For the Wolf (The Wilderwood Books Book 1)

Sleep came only in fragments. By the time sunrise bled into the sky, Red stood by the window, tangling her fingers together and staring out at the Shrine.

Her room faced the interior gardens, an expanse of carefully maintained trees and flowers, specially bred for their hardiness against the cold. The Shrine was tucked into the back corner, barely visible beneath a blooming arbor. Sunrise caught the edge of the arched stone and painted it muted gold.

The Order stood scattered among the greenery, crowding the flowers, a sea of white robes and piety. Every priestess that called Valleyda home, plus all who had traveled, from the Rylt across the sea and Karsecka at the southern tip of the continent and everywhere in between. Each Temple had a white tree shard, a small splinter of the Wilderwood to pray to, but it was a special honor to trek to the Valleydan Temple, where they had a veritable grove of them. A privilege, to pray among the bone-white branches that made the prison of the Kings and beseech their return.

But this morning, none of the priestesses stepped inside the Shrine. The only person permitted to pray among the white branches today was Red.

The glass fogged with her breath. Absently, Red drew a finger through the cloud. Their nursemaids had done that long ago, illustrating stories on the windowpane. Stories of the Wilderwood as it was before the creation of the Shadowlands, when all the magic of the world was locked within it to make a prison for the god-like creatures that had reigned in terror.

Before, the forest had been a place of eternal summer, a spot of solace in a world ruled by violence. According to the nursemaids, it’d even been capable of granting boons to those who left sacrifices within its borders— bundled hair, lost teeth, paper dotted with blood. Magic had run freely in that world, available to anyone who could learn to use it.

But once the Five Kings bargained with the forest to bind away the monstrous gods— to create the Shadowlands as their prison— all that magic was gone, pulled into the Wilderwood to accomplish its monumental task.

But the forest could still bargain, even then— it bargained with Ciaran and Gaya, the original Wolf and Second Daughter. In Year One of the Binding, the same year the monsters were locked away, they’d asked the Wilderwood for shelter from Gaya’s father, Valchior, and her betrothed, Solmir— two of the fabled Five Kings. The Wilderwood granted Gaya and Ciaran’s request, giving them a place to hide, a place to be together forever. It bound them into its borders and made them something more than human.

That’s where the nursemaids stopped. They didn’t talk about how the Kings entered the Wilderwood again, fifty years after the Binding, and never returned. They didn’t talk about Ciaran bringing Gaya’s dead body to the edge of the woods, a century and a half after the Kings disappeared.

Red still knew the tale. She’d read it hundreds of times, both in books counted as holy and in those of lesser import. Every version of it she could find. Though some of the details differed, the broad strokes remained. Ciaran, bringing Gaya to the Wilderwood’s border. Her body, half rotted, wound through with vines and tree roots as if she’d been tangled in the very foundations of the forest. His words to those who saw him, a few unimportant northern villagers who suddenly found themselves part of religious history.

Send the next.

And so, a love story turned to horror, as surely as eternal summer faded to withered fall.

Red drew her hand away as the edges of her foggy canvas faded. The trails her fingers left looked like claw marks.

A knock at the door, nearly tentative. Red leaned her forehead against the window. “A moment.”

One breath, deep and cold, then Red stood up. Her nightgown stuck to the chilled sweat on her shoulder blades as she tugged it off. Almost unconsciously, her eyes strayed to the skin above her elbow. Still unmarked, and she had to fight to keep hope from sinking teeth into her chest.

There was no account of what the Marks were supposed to look like, only that they appeared on the Second Daughter’s arm sometime in her nineteenth year, exerting an inexorable pull toward the north, toward the Wilderwood. Every morning since the year turned, she’d carefully inspected her skin, peering at each mole and freckle.

Another knock. Red glared at the closed door like the force of her ire could penetrate the wood. “Unless you want me to pray naked, you’ll give me a moment.”

No more knocking.

A wrinkled gown puddled by her feet. Red pulled it on and opened the door, not bothering to comb her hair.

