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

of his hair and the rough texture of his scars, the way the corner of his lip lifted, just so, when she said something he thought was funny. How his brows lowered when he read and how right before he fell asleep he’d let out a long, soft sigh and Kings how his mouth felt on hers, how he clung to her like ivy against the stone walls of their Keep.

It was, in the end, the easiest choice she’d ever made.

The seed in her grew and grew, unfettered by anything because it was hers, hers by word and blood.

It was a quiet storm of root and thorn and branch, the deluge of the Wilderwood finally coming for her— not as a predator, but as a missing piece, grateful to finally fit against the splintered edges it had left. The thin tendril of power she’d been given four years ago sped out to meet the rest of itself, and when she breathed deep, she tasted loam, growing things, honey.

Arick, shadow-thin, threw an arm over his face. Solmir pushed off from the wall with his teeth bared. “Shadows damn you—”

His words were lost in the rush. The power in her center met the power outside, collided and bloomed, filling her with root and branch. It grew in the hollows of her lungs, climbed along her spine, vines wrapping organs and seeding in her marrow.

The darkness behind her eyelids was shaped like leaves. And when it cleared, she saw Eammon. Not just his hands, not just the world through his eyes— him, entire, almost something she could reach out and touch.

He jolted from his seat at the edge of their bed, like he saw her as clearly as she saw him. Amber eyes cycled through shock, and wonder, and finally terror as he leapt, hand reaching out to empty air, mouth shaping her name—

Then he was gone, and she glowed golden in a dungeon with the roots of the Wilderwood between her bones.

Red pushed out her hands, fingers crooked. The tiny roots of grass above them grew long, stretched toward her, spangling the ceiling with starburst shatters and sending rock dust raining.

Kiri tried to cower against Solmir, but he knocked her to the side, thrusting out his hands and shaping his fingers into claws. Shadows gathered, but Red was flush with the power of a whole, healed Wilderwood, and all she had to do was arch a hand in his direction. Golden light wrapped Solmir’s fists, straightened his fingers, and he roared agony at the stone ceiling as it consumed his own cold magic, canceled it out.

“You’ll abandon her.” Solmir gritted his teeth, blue eyes glittering in Red’s light. “You’ll be trapped in the Wilderwood, forever. You’re choosing him over her.”

It made her heart feel too large for her ribs, made the beat of it against vine and bloom a painful thud. “If the Wilderwood falls and the Shadowlands break through, I’ll lose them both.”

“Then you have little faith in her.” Still a snarl, but there was something sorrowing in it. “Neve takes to shadows better than you think.”

Her lips peeled back from her teeth at that warmth in his voice again. Red closed her hand to a fist, jerked it sideways.

The light wrapped around Solmir’s hands swept him in the direction Red willed it, bashing his head against a fallen rock from the ceiling. He fell next to Kiri and lay still.

Red’s glow bathed the dungeon, though already the pain was starting, the roots pulling her toward the Wilderwood. The forest reeled her back like the roots in her body were a kite string. More dust spilled from the ceiling, the sound of breaking rock a discordant symphony.

Slumped against the wall, Arick looked half a corpse. His eyes were hollows, cheekbones knife-sharp. He winced away, like she hurt his eyes.

Red thrust out her hand. “Come with me!”

A stone fell from the ceiling and should have hit him; instead, it fell to the floor, like Arick was formed of smoke, like he’d become the shadow.

Arick shook his head. “I can’t, Red.” A tear slid down his cheek, cleared it of dirt. “I’m tied to him. I can’t leave.”

“Please.” She reached through the bars like she could hold his bloody hand, knowing it was fruitless, begging anyway. “Please.”

“Go, Red.” Another fall of rock, another rain of dust. “You have to go!”

Sobbing against pain of two kinds, Red bent her fingers again. Grass roots wrapped around the bars, made impossibly strong by the magic of the Wilderwood. They split, rending from stone with an awful tearing sound, and she climbed through, squeezing between the wall and the already-fallen rocks on bare, bleeding feet.

Neve. She had to find Neve. Red closed her eyes, pelting blindly down the corridor as if the golden glow of the roots could guide her toward her sister. Pain lanced every limb, but she gritted her teeth against it. A grate up ahead filtered starlight onto the stone floor; Red scrambled through, leaking green-threaded blood from her unbroken hand, the other still a mess of agony at the end of her wrist. She emerged on an empty alley next to the palace walls, and tried to rush forward, searching for a gate, a way in.

A scream ripped from her mouth as the roots tightened around her bones, pulling her back in the opposite direction. Red strained against it, her pleading audible now. “Please, I have to at least tell her goodbye, please . . .”

The Wilderwood didn’t answer, not in words. But she could feel its apology, feel it in the gentling of the vines around her spine, the bloom along her rib cage. Growing, and pulling her inexorably away.

Still, she struggled forward. Her vision blackened, and she fell to her knees on the cobblestones, a harsh sob in her throat. With as much care as they could, the sentinels reached their roots into her, curling around her organs, calling her back home.

Home.

Neve wasn’t dead. Solmir claimed she was safe, and though