For the Wolf

FOR THE WOLF

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Book Two of The Wilderwood

Hannah Whitten

Chapter One

Neve

Out of the open window, something was moving. That wasn’t so strange in and of itself—she’d seen so much in the scant minutes she’d been awake, so much that her mind couldn’t twist into the proper patterns. Words rang in her ears, made soft and rounded by a mind that wouldn’t stop running in panicked loops. Her head felt thick, her body alien, understanding a flickering thing that eluded her grasp.

If she refused to listen, refused to treat this like it was real, maybe it wouldn’t be.

Darkness slithered in Neve’s head, cold through her veins. She clenched her fists.

Patient words, repeated again, drumming into her brain despite her best efforts: “Do you understand why you’re here?”

His voice was so smooth, so conciliatory. Like a physician to a newly awakened patient. It was uncanny, really, that she’d never realized he wasn’t Arick. Whatever they’d used to switch places made his voice sound like Arick’s, but the cadence was all wrong. From Arick, everything had the rhythm of a joke. From Solmir, nothing did.

Solmir. Her mind skittered away from the name, one more thing that made no sense.

But that wasn’t quite true, was it? It made too much sense, and therein was the problem.

Kings, what had she gotten herself into?

“I didn’t want it to come to this, Neverah.” Her full name again. She remembered how odd the shortened version sounded coming from him in those last few months. A false closeness they hadn’t quite earned yet, and part of her had known it even then. “Things… veered out of my control. Wildly.”

He sat behind her from where she stood at the window and looked on the gray world. His wooden chair made up one of four pieces of furniture in this spare tower room. Two chairs, a table… her coffin.

There was a fireplace next to Solmir, but it was empty. The room was circular, marked by four windows, their sills carved with sinuous lines that reminded her of smoke. Nothing on the walls, but that gray paper moon hung from the central point of the dark-painted ceiling, spangled with drawn-on constellations she recognized. The Two Sisters, the Plague Stars.

And all of it, everything, gray.

Neve didn’t look at the man—the god—behind her. She concentrated on the thing outside the window instead, a monster that seemed easier to understand. A distant mottled side, like the body of a snake in half molt, winding through inverted trees.

A gray beast, a gray forest, everything gray but her captor’s eyes. They blazed blue, and she could nearly feel them boring into her back, willing her to turn. Willing her to acknowledge what was happening here, to remember what she’d done.

What she’d done.

So much to remember, so much to parse. Darkness running out of her like a second set of veins, power in them pulsing like a heartbeat. Power that she pulled in, power that she chose to make part of herself.

Red’s face. Red and Raffe, screaming at her from beyond the smoky glass. Neve left them, Neve chose to leave them. What else could she deserve, she who by her own selfishness had nearly unleashed an apocalypse? She’d resigned herself to shadows, and here they were, shaped like a man and a tower and a gray world filled with gods and monsters.

Their religion had no concept of an afterlife, but she’d twisted so many of those holy pieces already, made them fit what she wanted. Maybe she was dead, maybe this was a punishment created specifically for her.

For her, and for him.

“In the end, I had no choice.” If Solmir noticed that she was close to panic, that all his patience did nothing to soothe her speeding heart, his tone didn’t indicate it. It stayed even and placating, it made her want to rip out his tongue.

The thought, such unexpected violence, tugged at her veins, pulled at something in her head. All the shadow she’d pulled within her spun and writhed beneath her skin; the darkness crouching at the edge of her thoughts was set to pounce. Not her thought, not her action—something different, lurking in her like a waiting predator.

Her hands had curled to claws, and she didn’t have to look down to know her veins ran tar black.

“I thought I had no choice.” He said it quietly, like this was a confession. Still facing the window, Neve bared her teeth. He’d get no absolution from her. “You were weak. You’d let in too much shadow, given too much over, and when you fought Kiri in the Shrine… you were gone, after that. You wouldn’t wake up. I thought anchoring you to the magic of the grove might heal you.” She still didn’t look at him, but she heard the faint sound of his loose long hair shifting over his shoulders as he shook his head. “I didn’t expect you to—to take it all in, when your sister came to save you.”

Sister. Neve closed her eyes.

“But that could work for us.” Hope was an incongruous thing here. It sounded so out of place. “I thought I would have to try the same plan again—wait for another opportunity, when we’re rapidly running out of time. But with you here and Red on the other side, there might be another way.”

