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

she knew the answer. A dying man and a root-threaded body, the myth that hung over both their heads. “Please.”

Eammon freed his hand from hers, gently, and ran it over his face, eyes cast away like he was looking for answers in the starless sky. “It isn’t immediate. The Wilderwood doesn’t mean for you to die.”

Around the clearing, the white sentinels stood silent and still. Listening. That decision made in an unfathomable, inhuman mind, solidifying.

“The forest needs an anchor.” Eammon crossed his arms, hiding the new bracelets of bark on his wrists. “That’s what it’s after.”

An anchor. A living seed, a nexus for it all to stem from. Him, holding it all alone.

Must be two.

Red’s palms itched to touch him again, to find a friction to his skin. “An anchor,” she repeated. “Like the way it anchors in you. But it needs more than that. You need more than—”

“Stop it, Red.” It sliced through the air, knife-cold and just as sharp. “Stop. It’s not for you.” A ragged sigh, another pass of his bleeding hand over his face. “None of this should be for you.”

“Why not?” Her voice shook with anger, with bewilderment, with something else. “You want me to just leave you here? Go back to Valleyda and forget about all of this, leave you to bleed into a forest until there’s nothing left and you become . . . whatever it wants you to become? And what about after that, if you can’t hold the Shadowlands closed anymore even once it takes all of you? How do you think this ends, Eammon?”

“I don’t know.” He said it quietly. His softness, always a contrast for her edges. “I don’t know how it’d all end, and I’m nearly past caring. But I’d know I tried to keep you safe. I’d know I did my best to keep you from going down with me.”

“You act like this is a punishment. You didn’t choose this any more than I did. This isn’t your fault.”

“It’s my fault you’re here. It’s my fault they died. I wasn’t strong enough, so the Wilderwood kept calling Second Daughters. Kept taking them.” He said it all evenly, matter-of-fact, but his eyes still burned and his hands kept twitching to fists, like he wanted to hide the scars on his palms.

So she took his hands. Wove her fingers with his. Held them so tight her knuckles blanched, so tight she could feel his scars like lace pressed against her skin. “It’s not going to take me,” she said, a low whisper. “And I won’t let it take you.”

It almost put a name to the thing growing between them, that declaration. But the name was too vast and too fragile, something that might break them to acknowledge now.

“I’m trying to protect you,” he murmured. “Red, I’d let the world burn before I hurt you.”

“It would hurt me to leave you here.” Prayer and confession. “It would hurt me to leave you all alone.”

His sigh shuddered on the end. Red tugged at his scarred and bloodied hands. “Let’s go home.”

They walked back silently, hands tightly clasped, nearly sealed together by sap and blood. The Wilderwood stayed quiet, preternaturally still. Red still had that sense of slow, unknowable thought, churning deep in the forest, rolling over what it’d heard, what it’d seen.

Choice.

She thought she heard the word again, murmured in thicket and bower, but no leaves dropped and no moss withered. Like the Wilderwood whispered it into the thin thread of its magic she carried, something for only her to hear.

When they reached the Keep, Red climbed the stairs to their room with Eammon’s arm wrapped around her, providing what little support she could when the top of her head came to only his shoulder. She led him to the bed, despite his noise of protest. “You need it more than I do.”

Eammon looked at her from under the fringe of his hair, something unreadable in the twist of his mouth.

She wanted to kiss the look away. She didn’t.

The cloak spread over her like a blanket as she stretched out on the floor. She fingered the embroidery, the gold wolves tangled in tree roots near the hem. “This is beautiful.”

Eammon was silent long enough that she wondered if he was already asleep. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said finally. “If you just want the plain cloak again, Asheyla can—”

“No.” Fierce and final. “It’s perfect.”

Another pause. “You deserve a real bridal cloak,” Eammon murmured into the ember-lit dark. “Even if it’s only a thread bond.”

Warmth rose in her fingers, curled in her middle. “It’s just as binding as a marriage, you said.”

There was a question in it, one that recalled mouths and hands and other ways to bind a marriage. Things he wouldn’t let happen, because it would be a distraction from his task of keeping the Wilderwood in check, and would spell an end for them both.

His inhale was sharp. He caught her meaning. It was cruel to say it, maybe, cruel to let that heat suffuse her voice. But he’d had room for doubt, earlier, room to think she might not come back. She needed him to know she would. That whether he could answer this want or not, she would always come back.

“Just as binding.” His voice was strained.

She wasn’t sure how long they both lay there, staring up into the ceiling, painfully aware of the shape of the other. When Red finally dropped into sleep, her dreams were burning.

Valleydan Interlude VII

T he sunlight in the gardens hurt Neve’s eyes after so long in the Shrine. Unthinkingly, she lifted her hand to shade her face. Blood smeared over her cheek, the new slash in her skin tugging with a slight but aching pain.

With a curse, she rubbed the blood away, then peered at her palm. She’d taken care to slice herself in different places every time; thin, precise cuts of Kiri’s dagger. They never seemed to completely heal.

Stealing pieces of the Wilderwood