For the Wolf (The Wilderwood Books Book 1)

It was like looking through a window. No, not quite— like being trapped in a window, folded into the glass. She tried to move and couldn’t, couldn’t sense her limbs at all. Her awareness was stretched thin, diffused and refracted into mirror-light.

Neve stood in the Shrine, behind the statue of Gaya. Her figure was smudged, but still Red could see she was thinner than before, her cheeks gaunt. A bandage wrapped around her left hand.

Red tried to scream for her, forgetting it would be fruitless, that this mirror was one-way and only for seeing. Distantly, she felt the work of vocal cords, but there was no sound, nothing.

Still, her shout seemed to spark something, like her desire strengthened the magic that made the mirror. Gradually, Neve’s image cleared, grew solid.

“We’ve been doing this for a month now, and she hasn’t returned.” Her sister was turned to the side, brows drawn down, dark eyes narrowed. Her lip disappeared between her teeth, an anxious tell she and Red shared. “Why hasn’t she escaped?”

Red couldn’t make out whomever Neve spoke to— they were blurred, shadowed. This mirror was built to show the First Daughter, and it did no more than that.

“It will take time.” The voice came muffled, barely clear enough to hear. “Great things often do. Patience, Neverah.”

“Is there no way to hurry things along?” Neve’s arms crossed over her thin chest. When her head lifted, firelight caught on the silver circlet in her hair. More ornate than the one she usually wore. Familiar in a way that tugged at the back of Red’s mind, that seemed somehow off.

“Perhaps.”

“Tell me what we need, Kiri.” Neve was no stranger to a commanding tone, but there was some new strength in it now. The voice of someone who knew beyond a doubt she’d be obeyed. “Tell me what we need, and I will make sure it happens.”

The pause stretched uncomfortably long. The line of Neve’s jaw tremored, once. She reached up and touched the circlet, adjusting it on her brow.

“I suppose you can do that with no restraint now, can’t you?” There was something sly in the muffled voice. Something that pricked at the entire length of Red’s spine. “Now that Isla is dead. Now that you are Queen.”

Queen.

Even in her strange and suspended consciousness, Red felt the air leave her lungs, felt the breathy half-cry crawl its way up her throat.

In the mirror, Neve flinched, just barely.

Red felt Eammon’s hands on her shoulders, knew he’d heard her, sensed something was wrong. His touch drew her from the vision, smoke and silver-bright eclipsing Neve’s image, but not before she heard one last thing from that muffled voice.

“You could always offer more blood.”

Then— the sharp bite of floor into her knees, the paper-and-coffee scent of Eammon bent over her. “Red?” His voice was calm but laced with barely leashed panic. “Red, what’s wrong?”

“My mother is dead,” she murmured, eyes wide. “My mother is dead.”

Steam curled from the rapidly cooling mug of tea on the desk. Red couldn’t quite summon the energy to reach for it. She sat on the bed, arms looped around her knees, and watched the steam twist silently into the air. The book of poems sat next to it. She hadn’t realized she’d brought it with her from the tower until Eammon gently took it from her hands and laid it aside.

The murmurs at the bottom of the stairs were barely hidden by the pop of flames in the grate. “Are we sure it was real?” Lyra asked. “That mirror is ancient.”

“She saw her sister.” Eammon’s voice. “That’s what it was built for.”

“But its power is from the Wilderwood.” This from Fife, wary. “And things with the Wilderwood aren’t going well lately. How can you be sure it showed the truth?”

“I just know, Fife.” She could almost see Eammon rubbing at his dark-shrouded eyes. Then a sharp, brittle laugh. “Her mother is dead, and her sister is alone, and she’s in this shadows-damned forest when she has no reason to be.”

“No reason other than to help you,” Fife said.

Silence from Eammon.

When Lyra spoke, it was hushed. “Eammon, you aren’t thinking . . .”

“If she asked,” Eammon said, “I wouldn’t tell her no.” Heavy silence, just for a moment. Then, quiet: “I should’ve made her go when she first arrived. The Wilderwood has no hold on her, not enough to keep her here. Not like the others.”

