Arick gathered her hands, pulled her close again. “Run away with me,” he repeated, chafing his thumbs over her palms. “We’ll go south, to Karsecka or Elkyrath, find some backwater town where no one cares about religion or the Kings coming back, too far away from the forest to worry about any monsters. I’ll find work doing . . . doing something, and—”
“We can’t do that.” Red tugged out of his grip. The pleasant numbness of wine was rapidly giving over to a dull ache, and she pressed her fingers into her temples as she turned away. “You have responsibilities. To Floriane, to Neve . . .”
“None of that matters.” His hands framed her waist. “Red, I can’t let you go to the Wilderwood.”
She felt it again, the awakening in her veins. The ferns shuddered on the sill.
For a moment, she thought about telling him.
Telling him about the stray splinter of magic the Wilderwood left in her the night she and Neve ran to the forest’s edge. Telling him of the destruction it wrought, the blood and the violence. Telling him how every day was an exercise in fighting it down, keeping it contained, making sure it never hurt anyone again.
But the words wouldn’t come.
Red wasn’t going to the Wilderwood to bring back gods. She wasn’t going as insurance against monsters. It was an ancient and esoteric web she’d been born tangled in, but her reasons for not fighting free of it had nothing to do with piety, nothing to do with a religion she’d never truly believed in.
She was going to the Wilderwood to save everyone she loved from herself.
“It doesn’t have to be this way.” Arick gripped her shoulders. “We could have a life, Red. We could be just us.”
“I’m the Second Daughter. You’re the Consort Elect.” Red shook her head. “That is who we are.”
Silence. “I could make you go.”
Red’s eyes narrowed, half confusion and half wariness.
His hands slid from her shoulders, closed around her wrists. “I could take you somewhere he couldn’t get to you.” A pause, laden with sharp hurt. “Where you couldn’t get to him.”
Arick’s grip was just shy of bruising, and with an angry surge like leaves caught in a cyclone, Red’s shard of magic broke free.
It clawed its way out of her bones, unspooling from the spaces between her ribs like ivy climbing ruins. The ferns on the sill arched toward her, called by some strange magnetism, and she felt the quickening of earth beneath her feet even through layers of marble, roots running like currents, reaching for her—
Red wrestled the power under control just before the ferns touched Arick’s shoulder, the fronds grown long and jagged in seconds. She shoved him away instead, harder than she meant to. Arick stumbled as the ferns retracted, slinking back to normal shapes.
“You can’t make me do anything, Arick.” Her hands trembled; her voice was thin. “I can’t stay here.”
“Why?” All fire, angry and low.
Red turned, picking up the edge of the brocaded curtain in a hand she hoped didn’t shake. Her mouth worked, but no words seemed right, so the quiet grew heavy and was her answer.
“This is about what happened with Neve, isn’t it?” It was an accusation, and he threw it like one. “When you went to the Wilderwood?”
Red’s heart slammed against her ribs. She ducked under the curtain and dropped it behind her, muffling Arick’s words, hiding his face. Her gown whispered over the marble as she walked down the corridor, toward the double doors of the north-facing balcony. Distantly, she wondered what the priestesses’ informants might make of her mussed hair and swollen lips.
Well. If they wanted an untouched sacrifice, that ship had long since sailed.
The cold was bracing after the hearths in the ballroom, but Red was Valleydan, and gooseflesh on her arms still felt like summer. Sweat dried in her hair, now hopelessly straight, careful curls loosened by heat and hands.
Breathe in, breathe out, steady her shaking shoulders, blink away the burn in her eyes. She could count the number of people who loved her on one hand, and they all kept begging for the only thing she couldn’t give them.
The night air froze the tears into her lashes before they could fall. She’d been damned from the moment she was born— a Second Daughter, meant for the Wolf and the Wilderwood, as etched into the bark in the Shrine— but still, sometimes, she wondered. Wondered if the damning was her own fault for what she’d done four years ago.
Reckless courage got the best of them after that disastrous ball, reckless courage and too much wine. They stole horses, rode north, two girls against a monster and an endless forest with nothing but rocks and matches and a fierce love for each other.
That love burned so brightly, it almost seemed like the power that took root in Red was a deliberate mockery. The Wilderwood, proving that it was stronger. That her ties to the forest and its waiting Wolf would always be stronger.
Red swallowed against a tight throat. Biting irony, that if it hadn’t been for that night and what it wrought, she might’ve done what Neve wanted. She might’ve run.
She looked to the north, squinting against cold wind. Somewhere, beyond the mist and the hazy lights of the capital, was the Wilderwood. The Wolf. Their long wait was almost ended.
“I’m coming,” she murmured. “Damn you, I’m coming.”
She turned in a sweep of crimson skirts and went back inside.
Chapter Two
S leep came only in fragments. By the time sunrise bled into the sky, Red stood by the window, tangling her fingers together and staring out at the Shrine.
Her room faced the interior gardens, an expanse of carefully maintained trees and flowers, specially bred for their hardiness against the cold. The Shrine was tucked into the back corner, barely visible beneath a blooming
