For the Wolf (The Wilderwood Books Book 1)

Red sat next to the window with her thumbnail between her teeth. Fife had brought a basket of slightly wrinkled apples for lunch, but worry gnawed her middle in place of hunger. Ridiculous. Worrying over the Wolf, going to do Wolf-things, was ridiculous.

And yet.

She wouldn’t necessarily call Eammon a friend. She wasn’t sure if she even liked Eammon, despite the strange kinship they’d forged in mutual entrapment. But he’d saved her, twice now, and even if it was more because he needed her than for any personal reason, it still counted for something. He hadn’t quite gained her friendship, but he’d gained her trust, and the fact it was their only tether made it stronger.

And if something happened to Eammon, what would that mean for the Wilderwood? Would the burden of it all, the weakened sentinels and the shadow-rot and the monsters clamoring for release, fall wholly to her? Red didn’t think she could keep it up alone, not for long. Eammon hadn’t been able to. What would happen to Neve, to the whole world beyond the Wilderwood, when she inevitably failed?

And so, worry. Stomach-churning, palm-tingling worry, and her eyes fixed to the forest so she didn’t miss his return.

Fife watched her from the chair Eammon had vacated, turned around backward so his good hand could rest on its back. He’d been silent since he returned to the tower. While the awkward quiet might’ve bothered Red in any other situation, right now she was too full of nerves to notice until it was broken.

“He’ll be fine, you know.” Fife tapped a knuckle against the back of the chair. “This is business as usual around here. Well, other than someone falling in the breach, but even that, Eammon can take care of more easily than the rest of us. The villagers push at the border all the time.”

His voice startled her, but it wasn’t unwelcome. Red’s brow knit. “What does that mean, push at the border? And what villagers?”

“At the Edge, beyond the Wilderwood’s northern boundary line. Descendants of the explorers who tried to see what was behind it, long ago— when the borders of the forest closed while they were still back there, they were trapped. The Wilderwood won’t let them through, but that doesn’t stop them from looking for weak spots, thinking they can find a place that will let them out.” Fife shrugged. “It’s pointless. If you’re stuck here, you’re stuck here for good.”

Red had never heard of the Edge, or anything beyond the Wilderwood, but it didn’t seem like Fife would be the one to ask for more information. Not when the resentment in his tone was nearly palpable.

She was too consumed with anxiety to muster much curiosity, anyway.

“He just looks . . .” She trailed off, unsure how to frame the bruises around Eammon’s eyes, the tightness of his jaw. “Tired.”

“We’re all tired.” Fife grabbed an apple with his uninjured hand, and again Red’s eyes caught on the thin band of root around his arm. The skin under her sleeve itched— she’d kept her Mark covered ever since it appeared, other than showing it to Eammon that first day in the library.

“Did he take some vials with him, do you think?” she asked, thinking of the wounds in his hands and how they seemed to leak more sap than blood. How the bleeding was to stave off the forest from changing him. “In case he . . . runs out, needs more?”

“He won’t. My and Lyra’s blood is next to useless compared with his.”

“Why do you two keep bleeding, then?”

“Terms of the bargain.” He tapped his Mark. “When you bargain for a life, your end of the deal isn’t fulfilled until you’ve spent a certain amount of blood in the Wilderwood’s service. Apparently, I haven’t bled enough yet.”

Again, resentment, simmering under the surface of his voice like a killing current. Red reached for an apple, mostly for something to do with her hands. “What did you bargain for, Fife?”

The hitch in the air between them made her think he wouldn’t answer. Then his eyes flicked to hers, guarded. “How much do you know about treating with the Wilderwood?”

“Not as much as I probably should, considering.”