Three priestesses stood silently in the corridor. All were vaguely recognizable, so they must be from the Valleydan Temple, not visitors. Maybe that was meant to be comforting.

If her disheveled appearance took the priestesses aback, they didn’t show it. They only inclined their heads, hands hidden in wide white sleeves, and led her down the hall, out into the cold, bright air.

The holy throng in the gardens stood stone-still, heads bowed, flanking the flower-decked entrance to the Shrine. Each priestess she passed made Red’s heart ratchet higher in her throat. She didn’t look at any of them, kept her gaze straight ahead as she ducked into the shadows beneath the arch, alone.

The first room of the Shrine was plain and square. A small table stocked with prayer candles stood by the door, the statue of Gaya tall and proud in the center of the room. At the statue’s feet, the white bark with its inscribed sentencing, a piece of the tree where Gaya and Ciaran had made their bargain. Gaya’s sister, Tiernan, had helped the two of them escape, and she brought the bark back as proof that Solmir’s claim on Gaya was void.

Red frowned up at her predecessor. It was a deft bit of work, what made Gaya revered and the Wolf reviled, a delicate filling-in of unknown history. The Five Kings had disappeared in the Wolf’s territory, therefore he was to blame. No one quite knew what he was supposed to be accomplishing by trapping the Kings— more power, maybe. Perhaps he was just doing as monsters do, having become one himself as the forest he was tied to twisted and darkened. The Order said that Gaya had been killed trying to rescue the Kings from wherever Ciaran had hidden them, but there was really no way to know, was there? All they knew was that the Kings were gone, and Gaya was dead.

Stuttering scarlet prayer candles—scarlet for a sacrifice; I guess prayer counts— provided the only light, and it wasn’t enough to read by. But Red knew the words by heart.

The First Daughter is for the throne. The Second Daughter is for the Wolf. And the Wolves are for the Wilderwood.

The candlelight flickered over the carvings on the wall. Five figures to her right, vaguely masculine— the Five Kings. Valchior, Byriand, Malchrosite, Calryes, and Solmir. Three figures on the left-hand wall, carved with a more delicate hand. The Second Daughters— Kaldenore, Sayetha, Merra.

Red brushed her fingers over the blank space next to Merra’s rough outline. Someday, when she was nothing but bones in the forest, they’d carve her here.

A breeze filtered through the open stone door, ruffling the gauzy black veil behind Gaya’s statue. The second room of the Shrine. Red had been there only once before— a year ago, her nineteenth birthday, kneeling as the Order priestesses prayed that her Mark would appear quickly. She found little reason to linger in places of worship.

Still, a year hadn’t been enough to dim the memory of the white branches lining the walls, cuttings from Wilderwood trees cast in stone to stand upright. The pale, dead limbs never moved, but Red remembered the strange sense of them reaching for her, like ferns and growing things did when she couldn’t keep her splintered magic lashed down and tightly controlled. She’d tasted dirt the whole time the priestesses were praying.

Her fingers picked nervously at the wrinkled fabric of her skirt. She was supposed to enter the second room, supposed to spend this time readying herself to enter the Wilderwood, but the thought of being among those branches again made her blood run winter-cold.

“Red?”

A familiar figure stood in the doorway to the garden, outlined in morning glow against the Shrine’s gloom. Neve hurried toward her, a newly lit prayer candle guttering in her hand.

Confusion bloomed in Red’s chest, though it was chased with no small amount of relief. “How did you get in here?” She looked over Neve’s shoulder. “The priestesses—”

“I told them I wouldn’t enter the second room. They didn’t seem happy about it, but they let me through.” A tear broke from Neve’s lashes. She swiped it roughly away. “Red, you can’t do this. There’s no reason for it beyond words on shadow-damned bark.”

Red thought of riding headlong through the night, hair whipping, her sister at her side. She thought of thrown rocks and a fierceness that made her chest ache.

And then she thought of blood. Of violence. Of what coiled beneath her skin, a seed waiting to grow.

