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

her shoulder had been, before falling, making the mist eddy around them. The Wolf’s eyes tracked thoughtfully over her face, like an answer to some silent riddle was written on her skin.

Then he turned, striding away into the mist, leaving her alone.

Night was so judged by tiredness and the sky somewhat darkening from lavender to plum, though it seemed Red was the only one in the Keep trying to structure time by an absent sun. Lyra was patrolling again, tor on her back and vials of blood in her pockets. Fife was in the kitchen, having taken on cleanup duty after dinner.

She didn’t know where Eammon was. But she’d be going to find him soon. As soon as she worked up the nerve.

Red paced before her fireplace, thumbnail between her teeth. She still wore the dress she’d changed into before eating with Fife and Lyra, burgundy and thus far free of dirt or blood. Fife remained standoffish, but Lyra tied them together, folding them into a fragile but pleasant camaraderie. Clearly, she and Fife had known each other for untold years, and time and circumstance had born a strong connection. Red felt out of place next to them, an interloper, and found herself wondering if the other Second Daughters before her had felt the same.

Not that either of them mentioned the other Second Daughters, or sentinels, or magic threaded in blood. They never did. Still, such things gnawed at the back of Red’s mind even as Fife and Lyra talked lightly of other things.

You fear yourself that much?

She did. Four years now of constant, low-level anxiety, churning at the very base of her mind, replaying that night in snatches when she slipped enough to allow it. How her magic, freshly splintered from the Wilderwood, had ripped people into pieces, left a sea of blood on the leaves. How she hadn’t been able to control it.

How it almost killed Neve.

But maybe . . . maybe it didn’t have to be like that. Eammon had said the power was volatile at first, so maybe now that it’d coiled in her for years, it would be easier to harness. To direct. She’d have him there to help, as close to an expert in Wilderwood magic as she could get.

And that image of him entering the Keep, bent and bloodied, forest edging through him— that stuck with her. He kept spilling himself into the Wilderwood and letting the Wilderwood spill into him, doing everything he could to hold it on his own. Not pushing her. Giving her time, even when the waiting ran him into the ground. A week she’d been here, and her presence hadn’t helped Eammon or the forest at all.

She owed it to him to try. She owed it to Neve. In the end, wasn’t this just one more step in keeping her sister safe? Making sure the monsters she now knew for certain were real didn’t escape the Shadowlands? The horse was bought, no sense letting it founder now.

Pacing halted, deep breath taken. Then she turned from the hearth and strode purposefully toward the door.

A knock stopped her short. Red froze.

A muttered curse precluded another knock, this one sharper.

Red fetched up her voice from the back of her throat. “Yes?”

“May I come in?” He’d shaped his low rumble to try to sound accommodating, but it didn’t quite fit.

“It’s your Keep.”

“It’s your room.”

A moment of hesitation, laced with surprise. Then Red opened the door.

The Wolf had to slump to look under the lintel. He’d tied up his hair since this morning, made a messy knot of it at the back of his neck, though black strands still waved against his collarbones. Ink-stained fingers pulled nervously at his sleeves, but there was no trace of nervousness in his face, sharp-jawed and hard-planed as always. White bandages wrapped both his hands.

Red motioned him in. Eammon ducked past, stopping just inside the threshold. Her room looked smaller with him in it.

Silence, growing heavier the longer it was left. Red gestured to his hands. “Will they heal?”

His brow furrowed, like he didn’t know what she meant, then he looked down. A rueful noise in the back of his throat. “As much as they ever do.”

“I’m glad you’re here, actually.” Red swallowed. “I was just coming to . . .”

But then his bandaged hand turned, and the firelight caught on something shining silver in his grip. Dagger.

Red lurched backward, eyes wide and mind tangling. Maybe he was finally tired of her hedging, maybe he’d decided draining her himself would help him more than her magic would, how many vials would every drop of blood in her body fill—

Eammon looked at her like she’d gone mad before following her gaze to the blade. He held up his hands in surrender. “I’m not going to stab you.”

“Are there other uses for daggers?”

High flags of color on his cheekbones. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

Tension prepared for violence ebbed away. Red’s pulse regulated to a proper rhythm, though something in his eyes made each beat hit like a hammer.

Eammon ran one of his bandaged hands through his hair, looking at the fire in the grate instead of at her. “I . . .” He stopped, sighed, spoke again in a rush that ran the words together. “Have you heard of a thread bond?”

It took her a moment to organize the words into meanings, the question was so unexpected. “I think so. It’s a binding ceremony, right? A folk marriage. Where you don’t need a witness or a blessing.”

“Yes.” It was clipped, and his eyes didn’t leave the fire. “You each give a part of yourself— hair is customary— and bind it around a piece of your new, shared home.” The hand that didn’t hold the dagger fished in his pocket and pulled out a shard of wood, bone-pale. Sentinel bark.

Bound, the Wilderwood had said. Must be bound. Must be two.

Understanding was a slow bloom of heat in her chest. “Is this a proposal?”

Eammon didn’t