For the Wolf (The Wilderwood Books Book 1)

Red gripped at the roots of her hair until her fingers felt numb, forehead pressed against the heels of her hands. That night still etched in her mind with crystal clarity, at least up to a point. Once the thieves who’d followed them attacked and the bloodshed began, she’d blocked parts of it out.

But the flash behind her eyelids of something happening elsewhere, of scarred hands and immediate panic . . . she remembered that, now, remembered it with such detail she couldn’t believe she’d once thought it imagined. A moment of connection to someone other than herself, and that someone had been the Wolf.

He’d been there, somehow— been there when magic rioted out of the Wilderwood, when it climbed through the wound in her palm and made its home in her chest. Was it his fault, then? Had the forest shattered magic into her at his direction?

Gently, she laid her fingertips against her cheek, still blood-smeared from the wound he’d taken. If the Wolf had given her this damn power on purpose, surely he wouldn’t have tried to send her back? Wouldn’t have given her rules that were supposed to keep her safe from his forest?

Red groaned against her palms.

She was tempted to stay seated on the staircase until Eammon deigned to emerge from his library, to see if she could wrench more answers out of him. But Red was weary, and the floor was cold, and the idea of waiting for someone who explicitly wanted to avoid her was exhausting.

He’d told her not to leave the Keep, so logically, the Keep was safe. And it was her new home. As unwieldy as that thought felt, she might as well explore it.

Wearily, Red stood and started back up the long, root-threaded staircase.

There was light at the top of the stairs, as if someone had come along and reignited the fires jeweling the unburning vine in the foyer. Red paused on the landing, peering at the strange, makeshift sconce.

The flames were anchored on the vine. It should be burning. But through the bright, yellow-white hearts of the flames, she could see that the vine itself appeared wholly unharmed.

She thought of the wood shards in the library she’d first assumed were candles, how they also carried flame but stayed unburnt. Wood and vine, both growing things, locked in some strange symbiotic relationship. The splintered power in her chest felt restless.

Red backed away, venturing into the center of the ruined foyer. Above her, lavender sky shone through the cracked solarium glass, neither any brighter nor any darker than before she’d fled down the stairs. No moon, no stars, nothing to give any indication of time passed. Just endless twilight.

Though somewhat dim, the light from the burning vine and the solarium window was steady, and Red could see the remains of carpet on the mossy floor, shreds of something that had once been grand. The threads of nearly rotted tapestries hung on the walls, tangled with vines and thin roots. Too muddied to tell what the pictures might’ve been, for the most part, though she could pick out the vague shape of faces in one of them.

She frowned at it, eyes narrowed to put together the patterns. A man and a woman, it looked like. Holding hands, maybe. Her hair was long. His eyes were dark.

Gaya and Ciaran. Eammon’s parents. If she needed further proof that he was who he said, this would be it. Even though the tapestry was worn nearly to ruin, she could tell the man depicted here was not the man she’d just met in the library. His face was softer, more classically handsome. His chin canted upward at an angle that dared the viewer to try him, an expression she knew just by looking at it wouldn’t be worn naturally on Eammon’s face.

And Gaya . . . she was more muddied than Ciaran, the shape of her harder to make out. Beautiful, aloof in a way that the smudged tapestry highlighted rather than obscured.

That frustrated Red on some deep level, a knotted emotion she couldn’t quite parse out to its composite parts. All the Second Daughters, more icon than individual. Defined by what they were instead of who.

She frowned a moment longer at the tapestry before walking over to the broken archway at the other side of the stairs.

The arch led into what looked like a sunken dining room, one chipped stone step at the edge of the threshold. A large window framed the courtyard on the right side, the glass choked with climbing greenery and thin, spiderwebbed cracks. A scuffed wooden table sat in the center of the room, with three chairs clustered haphazardly at one end. On the back wall, another, smaller door on rusted hinges led to what she assumed was the kitchen. Other than that, the room was empty.

Three chairs. Her brows drew together. The tales told of no one here but the Wolf, but then again, the tales also hadn’t said there was more than one Wolf, and the current one was a tall young man with scarred hands and a sour disposition. It seemed the tales weren’t exactly reliable. Really, she had no idea who else—what else— might be lurking in the Keep.

One of us will burn it, the Wolf had said when he saw her torn cloak. Implying there was more than one inhabitant of this ruin.

As if in answer, there was a sudden clatter, like a dropped armful of pots and pans. Red heard a brief, muttered curse from behind that smaller door at the back of the room, and then a laugh from another voice, light and musical.

Her courage wasn’t quite steeled enough to investigate. Red’s mind crowded with thoughts of twisted poppets made of sticks and thorns, crafted from the Wilderwood and set to servitude by the same strange magic that kept the vine unburning. After the fanged trees, nothing seemed out of the realm of awful possibility.

She backed away from the broken arch, not stopping until the small of her back hit the staircase rail in the main foyer. Her shoulder jostled the dark coat hanging on the knob of the newel post, sending up a faint whiff of fallen leaves and coffee grounds.

