For the Wolf by Hannah F. Whitten

Chapter Thirty-Three

Red’s knees skimmed over the dead grass of a late Valleydan autumn as Solmir wrenched her forward. Her chest felt like a broken cage, roots reaching for home— if she looked down, surely she’d see branches breaking through her skin, rimed with viscera, her body made a sepulcher. An awful keening echoed in her head, and she didn’t know where it came from, in too much pain to know if her mouth was open or her vocal cords in use.

Vines tried for her ankles, for Solmir’s, but they were weak and skittering, made brittle by a dying forest. Branches clustered, reached as far as they could before snapping back like a spent bowstring. “Red!” Eammon’s scream scoured his throat. “Red!”

Valdrek and Lear stopped in their careful prowling through the field, Eammon’s voice cracking through the still night air. Raffe broke into a run, disappearing into the twisted grove. Valdrek cut his hand at Lear, gesturing for him to follow the other man. As Lear disappeared between the trees, figures in white shimmered into view, like they’d been hidden in the center of the grove until this moment.

Priestesses. Five of them that Red could count, through the strange, shivery clarity that hovered above her pain. Something about the number seemed portentous, awful in a way she couldn’t quite put together yet.

She thrashed in Solmir’s grip, but he held on vise-tight. Kiri walked beside them, smooth and unhurried, hands tucked primly into her sleeves.

A strained roar— Eammon, lurching across the Wilderwood’s border, pain blanching his face and raising tendons in his neck. His dagger slashed out, but Solmir jerked easily away. Kiri stepped aside with a small sound of distaste, as if Eammon was a minor inconvenience, a gnat that needed swatting.

Another lunge, but something snapped Eammon back, as if he’d hit an invisible wall. His neck twisted toward his shoulder, so far it looked like it might break, and Red’s scream had nothing to do with the way Solmir threw her aside like a cloak he’d grown tired of wearing.

“It’s to be this, then?” He sounded nearly weary. “Pointless heroics?”

Teeth bared, Eammon launched at him. One punch landed on the King’s chin, the grind of Solmir’s jaw audible as his head snapped up. The dagger in Eammon’s fist flipped sideways in his grip, then slashed out, opened Solmir’s arm.

But Solmir just stood there. Like he was waiting.

Eammon tried to lash out again, when a spasm racked through his whole body. His spine locked, bent almost backward. Strained silence, like he was holding it back, then an agonized scream burst from behind his teeth.

Vines slithered from the Wilderwood and hooked around Eammon’s arms, his ankles, his boots leaving runnels in the dirt as they dragged him backward. He called Red’s name through a throat that sounded razored, fought himself forward, but the Wilderwood pulled his thrashing body back and back and back, toward the border of the ruined forest.

Something almost like pity lit Solmir’s face. “It’s too tangled in you to let you go,” he said quietly. “The Wilderwood protects itself first.”

“Like what happened to my mother?” Eammon snarled, straining against the border and the Wilderwood’s hold. Vines wound around his legs, branches bent like fingers on his shoulders. Gentle, but inescapable. “When she tried to open the Shadowlands for you?”

Solmir’s eyes were unreadable. “Exactly.”

Kiri was halfway to the twisted grove now, a smear of white against the night-colors of the field. Something glittered in her hand. A dagger.

And another glint of silver, closer— Valdrek. Slowly, he crept toward the Wilderwood, keeping low to the dark ground between the twisted grove and the edge of the forest. His sword was drawn and at the ready, his eyes trained on Solmir’s back.

Satisfied that Eammon was held, Solmir turned to Red, eyes admonishing. “Things would’ve been over and done by now if it weren’t for you.” Solmir shook his head. His long hair shifted in the night breeze, and the moonlight caught the raised ridges of small scars on his brow, equidistant and deliberate looking. “If you’d stayed in Valleyda, he would’ve given up.”

“He wouldn’t.” Red tried to push up from the ground, but her body wouldn’t obey. “He didn’t give up before me. He wouldn’t give up after.”

His expression was one she hadn’t seen him wear before, no longer anger or boredom or contempt. It was almost sorrow, and she hated him for it.

Something shot past his head— Lyra’s tor. She and Fife had joined Eammon at the edge of the Wilderwood, as unable to leave it as he was. Lyra’s face was a snarl, her teeth bared.

“That was foolish.” Solmir sighed. “Once the Kings arrive, you’ll want a weapon.”

The Kings. Five of them, including Solmir. Five priestesses in the grove. And Kiri, headed toward them with a knife in her fist.

“Keep her from killing them!” Red yelled to whoever would listen, craning her head back just in time to see Kiri slip between the inverted trees. “You have to keep her from killing them!”

Her voice, hoarse from pain, might as well have been a whisper. But still, it was enough to make Solmir turn, enough to make his eyes scan the tall grass. Enough to make him notice Valdrek, crouched and waiting for an opening.

Valdrek didn’t hesitate, once he knew he was caught. The silver rings in his hair glinted as he leapt, roaring, swinging wildly.

Almost casually, Solmir lifted his dagger and punched the hilt against Valdrek’s temple.

Eammon lunged against the Wilderwood, shouting, but it held him fast. Red tried to get up, tried to struggle toward Valdrek, but something that felt like a wall of ice slammed her back down.

Tears trailed into her hair, her back pressed flat to the ground. It was the same cold Kiri had attacked her with in Valleyda, that made her organs feel iced and her throat rimed in frost, but stronger and heavier, born of years in darkness rather than blood on branches— Shadowlands magic, all that power twisted up into a prison, leaching into him as he served his sentence. The same magic he’d tried to use against her in the dungeon, and this time she wasn’t full enough of golden light to fight it back.

