The Order stood scattered among the greenery, crowding the flowers, a sea of white robes and piety. Every priestess that called Valleyda home, plus all who had traveled, from the Rylt across the sea and Karsecka at the southern tip of the continent and everywhere in between. Each Temple had a white tree shard, a small splinter of the Wilderwood to pray to, but it was a special honor to trek to the Valleydan Temple, where they had a veritable grove of them. A privilege, to pray among the bone-white branches that made the prison of the Kings and beseech their return.
But this morning, none of the priestesses stepped inside the Shrine. The only person permitted to pray among the white branches today was Red.
The glass fogged with her breath. Absently, Red drew a finger through the cloud. Their nursemaids had done that long ago, illustrating stories on the windowpane. Stories of the Wilderwood as it was before the creation of the Shadowlands, when all the magic of the world was locked within it to make a prison for the god-like creatures that had reigned in terror.
Before, the forest had been a place of eternal summer, a spot of solace in a world ruled by violence. According to the nursemaids, it’d even been capable of granting boons to those who left sacrifices within its borders— bundled hair, lost teeth, paper dotted with blood. Magic had run freely in that world, available to anyone who could learn to use it.
But once the Five Kings bargained with the forest to bind away the monstrous gods— to create the Shadowlands as their prison— all that magic was gone, pulled into the Wilderwood to accomplish its monumental task.
But the forest could still bargain, even then— it bargained with Ciaran and Gaya, the original Wolf and Second Daughter. In Year One of the Binding, the same year the monsters were locked away, they’d asked the Wilderwood for shelter from Gaya’s father, Valchior, and her betrothed, Solmir— two of the fabled Five Kings. The Wilderwood granted Gaya and Ciaran’s request, giving them a place to hide, a place to be together forever. It bound them into its borders and made them something more than human.
That’s where the nursemaids stopped. They didn’t talk about how the Kings entered the Wilderwood again, fifty years after the Binding, and never returned. They didn’t talk about Ciaran bringing Gaya’s dead body to the edge of the woods, a century and a half after the Kings disappeared.
Red still knew the tale. She’d read it hundreds of times, both in books counted as holy and in those of lesser import. Every version of it she could find. Though some of the details differed, the broad strokes remained. Ciaran, bringing Gaya to the Wilderwood’s border. Her body, half rotted, wound through with vines and tree roots as if she’d been tangled in the very foundations of the forest. His words to those who saw him, a few unimportant northern villagers who suddenly found themselves part of religious history.
Send the next.
And so, a love story turned to horror, as surely as eternal summer faded to withered fall.
Red drew her hand away as the edges of her foggy canvas faded. The trails her fingers left looked like claw marks.
A knock at the door, nearly tentative. Red leaned her forehead against the window. “A moment.”
One breath, deep and cold, then Red stood up. Her nightgown stuck to the chilled sweat on her shoulder blades as she tugged it off. Almost unconsciously, her eyes strayed to the skin above her elbow. Still unmarked, and she had to fight to keep hope from sinking teeth into her chest.
There was no account of what the Marks were supposed to look like, only that they appeared on the Second Daughter’s arm sometime in her nineteenth year, exerting an inexorable pull toward the north, toward the Wilderwood. Every morning since the year turned, she’d carefully inspected her skin, peering at each mole and freckle.
Another knock. Red glared at the closed door like the force of her ire could penetrate the wood. “Unless you want me to pray naked, you’ll give me a moment.”
No more knocking.
A wrinkled gown puddled by her feet. Red pulled it on and opened the door, not bothering to comb her hair.
Three priestesses stood silently in the corridor. All were vaguely recognizable, so they must be from the Valleydan Temple, not visitors. Maybe that was meant to be comforting.
If her disheveled appearance took the priestesses aback, they didn’t show it. They only inclined their heads, hands hidden in wide white sleeves, and led her down the hall, out into the cold, bright air.
The holy throng in the gardens stood stone-still, heads bowed, flanking the flower-decked entrance to the Shrine. Each priestess she passed made Red’s heart ratchet higher in her throat. She didn’t look at any of them, kept her gaze straight ahead as she ducked into the shadows beneath the arch, alone.
The first room of the Shrine was plain and square. A small table stocked with prayer candles stood by the door, the statue of Gaya tall and proud in the center of the room. At the statue’s feet, the white bark with its inscribed sentencing, a piece of the tree where Gaya and Ciaran had made their bargain. Gaya’s sister, Tiernan, had helped the two of them escape, and she brought the bark back as proof that Solmir’s claim on Gaya was void.
Red frowned up at her predecessor. It was a deft bit of work, what made Gaya revered and the Wolf reviled, a delicate filling-in of unknown history. The Five Kings had disappeared in the Wolf’s territory, therefore he was to blame. No one quite knew what he was supposed to be accomplishing by trapping the Kings— more power, maybe. Perhaps he was just doing as monsters do, having become one himself as the forest he was tied to twisted and darkened.
