For the Wolf (The Wilderwood Books Book 1)

The water in the tub was cold enough to make her teeth chatter when she dipped in her hand, but Red was too filthy to care. She pulled off her tattered white dress and black sash, kicking them into a pile on the floor— those, someone could burn. Shivering, she sank quickly into the tub before the cold could change her mind, and scrubbed at her hair until her nailbeds turned blue, extracting twigs one by one and letting them clatter to the floor.

Leaves matted her hair, too. As she pulled them out, Red noticed they were each blushed with green along the veins.

She frowned at one of them, tracing the lines with a fingertip. Addled by fear and confusion, her memories of the Wilderwood were probably less than reliable. But she’d swear that every leaf she saw outside the protection of the Wolf’s gate was gray and withered, the colors of autumn leaching rapidly into winter.

Red flicked the leaf from her wet fingers with more force than necessary.

When her nails were free of dirt and her hair free of forest, Red stepped from the tub, teeth clenched against the cold. Naked, she skulked across the room, feeling strangely exposed to the vines on the window, and grabbed the dark-green gown off the bed. She pulled it on without bothering to dry off, fabric sticking to her wet skin.

As she stood in front of the age-spotted mirror and attempted to untangle her hair, her stomach rumbled.

There’d been breakfast, before the procession left the Valleydan capital, but Red hadn’t managed to eat much, and couldn’t even remember what it was. Since then: a bloodthirsty forest, a surly Wolf, miles run on adrenaline alone.

Red set her teeth. This room was clean and safe and isolated; the last thing she wanted was to go wandering through the ruined Keep on the off chance she might find some toast. But her stomach twisted again, its growl more insistent.

During her earlier exploration, there’d been that small door with rusty hinges at the back of the dining room. The one behind which she’d heard the curse and the laugh. Red still didn’t feel quite brave enough to face who-or whatever made those noises, but she was pretty sure that room was a kitchen. And maybe the things she’d heard in it were elsewhere by now.

Thief-furtive, Red crept from her room. It was too cold to forgo shoes, really, a pervasive chill in the air that the half-forest walls didn’t cut, but her boots were still caked in enough mud to make her clumsy. She wanted to be able to run if she needed to.

The sky through the cracked, domed window above the foyer was mostly unchanged. Maybe slightly darker, if she squinted, but still twilight. The Wilderwood seemed caught in a perpetual gloaming, trapped between day and dusk.

A murmur came through the broken arch across the hall, too muffled to make out, but the cadence and low, graveled tone were familiar. The Wolf.

Red kept her back against the wall as she inched closer to the arch. Feeling the stone behind her was somehow reassuring, even moss-furred as it was, a solid thing to hold on to.

“She’s here?” A different voice, answering Eammon’s indistinct mutter. It at least sounded human, touched with a melodious accent that reminded her of Raffe’s. The laugher from before? “So that’s why the Wilderwood seemed so restless.”

“Restless is one way to put it,” Eammon grumbled.

“I would’ve gone with desperate.” This from a new voice, masculine and deep, but not as rough as Eammon’s. The voice she’d heard from behind the door, cursing after the clatter. “The Wilderwood needs two, and it knows she’s here now. You’ve held it alone for too long.”

A pause. “We’ve had this discussion,” Eammon said, clipped and stern.

No answer, though Red thought she heard a sigh. A moment, then the musical voice spoke again. “Well, did she find you?”

“In the library,” Eammon answered. “How’d she know to go to the damn library?”

“It’s not like there’s anywhere else to go, really. You can’t hide from her, Eammon, no more than you could from the others. What’d you expect?”

In response, Eammon grumbled a long and mostly unintelligible curse, something about the Five Kings and what they could do with certain appendages.

“Where is she now?” the second, masculine voice asked. “Do you know? Or did you just turn her out of the library and hope for the best?”

“I told her to stay in the gate and away from the trees,” Eammon answered. He neglected to mention the third rule, Red noticed, the one about staying out of his way. The omission seemed deliberate.

The masculine voice, admonishing: “Do you think that will change anything?”

Silence, tense as a bowstring. Red found herself holding her breath.

“There’s a breach to the east.” The other, melodic voice gently changed the subject. “Nothing’s come through from the Shadowlands yet, but I’m sure it won’t be long. The sentinel tree was half covered in rot when I saw it earlier, and sinking fast. I threw some blood on it, but it didn’t make much difference.” A light sigh. “There’s been more breaches than usual lately.”

Shadowlands. Here was another fairy tale suddenly made concrete. The Shadowlands were the prison the Wilderwood created, a place to trap monsters. Dread prickled at the back of Red’s neck.

“Far more breaches,” the deep voice agreed. “I haven’t found a sentinel tree free of shadow-rot in days. Some of them aren’t very far gone, but it won’t take long before they show up here. That’s a lot of potential holes for something to come through.”