That was enough to make her finally look at him, whipping around from the window. He leaned forward in his chair, elbows braced on knees, hands clasped between them. It was strange to see someone you’d been close to for months in a body different from the one you knew. Solmir’s long, straight hair fell over his shoulders, obscuring most of his face. A row of tiny scars marked his hairline, small in the center of his forehead, growing larger as they tracked to his temples. He wore thin silver rings on nearly every long finger, and the liquid shift of his hair revealed a matching silver ring in his right earlobe.

He raised his eyes to hers. Blazing blue, bluer than any sky or ocean she’d ever seen.

She wanted to speak. She had every intention. But seeing him there, a fairy-tale god made her villain, kept her vocal cords from working.

He could read on her face what she wanted to say, though. “We have to end them.” A whisper, like even now he was afraid they might be overheard, in this wide prison-world that held only beasts. “They’re amassing power, Neverah. They have been for centuries. They want the world they were cast out from, and they will unmake it before they let it go on without them.”

And there it was. The reason for all this. The motivation behind everything they’d done, he and Kiri, using her and Arick’s grief as a catalyst for their own cosmic plans.

She wanted to spit at him. She wanted to cry. All Neve did was pull in a deep, shaking breath.

“Connecting you to the shadow grove was never part of the plan,” Solmir murmured. “Giving you… what I gave you… was never part of the plan. But I did both of those things to save you, Neverah. I don’t expect you to believe me, but I did.”

Did she believe him? Neither yes nor no seemed safe.

“The other option seemed too outlandish,” he continued, speaking to his clasped, sliver-ringed hands, “too mythical. But I guess it’s ridiculous for us, of all people, to discount a myth. Had I known the original plan would go so poorly, I would’ve been looking from the start.”

So poorly, indeed. Neve remembered things in snatches, from before the smoked-glass coffin, before the shadow grove. The Shrine. Red, crouched like something wild, bloodied and listening to the trees. Pain in her head, then pain everywhere else, aching cold turning her inside out as she grabbed up more of that dark power than she ever had before, one last effort to save her sister from the inhuman thing she’d become.

But Neve had lost her humanity, too, in the end. Black lines, shadowed power, inverted trees.

There’d been pain, pain like unraveling, like someone had taken the thread at the end of her and sent her spinning. But then—a soft kiss on her forehead. A flare of something, deep in her, a lifeline her soul could wrap its claws around. And the pain was gone.

That’s when she’d seen Solmir, Solmir-who-was-Arick, shimmering in and out of view like a mirage. When had she put together what had happened? Had someone explained it to her? She didn’t think so. The power in her, cold and spangled with ice, seemed to do the explaining itself. Cold magic was its own end, threads of shadow spelling out what she should’ve seen the whole time: Arick wasn’t Arick, what she thought she was doing wasn’t the whole of it, and she’d shackled herself to a plan that didn’t care if Red lived or died.

There was more to it than that. There had to be. But if all of it ended with Neve inhuman and dark in a world meant for gods, did the minutiae matter so much?

And what of Red? Shadows damn her, had Neve gotten anything she wanted, or had it all spun so far out of control that she’d lost everything?

Control. Kings and shadows, all she wanted was some control.

“Redarys is alive.” It was almost like Solmir could read her thoughts, see her fear spelled out in her eyes. His own eyes flickered over her face, blue as an ocean in this sea of gray. A gust of cold breeze blew through the tower’s open windows, ruffling the straight smoke-shine of his hair. “She and her Wolf, both. They’re unharmed.” A flash of dark emotion across his hatefully handsome face. “We’ll need them, for this new plan to work.”

Red and her Wolf. The monster she’d chosen.

All his talk of new plans, of finding something, and she had no idea what any of it meant. She was the prisoner of a King, and dark power flowed through her veins like blood, and Neve understood none of it.

She opened her mouth, unsure what would come out, and what did was “There’s something outside.”

His brows drew together, dark slashes over blue eyes. Solmir looked over his shoulder, flicking the shining sheet of his long hair behind his shoulder. It was brownish-gold, she thought. In the world above. She wasn’t sure how she knew that; it was buried somewhere in the memories that spangled and wouldn’t come together into a clear picture. It felt like intimate knowledge, here where there was no color but his eyes, that she also knew the color of his hair.

If she weren’t so numb, if she didn’t feel like a corpse who hadn’t realized its death yet, Neve might’ve been sick.

