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

tree. “Our magic is a piece of the Wilderwood. So is a sentinel. To heal it, we pour our power into it, channel it back to the source. The Wilderwood strengthens, and strengthens us in turn. Rain feeding a river that evaporates to become the rain again.”

“A cycle.” There was a synchronicity to it. Cycles of Wolves, cycles of Second Daughters, cycles of grief.

“Exactly,” Eammon said softly. “You just let the magic move through you. Let it go.”

The sentinel buzzed under her hand. Something gathered behind the bark, an energy drawn to her, pushing forward. Apprehension danced with anticipation in her middle.

It must’ve shown on her face. Eammon shook his head. “You don’t—”

“No, I can do it.” Red concentrated on the rush in her veins, the warmth of the bark under her palm. She made her breath slow, counted her metronome heartbeats until they were an even rhythm. Eammon next to her, Eammon needing help, smoothed the chaotic ocean of her power to placid water as she closed her eyes.

Deep green spilled through her mind, changing the shade of the darkness behind her eyelids. It painted her thoughts in shades of sea-foam and emerald, lit in the very center by a soft, golden glow.

The more she concentrated, the clearer it grew. The glow was the sapling, a shining shape in a sea of shining shapes. A golden network of tall, straight trees with deep roots, bright lights casting enough shadow to hold a world.

Some sentinels were dimmer than others— those weakened were candle-flames, while the sentinels holding strong flared bonfire-bright. Their roots were a knotted riot, jagged lines of gold. But all of them led to a familiar shape, their vast network collecting in a frame she knew.

Eammon. As part of the Wilderwood as any sentinel, roots winding through him like he was their soil. Man tangled inextricably with forest, equal parts branch and bone. Half subsumed in the Wilderwood, but not drained, not like his mother or father or the other Second Daughters. Holding it all with a strength she couldn’t quite fathom, a determination that awed and frightened her at once.

He wasn’t human. She’d known that, seen it proven over and over. He was something different, as mysterious as the forest he inhabited. The forest that inhabited him.

This was the first time the reminder made her chest ache.

“Red?” He sounded so tentative.

She pressed her fingers into the trunk like he might be able to feel it, a reassuring pressure. “I’m fine.” A pause stretched long as her mind’s eye surveyed him, the seed from which all the Wilderwood bloomed. “It’s beautiful.”

Silence. The forest seemed to hold its breath.

“Follow my lead,” Eammon said finally. Then his golden form in her thoughts flashed bright. Liquid light seeped out of him, along the shining network he was tied to, going instead to the sentinel.

Gently, like a flower opening to the sun, Red let her power grow. It flowed up through her center and spilled out her palms, calmed and given purpose by Eammon’s closeness. The light she let go wasn’t as bright as Eammon’s, but it was no less welcome.

The sentinel before them slowly brightened, its flickering candle-flame gaining strength as their light drowned out the shadow.

Red stood with her hands pressed against the white tree and let the magic cycle, the rain feeding the river. As the dim figure of the sentinel brightened in her mind’s eye, she felt golden power flowing into her, too— at first, it made her start, spiked fear along her shoulder blades. But the Wilderwood, for now, wasn’t interested in conquest. She was just a part of the cycle, a rung on the wheel. The bright, thin filament of magic it’d left in her glowed, winding languidly around her bones.

It felt . . . good. Good, and this was the first time she really believed it, despite the insistence from Eammon and Fife that the sentinels weren’t malicious for all their want of her. It felt too simple a concept for such a complicated thing, but they were in accord, she and the Wilderwood, at least on the most basic level. They wanted the same things. It was bent on its own survival, its own need.

She thought of running through the forest on her birthday, the fierce desire deep in her gut to live. That’s what she felt from the sentinel, from the Wilderwood it was attached to. A deep, reckless determination to live.

When the sentinel was gone and her palm touched Eammon’s instead of bark, she had no idea how much time had passed.

Her eyes opened, banishing the shining network of the Wilderwood to see the man instead. He watched her with his brows slashed low, full mouth slightly parted, black hair falling over his forehead. The whites of his eyes were traced faintly in emerald, his shadow longer on the ground than it had been before, the edges feathered like leaves. He’d rolled up his long sleeves, and bark sheathed his forearms again.

Eammon didn’t try to hide the changes magic wrought in him. He stood there, still, and let her see.

Her wrists pressed close to his, the network of her veins outlined in green. The urge to cover them was instinctual, but Red kept her hands steady. If he wasn’t hiding, she wasn’t, either. What they’d just done— healed the Wilderwood, if only a small part of it, together and unbloodied— wrought honesty from them both.

Slowly, the green in his eyes faded. Bark disappeared, revealing only scarred skin; his height lessened, the edges of his shadow on the ground grew more solid. No permanent changes, not this time, though that previous extra height lingered. Just another scar, another mark made for the forest.

He watched her a moment longer, the severe lines of his face unreadable as the veins winding up her arms faded back to blue. Then Eammon dropped his hand from hers and turned away.

Red pressed her palm against her thigh, banishing the lingering warmth of his touch. At their feet, where