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

indigo, scattered with stars like the glass from a broken window.

Beyond, in the flat and empty expanse of northern Valleyda, a tightly clustered copse of white trees grew, maybe half a mile from the border. Twisted roots stretched up to the sky, tangling and matting together in an impenetrable ring, while thicker branches slashed through the ground below— another inverted sentinel grove, growing upside down. Between the bleached-bone trunks, nothing stirred.

Red recoiled. The Wilderwood within her did, too.

“There.” Raffe was beside her, bared teeth a flash in the dark. “She’ll be there.” He jogged over the burned earth toward the grove with no hesitation.

Valdrek stepped up to the broken border, Lear beside him. As he tentatively stepped over the line, Red felt a tugging in her chest, like a frayed string snapping. The forest, letting them go, knowing that holding its borders wouldn’t help it now.

“Well.” Valdrek turned back, surprise and a tired, sorrow-tinged joy in his eyes. “The world feels much the same on this side. Good luck, Wolves.” He started over the hills after Raffe, Lear following behind.

Lyra stood with her tor in her hand, a loose readiness to her frame like she was set to spring. “No shadow-creatures yet,” she said, eyes scanning the broken edge of the forest. “I can’t decide if that’s comforting or not.”

“The Shadowlands have more important things to let loose.” Eammon kept his voice steady, though his jaw was a clenched line of pain. His eyes flickered to Red. “I’m going to scout the edge of the forest with Lyra. You and Fife stay here. Don’t come any closer to the border until I call for you.”

“Is that an order?” Half a joke, an attempt at lightness to lift the iron feeling in her chest.

Eammon huffed, half a laugh for half a joke, fingers tightening on hers. “If you want it to be.”

“Eammon—”

He tucked her hair behind her ear, scarred palm brushing her cheek. “Let me do this.”

Gently, he untangled their fingers. Gently, he brought her hand to his lips. Then he was gone, off into the ruin their forest had become.

Fife stepped up beside her as Eammon and Lyra moved quickly away. “Foolish of us,” he said, trying for the usual brusque tone he took with her and falling short.

She arched a brow.

He shrugged. “Falling in love with reckless idiots.”

Red gripped Fife’s fingers, briefly, then let them fall.

A flutter of movement caught her eye, in the opposite direction of Eammon and Lyra. Something white, hidden in shadows, right at the edge of the Valleydan border. Eyes narrowing, Red took a lurching step forward. “Do you see that?”

“See what?”

Another flutter of white. In her vision, Neve had been wearing white.

That was enough to make her run.

“Red!”

But she didn’t pay attention, hurtling toward that flicker in the shadowed trees. Maybe Neve had woken from her strange trance, come to the edge of the broken forest—

“Come,” said a voice from the shapeless darkness behind the tree. It was quiet, quiet enough for the voice itself to be indistinct.

“Neve?” Red called, everything in her focused on saving the sister she’d left behind.

No answer.

“Redarys!” A scream this time, a scream to scrape a throat bloody. Eammon, calling for her. The Wilderwood in her chest sliced and burned, a warning against being so close to the edge, but Red clenched her teeth and kept going. Her boots skidded in the dirt as she reached the tree, putting out a hand to sling herself around it.

From the shadows, Kiri grinned.

Red tried to backtrack, but her lungs ached so badly, and the falling forest anchored in her hurt so much. Her fingers fumbled against the hilt of her dagger, too panic-numb to find a grip, and then Kiri’s hands were around her throat, pressing hard.

“More trouble than you’re worth,” the High Priestess hissed, eyes glinting madly in the collision of stars and twilight. “You don’t deserve to see our gods returned.”

“Red!” She felt the slither of roots over her ankles, the piercing of the Wilderwood in her chest as Eammon tried to garner its broken pieces into power.

“Say goodbye to your Wolf.” Kiri’s hands tightened on Red’s neck. “He’ll be joining you soon enough.”

Then— hands wrenching at the priestess’s arms, opening her fingers to let air back into Red’s lungs. Solmir cursed mildly, grabbing Red’s arm in a bruising grip and pulling her toward the ragged tree line.

Distantly, over the sound of her gasps, Red heard running footsteps, heard Eammon’s bellow.

“More trouble than you’re worth, maybe,” Solmir muttered, hauling her by her arm so her feet fell out from under her and her knees slid in the dirt, “but more useful alive than dead.”

Red opened her mouth to curse, to shout for Eammon. But Solmir pulled her over the border, and every fiber, every nerve exploded in burning, all-consuming pain. All thought of anything else washed from her mind in the flare, her scream reverberating through the Wilderwood.

The trees bowed in mourning.

Chapter Thirty-Three

R ed’s knees skimmed over the dead grass of a late Valleydan autumn as Solmir wrenched her forward. Her chest felt like a broken cage, roots reaching for home— if she looked down, surely she’d see branches breaking through her skin, rimed with viscera, her body made a sepulcher. An awful keening echoed in her head, and she didn’t know where it came from, in too much pain to know if her mouth was open or her vocal cords in use.

Vines tried for her ankles, for Solmir’s, but they were weak and skittering, made brittle by a dying forest. Branches clustered, reached as far as they could before snapping back like a spent bowstring. “Red!” Eammon’s scream scoured his throat. “Red!”

Valdrek and Lear stopped in their careful prowling through the field, Eammon’s voice cracking through the still night air. Raffe broke into a run, disappearing into the twisted grove. Valdrek cut his hand at Lear, gesturing for him to follow the other man. As Lear disappeared between the trees, figures in white