For the Wolf (The Wilderwood Books Book 1)

Red knew Eammon’s movements by now, cataloged in moments of feigned sleep, observed through half-closed eyelids.

Whatever moved in this room wasn’t Eammon.

The air smelled wrong, like flowers, like rain. The movement stopped, and something whispered, feminine and strange.

Teeth bared, Red shot up from the couch, fingers hooked like claws.

White walls, silver shine, and the terrified faces of three handmaidens. No forest. No Keep.

No Eammon.

The maid closest to her recovered, straightening with a conciliatory smile. She curtsied, but her eyes still held the sheen of cornered prey. Behind her, the other two clutched sheets to their chests and watched Red as though she might attack, some feral creature from the Wilderwood.

Well. They weren’t entirely wrong.

Pushing tangled hair from her eyes, Red tried for a smile. It only seemed to frighten them more.

The first steeled herself to speak. “Morning, Lady Wolf. The Queen asks that you meet her in the gardens when you’re ready.”

Right. Today was the day she’d finally see the Shrine. See what Neve was doing and how she could fix it.

What would be left of them, once she did? What would be between them to pick up and put back together?

“Breakfast is on the table,” piped up one of the others, like their courage was a collective thing. “And clothes in the wardrobe.”

“Thank you.” Red stood awkwardly, crossing her arms over her chest. The three of them gawked at her like a myth come to life, like they didn’t quite believe she existed.

She hadn’t missed this feeling.

Her cloak lay over the back of the chair they clustered around, and the dart of their eyes confirmed it was the subject of the whispering. Their gazes held a wordless conversation, then the one who’d spoken first turned to Red.

“We’d heard you came back with a different cloak,” she said, voice steady despite her knotted hands. “An embroidered one. Like a bridal cloak.”

Of course they’d heard. She’d paraded through the palace in it, told Noruscan to call her Lady Wolf. The seasoned court gossips must’ve put two and two together. Red gave one weary nod.

Three pairs of eyes grew even wider, something she hadn’t thought possible. They looked at one another, somewhat at a loss, before one of the previously reticent handmaidens took a tiny step forward. “So you . . . you married the Wolf?”

Wolf and monster were interchangeable in her tone. Red stiffened, though not long ago she would’ve done the same. How unfair, the way history twisted.

“I did.” Red headed for the wardrobe. The handmaidens moved as one, backing away like a school of fish.

The brave one spoke again. “Isn’t he wicked?”

“No.” Red pulled out the first dress her fist closed on. Forestcolored, embroidered in white thread that reminded her of scars. “No more wicked than any other man. Far less wicked than most.”

Silence. Red didn’t look at them, didn’t want to see if the looks on their faces were surprise or disbelief or something in between. “You’re free to go. I’m perfectly capable of dressing myself.”

Skirts rustled through the door, but the brave one lingered beneath the lintel. When Red turned, she didn’t flinch, eyes narrowed. “Did he tell you why the Second Daughters have to go to the Wilderwood?” she asked. “The truth?”

Some things were too hard to explain. Some things were too heavy for fragile belief to shoulder. And Red didn’t have time to even try.

“Because the monsters are real,” she said. “And even the Wolf needs help sometimes.”

The handmaid’s eyes widened. She curtsied, quick and clumsy, and disappeared through the door.

The blooming season in Valleyda was always short, summer truncated by northern cold, and things were generally more brown than green by the time autumn approached. Still, it was strange for the gardens to be almost wholly dead. Hedges were nothing but sharp bundles of twigs; flower beds held only dry grass. Even the hardier blooms that usually lived until the first snow were limp and nearly colorless.

Neve waited beneath a barren arbor. Tired shadows stood out beneath her eyes, but when she spotted Red, her mouth flickered a smile. “You look well.”

She’d availed herself of the washbasin in Neve’s room, wiping stray smudges of dirt from her jaw, working out the snarls in her hair. It was the first time in a long while Red had looked in a mirror for the purpose of seeing herself, and the changes were obvious. Her eyes weren’t as hollow. Her mouth wasn’t so thin. The line of her shoulders was crooked, like something weighed on them. It had reminded her of Eammon, and she’d had to squeeze her eyes shut for a moment.