There was no surprise in the resulting pause. Fife and Lyra had known something was different about Red, known it from that first day.

“So her being here doesn’t do much, anyway,” Fife murmured.

The low, rough sound of Eammon’s sigh. “No.”

Red squeezed her eyes shut.

Footsteps on the stairs. Eammon appeared, hair tangled around his shoulders. He frowned. “You’re still awake.”

“Can’t sleep.” Red reached over to the desk, took the now-lukewarm mug. The tea smelled pleasant, all spice and clove, and when she took a sip it warmed her chest.

Eammon held another glass in his hand, half filled with deep burgundy. He set it where the mug had been. “In case you need something stronger than tea.” A brief smile flickered at the corner of his mouth. “Lyra told me to warn you it’s not Meducian. Valdrek makes his own wine at the Edge, and I’m half convinced he waters it down before selling it to me.”

She tried to answer his smile, but her lips barely lifted.

Gingerly, Eammon sat in the chair before the desk, hands clasped between his knees. The quiet hung thick in the air, broken only by the crackle of flame, but it was comfortable.

Red drained the tea, stared into the dregs. “Now we know the mirror works. I suppose that’s a good thing.”

“I’m so sorry, Red.” He said it to the floor, like he didn’t think eye contact would be welcome. “Did she look . . . was your sister . . .”

“She looked tired. Tired and . . . and sad.” Red tried to shrug, but the movement was stilted. “I don’t know if Neve is ready to be Queen. To take our mother’s place.”

“I don’t think we’re ever ready to take on what our parents leave us.” Eammon studied his knotted hands. “The places left rarely fit.”

White knuckles belied his nonchalance, translating his statement into a language they both knew. His parents’ shadows, cast long and dark. The legacy of a Wolf and a Second Daughter neither of them had chosen.

“I’m more worried about Neve than I am sad about my mother.” A confession, shame-scraped. “How awful is that?”

“Not awful. Grief is strange.”

Red’s relationship with Isla was a fraught and layered thing, not easily explained. But her absence, the gaping place left, made her want to try. The only absolution she could give her. “We . . . my mother and I . . . we were never close.”

His knuckles blanched, hands still clasped between his knees. “Because of . . .” One hand came free, waved in the space between them.

“Not just that.” Red shook her head. “She wasn’t overly close with Neve, either, though I think she wanted to be.” She studied the loose threads in the blanket, both of them keeping their eyes carefully from the other. “She needed an heir. She got two daughters in the bargain, and one she couldn’t keep. It was easier for her to pretend I didn’t exist. Especially after . . .” She trailed off, but she didn’t really need an ending. The shard of the Wilderwood’s magic in her center bloomed upward, the vague taste of earth on her tongue.

Eammon’s shoulders sank, like guilt was something physical. Her fingers itched to settle on them, to smooth them back to straightness. To run them into his hair and make them both think of other things.

Red clenched her mug instead. She was well acquainted with guilt, and how it took more than warm hands or even warm mouths to banish it.

Guilt. It kept circling back to that.

“I know you didn’t see everything that happened that night.” She shifted on the bed. “But did you see me?”

“No more than your hands. I just . . . sensed you.” A fall of dark hair hid his eyes; he pushed it back with a scarred knuckle. “I felt the Wilderwood rushing for something, though I didn’t know what, not at first. But once it touched you, I felt your pain. Your panic. It drowned out everything else.”

Her lips pressed bloodlessly together.

“I tried to stop it.” He braced his forearms on his thighs. “Clearly, I wasn’t as successful as I should’ve been. I couldn’t keep all of it from you. But even though the Wilderwood gave you a piece of its power, I thought, maybe, I could keep you from being called. If I kept the forest strong, maybe your Mark would never show up. Maybe the cycle could break.” He swallowed. “I wasn’t successful at that, either.”

Eammon had been trying to save her for years, pushing her away until he couldn’t anymore. Until the Wilderwood decided it would have its due, no matter how much of himself the Wolf gave up.