Fife arched an incredulous brow, then shrugged. “Every bargain bore a price. You know the smaller ones, the lost teeth and the bundled hair. But bargaining to save a life was different. The Wilderwood marked you, and the Wilderwood could call you in. No one knew what for. I made my bargain, got my Mark, and didn’t know what it would do to me until the forest called me back, reeled me in like a damn fish and bled me like one, too.” He tossed his spent apple core into the hearth. The uncharring wood hissed. “Lyra and I were the only two who ever tried bargaining for a life. Foolish of us.”

“Or brave,” Red offered quietly.

“Her, maybe. Not me.” Fife sat back, withered hand held tight against his middle, and fell silent. Red didn’t pick at the quiet.

“There was a girl,” he said after a moment, almost to himself. “She was in an accident. Leg smashed in a stone mill. The wound suppurated, she grew fevered. Death was inevitable. So I bargained. My life for hers.” Reddish hair feathered across his freckled brow as he shifted in his seat. “She married someone else, but it was probably for the best. The Wilderwood closed up only two years after that, and it called Lyra and me in before it did, fools with Bargainer’s Marks and a debt to a forest. I would’ve left her a widow.”

Red twisted at the stem of her mostly uneaten apple. “Is that what happened to your hand, too? Part of your bargain?”

His face shuttered, and his hand twitched like he might try to hide it. But then Fife sighed, looking down at the mass of scar tissue. Lurid lines marked him from knuckle to wristbone, most heavily concentrated around the veins of his wrist. “No. This happened when I tried to meet the terms all at once— spill all the damn blood the forest wanted. Didn’t work, obviously. All I did was sever a few tendons and pass out for three days.” He shrugged. “I’ve never seen Lyra so angry. Or Eammon so quiet. Took a bit for things to go back to normal after that.”

That thick scarring, concentrated over his wrist . . . pity contracted her heart, but Red kept it from her face, knowing it was the last thing he’d want. “I’m so sorry, Fife.”

“Don’t be.” Gruff, but not angry. “If I hadn’t bargained, I wouldn’t have met Lyra.”

The stem of Red’s apple broke off. “Are you two . . .”

“No,” he answered quickly. “Well. Not like that, not really. It’s complicated.” Fife tapped his unwounded fingers against the back of his chair, searching for words. “Lyra isn’t one for romance. Never has been. But she’s the most important person in my life, and has been for centuries now. That’s enough.”

Red nodded, sensing she shouldn’t pry further. He’d already spoken more to her in the past five minutes than he had in her whole time at the Keep. “What did Lyra bargain for?”

“Not my story to tell.” Fife reached for another apple. “It’s longer and more noble than mine.”

They lapsed into silence, still somewhat chilly, but more comfortable than before. Red lifted her apple to take a bite, but before it reached her mouth, something . . . faltered in her vision. A flash of green shadows, shaped like leaves and branches.

It reminded her of that night. When the Wilderwood rushed her, as if her sliced palm was something it could seep into. When she first saw Eammon’s hands, the connection between them forged in branch and blood.

Her brow furrowed as she shook her head. She hadn’t had a vision like that in four years; no reason to think she’d have another now. Across the table, Fife was oblivious, crunching an apple and staring into space, lost in thought.

She pressed her lips to a white line.

When the strange faltering came again, it was nothing so subtle as forest-shadows. This was a lightning strike behind her eyes, completely washing out the tower to show her something else entirely. The potted ivy on the table stretched green fingers toward her, the withered apples plumped and blushed scarlet.

Fife cursed, jumping from his seat, but Red didn’t hear him. Red didn’t see the tower anymore, nor anything in it. Instead, like the night of her sixteenth birthday, she saw hands.

Scarred hands, holding a dagger, palms running with green-threaded blood.

And beyond them— a creature, a monster. Vaguely man-shaped, but as if a man had been taken and twisted in ropes of shadow, the form bent to wrong angles and painted in dripping black. Milky eyes, a howling mouth. Behind it, fog shifted around a white tree with dark rot climbing its trunk.

The creature gave a low laugh, tripping up a discordant scale, and raised its clawed fingers before slashing down.

