For the Wolf (The Wilderwood Books Book 1)

Air was a slippery thing, too thin to hold in her lungs. Red’s hands opened and closed on her cloak. He’d told her what happened to the others, to Kaldenore and Sayetha and Merra, but seeing it struck her cold, an icy chill of fear that ran from her temples and slowly down her spine.

Eammon turned away, shoulders a hunched ridge. “Go.” He rubbed a weary hand over his face, smearing blood. “Please, go.”

“No.” Red grabbed Eammon’s hand, laced her fingers tightly with his, pressing their palms together and daring him to pull away. “Tell me what happened to them. Exactly what happened, no more half answers.” Her nails bit into his skin, and she thought of myths and how they made terrible things somewhat easier to bear. “Tell me the story, Eammon.”

That stiffened him further, made his jaw clench and his eyes arc away from her, to the waiting Wilderwood beyond their ring of cleared ground. “I warned you before. None of the stories here have happy endings.”

“I don’t care about happy endings. I care about you.”

His breath rattled in and out of his lungs. She thought he’d pull away, but instead his hand relaxed into hers, like he didn’t have the energy to resist. When he finally spoke, the words were clouds of fog, with the low, measured cadence of a remembered tale.

“I’d been the Wolf for nearly ten years when Kaldenore came. By then I’d figured out how to use blood to keep the forest mostly together, when . . . when it wanted to take more than I was willing to give. Got the idea from Fife and Lyra.” He faced the tree line, away from her, but the memory of Ciaran’s awful death still drew tension into his shoulders. “I didn’t know what to make of it, not at first. But then I remembered what I’d heard Ciaran say, and Kaldenore showed me the Mark, told me how it called her north.” Shame lowered his tone, made his head dip farther, black hair obscuring his face. “I should’ve sent her back, but the Wilderwood . . . it already had her. It’d tangled itself in her when she first crossed the border.”

The thorn on her cheek, the drop of blood, fanged sentinels chasing her through the fog. “Like it tried to do to me.”

Eammon jerked a nod. “I didn’t know how to stop it. Not then.”

He’d done it for her, though. Shackled the forest through white-knuckle, all-consuming concentration, keeping the wild thing leashed.

Rustling in the leaves around them, almost like a sigh.

“Kaldenore didn’t last long,” he said hoarsely, barely a breath in the chilly air. “The Wilderwood was desperate. It drained her quick.”

“And once it did,” Red murmured, “you were alone with it again.”

“I was alone with it again.” Bitterness laced his voice, bitterness and shame and exhaustion. “I still didn’t fully understand what had happened, not really. But I started to put the pieces together— the bargain, how it’d been worded so there would be Wardens even if Ciaran and Gaya died. Worded so it would pass on.”

His voice cut on their names, but it was deliberate. Cutting was better than breaking.

“After that, I started experimenting. Giving the forest more blood, letting in more magic. Trying to hold it on my own. But then Sayetha arrived.”

Red’s fingers twitched, phantom sympathy for a woman she didn’t know. Kaldenore’s sickly elder sister had served only a year as Queen before dying childless, and Aida Thoriden, the oldest daughter of the next House in line, already had one daughter before she took the throne. Queen Aida learned she was pregnant with Sayetha within weeks of her coronation.

“I tried to keep the same thing from happening to her that happened to Kaldenore.” Eammon’s voice was barely a breath, only audible for the silence of the forest around them. “But I wasn’t strong enough. The Wilderwood drained her, too, in the end.”

A second rib cage, a second skull. Red tasted copper— she’d bitten too far into her lip.

Eammon still faced the trees, still wouldn’t look at her. Dirt patterned the bloody skin of his arms, almost delicate in the dim light. “After Sayetha, I did everything I could, studied whatever I could get my hands on, trying to keep it from calling Second Daughters, or at least from killing them once they came. Merra arrived, eventually, but I was able to keep the forest from her. For a while.”

Death piled around the Wolf, corpses of those he couldn’t save. Those the desperate Wilderwood tore through, bent only on its own survival, on the task set before it and the strength it needed to carry through.

She wanted to scream at it. Wanted to kick the sentinels until they were bloody, wanted to burn them all to the ground.

“It was my fault. I grew complacent.” He shook his head, a fall of dust scattering over bare, still-sweaty shoulders. “I stopped concentrating, after she’d been here awhile. She lived her life and I lived mine, friendly but distant. I thought it could be enough. Maybe the Wilderwood would be content with only her presence and my blood. But it wasn’t.” A snarl in his voice. “It was just waiting for me to slip.”

When they’d kissed in the tower, pressing desperately together, the Wilderwood had seen an opening. Seeping in the windows, growing slowly toward her. And Eammon had noticed, and pushed Red away, knowing that whatever longing they felt could never fully be acted on. Because it would be a distraction, pulling him from the constant work of keeping the Wilderwood shackled. Because bringing her closer to him meant bringing her closer to his hungry forest.

Everything in Eammon was for the Wilderwood— all he was, down to the bone and blood. Everything in his life was oriented around making sure he never slipped again.

Oriented around keeping her safe from the thing that had taken so much of him.

