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

Red rubbed her ankle, banishing the ghost of his touch. “It looked . . .” Now it seemed ridiculous, but damn if she was going to tell him that. “It looked like someone I knew.”

“You thought someone you knew came traipsing through the Wilder-wood and made it all the way to my gate? Really, it’s remarkable you—”

“It looked human. More human than the thing last night.” Red stood, glaring up at him. His dark hair had come fully unbound, falling messily over his shoulders, shadowing his burning eyes. “I know it was foolish to think it was. But it looked like him.”

“Him.” Quiet, stern.

Red swallowed. “Him.”

Silence. Finally, Eammon sighed, hands hung on his hips, head angled toward the ground. “It was convincing,” he conceded. “That shadow-creature had time to make a decent mask before it reached the Keep. I don’t . . . I don’t fault you for being fooled.”

Well. That was unexpected. Red crossed her arms and worried at a loose thread in her sleeve. “Would it have gone away if I bled on it? Like you and Lyra and Fife?”

“I thought I was clear about you bleeding.”

“Answer the question.”

His jaw worked before he swiped a hand over his mouth and looked away. “No.”

Not the truth. Not the whole of it, anyway, between what Fife asked in the corridor and the shift of Eammon’s eyes. She’d known him for only two days, but the Wolf was bad at lying.

“The Wilderwood can’t last much longer like this.” Eammon reached up, began retying his hair. “Sentinels are uprooting and coming to the Keep in droves, too quickly for me to heal before the rot sets in. Breaches stay open for days. I used to be able to keep them in check, but I can’t anymore.” A tense pause, a thread set to snap. “Not alone.”

Red’s stomach twisted in on itself.

Hair now bound, Eammon’s hands dropped. He kept his gaze turned away, toward the gate. “If you use your magic—”

“I can’t use it.” Every time she entertained the thought, the memories crashed up on the shore of her mind. Branches, blood, Neve. Violence that nearly killed her sister, and all of it her fault. “I’d rather bleed. There has to be a way—”

“There isn’t.” Warmth and library scent as Eammon stepped forward, his voice strangely apologetic, eyes raised to hers through clear effort. “Believe me, Redarys. The magic is the easiest way.”

Her eyes pressed closed. Red shook her head.

“Why are you so determined to think yourself helpless?” His voice cracked over the word, like it was something he could punish. “You can’t afford that luxury—”

“Luxury? You think this is a luxury?”

“It’s a luxury to ignore it,” he snapped. “To decide you’d rather pretend it doesn’t exist, and damn everyone else.”

“It seems to me like we’re all damned anyway!”

His expression shifted, tangled, too many emotions for her to make sense of. Red’s pulse ticked in her throat. They stayed like that, bent like bowstrings, neither willing to be the first to look away.

Eammon finally broke, eyes closing as his face turned away. “So it does.” He started toward the gate, silent and stoic. “I have to go close the breach before that thing cobbles itself together again.” A press of his hand, the bloom of an opening in the iron. The gate swung out, stirring fog, and the Wolf stalked into the Wilderwood.

Red frowned after him as Eammon disappeared into the trees. Her limbs felt locked, paralyzed by fear and regret.

What Eammon wanted was impossible. Even if her power was something she could use, her mind was too shackled by fear to let her. Every time it surged, all she could see were her memories of carnage, and it froze her, choked her, focused everything in her only on lashing it down.

But the Wilderwood was darkening. Deteriorating. She’d seen the barest hint of the things it held back, and it was enough to fill her with a bone-deep terror of what else might be waiting.

If it failed— if the Shadowlands broke through completely, if monsters stalked the world like they had before— what would happen to them?

What would happen to Neve?

“Kings and shadows, I missed it.”

Lyra emerged from the fog. She frowned at the burn mark the shadow-creature left on the ground, fiddling with a vial of blood in her hand. “There’s a breach southward, right at the Valleydan border. I stayed far enough back to be safe but still managed to bloody it up. I could tell something had already escaped, but I thought I’d beat it here.”

“Eammon took care of it.” Red’s ankle tingled with the memory of his touch, incongruously gentle against his sharp anger, as she pointed beyond the gate. “He went that way, to close the breach.”

“Hmm.” A shrug of narrow shoulders as she turned into the eddying fog, headed toward the Keep. “Well. He doesn’t need me to navigate, then.”

The curved sword on Lyra’s back shone like a sickle moon. Earlier, Red had been too addled to take much notice of it, but now its shape looked somehow familiar. She studied it as she followed Lyra back to the castle, mostly to keep from thinking of Arick’s face on wrong bones, of Eammon stalking into the forest with a hand sliced to shit and barely bleeding.

Another moment of scrutiny, and the word she was searching for came to her. “Is that a tor?” Raffe had a tor, worn on his back for state functions. According to tradition, Meducian Councilors’ oldest children trained with them for a year after their parents were voted in, symbolizing that Councilors’ duty was to serve their country with all they had.

“Sure is.” She sounded almost amused.

“I thought they were ceremonial.”

“Technically.” Lyra didn’t draw the weapon, but her fingers closed gently around the hilt like a worry stone. “But they’re just as sharp as any back-alley dagger.”

They rounded the side of the Keep, approaching the ruined corridor that held Red’s room. Lyra walked down the sloping hill toward the