For the Wolf by Hannah Whitten (freda ebook reader .txt) 📕

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