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

Half a second of stillness, of expectant silence. “Oh, Kings.”

The forest erupted.

The window in her room spiderwebbed, cracked like a starburst, vines slithering through the broken pane. They wrapped the walls in seconds, crushing the posters of the bed, curling vise-like around the wardrobe. Thorns sprang sharp and reaching from the ground, leaves stretching like straining fingers. The sounds of rush and ruin collected, became a bellow, and the Wilderwood lunged.

Moss lumped up to trip her, vines lashed for her feet. A thicket burst from the floor, filled with sharp branches; one slashed across her arm, and where her blood splattered, the forest soaked it up like water to parched ground.

Her first instinct was to careen down the hall, but then Red remembered her cloak, still in the wardrobe now wrapped in vines in her room. Her tattered, threadbare cloak, the one Neve had draped over her shoulders. A symbol of a sacrifice she’d somehow outlived.

Damn if the Wilderwood was taking that from her.

Teeth bared, Red ran through her open door, dodging reaching branches and curling leaves. She tore at the vines with her bare hands, ripping them away— the Wilderwood made a thin, screeching sound, terribly like a scream. Wrenching open the warped and broken wardrobe, Red tugged out the still-dirty crimson fabric of the cloak, balling it against her chest and jumping the threshold just before the lintel cracked, collapsing the room behind her.

The Wilderwood howled as Red pelted around the corner. She felt it in her bones as much as heard it in her ears, caught and amplified by the piece of its magic coiled in her middle.

You begin and begin, yet never see it finished!

One of the bushes by the corner withered instantly, leaves dropping all at once as the twigs curled inward in a death throe. The Wilderwood paying its price for speech.

Stone rained from the ceiling of the corridor, littered the floor as vines and roots rioted through and broke it apart. Red clasped her arms over her head and leapt to huddle under the solarium light, cloak falling next to her on the floor.

“Red!”

The stairs shuddered as Eammon thundered down them, bare-chested, hair unbound. He glared at the advancing forest with a snarl on his lips, hands arched into claws and tendons tight on his neck.

The Wilderwood’s shriek was deafening, a cascade of sapling and thorn reaching for her on the floor. Eammon jumped down the rest of the stairs, almost lost his balance, landed before her in a wild-haired crouch. He came up on one knee, hands outstretched, every muscle in his body strained.

Fear brought a strange sort of clarity, and Red’s eyes went straight to Eammon’s bare arm, to what she knew would be there. A Bargainer’s Mark, larger and more intricate than hers. Tendrils twisted off the band of roots, spiraling beneath his skin in delicate patterns, stretching down to the center of his forearm, up past his elbow.

Already he called up magic, and the changes it wrought came swiftly— the veins in his hands ran green, not just his wrists, but his neck, too, running down the curvature of his shoulders. Bands of bark edged through the skin of his forearms, from wristbone to where the tendrils of his Mark began. He grew taller, his hair longer, a glimpse of ivy leaves when it shifted over his back.

The Wolf and the Wilderwood, tangling, blurring, fighting for dominance. Stopping the forest’s advance was a battle too intimate to be won with blood.

Eammon lifted his green-veined hands toward the corridor. Then his fingers curled to fists, as if taking hold of something, and he jerked them back.

A boom, a compression of air. It reminded her of that first night, when she’d clamped down on all her own power and sliced it off, just on a larger scale. He’d pulled the Wilderwood in, let his internal balance tip, then lashed all that power down. The forest had no choice but to obey.

The Wilderwood gave one more howl that faded slowly into normal forest sounds— twigs snapping, branches stretching, then silence. Eammon shuddered, dropping to brace on knees and elbows. Slowly, slowly, his veins ran from bright green to blue. The bark on his forearms slipped under his skin, though a rough band remained right around his wrist, like a bracelet. The heave of his bare back perfectly matched the slow sway of settling leaves.

When he finally looked back at her, hair stuck to his forehead by sweat, the whites of his eyes were spiderwebbed with green, a halo of it around his irises.

The encroaching forest sliced off right where the hallway branched, as if by some giant scythe. Cut roots twitched feebly on the moss like dying beetles, their movements synced to the rhythms of Eammon’s breath. Five sentinels stood just inside the edge of the corridor, a wall of bone-white trees.

Red and the Wolf crouched on the ground for a moment, two pairs of shoulders shaking, two pairs of wild eyes surveying a hall lost to a forest. Eammon’s gaze dropped to the cloak puddled by her knees, puzzlement creasing his brow when his eyes rose back to her face.

Fife skidded out from the dining room, still fully dressed. His eyes widened, mouth working a string of curses. “Kings. Shadows damn us.”

Lyra ran from beneath the broken arch, stopping short and clapping a hand over her mouth. Behind her palm, her jaw worked, but all that came out was “Oh.”

Eammon regained composure before Red did, standing on shaking legs. She noticed he hadn’t lost all the height magic gave him, not this time, though the rest of the changes were slowly leaking away. The green leached out of his eyes, and the last of the bark-vambraces slipped beneath his skin as he pushed his hair back from his forehead.

“What happened?” Fife looked from the forest to Eammon, taking in his slightly increased height with nothing more than a