Solmir peered out the window, at the slowly slithering mass in the inverted forest. Roots stretched toward the sky, up and up and up, farther than Neve thought should be possible. Eventually, they nearly disappeared, became faint enough that she could almost convince herself they were just strangely stratified clouds. Branches thatched over the ground like bridges built by madmen. In the window behind her, there was no inverted forest, nothing but an expanse of gray rolling ground and gray rolling sky. The roots were still slightly visible, miles up into the air, but they didn’t extend down into trunks and branches. And other than that, nothing.

Nothing but them in this tower on the edge of nowhere. An eternity of gray and monsters beyond the door.

“A lesser beast,” Solmir said, waving a hand at the slithering thing as he turned back around. “The Old Ones are deeper in the ’lands, tied to their own territories. They won’t come this far out. And the Kings are tethered to the Sanctum.”

He said these things like she should know what they meant. Neve shook her head. “Territories?” Her voice croaked, sounded like she’d swallowed a handful of nails. “Sanctum?”

“The gods trapped here have made their own places,” Solmir said, as if it was an explanation and not just another string of words that made sense separately but not together. “They shaped the ’lands into kingdoms, carved it up. Not many of them are left, but the ones who are stay in their places. The Oracle is in the mountains, the Leviathan in the sea, the Serpent underground. And the Kings in the Sanctum.” He gestured again at the creature beyond the window. “That’s a lesser beast. There aren’t many of them left. Lesser beasts are the only things that will venture this close to the edges of the Wilderwood, the only things stupid enough to think they can escape.” He shrugged, fallen fully into the role of lecturing teacher, like that could distract her from the horror she was caught in. “Before, they could occasionally. But not now that the Wilderwood is healed and held by two Wolves again.”

If he didn’t stop mentioning Red, Neve was going to lose it. Her hands found the sinuously carved windowsill behind her and dug in, clawing like it could be a lifeline. Was Red looking for her? Was she gripped with the same desperation that had held Neve by the throat for the past months?

She didn’t know. She didn’t know.

Another stirring of anger in her heart, thoughts of violence. But this time, it wasn’t against Solmir—it was against Kiri, against Arick, even—everyone around her who had let her do this. The veins in her arms ran darker at the thought.

What had happened to her?

“Nothing to be worried about.” Solmir finally stood, clasped his hands behind him at almost military attention, like he’d taken every ounce of rawness she’d sensed from him before and tucked it carefully away. He stood a head and a half taller than her, built strong but lithe, face aristocratically handsome with an edge of cruelty—a knife-blade nose, sharp cheekbones, dark brows slashed over those infernally blue eyes. He looked cold.

So unlike Raffe.

Kings, her knees were going to give out.

“If it decides to die right outside our window,” Solmir continued, still in that measured voice that said he could tell she was fractured, and was trying very hard not to make her break, “then, maybe I’ll be concerned. The shadow-creatures it produces are a nuisance—all that trapped magic letting free when a soulless thing finally dissolves.” His eyes narrowed at Neve, like he was taking her mettle. “They have some moments of semi-sentience, when they first get free. Mostly, they just try to break through to the world above. But now, they’d probably be drawn to the Kings. Build up their power.”

There was something for her mind to latch onto, concrete in his sea of explanations. “You keep talking about the Kings like you aren’t one of them.”

It came out stronger, the first time she’d sounded like herself since she woke up. She sounded like a queen.

He had no right to look so stricken.

“You brought me here.” Winter gathered in her closed fists, spangles of ice in her veins as her sluggish thoughts caught up with her heart, alchemized emotion from her tired body. “You tricked Arick, and you tried to kill my sister after telling me you could save her, and you trapped me here with you.”

The last word was nearly a shout, her hands raised and clawed. Black lines shivered over them, her veins made snakes of shadow, ice crystallizing on her fingers. But he didn’t back away. He didn’t look frightened. He looked, instead, like he was weighing something in his mind, deciding whether one path or another would be easier to take.

When the decision was made, he shrugged. “I did.” No denying, no attempting to mitigate the magnitude of what he’d done. “I did what I had to, Neverah. Had honesty been an option, I would’ve given it to you. But it wasn’t.” His brows drew together, chin tipping upward. “Yes, I brought you here. Yes, I trapped you. But I promise you this, on my life and on my blood: I will see you safely from here once our work is done.”

On my life and on my blood. An ancient vow, one she’d only read in history books. It should’ve sent her thoughts skittering again, scattered from the center like beads from a snapped bracelet, but instead it was somehow bolstering.

“You and I are going to end this underworld,” Solmir murmured, low and fierce. “We are going to burn it to the ground and take the Kings with it.”