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

Bleeding on the branches pulled at the rest of the tree they’d been cut from, made them fall away from the forest to appear instead in the cavern of the Shrine. They grew strange and inverted, resisting, but they came. There were at least a dozen now, an unnatural forest encased in rock, growing from stone and watered with blood.

And if you offered the blood, you received the magic, sharp and cold as daggers of ice. Magic from the Shadowlands that left frost on your fingers, darkened your veins. Felt like winter slithering around your bones.

Magic she’d finally stopped denying herself.

She’d resisted, for a time. This strange power was never her objective— Neve didn’t care about anything other than weakening her sister’s prison, making a way for her to return. But the more she bled for it, the more it tugged at her, shadowed and seductive. Promising control, at least over this one thing.

At the end of it all, she couldn’t make Red run, and now she couldn’t make her leave the Wilderwood. But she could wrench power from it. Here was something that rested entirely in her grasp, and the more time went on, the more foolish it seemed not to wield it.

With a touch, Neve could wither a flower. A flick of her fingers could turn a leaf from green to brown, and sometimes it seemed like shadows grew longer when she drew near them, like they were waiting for her command. The delicate tracing of darkness in her veins took longer to fade away each time she used it.

And Red was still gone.

Guards were stationed in the village nearest the border, watching for her return. Kiri said they had to be cautious— even if the bonds holding Red to the Wilderwood loosened enough for her to escape, they might not let her free entirely, and there was no way to know how she might be altered by them. But nothing emerged from the edge of the trees.

Frowning, Neve gestured at a green bush by the path. Cold across her fingertips, veins running like ink. The leaf curled in on itself, brown and brittle, before dropping to the path.

Kiri emerged from the shadows of the Shrine, blue eyes avid as she deftly wrapped her bleeding palm. She always cut deep, gave more blood than necessary. Neve didn’t think it gave her any more magic than it gave the rest of them. She thought Kiri just enjoyed bloodletting.

Other priestesses filtered silently into the gardens behind Kiri, bandaging their own wounds. Around each neck, a branch-shard pendant, white bark brushed with subtle shadow.

The new High Priestess reached up with copper-smeared fingers, lightly touched the matching pendant at her neck. Her eyes fluttered closed, a brief moment of calm, before opening again. A slight smile crossed her face, untouched by any sharpness, only seen in these brief moments when the blood was fresh.

Neve’s own pendant was still in the drawer of her desk. She hadn’t touched it since that day she accidentally marked it with her blood, the day she had that overwhelming sense of being watched. Kiri seemed irritated by this quiet rebellion at first, but didn’t push. Arick, who for reasons unknown to her had never received an odd necklace of his own, seemed almost . . . relieved.

But the other priestesses still wore theirs, each pendant produced by Kiri after they’d made their first blood offering, wielded the magic of the Shadowlands for the first time. Neve didn’t know where she got the wood; it wasn’t from any of the trees now crowding the Shrine. She didn’t ask.

News of the changes in the Order had trickled slowly across the continent. Not the concrete details, but how they were doing more to free the Kings than just sending Second Daughters, how the candles in the Shrine had changed from scarlet to shadowy gray. Neve had braced for backlash, but it turned out Kiri was right. Whatever Valleyda decided, the other Temples fell in line, especially as the rumors of what they’d done in Floriane Harbor spread.

None of them knew the full scope of what was happening here— Neve didn’t even know how one would begin to explain it— but some priestesses from other countries were curious enough to come to Valleyda, to be part of the movement. The Order was still smaller than it had been before banishing dissenters to the Rylt, but its growth was slow and steady.

One of the priestesses exiting the Shrine carried a bloodstained cup— Arick’s daily contribution. Neve had never known him to be squeamish, but recently he’d either sent his sacrifice with a priestess or brought the cup himself, rather than offering straight from the vein. It still worked. Blood was blood, and Arick’s was what had woken the branch shards in the first place, made them able to draw the white trees out of the forest.

“The Consort Elect will arrive shortly to observe the new arrival,” Kiri said, coming level with Neve. “Are you planning to stay?”

She wasn’t. Neve was headed to the garrison, where she would ask Noruscan, her captain of the guard, if he’d received any reports from the Wilderwood. Kiri knew this. Still, she asked, like she was daring Neve to come up with a different answer.

“I’m retiring for the evening.” Neve turned away, headed down the path. “Tell Arick to meet me in my chambers, when you’re finished.”

She needed to talk to him. Arick was uncharacteristically cautious about Red, too, warning Neve that the woman who returned might not be the woman they’d lost, that the binds of the Wilderwood were difficult to untangle. The way he spoke about her was almost cold. It made Neve wonder why he was doing this, sometimes, when she had the energy to wonder such things, but Red and Arick had always been a complicated equation. The threads binding them all were wound in inextricable knots.

She was halfway down the path when Kiri spoke again. “We made you a Queen