Red dropped a mock curtsy. “It’s been a while since I wore a dress,” she said, picking at the embroidery on her sleeve.

“You would reappear dressed like a storybook huntsman.” Neve shook her head, lips twisted in a wry grin. “I’m surprised no courtiers swooned at the immodesty.”

“Immodest or not, dressing like a storybook huntsman is far more practical.”

The grin vanished. “For traipsing through the Wilderwood, I suppose it is.”

Her voice drew battle lines. Red wilted.

Neve turned to walk down the pathway, and Red fell in beside her, their silence as chilly as the autumn air. The twigs of a barren hedge scraped Red’s arm as they passed. She could almost see the leaves withering, months of decay distilled into seconds. A strange scent tickled her nose, cold and somehow familiar. It plucked at her, something she should recognize, but she couldn’t quite draw all of it together into a conclusion. “What’s wrong with them?”

Neve’s shoulders stiffened, but her voice was mild. “It’s been a hard autumn.”

Autumn had just begun, but Red didn’t mention that. A leaf dropped from the hedge to the cobblestone path. She frowned, nudging it with her toe. It crumpled to dust, leaving a brittle skeleton ringed with dead lace.

“I know the gardens don’t look like much,” Neve said. “I should probably get someone to fix them. But no one passes through this way, really, unless they’re on the way to the Shrine.”

The mention of the Shrine seemed to tug at both of their frames, up straighter and away from each other. Silence fell between them, shining and brittle as springtime ice.

When Neve reached out and grabbed Red’s hand, her palm was slick with sweat. “My intention was always to save you.” The sincerity could slice. “Everything I’ve done, it was to save you.”

“Neve, I told you.” Red’s voice sounded soothing, falsely gentle, and she hated it. Hadn’t Neve spoken to her the same way, countless times? Like an animal struggling in a trap and only making it cut deeper? “I don’t need saving. Eammon is a good man, and he needs me. I understand why you did it, but hurting the Wilderwood—”

“Hurts you.” Neve’s eyes had closed when Red said Eammon’s name. Now they stayed that way, squeezing tighter. “Hurting the Wilderwood hurts you.”

“Yes.” Red wasn’t sure what else to say.

“I should’ve expected this.” Neve released Red’s hand, slowly, like lowering something in a grave. “They tried to warn me the forest wouldn’t let you go easily. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the son or the father, the Wilderwood made the Wolves monsters, and now he’s tangled you in it, too.”

“All Eammon has done is be bound to the Wilderwood for a bargain he had no part in.” Red grabbed her sleeve, pulled it up so her Mark glared in the sunlight. “If that makes him a monster, what does it make me?”

No answer. The air between them all but vibrated.

Dark shadows deepened under Neve’s eyes, her sigh stooping her shoulders. “You wanted to see the Shrine.”

She’d nearly forgotten, in the rush of her anger. Red nodded, but she didn’t pull her sleeve down. The tendrils of her Mark curled beneath her skin, stark and solid as ink.

“Come on, then.” Neve started back down the path, drifting beneath thorny arbors that used to hold flowers.

She stopped just outside the arched stone entrance, looking back at Red over her shoulder. The swirl of emotions on her face was hard to parse— sadness and hope and fear and relief. “You should light a candle,” she said softly. “You should pray.”

“I don’t want to pray.”

A swallow worked the narrow column of Neve’s throat. “Then do it for me.” She disappeared into the dark.

Red closed her eyes, took a shaking breath. She could light a candle, if Neve wished it. No one but her would know she cursed the Kings as it burned.

She stepped into the Shrine.

Nothing was different. Maybe it’d been foolish of her to think this would be so easy, that whatever she needed to find and reverse would be immediately apparent.

But on second glance, there were subtle changes. Dark-gray candles flickered on the ledges of altars, at Gaya’s marble feet. Red frowned— she remembered them being crimson. The darkness behind the statue, that second room with its gauzy curtain and sentinel shards, seemed somehow deeper than before. Like the cavern had grown larger.

And Neve was nowhere to be seen.