That was her reason. Not monsters, not words on bark. The only way to keep her sister safe was to leave her.

There were no words of comfort. Instead she pulled her twin forward, Neve’s forehead notching into her collarbone. Neither of them sobbed, but the silence was almost worse, broken only by hitched breathing.

“You have to trust me.” Red murmured it into her sister’s hair. “I know what I’m doing. This is how it has to be.”

“No.” Neve shook her head, black hair matting against Red’s cheek. “Red, I know . . . I know you blame yourself for what happened that night. But you couldn’t have known we were being followed—”

“Don’t.” Red squeezed her eyes shut. “Please don’t.”

Neve’s shoulders stiffened beneath Red’s arms, but she went quiet. Finally, she pulled back. “You’ll die. If you go to the Wolf, you’ll die.”

“You don’t know that.” Red swallowed, trying unsuccessfully to level the knot in her throat. “We don’t know what happened to the others.”

“We know what happened to Gaya.”

Red had no response for that.

“Clearly, you’re determined to go.” Neve tried to raise her chin, but it trembled too much. “And clearly, I can’t stop you.”

She turned on her heel toward the door, swept past the carved Five Kings and Second Daughters, past the guttering candles of useless prayers. More than one blew out in her wake.

Numbly, Red picked up a candle and a match from the small table. It took a few curses before the wick finally caught, singeing her fingers. The pain was nearly welcome, a bare thread of feeling weaving past the shell she’d built.

Red slammed her candle into the base of Gaya’s statue. Wax puddled, dripped down the edge of the inscribed bark.

“Shadows damn you,” she whispered, the only prayer she’d make here. “Shadows damn us all.”

Hours later, bathed and perfumed and veiled in crimson, Red was officially blessed as a sacrifice to the Wolf in the Wilderwood.

Courtiers lined the cavernous hall, all dressed in black. More people crowded outside, the citizens of the capital rubbing shoulders with villagers who’d traveled from far and wide for the chance to see a Second Daughter consecrated by the Order.

From Red’s vantage point on the dais at the front of the room, the audience looked like one shapeless mass, something made only of still limbs and eyes for staring.

The dais was circular, and Red sat cross-legged on a black stone altar in its center, surrounded by a ring of priestesses specially chosen for the honor from Temples all over the continent. All wore their traditional white robes with the addition of a white cloak, a deep hood pulled up to shadow their faces. They stood with their backs to Red. The priestesses who hadn’t been chosen as attendants wore cloaks, too, a solemn row of them sitting directly in front of the dais.

In contrast, Red’s gown was as scarlet as the one she’d worn to the ball, but shapeless this time— in any other circumstances, it would be comfortable. Her hair was unbound beneath a matching bloodcolored veil, large enough to cover her whole body and spill over the edges of the altar.

White, for piety. Black, for absence. Scarlet, for sacrifice.

In the row behind the priestesses, Neve sat between Arick and Raffe, poised at the edge of her seat. Red’s veil made all of them look bloody.

The Valleydan High Priestess, the highest religious authority on the continent, stood directly in front of Red. Her cloak had a longer train than any of the other priestesses’, and to Red, it almost looked a brighter white. She faced the altar, back to the court, the train of her cloak dripping over the edge of the dais to gather in a puddle of white fabric.

Overflowing piety. A high, skittering laugh wanted to lodge in Red’s throat; she swallowed it back.

Eyes hidden in the deep shadows of her hood, the High Priestess stepped forward. Zophia had held the position for as long as Red could remember, her hair long devoid of whatever color it’d once been, her face grizzled with an age that could be determined only as old. She held a white branch in her hands with all the gentleness of a mother cradling a newborn, and passed it off to the priestess at her right with the same care.

Though stoic, most of the other priestesses at least had some sort of emotion on their face— joy, for most, kept subtle but still there. Not so for the priestess now holding the branch shard. Cold blue eyes beneath a sweep of flame-colored hair watched Red with an expression reminiscent of someone observing an insect. Her gaze didn’t waver as Zophia reached forward and lifted Red’s veil, gathering the yards of fabric in her hands.

