For the Throne Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2022 by Hannah Whitten

  Excerpt from The Foxglove King copyright © 2022 by Hannah Whitten

  Excerpt from One Dark Window copyright © 2022 by Rachel Gillig

  Cover design by Lisa Marie Pompilio

  Cover illustrations by Arcangel and Shutterstock

  Cover copyright © 2022 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Author photograph by Caleb Whitten

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First Edition: June 2022

  Simultaneously published in Great Britain by Orbit

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Whitten, Hannah, author.

  Title: For the throne / Hannah Whitten.

  Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Orbit, 2022. | Series: The wilderwood ; book 2

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021052029 | ISBN 9780316592819 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780316592826 (ebook) | ISBN 9780316592833 (ebook other)

  Classification: LCC PS3623.H5864 F667 2021 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021052029

  ISBNs: 9780316592819 (trade paperback), 9780316592826 (ebook)

  E3-20220330-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  Extras Meet the Author

  A Preview of The Foxglove King

  A Preview of One Dark Window

  Also by Hannah Whitten

  Praise for For the Wolf

  To anyone who grew thorns instead of flowers—

  You had your reasons.

  Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.

  Tap here to learn more.

  This thing of darkness I

  Acknowledge mine.

  —Shakespeare, The Tempest (5.1.275–276)

  Add

  a second light and you get a second darkness, it’s only

  fair.

  —Richard Siken, “Portrait of Fryderyk in Shifting Light”

  mirror mirror

  three years ago

  She couldn’t sleep.

  That wasn’t so strange. Sleep had never come easily to Neve, not even in the cradle; apparently, it’d taken an elaborate bedtime ritual of stories and songs to get her infant self to slumber, the nursemaids taking turns in an endless cycle of walking and bouncing the tiny First Daughter before she was finally soothed to rest.

  Not much had changed, really. Neve still had to wear her mind thin before it would accept respite, had to tie it up in knots until the threads wore out. It’d never really bothered her, as sleeping often seemed like a waste of time, hours that could be better spent working.

  Like now.

  Neve tapped her fingers on her comforter, filled with fine down from Ryltish geese and spun with soft fibers from Karseckan looms. Prayer-taxes put to use. She probably had one of the most comfortable beds in Valleyda, which seemed wasteful, with how little she used it lately.

  Wasteful or not, sleep wasn’t coming anytime soon. Muttering a curse, Neve pushed herself up.

  The floor was cold, but she didn’t bother finding slippers. There was a fireplace in the library that was never completely banked; she’d be warm enough.

  A taper in a pewter stand and a book of matches waited on her bedside table. Neve struck the match, blooming sulfur-scent into the chilled air as she touched flame to wick. She nudged her door open quietly, careful to keep it from squeaking, and padded out into the corridor.

  She passed a guard or two dozing at their posts, but if they saw her, they didn’t speak. The First Daughter haunting the halls was nothing new. For a year now, she’d been sneaking out of her room at night, heading to the library. Finding every scrap of information she could about Wolves and woods and Second Daughters.

  Her steps slowed the closer she got to Red’s door, stalling a decision she didn’t really have to make. Red used to join her on these nighttime excursions, as unable to sleep as Neve. But last year, after she turned sixteen, after… well, after, Red had stopped coming with Neve to the library. Stopped trying to find a way out of the awful bargain she’d been born into.

  It made something that was almost anger burn in Neve’s belly, Red’s compliance. Her acceptance of the unacceptable. Maybe her twin really did think it was for the greater good, but in her darkest moments, Neve thought it was more like cowardice. If fate delivered you something awful, why would you decide you had to take it? What could ever make that decision fit comfortably in your mind?

  So Neve kept going to the library, kept pulling from the shelves every book that so much as mentioned the Wolves or the Kings or prophecies or bargains and reading them cover to cover. Red might be willing to walk into the mouth of a monster, but Neve was going to find a way to make the monster choke.

  She could fix this.

  Despite knowing what the answer would be, she lingered a moment outside Red’s door. Si
lence from within, silence in the hall, silence in the soft dark cut by moonlight through the window.

  Neve sighed. She walked on.

  The double doors to the library opened at her touch, the hinges well-oiled and gleaming. The Valleydan library was prized, something queens had added to over centuries, full of rare books and art—some the only copies in the known world. Neve walked inside and pulled the doors closed behind her, setting her taper on a table. The flickering light made shadowed recesses of the shelves, turned all the chairs to spindly, spidery things.

