For the Wolf Hannah Whitten (desktop ebook reader .TXT) 📖

door to the Keep, ran to the gate, pressed her hand against the iron. It opened to her touch, like it recognized her now.

The path was unknown, but her feet seemed to point toward Eammon, and she trusted the instinct. Red ran through the Wilderwood, and the beat in her veins and the prayer in her mouth was hold on, hold on, hold on.

She heard him before she saw him. Eammon’s labored breathing was echoed by the forest, the two of them heaving in sync. A ring of white trees before her opened on a clearing with the Wolf in its center. His lashed and bloody back caught the violet light, a man-shaped bruise on the world.

“Eammon!” His name snapped from her tongue like a whip crack, but he didn’t seem to hear. His head bowed so far forward his hair brushed the dirt, arms sunk in soil to the elbow, sweat gleaming in twilight. The sentinels bowed toward him, reaching, needing, worship and sacrifice at once.

Red’s knees hit the ground next to him, hands running through his hair with a tenderness her racing heart and screaming breath belied. She didn’t bother asking for an explanation. There was clarity in the way his veins burned emerald, the rings of bark closing around his arms, the whites of his eyes now wholly green around amber irises. Whatever vestiges of humanity he’d managed to salvage over centuries running out as forest ran in, because he was the only one to hold it, and one was no longer enough.

Must be two. The memory echoed, but it seemed to come more from the shard of magic she carried than her own mind.

“What can I do?” A snarl heralded the memory of his usual answer, but when she spoke it was a plea. “Don’t say nothing.”

“It’s the only way.” Sediment fell from Eammon’s hair as his head shook. His voice echoed, layered and resonant. “This is the only way to hold it, if I don’t want it to take you.”

Red dug her fingers into his temples, made him look at her. “It’s not. I’m not letting it take you from me, Eammon.”

The golden afterimage of the Wilderwood bloomed over her vision when she touched him, double-exposed. He’d spent himself to the last, magic and blood, but the forest needed more. Was taking more.

Green veins stood out in Eammon’s neck, tendons like ridges of root. “Only way.” Greater distortion in his voice, rustling leaves in autumn wind, stronger than she’d ever heard it before. “Either it takes me, or it takes you.”

“That’s a price I’m not willing to pay.” She gripped his jaw, forced his green-haloed eyes to hers. “I’m not leaving you to this. You don’t leave me either, Eammon. Don’t you dare.”

His full lips pressed together. His eyes stayed on hers as tiny leaves edged at their corners.

Must be two. That memory again. An urging.

She wrapped her hands around his shoulders, a strange echo of their embrace in the tower. A tug at her twining magic, but it slipped from her grip. It was the Wilderwood, a small shard of it lodged in her, and the Wilderwood didn’t want to obey.

All the pieces he’d given, all the blood he’d spilled, and it still wasn’t satisfied.

“No.” She didn’t know she’d spoken aloud until it hissed from between her teeth. “You can’t just keep taking, shadows damn it! First the Second Daughters, and now him? They didn’t belong to you, and neither does he! None of us chose this!”

Her voice had risen until it was a scream, echoing in the trees, feral as a hunting-sound from some wild thing. And as it left her throat, the Wilderwood . . . paused. Something vast and unknowable, a consciousness that barely fit the definition of such a thing and adhered to no morality she could understand, stopped and turned to her and regarded.

Choice.

Quieter than she’d heard the Wilderwood speak before, more contemplative. A fall of leaves from a now-dead branch, fluttering to the ground.

Red didn’t have time to try to parse it out, no time to argue with a forest and hope it understood. The magic in her pulled toward Eammon, her thin thread of power wanting to follow, to go meet the rest of the Wilderwood as it flowed into him, remade him.

The forest, reverting into its nexus. Taking Eammon and leaving itself in his place. Scouring the borders between man and forest until there was no delineation.

But it would need all of itself to do it. Including the part of it that lived in her.

Red clamped down on her magic with every bit of strength she could muster, that small piece of the Wilderwood that had made a home in her.

And she tore.

It hurt. It ripped at her veins like thorns, like taking a stem and splitting it in half. It hurt the Wilderwood, too— she could hear it, a shriek in a voice of leaf and branch, vibrating her bones. Guilt soured her stomach, guilt for harming the thing they were meant to save.

Kings and shadows, it always came back to guilt.

But it worked. Red tugged at her shard of Wilderwood magic like she was trying to pull up a weed by the root, diverting its flow, keeping it from running into Eammon. A small amount, but it was enough to keep the forest from seeping into him. To keep him as close to human as he could be.

It fought against her, the pain of it making her eyes water, making her feel like every vein ran with coals. But Red held on, refusing to let go, caging the bit of forest within her the same way Eammon had caged his all these years.

And then, it stopped. Stopped, and held silent for a moment that hung heavy.

The atmosphere shifted. The Wilderwood shifted, a ripple in the roots beneath her feet, a shimmer in the leaves.

The weight of an inhuman realization. Something, finally, understood.

Red’s small piece of the Wilderwood ceased trying to run out of her,