Another shadowed rush of leaves and branches. Her eyes saw only the tower again. Red’s mouth opened and closed on a choked sound as she clutched her stomach, sure she’d feel viscera spilling warm and slippery.

But it wasn’t her facing a monster. It was Eammon. Eammon, the vision of him even stronger than it’d been before.

The thread bond made her magic easier to wield— at least in theory, when she wasn’t utterly frozen by bloody memories. Apparently, it gave them other abilities, too. Tied them so tightly together that she could see through his eyes.

See that something was terribly, horribly wrong.

“Are you all right?” Fife arched a brow.

“I . . .” She didn’t know how to articulate what she’d seen. Past or present? Future? The parameters of this new bond between them were entirely alien. “I saw Eammon. Eammon getting hurt, hurt by something . . . something dark . . .”

Fife’s eyes went wide and worried. “You saw him?”

“It’s happened before.” She didn’t know quite how to explain it, so she didn’t try. Red stood quickly, her chair toppling behind her. “I have to go.”

“Absolutely not.” Fife’s head shook so vehemently, his hair stuck up. “Eammon said—”

“I can’t just leave him.” Shadowed forest-shapes still edged in at the corners of her eyes, sharp twigs and climbing vines. In her chest, power swirled, growing up and out, making the already-overgrown ivy on the table quiver. “It was real, Fife, just like last time. I have to do something.”

His brow furrowed with an emotion she couldn’t quite identify. Finally, Fife sighed, standing. “Fine.” He turned to jog down the stairs. “But when Eammon wants to know whose idea it was, don’t expect me to save your ass.”

The Wilderwood was eerily still as Red and Fife made their way between the trees, its attention drawn elsewhere. Fog stretched sinuous fingers into the lavender sky, threading between mostly bare branches.

“Northwest, since they came from the Edge,” Fife murmured, following a compass in his head. “And probably close by.” His teeth flashed. “Kings-shitting stupid Valdrek.”

Red barely heard him. She pushed through the undergrowth, weaving around thorns and catches of leaves, her focus singular— Find Eammon.

As far as what she could do once she found him . . . that, she wasn’t quite sure of yet.

Sentinel trees scattered along their path, tall and pale. Black rot climbed them all, sometimes only at the roots, sometimes past Red’s knees. She could smell it when they came close— empty and cold, ozonic. The ground around them was solid, for now, but she couldn’t keep from wondering how long that would hold. When they’d come loose from whatever magic moored them in place and show up at the Keep, a silent sign for Eammon to either spill more blood or risk tipping his internal scale further into forest.

A sound ripped through the quiet. A roar.

Fife met her eyes. Simultaneously, they broke into a run.

Branches whipped past, Red barely avoiding their sharp ends, still remembering Eammon’s rule, the only one he seemed intent on her keeping—don’t bleed where the trees can taste it. Labored breath a harsh bellows in her throat, the thrash of Fife’s feet through the underbrush making a metronome. Don’t bleed don’t bleed don’t bleed.

Voices up ahead, curses made ethereal by layers of fog. Possibilities flickered through her mind and lent her speed— Eammon wounded, Eammon gored, Eammon dying in puddles of leaf-flecked blood.

But when she reached him, Eammon was whole. Whole and snarling.

He stood with his back to them, arms outstretched, precisely cut slashes in both palms leaking green-chased scarlet down his wrists. Before him, a sentinel listed to the side, covered in black rot, on the verge of collapse. Roots slashed through rotten dirt, the slow-spreading ring of darkness like a seeping wound. Bloody handprints marked the ground, and there the edge of infection receded, barely. Already, the small amount of forest floor Eammon had managed to clear was rotting again.

Instinctively, Red took a step back, colliding with a warm figure. At first, she thought it was Fife. But the arm attached to the hand clapping over her mouth was clad to the wrist in gray leather vambraces.

“Quiet,” an unfamiliar voice hissed in her ear.