A deep breath, and Red sat up straight, dropping her knees to sit cross-legged on the threadbare coverlet. She’d never recounted the whole of what happened that night she and Neve ran to the Wilderwood, not to anyone. Their attackers were dead; Neve had blocked it out. The memory was a wound, and she’d covered it up, never letting it breathe, never letting it heal.

It hadn’t occurred to her before now that the memory wasn’t only her own— parts of it belonged to Eammon, too. Another shared hurt, another mirrored mark. A burden that might lessen if they bore it together.

“It was our sixteenth birthday.” Red spoke to the mattress, though she was painfully aware of Eammon’s puzzled eyes on her. If she looked at him, it might break the spell, break the cadence that made this a story and therefore easier to speak. “There was a ball.”

As if sensing what she needed, Eammon stayed silent. He sat still, waiting for her to go on, firelight playing over the angles of his face.

“It was . . . unpleasant. That was the first night I really noticed just how different Neve and I were. How different our lives would be.” She paused. “My mother barely spoke to me.”

Eammon’s fists tightened between his knees.

“After, Neve found me crying. She asked me what she could do. I told her nothing, unless she knew a way to get rid of the Wilderwood. So that’s what we tried.” Red snorted. “Everyone was half drunk, so stealing horses was far easier than it should’ve been. We ran them all the way to the border.”

The horses had lathered quickly, their breaths screaming in the cold night air. Red remembered thinking their northward flight hadn’t taken enough time. She’d wanted to run under the star-strewn sky with her sister forever.

“The matches Neve brought didn’t work,” she continued quietly. “The Wilderwood can’t be burned, we’d always heard that, but neither of us believed it until then. It scared her, I think, to see the proof of it— that the forest wasn’t just a forest, that it was something more. Neve probably would’ve left after that, and that would’ve been the end. But I found a stone.”

She’d picked up the rock, hurled it wildly between the trees. The sound it made wasn’t loud enough for her, just a muffled thud in the underbrush. So she’d screamed, and once she started, she couldn’t stop. Red had picked up rock after rock, throwing them blindly, getting closer and closer to the edge of the trees. She remembered how the hum pressed against her skin, vibrated in her bones. The forest allowing her closer when it wouldn’t let anyone else.

Neve found her own stone, threw it at the Wilderwood, getting as near to it as she could. Her screams joined Red’s, two lost girls on the edge of the world they knew, shrieking and throwing rocks because there was nothing else they could do, and they had to do something.

“One of the rocks sliced my palm,” Red said, the memory playing on the back of her eyelids like a shadow show. “And I tripped as I threw it. I tried to stop the fall with my cut hand, landed just inside the border.”

“And the Wilderwood came for you.” Eammon’s voice was rough and hushed, like he’d been silent for hours instead of minutes.

“And you stopped it,” Red added smoothly. She didn’t open her eyes; she knew it’d make her lose her nerve. But she felt Eammon look at her, felt his regard as heavy as an arm on her shoulder.

She paused for a moment before picking up the story again. “All that screaming attracted attention, and so had two girls on fine horses tearing down the road. I don’t know how long they lay in wait, how long they watched us. But they got Neve, after she pulled me away from the forest by my leg. Held a knife to her throat. And I . . .” She squeezed her eyes shut tighter. “I let it go.”

There’d been a moment of stillness, she remembered. A moment when the magic left splintered in her center had paused, nearly stunned, like vines stretched taut and sliced off. The veins in her wrists blazed verdant, traveling up her arms, through her chest, toward her heart. A bloom of golden light behind her eyes.

And her shard of splintered magic erupted.

A trunk had exploded through the ground and impaled one of the thieves, shooting out of his mouth covered in gore and viscera, spreading branches that broke bones. Vines slithered from the ground and ensnared another, pulling tight around his neck until his face bloated, turned purple, burst like a popped bubble.

The man holding Neve had stumbled backward, letting her fall to the ground in a dead faint. A root rose behind him, tripped him, and a thicket of thorns grew up in an instant. They’d ripped through his skin like paper, shooting out of his mouth, his eyes.

But the worst was Neve. She’d lain there, and thorns had sprouted from the ground around her, just one more body caught in the maelstrom Red had created. One more thing her chaotic forest magic might kill.

