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

A slight breeze nudged the desiccated leaf toward Neve’s foot; she sidestepped it, unwilling to let it touch her.

“Come now, First Daughter.” Kiri tucked her hands back into her sleeves, veins now undarkened. “Don’t be skittish. You could do it, too, if you wanted. All who give blood can.”

“No, thank you.” Her voice was prim, but the metronome of her pulse sped up. “The power doesn’t matter to me. Only weakening the Wilderwood’s hold on Red so she can escape.”

The priestess’s eyes flickered, as if in any other circumstance she might’ve rolled them. “Yes. Well. Rest assured, the Wilderwood is weakening, which should loosen its ties to your sister. We’re both getting what we want.”

On the cobblestones, the dead leaf fluttered. The breeze picked up, pushed it farther away.

“In any case,” Kiri said, “this will be convincing enough to get us our grain.” A flash of teeth in the weak sunlight. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we can raise prayer-taxes after word gets around. Yes, we’ll all get what we want, just like I was told.”

A shiver pricked down Neve’s spine. Their religion was one of contrasts, of material proof and nebulous belief— the Wilderwood and the Second Daughters, forest and flesh, paired with the fear of shadowed monsters and the conviction the Kings were trapped and needed to be freed. Why else would they be absent? What other reason could they have for returning to the Wilderwood fifty years after the Binding, other than through some treachery that kept them from the world they’d saved? People created stories to fill the gaps they didn’t understand, and religion grew up around it like rot on a fallen tree.

Four hundred years was long enough for there to be facets of both fact and faith, concrete evidence and myths that became holy truths. But this power . . . this twisting of one concrete pillar of belief, wringing out its magic to prove something . . . it took those two opposing forces and melted them together in a way that both terrified and exhilarated her.

Strange, that she’d find faith in blasphemy.

Neve nodded, a sharp dip of her chin. “It seems we have a plan, then.” She turned on her heel and strode away, back toward the palace.

Behind her, the wind finally caught the dead leaf from the hedge, twisting it into the air.

Chapter Fifteen

T he noise at the door didn’t sound like a knock.

Red looked up from her book, frowning. It was late into the night— as best she could tell, anyway. She’d eaten hours ago with Fife and Lyra, apples and hunks of hard cheese and coarse bread. After they’d returned to the Keep, Eammon had disappeared up the stairs, presumably to his room, and she hadn’t seen him since.

She’d told Lyra about his wounds, but the other woman didn’t seem overly concerned. “Eammon is used to bleeding,” she’d said, slicing an apple. “He knows how to take care of himself.”

“Could you heal him? If he needed it?”

“Not in the way you’re thinking. Fife and I aren’t connected enough to the forest for that.” A delicate brow arched. “Healing is only between you two.”

That’d sent Red into silence for the remainder of the meal. She hadn’t eaten much, and as she drifted back to her room, she kept reaching up to touch the place on her cheek the Wolf had healed.

Now, hours past dinner, there was another sound at the door. Still not a knock— more like something sliding against the wood, the slow scratch of a nail.

When she and Neve were small, they’d play at trying to frighten each other. Red would hide in the curtains to jump out at her unsuspecting twin, but Neve preferred more subtlety. Once, she’d scratched against the foot of her bed for an hour, frightening Red so much she called for the nursemaid. That’s what this noise sounded like— someone scratching.

Thinking of Neve made her heart contract. She slipped a finger between the pages of her book. “Hello?”

No answer. Briefly, Red thought of Eammon, slumped against her doorway in a blood-caked shirt, finally willing to accept her healing.

Improbable. But still, she cursed, rising to wrench open the door.

The hall was empty, the light through the distant solarium window illuminating only the curls of leaves, the edges of thorns. Even when the sky was lavender, the corridor was unsettling; in the deep violet of a forest-muddled night, it nearly seethed unease.

Red swallowed, stepping back toward her threshold, reaching behind her to retreat to her room. But instead of the open space of her doorway, her hand brushed along a smooth, unfamiliar surface next to it. Slowly, Red looked back over her shoulder.

White bark, stretching spindly fingers up into the gloom. A sentinel.

More scattered through the ruined hallway, easy to spot now that she’d seen the first, tall and pale as picked-clean bones. They hadn’t been there when she came back from dinner. These were new saplings, the harbingers of new breaches into the Shadowlands. How many had opened, in the mere hours between then and now?

Not evil, she’d been reassured, not dangerous on their own, but wanting her blood with consequences Eammon was determined to keep her from. Inhuman and wild, not good or bad, existing outside of the binaries she understood. His warning from earlier rang in her head—the Wilderwood is restless, and every time it tastes your blood, it seems to get worse.

It’d tasted her blood today, drunk it long and deep. Tried to do more before the Wolf stopped it. What she’d told him after, about the forest being upset with them, seemed to ring even more true under the heavy regard of the saplings in the corridor.

Red backed away from the white tree like it was a wild animal, deft and cautious. But the sentinels weren’t the only new growth in the Keep— two steps, and her heel caught on a tangle of new-sprouted thorns. Slicing