The fear she’d steeled herself against rushed in when the veil lifted, like it had been a sort of armor. Red’s fingers clutched at the edge of the altar, nails close to breaking against the stone.

“We honor your sacrifice, Second Daughter,” Zophia whispered. She stepped back and raised her arms toward the ceiling. All around, the Order mirrored her in a wave, starting at the front of the dais and cresting around to the back in a sea of raised hands.

For a brief, shining moment, Red thought of running, of forgetting about the splinter of magic that lived in her heart and trying to save herself instead of everyone else. How far could she get if she launched herself from this altar, tangled in crimson gauze? Would they wrestle her back? Knock her out? Would the Wolf care if she arrived bruised?

She dug her nails into the stone again. She felt one split.

“Kaldenore, of House Andraline,” the High Priestess announced to the ceiling, beginning the litany of Second Daughters. “Sent in Year Two Hundred and Ten of the Binding.”

Kaldenore, no blood relation, born of the same House as Gaya. She’d been a child when the Wolf brought Gaya’s body to the edge of the forest, when the monsters burst from the Wilderwood a year later— a storm of shadowy things, by eyewitness accounts, shape-shifting bits of darkness that could take whatever form they chose. By the time Kaldenore’s Mark appeared, the monsters had been haunting the northern villages for nearly ten years, with reports of them sometimes getting as far as Floriane and Meducia.

No one knew what the Mark meant, not at first. But one night, Kaldenore was found sleepwalking barefoot toward the Wilderwood, as if compelled.

After that, things had fallen together, the words on the bark in the Shrine and the meaning of Gaya’s death becoming clear. They’d sent Kaldenore to the Wilderwood. And the monsters disappeared, faded away like shadows.

“Sayetha, of House Thoriden. Sent in Year Two Hundred and Forty of the Binding.”

Another name, another tragedy. Sayetha’s family was new to power and mistakenly believed the tithe of the Second Daughter applied to only Gaya’s line. They were wrong. Valleyda was locked into its trade no matter who sat on the throne.

“Merra, of House Valedren. Sent in Year Three Hundred of the Binding.”

She, at least, was a blood ancestor. The Valedrens took over after the last Thoriden Queen produced no heir. Merra was born forty years after Sayetha was sent to the Wilderwood, while Sayetha’s birth was only ten years after Kaldenore left.

“Redarys, of House Valedren. Sent in year Four Hundred of the Binding.” The High Priestess seemed to raise her hands higher, the branch clutched in her fist casting jagged shadows. Her eyes dropped from her reaching fingers, met Red’s. “Four hundred years since our gods bound the monsters away. Three hundred and fifty since they disappeared, bound away themselves through the Wolf’s treachery. Tomorrow, when the sacrifice has reached twenty years, the same age Gaya was when first bound to the Wolf and Wood, we send her consecrated, clad in white and black and scarlet. We pray it is enough for the return of our gods. We pray it is enough to keep darkness from our doorsteps.”

Red’s heartbeat was a staccato pounding in her ears. She sat still as the stone altar, still as the statue in the Shrine. The effigy they wanted her to be.

“May you not flinch from your duty.” Zophia’s clear voice was a clarion call, sweetly resonant. “May you meet your fate with dignity.”

Red tried to swallow, but her mouth was too dry.

Zophia’s eyes were cold. “May your sacrifice be deemed enough.”

Silence in the chamber.

The High Priestess dropped her arms, taking the white branch back from the red-haired priestess. Another priestess came forward, holding a small bowl of dark ashes. Gently, Zophia dipped one of the tines of the branch into the bowl, then drew it across Red’s forehead, leaving a black mark from temple to temple.

The bark was warm. Red tensed every muscle in her body to keep from shuddering.

“We mark you bound,” she said quietly. “The Wolf and the Wilderwood will have their due.”