The forest had been empty of monsters when Red entered. At least, empty of the kind that had supposedly come from the Wilderwood before Kaldenore went to the Wolf— shape-shifting things made of shadow, formed from scraps of forest and bone. Red hadn’t thought much of it, preoccupied with running from fanged trees that wanted her blood. But this mention of the Shadowlands, of a breach, of something coming through . . .

“The Wilderwood is weak.” Eammon, tired. “But I can fix it.”

“Not without a knife.” The musical voice, shaded dark. “Not without a knife, or without becoming—”

“It doesn’t matter how I do it, so long as it’s done.”

“If she’s here, it’s because she’s needed, Eammon.” The second, deeper voice, brusque. “Whether you want that or not.”

“Getting one more person tangled in this mess has never helped before. Not in a way that lasts.” The sound of a chair scraping across the floor. “You know that, Fife. It never has, and it never will.”

Red’s heartbeat thudded in the hollow of her throat.

The Wolf rounded the edge of the archway with fire sparking in amber eyes, his jaw clenched tight. Red pushed off the wall to meet him, hands balled into fists at her sides. Behind Eammon, she saw fleeting glimpses of two other people— a small, delicately featured woman with golden-brown skin, and a pale, lanky figure with a shock of reddish-gold hair— but all her attention was commanded by the Wolf, by the terrible possibilities of what she’d overheard and what it could mean. “What’s breached?”

He backpedaled when he saw her, his hands once again rising like she was something to be warded off. The Wolf’s eyebrows slashed downward. “Eavesdropping is rude.”

“You’re one to talk about rude.” She matched his narrowed eyes. “I repeat, what’s breached?”

His hands, still held defensively between them, slowly fell. Eammon stared at her for a minute, some internal debate weighing his gaze. Then he tried to shoulder past. “None of your concern.”

Red turned with him. “I beg to differ.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“Is it the monsters?”

He froze, hand half outstretched for the coat hanging on the knob of the moss-covered stair railing. “What do you know about the monsters?”

“I know they came from the forest before Kaldenore went in, and they disappeared afterward.” To say she knew that seemed strange, after so many years of thinking it little more than a tale to frighten children. But in the past day she’d spent here, old doubts had been scrubbed away with the same speed as new ones had surfaced. “I know that you supposedly would’ve unleashed them on the world again if I hadn’t arrived.”

He’d blanched at the mention of Kaldenore’s name, those long, scarred fingers falling back to his thigh as he turned to face her. “I didn’t send the monsters.” He swallowed, a visible tic in his throat. “They weren’t . . . they weren’t on purpose.”

One more thing she didn’t know how to make sense of— this hulking, scarred man who seemed just as horrified by his forest as she was. “So that story is true?”

“That story is true.” He turned away, ran a hand through his long, dark hair. “But rest assured, it won’t happen again. Regardless of whether you’d come or not, I’ll never purposefully unleash anything from this damn forest, and in fact work quite hard to keep it all contained.”

Cold comfort, especially hedged by purposefully. “So where are you going, then?”

“To do Wolf-things.” Eammon grabbed the coat and swung it over his shoulders in one motion, turning toward the door.

The decision was split-second and out of her mouth before she could give it too much thought. “I’m coming with you.”

The Wolf rounded on her, teeth glinting in the light of the flames along the unburnt vine. “You most certainly are not.”

“Then give me a better answer than Wolf-things.”

Eammon’s hands tensed into knots by his sides. His mouth worked as if looking for that better answer; he swallowed whatever he found. “It’s not safe for you,” he said finally. “You know that.”

“Safe around here seems a relative concept at best. And I’d like to see for myself that you’re holding up your end of the bargain. That no monsters will be leaving the confines of your forest.”

The dim light caught his eyes, emphasized both their color and the depth of the shadows beneath. “You could just trust me.”

Her chin tipped up. “Give me a reason to.”

They stared at each other, Red and the Wolf. It could’ve been a contest of wills, if it felt like something either of them could win.

“I promise not to bleed,” Red said softly. “That’s the only way it will come for me, right? If I bleed?”

He didn’t answer. Eammon’s gaze pinned her in place, unreadable. Then he jerked his chin toward the corridor. “Go get boots. You can’t traipse through the Wilderwood barefoot.”

Her mud-caked boots were right inside her room’s door. Red knocked off the worst of the muck and laced them quickly, half convinced the Wolf would change his mind if she dallied too long. She thought of grabbing her scarlet cloak from the wardrobe, but it had suffered enough indignities today.

When she came back into the main hall, Eammon had shrugged off his coat. He held it out like an offering but didn’t meet her eyes. “It’s cold.”

After a moment’s hesitation, she took the proffered coat, swung it over her shoulders. It hung to her knees, smelled of old books and coffee and the cinnamon-bite of fallen leaves, still warm from where he’d worn it.

Brows drawn down, Eammon opened the door and stalked into the fog.