Pain still roared through her, agonizing, contorting her muscles as the Wilderwood fell and fell. She cried out, though her mouth tried to clamp around it.

“It’s not so tangled in her as it is in you.” Solmir spoke casually, voice pitched to carry over the yards between him and Eammon as if it was a tavern table. “The forest in your Lady is new, easy to uproot. You know how to fix this. How to stop her pain.”

“No!” Red arched up off the ground, nearly in half, craning so her eyes could meet Eammon’s. “No.”

A rumble, a deep reverberation that make her teeth clatter together. Red tried to aim her blurry eyes toward the grove, just enough to make out a white-robed figure falling to the ground, trailing scarlet.

The first priestess, dead. Four to go.

“She’ll die if you don’t.” Solmir gestured toward the grove behind them, the distant horror happening on its roots. As he did, another priestess fell.

Two down.

“Bringing them through— what they’ve become— will kill the Wilderwood and everything attached to it. It’s been part of you too long, Eammon. There’s no way for you to escape it.” Solmir’s hand touched Red’s hair, lightly, and she flinched away as much as she could, when her body was a battleground for the rip of the roots and the cold weight of shadowed magic. “But she can.”

Eammon’s chest heaved. His eyes shone above the agonized rictus of his mouth. Fife had pulled Lyra away, had an arm wrapped around her shoulders as they stood and watched in horrified, helpless silence.

“Why?” Eammon’s voice sounded shredded. “Why bring the rest of them through? They brought you down with them! They’re the reason for all of it!”

Solmir’s eyes were like chips of ice. For a moment, his mouth worked, like he might actually offer an explanation. But then he shook his head, almost defeated. “Because it’s inevitable. Their return is inevitable.” A pause, his voice growing serrated edges. “And the longer they have to prepare, the worse it will be.”

Another bone-rattling rumble, shaking the earth. Then another, louder.

Four down.

Across the gulf of the border, Eammon’s eyes bored into hers, a promise burning in amber and green. I’d let the world burn before I hurt you.

She read his intention, like she could read everything with Eammon. Red set her teeth, snarled at him. “No—”

Eammon’s head wrenched to the side as he pulled the Wilderwood out of her, as the forest within her body uprooted. He roared agony at the sky, and she realized that wasn’t the whole of it, what he’d said about the world burning.

He may let the world burn, but he’d let himself burn with it.

Red screamed, digging her fingers in the dirt. “Give them back! Damn you, give them back!”

The Wilderwood didn’t listen. She coughed up bloody leaves, knots of roots. Desperately, she thought of stuffing them in her mouth and swallowing them back down, but it was useless. She was nothing but human again, nothing but bone and organ and blood.

The branches and roots and vines around Eammon tensed once, like a closing fist, then opened. A spasm, bending his spine, and Eammon fell to his knees, shuddering. Tendons stood out like tree roots in his neck, his shoulders, visible through the ripped fabric of his shirt. His fingers clawed into the ground as golden light, dim but visible, pulsed through his veins.

“Give up, Eammon,” Solmir muttered, not paying attention to Red at all. This was between the King and the Wolf. “Give up.”

And after a moment, the Wolf lay still.

The world froze, poised on a knife’s edge. Fife and Lyra stood like statues, tear tracks gleaming on Lyra’s cheeks.

A moment of stillness.

A choice, made.

A surge.

The forest rose up behind Eammon like a wave, a cresting tide of root and branch and vine and thorn. The sentinels arched toward him, stretching sharp white fingers. They pierced his skin and flowed inward, turning to light, making star-tracks of his veins, gold-to-green. The Wolf was corpse-still, but the things that made the Wilderwood pumped into him like rain to a river. It came and came, a wave breaking against his back, a forest seeping back to seed.

Then Eammon stood.

He pulled himself to his full height, then higher, topping seven feet, eight. His eyes changed as his shadow grew longer on the ground, the whites around his amber irises turning to pure, bright emerald. Ivy wreathed his wrists, a garland of it growing in his too-long black hair as swirls of bark armored his arms, as branches like antlers grew from his forehead.

All those small changes— the splinters the Wilderwood left when he used its magic alone, the pieces of himself he’d given up, everything he’d tried to stop by offering his blood— it was all just a ghost of this.

A forest made a man made a god.

Eammon— what had been Eammon— turned his strange god-eyes to Red, cowering in the dirt, and she understood. He’d finally given up. Given up on being man and forest, given up on the impossible binary of bone and branch. He’d pulled all of it into him, the shining network of the Wilderwood crowding out everything of who he’d been before.

This time, he’d let it take him over. He’d given himself up, to save her. And those inhuman eyes held nothing of the man she loved.

Red’s sob tasted like blood.

A low, rueful laugh rolled from Solmir’s mouth. “Wolves and their sacrifices.”

A final crack, like the earth itself sundered. In her tear-blurred vision, Red saw the fifth priestess fall, Kiri’s knife glinting blood-tinged light before she darted into the grove. At the same moment, Lear threw himself out from between the trees, landing in an unmoving huddle. Shadows burst from the ground around the twisted sentinels, a ring of writhing darkness.

Solmir made that strange shape with his hand again. The shadows rolled over the ground like a black tide, flocked to him like birds, making mad skittering noises. They built Solmir up, made him taller, surrounded him in darkness.

Grinning, seething shadows, he beckoned.

And the Wilderwood—Eammon— charged forward with a roar.