Frustration drove her teeth together, the despair of seconds ago transmuting into fierce anger. She felt roots arching toward her under her feet, felt bone-colored boughs stretching over her head. Instinct told her to fight the magic down, but this was the Wilderwood, where it belonged. Where it’d been born. “I’m here, shadows damn you!” she screamed into the gloom. “Come collect your sacrifice, Wolf!”
The Wilderwood seemed to bend toward her. Anticipating. Like she had something it wanted.
The recklessness was gone as soon as it came. Spots spun in Red’s eyes as she gasped, fists closing, or trying to— her fingers were held straight by the forest floor beneath them.
Her brow furrowed at the sight of her hands against the ground. She didn’t remember kneeling, didn’t remember pressing them to the dirt.
Before she had a chance to stand, her hands began to sink.
In an instant soil covered her arms to the wrist, her fingers dropping deep to tangle in thready roots. They brushed against her hands like sentient things, searchingly prodding at her knuckles, the creases of her palms. A sharp prick at her nailbed, the slithering feeling of a root trying to work its way into her skin.
Red’s heart ratcheted, panic closing her throat as she desperately tried to work free, wrenching her hands in the dirt to escape that probing root. Branches brushed against her scalp, tangled in her hair. Laying claim.
The magic in her center reached forward, slow but implacable, a vine growing through a summer that counted days in her quickened heartbeat. It felt like it would reach right out of her skin to meet the forest that made it.
No.
Her teeth cracked together. Red forced her magic down, swallowing that dirt-taste, pressing until she thought she might collapse from the effort of folding a part of herself up and hiding it away. Sweat stood out on her brow when her magic was finally contained, coiled back into the places she’d made for it. Her wrists burned green with power she wouldn’t let loose.
Red yanked her hands from the forest floor. Broken root tendrils slithered away as she wiped her palms on her knees, like snakes going back to burrow.
Three white trees bent toward her, all seeming closer than they had a moment ago. Their graceful, swooping branches dipped low, a hand frozen right before it reached to caress.
A soft sound boiled and spilled over— for a moment, it almost sounded like a voice, like a word. But it broke apart before Red could make sense of it, fading into nothing but breeze and rustling leaves.
In the following silence, three blossoms dropped from the same bough of a flowering bush, one of many dotting the forest floor. The small white blooms were brown and withered before they hit the ground.
It gave Red the unsettling impression of a price being paid.
Swallowing hard, she stood, hitching her bag over her shoulder. “I suppose I’ll have to find you, then.”
She set off into the woods.
Red didn’t know how long she’d been walking when the thicket rose before her, grown up around one of the white trees. Short, scrubby bushes wrapped the trunk, thorns pointed outward at wicked angles. Through the close growth, Red could barely see the black rot spreading up the tree, crawling toward the clustered branches at the top.
A thorn caught in her hood as she tried to skirt around the thicket, one she’d swear hadn’t been there before. The crimson fabric pulled back from her face. Another dagger-sharp thorn drew a bloody line down her cheekbone.
Red clapped her hand to the wound, but the damage was done. A bead of blood rolled slowly down the thorn, coming to its end and dropping to another, ever closer to the dark-ravaged trunk of the white tree.
If she tried to reach through the tangle and smear it away, she’d only catch more thorns, spill more blood. So Red stood, and watched, and waited, dread roiling beneath her ribs.
Her blood touched the white trunk, hesitated. Then the tree absorbed it, took it in like water to parched soil.
Tripping over leaves, Red backed away from the tree until she collided with another, this one also thin and pale, also twisted with black rot. Underbrush tangled in her skirts, and Red tore herself away, the rip unnaturally loud in the silent forest.
That sound again, reverberating up from the forest floor, rustling leaves and stretching vines and clattering twigs cobbling themselves into something like a voice, something she didn’t so much hear as feel. It boiled up from her center, from the shard of magic she kept lashed down through white-knuckle effort.
Finally.
It’s been only one for so long.
A tree limb broke from a trunk, fell to the forest floor. It shriveled at once, years of decay packed into seconds, leaving nothing but a desiccated husk.