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

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.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

A mber eyes and a soft mouth, dark hair between her fingers. Red was loath to wake, even as cold water dripped down her neck, stones digging into her back. But she roused, peeled her eyes open, pain fading in as dreams of Eammon faded out.

Damp rock walls, metal bars. A dungeon.

Logically, she’d known there were dungeons under the Valleydan palace, but she never remembered them being used. The ceiling began mere inches above her head, and a single guttering sconce provided the only light. Through the dim, she could barely make out another cell across a skinny, damp hallway. Masses of shadow lurked behind the bars.

Red dared a look at her hand. A mess of awful angles, everything bent the wrong way beneath her skin. The other hand, the one she’d sliced, was scarlet and angry and tacky with blood. Pain churned to nausea; she retched, but nothing came up.

Gritting her teeth, Red placed her lacerated hand against the wall. Behind it, she could sense the deep roots of growing things above— grasses and weeds threading through the dirt. A shuddering breath, and she bent her fingers slowly, tugging at the thin curl of her magic in her chest, seeing if she could manage enough to pull them toward her, just as a test.

The magic roused, barely. Enough to feel, not enough to use, not enough to affect the growing things beyond the wall. Her hand fell.

She squeezed her eyes shut, taking the thoughts pain shattered, piecing them together into the path that led here. Arick, asking after Neve. His boot on her temple. He’d brought her to a dungeon, where no one would think to look for her.

And he didn’t have a shadow.

Desperation thrummed at the base of her throat. Red crooked her unbroken fingers again, coaxing fruitlessly at her splintered power.

“It’s the walls.”

Arick strode down the damp hallway, lit by guttering torchlight, hands clasped behind his back. He moved differently— before, Arick walked as if the world would wait on him, loose and languid. Now his posture was at almost-military attention. The dim light told her nothing about his shadow.

Red swallowed against a bone-dry throat. “What?”

He tapped his knuckles nonchalantly on the wall beside the bars. “This deadens magic. I’m not sure how, to be honest. Valchior was a hard ruler, and he didn’t like for anyone to be better at calling power than he, back when it was free for the taking. Still doesn’t.” Another tap before he tucked his hands behind his back again, regal despite the damp. “In any case, he didn’t share his secrets with the rest of us.”

Her head ached, and his nonsense made it throb harder. “You kicked me.”

“I did.” He didn’t seem sorry. “You hurt Neve.”

Neve. Red looked up, hope sharp and sudden. “Is she alive? Did she make it out?”

Arick opened his mouth to answer, but another voice beat him to it. “No thanks to you.”

A slender figure stepped into the transient light. Kiri. Two bluish handprints marked the sides of her neck where Neve had held her, made her voice a whispery rasp. “You’ve long outlived your usefulness, Second Daughter. Now you’re nothing but a liability.”

“Kiri.” Arick’s eyes were a colorless glitter. “Hush.”

Red’s whole body was a knot of agony. She searched Arick’s face, looking for some kind of warmth, any echo of the man she’d known. But he watched her like an animal in a cage, observing her pain with nothing more than vague curiosity.

Behind him, in the half-illuminated cell, the mass of shadow shifted.

Red’s eyes squeezed shut against the throb of her wounded hands. “Neve is alive.” If she didn’t phrase it like a question, the answer couldn’t be no. “She’s all right.”

“Neve is safe.” Arick’s voice held a strange note of softness. “As safe as I can make her.”

That, at least, brought a flood of relief. “Why am I here? What is this place?”

“A place for things that work against our gods.” Kiri’s lip lifted in a sneer. “Things like you.”

Arick’s jaw tightened.

“We’ll save them.” Kiri’s eyes rose to the ceiling of the dungeon, mildewed and moldering, with the light of someone looking on holiness. Her hands rose to her chest like her heart was something she could cradle. “Now that you’re here, now that we know you are empty and the Wolf stands alone. We’ve made the Wilderwood weak, their time is soon at hand. Our Kings will finally return, and our rewards will be great.” Her unsound eyes turned to Arick, head bending to bow. “All of our Kings, in the flesh.”

Distaste lived in the set of Arick’s mouth, but he said nothing. Arick, who made it a point to think of the Wilderwood and the Five Kings as little as possible. Arick, who had no patience for things regarded as holy.

“You don’t want the Kings back.” Red shook her throbbing head. “Eammon told me—”

“Of course he did.” Arick rolled his eyes. “The boy’s just like his father, mistaking foolishness for nobility. I told Ciaran things would end badly when he and Gaya concocted their stupid plan. He never listened, either.”

It slid around in Red’s head, still, pain taking over the space she needed to parse all this into sense. But the mention of Ciaran stuck in her mind like a burr, and her eyes narrowed. Eammon’s father, spoken of like a friend.

Or