  Embers glowed in the large hearth to the left of the door, making the oil painting hung above it macabre in the half-light. Neve studied it as she poked the ashes into a low flame, sending a wave of heat through the frigid room.

  The painting was huge, nearly the size of the floor in Neve’s room. A dark field studded with bright spots of white, connected with pale lines. A map of the constellations.

  There’d been a time when Neve was fascinated by the night sky. She still felt a certain kinship with it, though she was self-aware enough to recognize that it was painfully pretentious for someone her age to think of themselves as dark and unknowable.

  Neve was very knowable. She wanted so little. Safety for her sister. Someone who loved her. A measure of control, as large a measure as she could get. To be an active player in her life rather than led along by outside forces, pushed in different directions as easily as a plume of smoke from a snuffed candle.

  Fire fed, she stepped back, squinted up at the painting. She knew most of the names of the constellations, knowledge she’d found in this very library. The Leviathan, the Plague Stars, the Sisters, the Far-Flung Queen. She knew some of the stories, too, though they varied so widely from country to country, it was hard to believe there was any kernel of truth in them. In Nioh, the Far-Flung Queen had been a conniving daughter who usurped a throne and plunged the world into war; the constellation was considered an ill omen. In Valleyda, the constellation’s story was one of gentleness and peace, a queen who’d been raised far away coming of age and ushering in a period of prosperity. And in Alpera, they didn’t think the shape in the stars was a queen at all, but a dagger.

  Destruction and rebirth and peace and war, all of it twisted, none of it true. Neve’s squint became a scowl.

  Neve walked to the bookshelf she’d been working through, rubbing the heel of her hand against her tired eyes. Three books, plucked from the shelves and held against her chest like shields, then dumped unceremoniously on a nearby table. She sat down, yawned, opened the first one. A singular edition, the cover cracked leather, the pages smelling of dust. The letters looked handwritten, ink faded to ghostliness in some places.

  Most of the entries were formatted like poems. Her nose wrinkled. At this point, Neve couldn’t really afford to be picky, but she didn’t have much faith that she would find what she needed here, in what looked more like an old journal than anything else.

  In fact, she was so sure the book would be useless that she had the cover halfway closed before a stray line caught her eye: the Golden-Veined, the Wood-Entangled.

  She swallowed, hard. Then she opened the book and read.

  I have heard the whispering in the branches, and they tell of one who becomes two, who become three.

  One to be the vessel—the Shadow Queen, the Dark-Holder.

  Two to make the doorway—the Shadow Queen and the Golden-Veined, Wood-Entangled.

  Three to make a throne—the Shadow Queen, the Golden-Veined, and the Holy Traitor, Blasphemy-Bound.

  “Gibberish,” Neve muttered to the book. She slammed it shut so hard, the old pages kicked out a faint cloud of dust. “Kings and shadows damn it.”

  Her throat felt thick, raw. Neve crossed her arms on the table and laid her forehead against them, teeth bared at the expectation of frustrated tears. Neve wasn’t much of a crier, but it was always things like this that brought her to weeping—wasted time, useless effort, reminders of how little she could do.

  She hiccupped one sob, quiet against the shush of the fire, then pushed the emotions down. That, at least, she could control.

  After a moment, she stood, leaning wearily against the table like an old woman, before heading to the door. She couldn’t do this tonight, insomnia or no.

  Neve was halfway to the door before a surge of rage eclipsed the gentler kind of anger that raised tears. She didn’t think before she acted; she strode back to the table, grabbed the useless book, and threw it into the fire.

  The leather popped and bubbled, filling the room with an acrid smell as the paper inside caught flame. The book flipped open, as if in a death throe, shrinking as the fire winnowed it away, turned it into so much smoke. The force of such rapid destruction made the pages flip. Neve caught the lines and arcs of half-eaten letters on the back cover—a T, an N, a Y.

  She left before the book finished burning.

  As she passed Red’s room again, she looked to the window on the wall opposite and told herself it wasn’t because she didn’t want to see Red’s closed door, didn’t want to think about her sister sleeping behind it and how the clock was rapidly ticking down to a time when Red wouldn’t be.

