For the Wolf (The Wilderwood Books Book 1)

The noise at the door didn’t sound like a knock.

Red looked up from her book, frowning. It was late into the night— as best she could tell, anyway. She’d eaten hours ago with Fife and Lyra, apples and hunks of hard cheese and coarse bread. After they’d returned to the Keep, Eammon had disappeared up the stairs, presumably to his room, and she hadn’t seen him since.

She’d told Lyra about his wounds, but the other woman didn’t seem overly concerned. “Eammon is used to bleeding,” she’d said, slicing an apple. “He knows how to take care of himself.”

“Could you heal him? If he needed it?”

“Not in the way you’re thinking. Fife and I aren’t connected enough to the forest for that.” A delicate brow arched. “Healing is only between you two.”

That’d sent Red into silence for the remainder of the meal. She hadn’t eaten much, and as she drifted back to her room, she kept reaching up to touch the place on her cheek the Wolf had healed.

Now, hours past dinner, there was another sound at the door. Still not a knock— more like something sliding against the wood, the slow scratch of a nail.

When she and Neve were small, they’d play at trying to frighten each other. Red would hide in the curtains to jump out at her unsuspecting twin, but Neve preferred more subtlety. Once, she’d scratched against the foot of her bed for an hour, frightening Red so much she called for the nursemaid. That’s what this noise sounded like— someone scratching.

Thinking of Neve made her heart contract. She slipped a finger between the pages of her book. “Hello?”

No answer. Briefly, Red thought of Eammon, slumped against her doorway in a blood-caked shirt, finally willing to accept her healing.

Improbable. But still, she cursed, rising to wrench open the door.

The hall was empty, the light through the distant solarium window illuminating only the curls of leaves, the edges of thorns. Even when the sky was lavender, the corridor was unsettling; in the deep violet of a forest-muddled night, it nearly seethed unease.

Red swallowed, stepping back toward her threshold, reaching behind her to retreat to her room. But instead of the open space of her doorway, her hand brushed along a smooth, unfamiliar surface next to it. Slowly, Red looked back over her shoulder.

White bark, stretching spindly fingers up into the gloom. A sentinel.

More scattered through the ruined hallway, easy to spot now that she’d seen the first, tall and pale as picked-clean bones. They hadn’t been there when she came back from dinner. These were new saplings, the harbingers of new breaches into the Shadowlands. How many had opened, in the mere hours between then and now?

Not evil, she’d been reassured, not dangerous on their own, but wanting her blood with consequences Eammon was determined to keep her from. Inhuman and wild, not good or bad, existing outside of the binaries she understood. His warning from earlier rang in her head—the Wilderwood is restless, and every time it tastes your blood, it seems to get worse.

It’d tasted her blood today, drunk it long and deep. Tried to do more before the Wolf stopped it. What she’d told him after, about the forest being upset with them, seemed to ring even more true under the heavy regard of the saplings in the corridor.

Red backed away from the white tree like it was a wild animal, deft and cautious. But the sentinels weren’t the only new growth in the Keep— two steps, and her heel caught on a tangle of new-sprouted thorns. Slicing pain drove her teeth together as one drew a bloody line over her ankle.

Half a second of stillness, of expectant silence. “Oh, Kings.”

The forest erupted.

The window in her room spiderwebbed, cracked like a starburst, vines slithering through the broken pane. They wrapped the walls in seconds, crushing the posters of the bed, curling vise-like around the wardrobe. Thorns sprang sharp and reaching from the ground, leaves stretching like straining fingers. The sounds of rush and ruin collected, became a bellow, and the Wilderwood lunged.

Moss lumped up to trip her, vines lashed for her feet. A thicket burst from the floor, filled with sharp branches; one slashed across her arm, and where her blood splattered, the forest soaked it up like water to parched ground.

Her first instinct was to careen down the hall, but then Red remembered her cloak, still in the wardrobe now wrapped in vines in her room. Her tattered, threadbare cloak, the one Neve had draped over her shoulders. A symbol of a sacrifice she’d somehow outlived.

Damn if the Wilderwood was taking that from her.

Teeth bared, Red ran through her open door, dodging reaching branches and curling leaves. She tore at the vines with her bare hands, ripping them away— the Wilderwood made a thin, screeching sound, terribly like a scream. Wrenching open the warped and broken wardrobe, Red tugged out the still-dirty crimson fabric of the cloak, balling it against her chest and jumping the threshold just before the lintel cracked, collapsing the room behind her.

The Wilderwood howled as Red pelted around the corner. She felt it in her bones as much as heard it in her ears, caught and amplified by the piece of its magic coiled in her middle.

You begin and begin, yet never see it finished!

One of the bushes by the corner withered instantly, leaves dropping all at once as the twigs curled inward in a death throe. The Wilderwood paying its price for speech.

Stone rained from the ceiling of the corridor, littered the floor as vines and roots rioted through and broke it apart. Red clasped her arms over her head and leapt to huddle under the solarium light, cloak falling next to her on the floor.

“Red!”

The stairs shuddered as Eammon thundered down them, bare-chested, hair unbound. He glared at the advancing forest with a snarl on his lips, hands arched into claws and tendons tight on his neck.