Apprehension crawled up Red’s throat. She crept forward, between the carvings of Second Daughters and the Five Kings. “Neve?”

“Here.” Her sister’s voice rose from behind the statue, muffled by the curtain. It reminded Red of the day before she left. Neve rushing through the morning-lit archway, candle guttering and voice rasping, begging her one last time to run.

Red felt like running now.

Cautiously, she moved farther into the Shrine. She picked up the curtain, candlelight flickering over her hands as she lifted it away.

The cavern behind was massive, far larger than before. But that wasn’t what set shock deep in her belly, what made her mouth fall open.

It was the sentinels.

Branches cut through the stone floor while rotting, shadow-dripping roots spanned the dark ceiling, a forest growing in the wrong direction. Scarlet stains marked the bone-white bark, smears like handprints.

Anchored in rock, watered with blood. Sentinels, but inverted, twisted, so the pent-up magic that made the Shadowlands could be freed. The Wilderwood taken and turned to horror, power tainted with the darkness it held back, ripped up and harvested.

Deep within Red’s chest, her shard of the forest mourned, a soundless scream rattling her bones and making her muscles go numb.

She didn’t know she’d fallen to her knees until the stone bit into them, a sharp ache that still held no candle to the pain reverberating from the Wilderwood. A high, keening noise echoed around her ears, she and the sentinels in chorus.

“See?” Kiri’s voice was cold and clinical. Red saw her through tear-blurred vision, a slash of white skin and red hair against the sickly trees, the same colors as the bark and the blood. “I knew it’d be more apparent here, in our grove. The Wilderwood is in her still, Neverah, and if you want her back, we’ll have to cut it out.” Her eyes gleamed, fixed on Red like a predator’s. “It will weaken the cursed forest further, losing its anchor. This could be a blessing.”

Neve’s face was drawn, but her mouth was a decided line, and agonized love shone in her eyes.

It made all this so much worse, that love.

“You can’t.” Red shook her head, though the movement was agony against the rioting, twisting thread of magic in her center. “Neve, you can’t do this.”

Shadow hissed as it dripped from the roots above their heads, liquid rot. With every drop that hit the floor, the veins in Kiri’s and Neve’s wrists flared black.

And Neve didn’t answer.

A glint of silver— Kiri drew a blade from within her sleeve.

She swept forward, blade held high, then slashed it down Red’s forearm. Red had the mental clarity to roll away, to keep the knife from going deep, but the blade sliced enough of her to make her bleed. She clapped her other hand over it, Eammon’s voice echoing between her ears—don’t bleed where the trees can taste it.

Abruptly, the keening of the inverted sentinels silenced, like they’d all heard the slash.

Like they could smell her blood.

Kiri pried Red’s hand from the cut, peered at it. “That can’t be right,” she muttered, the cadence veering out of sane rhythm, her voice jagging higher. “That can’t be right! Every Second Daughter is bound!” She raised the knife again.

“Kiri!” Neve, her voice strained, like she’d had to call it up from some hidden place. Indecision was written into every line of her, her mind changing direction too quickly for her body to follow. Her hands outstretched, her eyes wide, darkness gathering in her wrists.

But Red didn’t have time to figure out if this was what Neve wanted or if it had spiraled out of her control— she was listening to the silence of the inverted sentinels, and remembering Eammon’s voice, and careening rapidly toward a plan.

Kiri raged on. “If I have to cut to your heart to find the damn roots, I—”

Red reached up, snatched the knife away too quickly for Kiri to react. Teeth bared, she ran the blade across her palm, nearly deep enough to see the gleam of bone. She’d done this only once, she didn’t know how much blood she’d need. Then, with a snarling, animal sound, she slammed her hand to the floor. “Go on!” she screamed at the Wilderwood. “Isn’t this what you wanted? Take me! Take what you fucking need!”

There was a moment of hesitation, as if the Wilderwood had to question itself, had to decide how to use what she was offering. The shard of it she carried, the seed of her magic, bloomed only to wither again in a parade of indecision.