Red turned, peering upward. The landing at the top of the staircase was still hidden in shadow, a darkness that had scared her away before. Now that she felt somewhat less skittish, the upstairs seemed more intriguing than foreboding.

Despite being partially covered in moss, the stairs looked sturdy enough. She placed her mud-caked boot on the first step.

The moss moved under her feet like she’d stepped on a snake, seeping farther up the stairs, collecting toadstools and thin roots in its wake. The greenery gathered together, an army amassing, and became a solid wall of growing things, blocking her path.

Red stumbled backward, shaking off the weed tendrils knotting around her ankles. “Five Kings,” she cursed quietly. “Point taken.”

Dirt streaked the hand that reached up to push sweaty, leaf-matted hair from her eyes. She needed a bath, and badly, though she’d have to put her dirty clothes back on afterward. She hadn’t brought more. Hadn’t expected to need them.

The thought sank into her mind with serrated teeth. The fierceness with which she’d run for her life in the Wilderwood had been gut instinct, primal force. Now the consequences: a life. Already she was hours older than she ever expected to be.

She had no idea how to start coming to terms with that.

Red pressed her fingers to her eyes until the sharp feeling behind them dissipated. Once she was calmer, she shook her head, straightened. The Wolf said her room was in the corridor, and there was only one she could see, though it ended in a riot of ruin.

The oddly lit vine provided the light here, too, though the flames were smaller and more sporadic. Moss covered the floor and grew halfway up the walls. Blooming things she couldn’t name threaded through the ruined jumble at the hall’s end, a tangle of leaves and flowers and broken rock.

It looked like the Wilderwood had broken into the Black Keep more than once, leaving most of it a ruin. Not exactly a comforting thought.

Doors lined the hallway, but only one looked like it’d been disturbed recently. A jagged line of dirt and a green stain on the wood marked where growth had been cleared away, leaving a semicircle of bare wooden floor ringing the threshold. Already moss crept over it, taking back the space it had ceded.

Gingerly stepping over the moss, Red pushed the door open.

The room beyond was small and sparsely furnished. Dusty, still, but at least cleared of greenery. The walls were bare. A large window with vines crawling up the outside looked out on another courtyard, where a stone wall ran from the back of the hallway and down a gently sloping hill to meet the iron gate. Another tower sat directly behind the one she’d entered, short enough to be hidden from the front. Small trees grew around its base, and her heart stuttered for the half second it took to realize they weren’t bone-colored. Between the trees twisting around the structure and the flowering vines threading through them, the tower looked more grown than built.

A fully made bed stood in the corner by the window, linens faded but clean, with a fireplace set into the wall by its foot, neatly stacked with wood. To the left of the door, a small alcove housed a chamber pot and wide iron tub, already filled with water. A wardrobe was pushed into another corner, an age-spotted mirror hanging next to it on the wall. Large handprints marked the dust on the wardrobe’s side. The size of them matched Eammon’s.

He’d told her she could leave, but prepared for her to stay. It made her wonder how much of his insistence that she could return home was planned, and how much of it had been impulse, a knee-jerk reaction born from some emotion she wasn’t sure of.

Cautiously, Red walked over to the bed. With a quick breath, she ducked and peered beneath it, not sure what she was looking for, but sure she wouldn’t relax until she checked.

Nothing but remnants of moss. Her lips thinned as she straightened, headed next for the wardrobe.

She opened the doors quickly, prepared to snarl at anything that might rear up from the depths, but the snarl melted slowly to bewilderment.

Dresses. A row of them. Simple cuts in muted colors, jewel tones that would blend into a forest. Red pulled one out, deep green, careful not to let it brush against her dirt-smeared cloak. It looked like it would fit.

Red laid the gown out on the bed and closed the wardrobe. Then she stepped back, pressed her knuckles against her teeth, and let out one slightly panicked, slightly relieved, wholly confused sob.

This was what she wanted, wasn’t it? To lock herself and her sharp magic away in the Wilderwood. To ensure that she could never bring harm to Neve or anyone else she cared about ever again; that the destruction she’d wrought with her power the first time was the only time.

This was exactly what she wanted.

The satisfaction was hollow at best.

She gulped in a deep breath, held it until the burn in her lungs canceled out the one in her eyes. Carefully, Red shrugged out of her cloak. Her flight through the Wilderwood had left it worse for wear, pockmarked with rips and dirt, but Red handled it like it was priceless finery.

It was ridiculous. She was clearheaded enough to know that. Ridiculous that she’d want to keep the thing that marked her as a sacrifice. But the memory it carried was the one of Neve, helping her get dressed, smoothing out the wrinkles as she’d done so many times before. Other than Red’s, her hands had been the last to touch the scarlet fabric.

There were other, fiercer reasons, too. Reasons that came from that same deep place that was ferally pleased with the cruel coincidence of her childhood name. The part of her that would smile as she grabbed a bladed legacy and felt it make her bleed.

Red held the cloak in her hands for a moment, working the weave of it between her fingers. Then, with the same care she’d used to take it off, she folded it so the worst of the rips didn’t show and placed it in the wardrobe.