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

stasis by his strange relationship to the Wilderwood. But now, brushed in twilight, she could see a younger version of him. Eyes not so tired, shoulders not so rigid, unaware of the burden set to fall on them.

“Ciaran didn’t want to release Solmir,” Eammon continued. “Gaya claimed he’d been embroiled in her father’s machinations against his will, but Ciaran didn’t believe that. And with the Kings bound together the way they were, he didn’t think it’d be possible to release only one from the Shadowlands, anyway.”

A subtle change since he’d first decided to tell her the story, from my parents to Gaya and Ciaran, an artificial distance she wasn’t sure he was aware of creating. Like he wanted a separation, like he wanted a gulf. Like being close was too painful.

She understood.

Red kept her hand on his shoulder, but her eyes flickered toward the border of the Wilderwood. It stood tall and dark and fathomless, a place for losing.

Eammon ran a weary hand over his face. “Gaya decided to try anyway. She opened a breach, and Ciaran felt it happen. He went after her.” A pause, a heavy breath in. “By the time he got there, she was dead already. Consumed by the Wilderwood, to keep her from harming it further.”

The tale was easy to pick up from here. The Wolf, carrying the forest-riddled body of the Second Daughter to the edge of the woods. Figures shrouded and made less real by myth.

Except that they were the parents of the man standing before her now. Except that he’d seen it all happen.

“I saw him carrying her.” Low, expressionless, turned toward the forest that pulled him inexorably back into its darkness. “I followed him to the border. I heard what he said, but I didn’t understand what it meant. It took me so damn long to understand what he meant.”

Here his voice broke, but instead of shuddering, Eammon kept every muscle statue-still, like if he made himself less human the emotion couldn’t catch up. When he spoke again, it was a murmur. “He lasted a year after that. A year on his own, the Wilderwood eating him away the whole time. Taking everything that made him anything close to human. Breaches opened. The forest was full of shadow-creatures, but the borders stayed closed and didn’t let them out, like . . . like when something is about to die, and holds on all the tighter for it.”

“It wasn’t your fault.” She spoke as quietly as he did, a whisper against the darkening sky and the waiting, hungry wood. “None of it was your fault.”

He didn’t respond, lost in the cadence of his own horror story. “And then he died,” he said, as if it was still a startling end to the tale, all these centuries later. “He died, and in that moment, the borders opened, like that dead hand finally losing its grip. The shadow-creatures got out.” A pause, a rattling breath. “It was all instinct, after that. Cutting my hand, putting it to the ground. The Wilderwood . . . resurrected, I guess. Grew in me. It hurt.” His hand curled against his chest in memory of pain. “I’ve always wondered if it hurt me more or less than it did him. I can’t come up with an answer. He wasted away beneath it, and I’m still here.”

The last part was a whisper. They stood there, a man and a woman on the edge of the dark, both bent and shadowed beneath the weight of awful history.

“Then I was the Wolf,” Eammon said quietly. “And until Fife and Lyra arrived, I was alone.”

Red didn’t know what to say. This story had haunted her whole life— he’d lived it, had to exist under the shadow of its happening and the ghost it left. She wanted to comfort him; every line of his body said he didn’t want to be comforted.

“The forest was in so bad a state, getting a new Wolf didn’t heal all the breaches.” He’d gone back to neutral tones now. Tucking emotion away, burying it. “So some of the shadow-creatures that had escaped when the Wilderwood briefly died still lingered.”

“Until Kaldenore came,” Red said, piecing it together. “And the Wilderwood drained her to heal itself as best it could.” Not good, not bad. But hungry. And desperate.

A broken sigh. “No ending here has ever been happy, Red.”

He shrugged off her hand. He turned toward the Wilderwood.

Red’s fingers closed on empty space as he strode between the trees.

Alone. Determined, always, to be alone, even when she was standing next to him.

After a moment, she followed, light pressure fizzing over her skin when she passed the border. They moved through the fog in silence.

Eammon’s hand shooting out of the gloom to seize her arm made her grunt in surprise. Red’s boots tripped over the leaves, and she saw what he’d pulled her from— a perfectly circular piece of shadow-rotten ground, nearly hidden in the dim. It looked like a circle of spilled paint over the canvas of the forest, with no listing tree to mark its center.

A missing sentinel. A hole.

Eammon’s lips pulled tight. The hand on her arm tremored.

Magic bloomed to Red’s fingers, ready for use. “What do we do?”

“I told you before.” Eammon shook his head. “There’s nothing you can do, Red.”

“There has to be something. Or are you just determined to leave me out of it?”

He froze, and that was answer enough.

Red drew her dagger. Eammon’s grip went from her elbow to her wrist, lightning-fast, pulling her close enough that her nose nearly notched into his sternum. She didn’t try to jerk away, but neither did she let go of the hilt, holding the blade sideways between their chests.

“No,” he nearly snarled. “Not yours.”

“It worked once—”

“And the Wilderwood almost had you.” His voice was harsh, amber eyes burning, green encroaching where the whites should be. “I won’t let it happen again.”

“So I’m just supposed to let you bleed out, then? Give yourself over to the Wilderwood completely