That was the first time Red cut off her power, a wrenching that felt like ripping her own spine from her skin. She’d cut it off, and fell to her knees, and screamed and screamed and screamed.

“I killed them.” Her voice was a quick monotone now, tripping over words in the rush to get them out. “I killed them all. I nearly killed Neve, but I cut it off in time.”

“That’s why you said you had to stay here,” Eammon said, fitting the pieces together. “When I tried to make you go.”

Red nodded. She couldn’t speak on that anymore, couldn’t think of it too hard or the pain and guilt might close her throat. “After I made it stop, the forest . . . retracted. The vines and trees and thorns all sank back into the ground, and only the bodies were left.” Bodies in pools of blood, so much dead meat, and her throat itched with a scream even now. A shudder started in her shoulders, and it didn’t stop. “Neve fainted before she saw anything. She doesn’t remember what I did. And when the guards finally arrived— hours later, it felt like— I told them the thieves had all turned on one another. But it was me. All of it was me.”

Her voice dwindled, growing quieter and quieter, until the last words were a whisper. She didn’t realize she was crying until she tasted salt, and she didn’t realize Eammon had come to sit next to her until his rough palms cupped her face.

His thumbs brushed over her cheeks, obscuring tear tracks. Slowly, her shuddering faded, faded until she was still. When his hands dropped, she had to fight not to reach for them.

“You saved her.” Eammon’s voice was low, earnest. “None of it was your fault.”

“I don’t even think of it in terms of fault anymore.” Red hunched over her crossed arms. “It happened. I have to live with it.” Her eyes flickered toward him. “And before you taught me how to control this power, how to use it, I had to live with the fear that I might do it again.”

Eammon’s face was unreadable. “You’ll go back now, then?” It was quiet, like he was afraid to give it too much sound. “Now that you know you can control it?”

“Of course not.” Nearly sharp, incredulous he’d even ask. “You need me here.”

His eyes widened, just by a fraction, and that slice of a second was enough for Red to wish the words were a physical thing she could stuff back in her mouth and swallow down.

But Eammon didn’t refute her.

Red sighed, pushing her hair away from her face. “So I’m not sad about my mother’s death, and I’m a murderer.” She gave him the shaky edge of a smile, shattering before she could make it whole. “Two terrible confessions in one night.”

“Nothing about you is terrible,” Eammon murmured. “I’ve told you that before. You should believe it.”

The moment seemed to stretch as they sat there, close and warm on one bed. Then Eammon stood gracelessly, running a hand through his hair. He picked up the glass of wine on the desk and took a sip before handing it to Red. “Fife is attempting soup. Do you want some?”

“I think I just want to sleep.”

Eammon nodded, headed to the staircase. “Good night, then.”

“You have to sleep, too.”

He stopped, glanced over his shoulder with a raised brow.

Red took a swallow of wine. “No more all-nighters,” she said firmly. “You’re exhausted, Eammon.”

“I promise I will sleep.”

“Here. With at least a proper blanket. Not slumped over a table in the library.”

The heavy brow climbed higher, the corner of his lip following. “Any other orders, Lady Wolf?”

Her cheeks flushed, but Red angled up her chin. “Not at present, Warden.”

Eammon inclined his head in mock deference. Then he disappeared down the stairs.

Though not Meducian and certainly watered, she finished the wine all the same. Red settled into bed, movements stirring wafts of old books, fallen leaves.

But when she closed her eyes, she thought of Arick.

Arick, who was now the Consort Elect to the Queen, not just the First Daughter. Arick, passionate and brash, whose brain was the last organ he made decisions with.

No part of her was jealous, not anymore. Never truly had been— their relationship was one built of friendship and convenience and aching loneliness, and she knew it wouldn’t last. The complicated feelings she’d had for him were stars in a noon-bright sky, memories drowned in new light.

But if her feelings for Arick were faded shadows, her feelings for Eammon were the pitch black of a room she hadn’t had the courage to explore. The door was cracked, but if you didn’t look too closely, you didn’t have to think about what waited inside.

Slowly, the crackle of the fire lulled her to sleep, thinking of shadows and cracked-open doors.