“It came for Merra, and she couldn’t take it.” Still, his voice cadenced like a tale, like he could keep himself at arm’s length from his own history. “She tried to . . . to cut it out. Died before I could stop her.”

Third skull. Third rib cage. Third set of bones, fed on by vines and white trees.

“Cut it out?” The question was a bare breath, shaky and quiet.

That made him turn, finally, his green-and-amber eyes fierce in his dirt-streaked face. “It won’t happen to you. I won’t let it.”

But she couldn’t leave it at that, not with the bones in the corner of her vision and his blood tacky between her fingers. Not with the plucked string in her heart, vibrating a frequency she almost knew.

“Tell me what it does to them,” Red whispered, even though she knew the answer. A dying man and a root-threaded body, the myth that hung over both their heads. “Please.”

Eammon freed his hand from hers, gently, and ran it over his face, eyes cast away like he was looking for answers in the starless sky. “It isn’t immediate. The Wilderwood doesn’t mean for you to die.”

Around the clearing, the white sentinels stood silent and still. Listening. That decision made in an unfathomable, inhuman mind, solidifying.

“The forest needs an anchor.” Eammon crossed his arms, hiding the new bracelets of bark on his wrists. “That’s what it’s after.”

An anchor. A living seed, a nexus for it all to stem from. Him, holding it all alone.

Must be two.

Red’s palms itched to touch him again, to find a friction to his skin. “An anchor,” she repeated. “Like the way it anchors in you. But it needs more than that. You need more than—”

“Stop it, Red.” It sliced through the air, knife-cold and just as sharp. “Stop. It’s not for you.” A ragged sigh, another pass of his bleeding hand over his face. “None of this should be for you.”

“Why not?” Her voice shook with anger, with bewilderment, with something else. “You want me to just leave you here? Go back to Valleyda and forget about all of this, leave you to bleed into a forest until there’s nothing left and you become . . . whatever it wants you to become? And what about after that, if you can’t hold the Shadowlands closed anymore even once it takes all of you? How do you think this ends, Eammon?”

“I don’t know.” He said it quietly. His softness, always a contrast for her edges. “I don’t know how it’d all end, and I’m nearly past caring. But I’d know I tried to keep you safe. I’d know I did my best to keep you from going down with me.”

“You act like this is a punishment. You didn’t choose this any more than I did. This isn’t your fault.”

“It’s my fault you’re here. It’s my fault they died. I wasn’t strong enough, so the Wilderwood kept calling Second Daughters. Kept taking them.” He said it all evenly, matter-of-fact, but his eyes still burned and his hands kept twitching to fists, like he wanted to hide the scars on his palms.

So she took his hands. Wove her fingers with his. Held them so tight her knuckles blanched, so tight she could feel his scars like lace pressed against her skin. “It’s not going to take me,” she said, a low whisper. “And I won’t let it take you.”

It almost put a name to the thing growing between them, that declaration. But the name was too vast and too fragile, something that might break them to acknowledge now.

“I’m trying to protect you,” he murmured. “Red, I’d let the world burn before I hurt you.”

“It would hurt me to leave you here.” Prayer and confession. “It would hurt me to leave you all alone.”

His sigh shuddered on the end. Red tugged at his scarred and bloodied hands. “Let’s go home.”

They walked back silently, hands tightly clasped, nearly sealed together by sap and blood. The Wilderwood stayed quiet, preternaturally still. Red still had that sense of slow, unknowable thought, churning deep in the forest, rolling over what it’d heard, what it’d seen.

Choice.

She thought she heard the word again, murmured in thicket and bower, but no leaves dropped and no moss withered. Like the Wilderwood whispered it into the thin thread of its magic she carried, something for only her to hear.

When they reached the Keep, Red climbed the stairs to their room with Eammon’s arm wrapped around her, providing what little support she could when the top of her head came to only his shoulder. She led him to the bed, despite his noise of protest. “You need it more than I do.”

Eammon looked at her from under the fringe of his hair, something unreadable in the twist of his mouth.

She wanted to kiss the look away. She didn’t.

The cloak spread over her like a blanket as she stretched out on the floor. She fingered the embroidery, the gold wolves tangled in tree roots near the hem. “This is beautiful.”

Eammon was silent long enough that she wondered if he was already asleep. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said finally. “If you just want the plain cloak again, Asheyla can—”

“No.” Fierce and final. “It’s perfect.”

Another pause. “You deserve a real bridal cloak,” Eammon murmured into the ember-lit dark. “Even if it’s only a thread bond.”

Warmth rose in her fingers, curled in her middle. “It’s just as binding as a marriage, you said.”

There was a question in it, one that recalled mouths and hands and other ways to bind a marriage. Things he wouldn’t let happen, because it would be a distraction from his task of keeping the Wilderwood in check, and would spell an end for them both.

His inhale was sharp. He caught her meaning. It was cruel to say it, maybe, cruel to let that heat suffuse her voice. But he’d had room for doubt, earlier, room to think she might not come back. She needed him to know she would. That whether he could answer this want or not, she would always come back.

“Just as binding.” His voice was strained.

She wasn’t sure how long they both lay there, staring up into the ceiling, painfully aware of the shape of the other. When Red finally dropped into sleep, her dreams were burning.