The Wilderwood’s shriek was deafening, a cascade of sapling and thorn reaching for her on the floor. Eammon jumped down the rest of the stairs, almost lost his balance, landed before her in a wild-haired crouch. He came up on one knee, hands outstretched, every muscle in his body strained.

Fear brought a strange sort of clarity, and Red’s eyes went straight to Eammon’s bare arm, to what she knew would be there. A Bargainer’s Mark, larger and more intricate than hers. Tendrils twisted off the band of roots, spiraling beneath his skin in delicate patterns, stretching down to the center of his forearm, up past his elbow.

Already he called up magic, and the changes it wrought came swiftly— the veins in his hands ran green, not just his wrists, but his neck, too, running down the curvature of his shoulders. Bands of bark edged through the skin of his forearms, from wristbone to where the tendrils of his Mark began. He grew taller, his hair longer, a glimpse of ivy leaves when it shifted over his back.

The Wolf and the Wilderwood, tangling, blurring, fighting for dominance. Stopping the forest’s advance was a battle too intimate to be won with blood.

Eammon lifted his green-veined hands toward the corridor. Then his fingers curled to fists, as if taking hold of something, and he jerked them back.

A boom, a compression of air. It reminded her of that first night, when she’d clamped down on all her own power and sliced it off, just on a larger scale. He’d pulled the Wilderwood in, let his internal balance tip, then lashed all that power down. The forest had no choice but to obey.

The Wilderwood gave one more howl that faded slowly into normal forest sounds— twigs snapping, branches stretching, then silence. Eammon shuddered, dropping to brace on knees and elbows. Slowly, slowly, his veins ran from bright green to blue. The bark on his forearms slipped under his skin, though a rough band remained right around his wrist, like a bracelet. The heave of his bare back perfectly matched the slow sway of settling leaves.

When he finally looked back at her, hair stuck to his forehead by sweat, the whites of his eyes were spiderwebbed with green, a halo of it around his irises.

The encroaching forest sliced off right where the hallway branched, as if by some giant scythe. Cut roots twitched feebly on the moss like dying beetles, their movements synced to the rhythms of Eammon’s breath. Five sentinels stood just inside the edge of the corridor, a wall of bone-white trees.

Red and the Wolf crouched on the ground for a moment, two pairs of shoulders shaking, two pairs of wild eyes surveying a hall lost to a forest. Eammon’s gaze dropped to the cloak puddled by her knees, puzzlement creasing his brow when his eyes rose back to her face.

Fife skidded out from the dining room, still fully dressed. His eyes widened, mouth working a string of curses. “Kings. Shadows damn us.”

Lyra ran from beneath the broken arch, stopping short and clapping a hand over her mouth. Behind her palm, her jaw worked, but all that came out was “Oh.”

Eammon regained composure before Red did, standing on shaking legs. She noticed he hadn’t lost all the height magic gave him, not this time, though the rest of the changes were slowly leaking away. The green leached out of his eyes, and the last of the bark-vambraces slipped beneath his skin as he pushed his hair back from his forehead.

“What happened?” Fife looked from the forest to Eammon, taking in his slightly increased height with nothing more than a worried swallow and the flicker of a gaze at Lyra. “I checked the one in the corridor this morning. No shadow-rot.”

“I don’t think it had anything to do with shadow-rot.” A slight echo in Eammon’s voice, but it faded before he’d finished speaking. Bandages covered the wounds on his stomach, and new green-threaded blood seeped slowly through the fabric. He looked to Red, then away, rubbing between his now-only-amber eyes with thumb and forefinger. “It’s getting worse,” he murmured. “It’s never been like this.”

Lyra glanced at Fife, worry in the line of her mouth. Neither of them spoke.

Red let herself be helped up by Fife’s good hand. “Are you hurt?” he asked brusquely.

She shook her head.

Concern twisted the elfin angles of Lyra’s face, lips pursed as her eyes flickered over Eammon. Containing the Wilderwood’s magic had given him only about an inch more in height, but it still hadn’t gone away, a fact that seemed to unnerve her. “There’s a linen closet somewhere,” she said finally, turning to Red. “We can make a pallet in my room—”

“Neither of you is sleeping on the floor.” Eammon still looked at the corridor, at the ruin the forest had made it. A tremor went through his hand; he closed it to a fist.

“There are four of us and three beds. Someone will have to.”

“And it will be me.” Eammon didn’t meet anyone’s eyes as he turned toward the stairs. “She can have my bed. I’ll sleep in the hall.”

His tone brooked no argument. Lyra’s lips quirked, gaze flicking from Eammon’s retreating back to Fife’s face in an unspoken conversation. “Well. Pleasant dreams, I guess.”

“That seems awfully optimistic,” Fife muttered, but he was abruptly silenced by Lyra’s elbow in his ribs.

Eammon was halfway up the stairs and hadn’t looked back once. With a deep breath, Red placed her foot on the bottom step. The moss that had grown into a wall to keep her away now smoothed out in welcome.

Mouth set in a determined line, Red balled her cloak in her arms and followed the Wolf.