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

gestured toward the grove behind them, the distant horror happening on its roots. As he did, another priestess fell.

Two down.

“Bringing them through— what they’ve become— will kill the Wilderwood and everything attached to it. It’s been part of you too long, Eammon. There’s no way for you to escape it.” Solmir’s hand touched Red’s hair, lightly, and she flinched away as much as she could, when her body was a battleground for the rip of the roots and the cold weight of shadowed magic. “But she can.”

Eammon’s chest heaved. His eyes shone above the agonized rictus of his mouth. Fife had pulled Lyra away, had an arm wrapped around her shoulders as they stood and watched in horrified, helpless silence.

“Why?” Eammon’s voice sounded shredded. “Why bring the rest of them through? They brought you down with them! They’re the reason for all of it!”

Solmir’s eyes were like chips of ice. For a moment, his mouth worked, like he might actually offer an explanation. But then he shook his head, almost defeated. “Because it’s inevitable. Their return is inevitable.” A pause, his voice growing serrated edges. “And the longer they have to prepare, the worse it will be.”

Another bone-rattling rumble, shaking the earth. Then another, louder.

Four down.

Across the gulf of the border, Eammon’s eyes bored into hers, a promise burning in amber and green. I’d let the world burn before I hurt you.

She read his intention, like she could read everything with Eammon. Red set her teeth, snarled at him. “No—”

Eammon’s head wrenched to the side as he pulled the Wilderwood out of her, as the forest within her body uprooted. He roared agony at the sky, and she realized that wasn’t the whole of it, what he’d said about the world burning.

He may let the world burn, but he’d let himself burn with it.

Red screamed, digging her fingers in the dirt. “Give them back! Damn you, give them back!”

The Wilderwood didn’t listen. She coughed up bloody leaves, knots of roots. Desperately, she thought of stuffing them in her mouth and swallowing them back down, but it was useless. She was nothing but human again, nothing but bone and organ and blood.

The branches and roots and vines around Eammon tensed once, like a closing fist, then opened. A spasm, bending his spine, and Eammon fell to his knees, shuddering. Tendons stood out like tree roots in his neck, his shoulders, visible through the ripped fabric of his shirt. His fingers clawed into the ground as golden light, dim but visible, pulsed through his veins.

“Give up, Eammon,” Solmir muttered, not paying attention to Red at all. This was between the King and the Wolf. “Give up.”

And after a moment, the Wolf lay still.

The world froze, poised on a knife’s edge. Fife and Lyra stood like statues, tear tracks gleaming on Lyra’s cheeks.

A moment of stillness.

A choice, made.

A surge.

The forest rose up behind Eammon like a wave, a cresting tide of root and branch and vine and thorn. The sentinels arched toward him, stretching sharp white fingers. They pierced his skin and flowed inward, turning to light, making star-tracks of his veins, gold-to-green. The Wolf was corpse-still, but the things that made the Wilderwood pumped into him like rain to a river. It came and came, a wave breaking against his back, a forest seeping back to seed.

Then Eammon stood.

He pulled himself to his full height, then higher, topping seven feet, eight. His eyes changed as his shadow grew longer on the ground, the whites around his amber irises turning to pure, bright emerald. Ivy wreathed his wrists, a garland of it growing in his too-long black hair as swirls of bark armored his arms, as branches like antlers grew from his forehead.

All those small changes— the splinters the Wilderwood left when he used its magic alone, the pieces of himself he’d given up, everything he’d tried to stop by offering his blood— it was all just a ghost of this.

A forest made a man made a god.

Eammon— what had been Eammon— turned his strange god-eyes to Red, cowering in the dirt, and she understood. He’d finally given up. Given up on being man and forest, given up on the impossible binary of bone and branch. He’d pulled all of it into him, the shining network of the Wilderwood crowding out everything of who he’d been before.

This time, he’d let it take him over. He’d given himself up, to save her. And those inhuman eyes held nothing of the man she loved.

Red’s sob tasted like blood.

A low, rueful laugh rolled from Solmir’s mouth. “Wolves and their sacrifices.”

A final crack, like the earth itself sundered. In her tear-blurred vision, Red saw the fifth priestess fall, Kiri’s knife glinting blood-tinged light before she darted into the grove. At the same moment, Lear threw himself out from between the trees, landing in an unmoving huddle. Shadows burst from the ground around the twisted sentinels, a ring of writhing darkness.

Solmir made that strange shape with his hand again. The shadows rolled over the ground like a black tide, flocked to him like birds, making mad skittering noises. They built Solmir up, made him taller, surrounded him in darkness.

Grinning, seething shadows, he beckoned.

And the Wilderwood—Eammon— charged forward with a roar.

Chapter Thirty-Four

T he Wilderwood was no longer a forest. It had uprooted itself, taken a different form. Its boundaries were the boundaries of Eammon’s body, wreathed in thorn and vine. Eammon was gone, and the Wilderwood stood in the shape of a man in his place.

When he ran toward Solmir, the earth shook.

Red crouched, no longer pressed down by cold magic, sorrow and horror drying her mouth. The forest-god still looked like Eammon, still had his angular face and dark hair. But the way he moved was alien, fog shifting through branches, leaves twisting in wind. He was golden light to Solmir’s shadow, and both were terrible.

Eammon— what had been Eammon but wasn’t anymore and, Kings, she was going to lose it— cracked his