Red didn’t need the directive. The creature stalking back and forth across the rotting sentinel’s roots, as if guarding it, stole any speech from her throat.

“Wolf-snarls, small snarls, snarled in the trees.” The thing might’ve been a man, once, and that made it worse. The way he moved was wrong, low and lurching, on legs with knees bent backward. His shirt hung open at the arm, a long, dark slash marking his swollen bicep. Shadow crawled from the wound, inched over his skin, rotting it as surely as it rotted the ground. “Saw the shadows,” he singsonged, pacing back and forth. “Saw the shadows and the things in the shadows, and the things in the shadows have teeth.”

Eammon’s bloody fingers twitched, trying to call forth branch and thorn. The whites of his eyes shaded greener, veins in his neck turning verdant, but other than a bare twitch of the underbrush, the Wilderwood didn’t answer.

Blood and magic, both running thin.

A fractioned moment where the look on his face was close to helpless. Then, with a snarl, Eammon sliced into his palm again.

“Why aren’t you helping him?” Red tried to lunge forward, her whisper slashing through the air, but whoever held her had an iron grip. “Help him!”

“What do you want us to do, girl?” the voice behind her hissed. “Our blood won’t do shit for the Wilderwood, and we don’t need someone else getting shadow-infected.”

Her eyes darted, searching for Fife. He stood slightly behind her, among others clad in green and gray, blending into the colors of the dying forest. These must be the villagers he spoke of.

She caught his eye, wildly jerking her chin toward the falling sentinel in its spreading pool of rot. But Fife shook his head, fear in his eyes, and Red remembered what Eammon said in the tower— that Fife coming with him was too dangerous.

That someone already fallen would be looking to pull others in.

“How long can you last?” The thing advanced toward Eammon on twisted legs. One snapped, made weak by calcifying shadow. He dropped to his knees and kept coming, crawling through the rotten earth. “Not long, not long alone. Especially not now, now that the Wilderwood smells something fresh.”

Dark circles stood out around Eammon’s eyes as he knelt, pressed his bleeding palm to the earth again. This time, the shadow-rot didn’t recede at all. It inched unceasingly forward, and the leaves it touched on the forest floor crumpled, withered.

He couldn’t stop it alone.

Her body made the decision before her mind could make her stop. Red lurched, throwing herself out of the grip of whoever held her. They were surprised enough to let her go, and she slipped on the leaves, backpedaling away from the advancing tide of rotten ground.

Eammon’s gaze snapped to her, the frustration in his eyes blazing to fear. He shook his head, sharp, but Red ignored him. She moved quietly along the edge of the shadow-pit, hands opening and closing along with the bloom of forest magic in her middle. It pulled her toward the Wolf, the bond between them making it easier to grasp, easier to direct. The specter of dark memories tried to rear up from the corners of her mind, but her fear for Eammon eclipsed it, gave it no room. Power sang down her veins, washed them green.

The Wilderwood still seemed wrung out, exhausted and pushed to its limits. But when Red twitched her fingers, the branches quivered.

Eammon bared his teeth. He cut the air with his hand—go back— but Red shook her head. Another step closer, power coalescing—

And she stepped on a twig.

The crack could’ve been a spine, for how loud it sounded. Red

froze, hand outstretched toward Eammon. For the first time since she’d known him, the Wolf looked terrified.

The creature raised his nose to the wind. Sniffing. “And oh, here it is.” The shadow-bloated head swiveled to face Red. “Fresh blood.”

The word was a lunge, and the seconds stretched too long, her heartbeats coming in measured ticks. Beat and the creature launched in her direction, beat and its dark-rotting hand raised, beat and the once-human nails elongated to claws.

Beat and Eammon sprang in front of her. The claws raked him instead, slicing through fabric and flesh.

