apparently. You’ve learned love isn’t reason enough for ruin. You chose to save yourself.”

Choice.

She thought of the Wilderwood in the cavern, that awareness that it needed more from her, something it would no longer deign to take. She thought of Eammon, straining under the weight of the sentinels as they came for her again and again, trying to finish something started long ago. She thought of bones at the base of a tree, testaments to all the Second Daughters who came before, drained by a desperate forest that hadn’t yet learned its lesson. Hadn’t yet learned that something taken would only wither, while something given might grow.

She thought of roots.

Solmir’s lip curled. “The Wilderwood will fall. The Wolf will die. The Kings will be freed.” He shrugged, eyes narrowed, voice rueful. “And everyone will get what they wanted.”

Understanding came like the sudden bloom of a night flower, unfurling all at once in new light.

A choice had to be made, and here was hers.

“I’ll take them,” Red breathed.

Three pairs of eyes shot to her, confusion in each gaze, but Red paid no attention. Mustering up all her focus, all her will, she pulled at the thin thread of deep-green power in her center, made it bloom despite the deadening walls. It felt like it might kill her, every tug of blood through her veins a challenge, but still she pulled.

Red took a deep breath and pressed the edge of her sliced palm to the bone of her hip, pushing until the cut split farther and fresh blood seeped from her skin. With a pained gasp, she slapped her bloody hand to the floor of her cell.

Bleeding, and hoping with everything in her the trees could taste it.

“I want the roots,” she said, voice bell-clear and carrying. “I understand what it means, and I want them anyway, because I am for the Wolf, and the Wolves are for the Wilderwood.”

For a breath, the four of them froze in suspended silence. Then— a roar, a rush, as if a million stones overturned at once, as if something sped under the ground like some great beast flashing beneath the surface of the sea.

Roots, rushing from the north to flow into her waiting wound.

The floor cracked as the roots of the Wilderwood thrust up toward her hand, miles traveled in an instant at the call of her blood. The first press of it against the slice in her skin stung, but after that, the way the roots seeped in and curled around her bones felt like home.

The Wilderwood had finally learned, that night when Eammon almost lost himself to it. A Mark and words on a tree and invaded blood wouldn’t sustain it anymore. It needed her to choose it.

To choose him.

And she had been, by slow increments, ever since she met him. Choosing the black curl of his hair and the rough texture of his scars, the way the corner of his lip lifted, just so, when she said something he thought was funny. How his brows lowered when he read and how right before he fell asleep he’d let out a long, soft sigh and Kings how his mouth felt on hers, how he clung to her like ivy against the stone walls of their Keep.

It was, in the end, the easiest choice she’d ever made.

The seed in her grew and grew, unfettered by anything because it was hers, hers by word and blood.

It was a quiet storm of root and thorn and branch, the deluge of the Wilderwood finally coming for her— not as a predator, but as a missing piece, grateful to finally fit against the splintered edges it had left. The thin tendril of power she’d been given four years ago sped out to meet the rest of itself, and when she breathed deep, she tasted loam, growing things, honey.

Arick, shadow-thin, threw an arm over his face. Solmir pushed off from the wall with his teeth bared. “Shadows damn you—”

His words were lost in the rush. The power in her center met the power outside, collided and bloomed, filling her with root and branch. It grew in the hollows of her lungs, climbed along her spine, vines wrapping organs and seeding in her marrow.

The darkness behind her eyelids was shaped like leaves. And when it cleared, she saw Eammon. Not just his hands, not just the world through his eyes— him, entire, almost something she could reach out and touch.

He jolted from his seat at the edge of their bed, like he saw her as clearly as she saw him. Amber eyes cycled through shock, and wonder, and finally terror as he leapt, hand reaching out to empty air, mouth shaping her name—

Then he was gone, and she glowed golden in a dungeon with the roots of the Wilderwood between her bones.

Red pushed out her hands, fingers crooked. The tiny roots of grass above them grew long, stretched toward her, spangling the ceiling with starburst shatters and sending rock dust raining.

Kiri tried to cower against Solmir, but he knocked her to the side, thrusting out his hands and shaping his fingers into claws. Shadows gathered, but Red was flush with the power of a whole, healed Wilderwood, and all she had to do was arch a hand in his direction. Golden light wrapped Solmir’s fists, straightened his fingers, and he roared agony at the stone ceiling as it consumed his own cold magic, canceled it out.

“You’ll abandon her.” Solmir gritted his teeth, blue eyes glittering in Red’s light. “You’ll be trapped in the Wilderwood, forever. You’re choosing him over her.”

It made her heart feel too large for her ribs, made the beat of it against vine and bloom a painful thud. “If the Wilderwood falls and the Shadowlands break through, I’ll lose them both.”

“Then you have little faith in her.” Still a snarl, but there was something sorrowing in it. “Neve takes to shadows better than you think.”

Her lips peeled back from her teeth at that warmth in his voice again. Red closed her hand to a fist, jerked it sideways.

The light wrapped around Solmir’s hands swept him in the direction Red willed it, bashing his head against a fallen rock from the ceiling. He fell next to Kiri and lay still.

Red’s glow bathed the dungeon, though already the pain was starting, the roots pulling her toward the Wilderwood. The forest reeled her back like the roots in her body were a kite string. More dust spilled from the ceiling, the sound of breaking rock a discordant symphony.

Slumped against the wall, Arick looked half a corpse. His eyes were hollows, cheekbones knife-sharp. He winced away, like she hurt his eyes.

Red thrust out her hand. “Come with me!”

A stone fell from the ceiling and should have hit him; instead, it fell to the floor, like Arick was formed of smoke, like he’d become the shadow.

Arick shook his head. “I can’t, Red.” A tear slid down his cheek, cleared it of dirt. “I’m tied to him. I can’t leave.”

“Please.” She reached through the bars like she could hold his bloody hand, knowing it was fruitless, begging anyway. “Please.”

“Go, Red.” Another fall of rock, another rain of dust. “You have to go!”

Sobbing against pain of two kinds, Red bent her fingers again. Grass roots wrapped around the bars, made impossibly strong by the magic of the Wilderwood. They split, rending from stone with an awful tearing sound, and she climbed through, squeezing between the wall and the already-fallen rocks on bare, bleeding feet.

Neve. She had to find Neve. Red closed her eyes, pelting blindly down the corridor as if the golden glow of the roots could guide her toward her sister. Pain lanced every limb, but she gritted her teeth against it. A grate up ahead filtered starlight onto the stone floor; Red scrambled through, leaking green-threaded blood from her unbroken hand, the other still a mess of agony at the end of her wrist. She emerged on an empty alley next to the palace walls, and tried to rush forward, searching for a gate, a way in.

A scream ripped from her mouth as the roots tightened around her bones, pulling her back in the opposite direction. Red strained against it, her pleading audible now. “Please, I have to at least tell her goodbye, please . . .”

The Wilderwood didn’t answer, not in words. But she could feel its apology, feel it in the gentling of the vines around her spine, the bloom along her rib cage. Growing, and pulling her inexorably away.

Still, she struggled forward. Her vision blackened, and she fell to her knees on the cobblestones, a harsh sob in her throat. With as much care as they could, the sentinels reached their roots into her, curling around her organs, calling her back home.

Home.

Neve wasn’t dead. Solmir claimed she was safe, and though she loathed the softness with which he said her sister’s name, she believed him. Believed that he wouldn’t hurt her, that he’d protect her, in his own twisted way.

And Red would know if Neve was dead.

Her head hung low. Red released one more wrenching sob. Then she turned and ran toward the Wilderwood.