  Most of the lights in the city were doused at such a late hour, and the sky spread above the streets in a swath of midnight blue, pocked with stars. It was clear enough to pick out constellations, and Neve stopped almost unconsciously, eyes tracing brilliant patterns.

  The Sisters constellation was halfway over the horizon. One of the Sister shapes was visible, hand outstretched to the other still hidden behind the curve of the world.

  The angle made it look as if she were reaching into the earth.

  Chapter One

  Neve

  In the trees, something was moving.

  Neve stopped running, slamming against a trunk hard enough to knock the breath from her lungs. She felt half mad and looked it, too—fleeing from a tower into a nightmare landscape, where trees grew upside down and everything was shades of black and white and gray.

  Shadowlands. The prison of monsters, the prison of gods. An underworld, a half world, darkness anchored beneath the Wilderwood.

  It made a twisting sort of sense. One had consumed Red, so the other consumed Neve.

  Minutes ago, she’d woken in a glass coffin, woken with her veins inked black and her mind muddied. And he’d been there. And Neve hadn’t thought, hadn’t spared a second for niceties or explanations. She’d pushed up out of that coffin, and she’d run.

  Now, of course, she was slightly regretting it.

  She tried to calm her breathing, soften its rattle, panic closing in as she eyed the thing in the forest—can you still call it a forest if the trees are upside down?—ahead of her. It was too large to see in its entirety, shifts of gray against the white trunks, just enough to give the impression of slow, ponderous movement.

  Her heartbeat was almost calming to a regular pace when a hand closed around her arm, heralding a harsh whisper in her ear.

  “And where,” Solmir murmured, “do you think you’re going, Neverah?”

  Instinct had her elbow shooting back, aiming for some soft part of him—assuming he had any; the body pressed against her was all slender hard angles and sharp planes, a man built like a knife. Still, her elbow elicited a quick grunt, though it was more of surprise than pain, and that was bolstering enough for her to kick out with her foot, trying to stomp on his heel.

  “On every soulless Old One, you’re barefoot.” He sounded more exasperated than anything, still speaking in that close whisper right at the shell of her ear. “Do you really think you’re going to—”

  He cut himself off with another grunt as Neve’s fist drove into his hip bone.

  It hurt her as much as it sounded like it hurt him, and Neve’s lips peeled back from her teeth with a hoarse, angry cry. It wasn’t loud, but in the strange silence of this place, it echoed.

  Solmir froze, eyes darting from her to the creature in the forest, still moving sl
ow and sinuous through the trees. Then his hand clapped over her mouth.

  Neve writhed against his hold—she’d rather take her chances with the thing in the inverted trees than be so close to him. He solved the issue of her clawing hands by wrapping another arm around her waist, trapping her elbows against her ribs and the small of her back flush to his hips. “Listen,” he murmured in her ear, and damn him, it sounded like he was trying to be soothing. “I know you hate me. That’s fine. But I promise you will hate what that thing does to you more.”

  Her lips moved vainly against his palm, and Neve had half a thought to bite him, to tell him that there was nothing in this world or the one she’d just left that she hated more than him at that moment. But then the thing in the trees turned, enough for her to see its face.

  Face might not be the most accurate thing to call it. Really, it was just a mouth. A mouth with rings on rings of teeth, razor-sharp and as long as she was tall.

  Neve made a small sound behind Solmir’s hand. She stopped struggling.

  The toothed thing in the trees breathed, and the stink of it washed over Neve like a wave, carrion-thick and fever-hot, heightened by the cold of the air. Solmir pulled her tighter against him, arm a vise around her middle. They stood still, and waited.

  After what seemed like an age, the thing turned, that awful mouth facing away from them again. It resumed its slow meander through the inverted trees.

  A heartbeat, then Solmir let her go.

  Neve rounded on him, a snarl on her mouth and fingers curled into fists. She raised one of them, but he was faster. Solmir’s hand closed around hers in midair, stopping it before it reached his jaw.

  “Come now, Neverah,” he said, the ghost of a hateful smile on his lips. “All those lessons in diplomacy, and you won’t even hear me out?”

  “Diplomacy is for honorable men.” Their linked hands shook in the air, oppositional forces. “It doesn’t apply here.”

  “Fair enough.” A quick twist of his hand, and her arm was pinned behind her, between her body and the hard plane of his. “Then we’ll do this the undiplomatic way. I think you secretly like that better, anyway. You seem to jump at any excuse for violence.”