Magic rioted in her middle, the sight of Eammon’s blood finally giving space to memories of all the ways it could go wrong. It shivered in her grip, the ease their marriage had bought slipping away as Eammon crumpled before her. Magic wasn’t the only way to heal the breach, though, and the glint of the knife as it fell from his hand to the ground was a sharp, clear reminder even as her magic slipped toward chaos.

Damn his rules. Red grabbed the dagger and slit her palm.

Her hand slammed to the dirt, blood seeping into the forest floor. Her intention was a scream in her throat, reverberating through every part of her, too focused to be ignored. “Stop!”

The shadow-pit obeyed.

It wasn’t slow, not this time. The edges of the rotted ground shifted backward, surging toward the roots of the sentinel, disappearing beneath them. The tree righted itself with a boom, shock waves skittering over the forest floor. Distantly, Red was aware of those people at the fringes falling backward, unable to keep their balance on unsteady ground.

A moment of silence, of stillness. The creature watched her with wide eyes, still swimming in shadow. Eammon looked from the bloody dagger to Red’s hands subsumed in dirt, horror on his face.

And something in Red . . . shifted. The tide of her magic turned, no longer rushing out but rushing in.

Rushing in, and bringing the Wilderwood with it.

Something slithered against her hand in the dirt. A tendril of root, working its way into the cut in her skin. The forest laying claim. It had a taste of her, and wanted more.

If you give the Wilderwood blood, it won’t stop there.

Pain brought a snarl to her mouth, but the sound that ripped through the clearing didn’t come from her. It came from Eammon.

He lurched from the ground, his scarred and leaking hands closing around her shoulders, wrenching her out of the dirt. The slithering feeling of roots against the cut sharpened, then let go as her hands came free of the ground.

Eammon crouched, slamming his hand to the forest floor, still churned with Red’s blood. No new cuts in his skin. Instead, changes, like that day in the library when he healed her cheek: Bark closed around his forearms like vambraces, the veins in his neck and beneath his eyes going green. Emerald ringed his amber irises, until no white was left.

“Leave her,” Eammon growled at the now-healed sentinel, at the surrounding Wilderwood. His voice was layered, resonant, like it echoed through leaves. “This one isn’t yours.”

The Wilderwood shivered. It gave a sound almost like a sigh.

Eammon’s breath came in pants as he collapsed on his knees next to Red. His chest bloomed crimson and green in three stripes, more blood coming as he ripped a strip of fabric from the bottom of his shirt and tied it messily around her hand.

Then he sat still, eyes searching hers as green slowly leached away, wide and terrified and so tired.

A groan split the moment in two. Eammon flinched.

The creature on the sentinel’s roots twitched. Parts of it shrank— the claws that had rent Eammon’s middle contracted back into the shape of a human hand, the milky eyes that had been wide as saucers grew smaller, grew blue. His monstrous height halved, his legs righted themselves, broken bones snapping back together and ripping a scream from his throat. Shadow hissed out of the cut on his arm.

The half-man, half-monster creature collapsed on the roots, twitching, crying. She’d healed the breach, but not him, not completely.

Red turned away.

“We can take it from here.” The man who’d caught her when she and Fife first careened into the clearing stepped from the cover of trees. His hair was snowy blond, braided elaborately over his shoulder and into his long beard, paler than his white skin. Silver rings glinted in its length, a style Red had seen only in history books. The others stepped from the shadows, all dressed in the same greens and grays.

The man looked to Red, face inscrutable. “Thank you.”

Red managed a nod. Without the distraction of rushing forest and saving Eammon, the sight of other humans in the Wilderwood was enough to shock her to silence.

Now that the breach was safely closed, Fife joined the rest as they gathered sticks from between the trees, lashing them together to make a rough sling. One of them pulled a roll of bandages from his pack. “Careful not to touch the cut,” Fife cautioned. “It needs to be bound.”

Eammon stood on unsteady feet. “I’ll do it.”

