For the Wolf (The Wilderwood Books Book 1)

The empty chair across the table yawned like a chasm.

It had been easier to ignore when Arick ate with them, the few times it happened before Red left. Awkward as dinners with only Arick and Queen Isla were, he’d acted as a buffer when he played the dutiful Consort Elect, a retaining wall between her land and her mother’s cold sea. But now he was gone, fled with his grief and his sudden desire for heroism, and the dining room was a tomb with only two occupants.

No dinner with the Queen had ever been comfortable, really. Neve and Red hadn’t dined with their mother often, but when they did, they sat across from each other, Isla in the middle. Though those dinners had been nearly silent, at least Neve hadn’t been completely adrift. Red had been her anchor.

Now Neve stared into her empty plate, knowing every bite of dinner would go down like lead, knowing an hour here would feel like a day. Since Red left— since Red was sacrificed— time with her mother felt like a penance. Especially since Isla appeared wholly unaffected. If she carried the same ache Neve did, the Queen kept it hidden too deep to show.

The door opened and servants appeared, rolling in a single cart stacked with dishes. Even the smell of food made Neve’s nose wrinkle.

Reverently, one of the servants lit the three tapers in the center of the table— one white, one red, and one black. Isla bowed her head. After a moment, Neve begrudgingly followed.

The Queen’s eyes flickered expectantly to her daughter. Neve’s lips tightened over her teeth.

With a sigh, Isla closed her eyes. “To the Five Kings we give thanks,” she intoned, “for our safety and our sustenance. In piety and sacrifice and absence.”

The candles were snuffed. The servants filled their plates, topped their wine, then left, quick and silent. Neve didn’t touch her fork, but grabbed her wineglass and took a hearty swallow.

“The Rite of Thanks is two sentences, Neverah.” Isla took a dainty bite. “Surely it wouldn’t hurt you to make a show of faithfulness now and then.”

“I’d rather not, thank you.” Neve drained her glass. In the corner of her eye, her mother’s hand tensed on the table.

Isla took a swallow of wine. When she put the glass down, more forcefully than necessary, it made a small, crystalline pop. “I let the two of you grow too close,” she said, so quietly her mouth barely moved. “Back when you were children, I should’ve put a stop to it. I should’ve protected you—”

“I’m not the one who needed protecting.”

The Queen flinched.

The part of Neve that wanted to be a dutiful daughter felt a twist of pain at that. The same part that wished for something to cling to, for stable ground in this sea of guilt and uncertainty. That was what a mother should be, wasn’t it? Stable ground, even once you were grown? But Isla’s role in this was indelible, her complicity shaped as a missing daughter in a red cloak and violence she quietly accepted as collateral damage.

Neve loved her mother, but her mother deserved to flinch.

Her throat was a knife-ache, her fingers arched like claws on her knees beneath the table. Silence stretched, and she wished soundlessly for her mother to fill it with something. Anything.

When Isla finally moved, it was minuscule, a slump in her shoulders as she sighed. For one moment, the mask slipped, the icy Queen suddenly tired and hollow. But then her eyes rose to Neve’s, her composure reassembling itself. “This reminds me,” she said, as if they were having a normal conversation. “We should begin wedding preparations.”

Neve’s mouth hung partially open, the change in topic so abrupt her mind had to catch up. When it did, it was a white-hot riot, and her reply was truth stripped free of politeness or preamble. “I don’t want to marry Arick. You know that.”

“And you know it doesn’t matter.” Isla straightened, eyes reflecting candle-flames. “You think I wanted to marry your father? A man twice my age who only remained in court long enough to make an heir, and died before he knew he’d made two? The First Daughter’s marriage is always political. There are precedents. You are not the exception.” Isla drained the rest of her wine. “Neither of you could be the exception.”

“Arick is in love with Red.” Neve wanted to throw it down like a gauntlet, but it came out too brittle to be a weapon.

Still, some chord seemed to strike in her mother, drumming beneath her veneer of indifference. Isla’s eyes closed, her hands slackened on the tablecloth. The breath she pulled in was shallow.

Then her eyes opened, trained on empty air. “He’s more foolish than I thought, then.” She stood, slowly, like every movement was an effort. “That could be good for you, Neverah. Foolish men are easy to rule.”

The Queen left, gliding out the door with her ice-blue skirts trailing over the marble floor. She moved stiffly, but no one other than Neve would notice. She’d been trained in that same glide, the one that spoke of graceful power, and she could see the fault lines where it cracked.

A full wine bottle sat in the center of the table, uncorked and ready for pouring. Neve didn’t bother, drinking straight from the neck.

When nothing was left but lees, she stood on unsteady legs. The room pitched and spun, but no one offered an elbow for her to genteelly clasp— the dining hall was empty, and no servants waited just outside to attend to any royal needs. She must’ve scared them off with her unqueenly manners, her uncouth conversation.

In her inebriated state, it was almost funny.