And she knew, somehow, that this wasn’t everything the Wilderwood needed. That this was more complicated than a sliced hand on its roots. There was still a piece she hadn’t quite grasped, a necessity beyond mere healing— a new factor in the tangled, complex equation of trees and Second Daughters. Something the forest wouldn’t take unless she understood exactly what it was, what it would cost, and offered it anyway.

We will wait for your choice, it’d said as she slipped out between the trees. The decision it’d made, that night in the clearing. The Wilderwood had taken before, taken what wasn’t its own, and it was never enough. It waited for her choice, and that choice must be made in full knowledge of what it meant, not in a moment of panicked desperation.

The seed of her magic coiled deeper, down and away from the forest outside. It would wait.

All of this in a torrent, a rush of knowledge from the shard of strange power she’d carried for four years. Red couldn’t make sense of it, not now, so she just pressed her bloody hand to the floor hard enough to feel rock dust in her veins.

“Blasphemy.” Kiri didn’t go for the knife. She stretched her hands out, cold and darkness gathering in her veins. “Godless, heretical thing.”

Red clenched her eyes shut, hand still pressed to the ground, and waited for that frozen, inverted magic.

But nothing came. Only a gurgle.

She looked behind her— Kiri, held suspended, Neve’s hands clasped on either side of her throat. The same darkness she’d seen Kiri use gathered in her sister’s hands, cold enough to chill.

“Neve?” Red’s voice sounded so small.

Her twin’s face was not apologetic. Darkness had overtaken the whites of her eyes, swallowing her irises in black; the veins below her lids ran inky. “I won’t leave you,” she snarled, showing her teeth. “I won’t leave you to him, Red, but I can’t . . . not like this.”

Stillness. Red’s hand still pressed to the ground, blood pumping out of her and into the twisted sentinels, and she and her sister stared at each other, veins lined in black and green.

Then, a rumble.

The roots in the ceiling vibrated, breaking through the rock that held them, scattering dust. Golden phosphorescence swirled under shadow-rotted bark, gathering the darkness like a bandage soaking up blood as the sentinels sank down from swollen, misshapen trees to the branches they’d been before. A drop of shadow froze before Red’s face, shuddering in suspended motion, before reversing direction and seeping back into the roots above— inverted magic, righting itself.

It weakened Neve’s grip, made the dark veins beneath her skin stutter. Her hands dropped, and Kiri, now freed from her frozen hold, rounded on her with a shriek.

“You won’t stop this!” Kiri screamed it, eyes alight, everything in them mad and empty. “You won’t keep us godless!”

She raised her hand to strike, gathering shards of that stuttering dark power, but then a rock fell from above, knocking her prone and out of sight. Neve disappeared in a cloud of dust, slumping sideways, her eyes rolling up in her head.

Roots pulled out of the ceiling, destabilizing it; the floor shuddered as the barren branches cutting through the rock shrank away. It sounded like an earthquake, it felt like an apocalypse. Red’s vision dimmed at the edges, her cheek pressed against the breaking stone as her hand trailed blood across the floor. All she wanted was to rest, to lie still . . .

Another rock fell, landed on Red’s uncut hand. She screamed as the bones shattered, but it was enough of a shock to make her move. Adrenaline helped her push the rock away, rise to staggering feet. Lurching, she tried to move toward where she’d last seen her sister. “Neve!”

No answer but breaking floor, no sound but cracking stone. “Neve!” A sob built in her throat, sharp as the bones in her mangled hand.

The ceiling wouldn’t hold much longer. Larger pieces fell, cracking against the floor, and the doorway grew rapidly smaller as ruin piled around it. Swallowing another sob, Red dashed for the narrow opening, spilling past stone Second Daughters and burning candles, bloody and broken.

Her knees hit the cobblestones outside the Shrine. She tried to rise, failed. A scream hissed through her teeth, pain hitting her in waves.

“Redarys?”

Arick’s boots filled her vision as he crouched in the autumn sun. His voice was harsh, jagged. “What have you done? Where’s Neve?”

Red didn’t answer. Instead, she focused on the cobblestones behind him. On what wasn’t there. Her pain brought clarity, stripped the truth bare in her voice. “You don’t have a shadow.”

He paused. Then something sharp on her temple, and the world went black.