His brow arched at Eammon’s wounds, but Fife offered him the bandages. Slowly, like every step was pained, Eammon approached the man on the roots. He swallowed hard before kneeling to wrap his shadow-infected arm.

Sling made, Fife stepped back to Red, still seated on the ground. Blood seeped through the scrap of Eammon’s shirt wrapped around her palm. I keep ruining his clothes, she thought distantly.

“These are the villagers?” Her voice was hoarse as she pushed up, standing on numb legs. “From the Edge?”

Fife nodded, arms crossed and eyes narrowed.

“And they’re the descendants of the explorers who went beyond the Wilderwood. Before it closed up and wouldn’t let anyone but a Second Daughter pass.” She shook her head. “The official records say the explorers all died. None ever sent word.”

“They couldn’t.” Fife shrugged. “Once the Wilderwood closed up, they were stuck behind it, with no way to return or contact the outside world. They grew old, had children, who in turn grew old and had children. Now there’s a whole country of them back there, providing entirely for themselves.”

She eyed the people ringed around the clearing, all watching Eammon with anxious faces, all dressed like they’d stepped out of the past. “And you said they were looking for a weak spot? What does that mean?”

“A place the Wilderwood would let them pass through.”

Red snorted weakly. “It would appear they found one.”

“They usually do,” Fife said. “The Wilderwood is more relaxed about the northern border. Has less to guard from, I guess. Eammon, Lyra, and I can even leave the forest from that side, though we can’t go far, and it’s not exactly pleasant.” His jaw clenched. “But the Valleydan side is locked tight, and that’s the one that matters.”

The villagers loaded the wounded man into the sling. He moaned softly, still caught between human and monster. Eammon gave him one long look before turning to the man with the rings in his hair, presumably the leader. “Send word when you can.” Despite the wounds in Eammon’s middle, his voice was steady. “Do you have somewhere to keep him?”

“Tavern basement has worked in the past. It’s built strong.” The man shook his head, silver rings clinking. “Bormain helped build it. Damn, Bormain was drinking in it two days ago.”

“Was this a planned expedition?” Eammon’s question was cold.

The man rubbed a hand over his mouth, looking away from the Wolf. With a sigh, he nodded, once.

“It’s pointless, Valdrek.” There was anger in Eammon’s tone, but it was thin, like he didn’t have the energy for it. “Even if it lets you in on the northern side, you can’t get all the way through.”

“Why exactly is the forest still so weak? It should be strengthening, beginning to open its borders again, not closing them up in case the monsters rattle their cage.” Valdrek jerked his head at Red. “Isn’t that the point of you getting your new blood?”

“It’s Lady Wolf.” Eammon’s eyes could cut. “Not new blood.”

Pin-drop quiet. “I see.” Valdrek’s gaze darted from Eammon to Red. “Well. That’s new. Congratulations, Wolf.”

Next to her, Fife’s brow furrowed, then rose. “Oh.”

Red’s cheeks burned. She didn’t realize a title came along with her new marriage.

Eammon walked toward them, tall and straight, but Red saw the white line of effort his mouth became, the way his hand kept twitching to his side.

“That doesn’t look good,” Fife observed.

“It looks worse than it feels.” It was almost certainly a lie, but Eammon’s tone didn’t invite argument. When Red looked to Fife, he gave a slight shake of his head. Prying would be pointless.

“I’ll go on ahead, then. Tell Lyra everything is taken care of.” Fife jogged toward the tree line, muttering unintelligibly, but Red caught the phrase self-martyring bastard in there somewhere.

Pain laced Eammon’s features. The ragged hem of his shirt showed a stripe of blood-muddied skin. He opened his mouth, closed it again, throat working an empty swallow. Red, with nothing to feed into the waiting silence, just pressed her lips together.

Behind them, the shadow-infected man muttered nonsense under his breath. Red looked back over her shoulder, and his blind, milky eyes stared right at them.

“Solmir says hello, Wolf,” Bormain murmured.