Neve walked slowly out into the hall, hand tensed to steady herself on a wall if the need arose. She didn’t know the hour, other than it was late; the paned windows were velvet-dark, scattered with stars.

The windows faced north, toward the Wilderwood. With a motion made sloppy by too much wine, Neve spit on the floor in front of the glass.

Something caught her eye, disappearing around a corner. A flash of red and white, familiar in a way that would probably be obvious if she weren’t drunk. Brows knit, Neve walked forward, around the corner where whatever it was had disappeared.

Priestesses. Maybe two dozen, a few more than she’d seen when she argued with Raffe yesterday. Each of them held a candle, which wasn’t odd in itself— Order priestesses often carried scarlet prayer candles. At first, Neve thought the candles in their hands were black, like she’d stumbled on some late-night funerary procession or leave-taking rite.

Her eyes narrowed. No, not black. These candles were colored light charcoal. The same gray as a shadow.

The group glided silently down the hall, headed toward the gardens. Leading them, the red-haired priestess. Kiri.

Of course.

“You!”

Neve barely recognized the voice as hers at first. Even the single exclamation was somehow slurred, which probably should’ve been embarrassing, if she could muster the feeling.

The priestesses’ shoulders went rigid, each one, like children caught stealing sugar cubes. They looked to Kiri for instruction, but she seemed unbothered. Slowly, she turned around, the movement made syrupy in Neve’s wine-addled perception. Her small branch-shard pendant swung from her neck, the strands of darkness on the white bark nearly invisible in the gloom.

They stared at each other a moment. Then Kiri glanced at one of the others, nodded. A small, sharp smile turned up the corner of her lip.

Cool blue eyes flicked to Neve as the rest of the priestesses continued soundlessly down the corridor. “Can I help you, Your Highness?”

Her momentary ire had cooled, smothered by the strangeness of the priestesses in the dark, their silence and shadow-colored candles. “I saw you yesterday,” Neve murmured, more curious now than angry. “You were talking to Arick.”

“I was.” The flickering light twisted the lines of Kiri’s face.

“What did he want?”

The priestess’s face remained implacable, the flame from her shadow-gray candle dancing in her eyes. “The same thing you did, that night in the Shrine.”

A shiver rolled through Neve’s shoulders. “You told him how to save her.”

No answer. Just silence, just jittering shadows on the wall from Kiri’s gray candle.

“But how do you know?” Her voice sounded so small in the dark. “How do you know what happened to Red, how do you know how to get her back?” A shaky swallow. “Why didn’t you tell me first?”

Kiri’s hand reverently closed around her branch-shard pendant. “Since I was a child,” she said quietly, “long before I joined the Order, I have served the Kings. I have been guided by them to seek clarity, to know the true ways of things. It is not everyone who can be trusted with truth, Highness. It is a volatile thing, a fearful thing.” Her grip on her pendant tightened. “Caution is key, and moving in secrecy to make way for moving in light.”

“I can be trusted.” Neve nodded, only once, though the movement was sure to knock loose the start of a headache. “I want the truth, Kiri.”

Silence and wavering candlelight, cold blue eyes watching her, taking her measure. Kiri’s hand twitched on her pendant again. A dark, copper-scented smear marred the pad of one finger, and her eyes fluttered closed as she pressed it to the wood, almost as if she were listening to something.

Her eyes opened as she released her pendant. “Come.” Kiri resumed her slow glide down the corridor, taking the only light source in the hall and leaving Neve in darkness. How late was it? Why were none of the sconces lit?

Neve stared after her. “Where are you going?” It wasn’t accusing. It was genuinely curious.

The flame’s flicker caught the edge of a small, secretive smile as Kiri glanced over her shoulder. “Come,” she repeated, then turned toward the door to the gardens.

To the Shrine.

The priestesses filtered outside, hands cupped around the flames of their candles to guard them from the night breeze. Neve shifted back and forth on her feet. “Kings on shitting horses.” Soundlessly, she followed after them, out into the dark.

None of them looked at her as they walked silently down the garden paths, gliding like a sea of ghosts. The moon was new, and the deep night turned the shapes of the hedges beastly, made every arch a waiting monster.

Into the mouth of the Shrine, back toward the gauzy dark curtain. Kiri ducked in first but didn’t hold it open, making every priestess enter separately so no glimpse could be caught of the room beyond.

She knew what was back there, but gooseflesh still prickled over Neve’s skin.

The last priestess disappeared through the curtain. Neve took a deep breath. Then she ducked through, too.

The miniature Wilderwood. The priestesses, ringed around it with their odd gray candles. But something was different. The branch shards were marked, smeared with darkness. Blood? But no, the color was wrong, the scarlet of it marked through with threads of black. Kings, her head hurt.

“Neve?”

She whirled around. Arick stood behind her. A bandage wrapped around his hand, streaked crimson. In the center of his palm, a dark spot radiated on the white fabric like a miniature sun.

His weary face broke into a genuine smile. “I found a way.”