A Sign of the Time

  The Cathedral rose against the eastern wall of Black Rock as a stone fungus on the petrified oak and pine of the palisade wall. The white pelts stirred at the entrance of its high archway with the coming and going of the night breeze.

  Fenris tied the tangled mess of his hair in a knot at the nape of his neck, freeing his ears to listen; he had followed the pensive scattering of her thoughts here, and now heard her softly whispered cries from inside. He tucked his hands into the fur lined pockets of his cloak, and shouldered his way through the pelts.

  The familiar smells of the Cathedral greeted him solemnly. What light existed came not from the slit windows high above—those had been shuttered against the night by the Cathedral Keepers, the sons and daughters of the Elders—but from the hundreds upon hundreds of candles burning upon the great stone altar at the far end. Their collective glow threw wavering light upon every wall, where the pelts of past Alphas hung like their own silent, leering Sentinels.

  Fenris found Albi there.

  She sat on one of the smoothed benches at the very front, her form casting a shadow on the walls that was larger than any wolf Fenris had known.

  He found her nursing Willa. The babe was a small, swaddled bundle in the crook of her arm, a peaceful island in the sea of her mother’s stillness. All memories of the violence the babe just endured were forgiven and lost to the comfort of her mother’s skin. Albi leaned back against the wood pillar behind her bench, her eyes heavy-lidded and fixed numbly on the sea of roaring flames. Tears tracked silently down her cheeks, catching the candlelight like streaks of molten silver. On her throat, her chest, and across one pale cheek, thin, pink lines assaulted the pale cream of her skin; scratches from Beeba’s claws, already fading.

  She hadn’t allowed their coupling; though it would have fixed every wound in her. The arm had healed from what his bond gave her through the heavy sleep over the last two days, bound to one another in touch, but the other wounds, she told him, she would keep for now.

  Fenris sat beside her, removing his pocketed hands and wishing he had had a rolled leaf to smoke now. It seemed like a good time for one. The stone was cold through his breeches. He did not speak. He reached for her through their bond, seeking some semblance of answers in her thoughts as to what he should do, but he found only walls. Thick, high, icy walls she had built around herself. He expected as much. Behind them, he could sense only a dull, thrumming fear and a storm of sadness so violent that it swallowed her whole. He leaned and pressed his shoulder lightly against her arm, but the woman inside the body was leagues away somewhere else.

  He sighed, the sound too loud in the absolute deafness of the Cathedral. He looked down at his own hands, large and scarred, and wrung them together. Useless for the task before him.

  “The healers,” he whispered, his voice barely disturbing the silence, “say whatever occurred in the bedchamber, it has caused Beeba to develop the shaking sickness. She’s fought it some, but she will die tonight. She will not see the dawn. That….beast…whatever it had been, won’t come back.”. Fenris remembered Beeba how she’d looked after they’d both returned from Albi’s vision. The lights in her eyes had gone out, the gold in them became cloudy with death, and her body had crumbled down on itself as the milk of poppy spread.

  He paused, choosing his words like stepping stones across a treacherous stream. “Jorik says there is no mystery to it. She was Imprinted to Hroth. His soul was a poisoned well. Some of that poison might have festered in her mind.” He glanced at her profile, sharp against the candle-glow. “It was nothing more than….than the ramblings of a dying woman. A mind broken by constant pain and illness. Do not let it take root in you.”

  Albi shook her head slowly, her gaze never leaving the candles. “You believe none of your own words, Fenris,” she whispered, her accented voice hoarse. “The voice was not her madness. The vision was not her madness. It was a Prophecy, proper.”

  “The Mother would never show you such an….such an evil thing, Albi. She would not do something like that to us.”

  “It was not the Mother who sent it.” Albi swallowed.

  Fenris shifted, a coil of unease tightening in his gut. “Who then, Albi? If you do not wish to speak so you make even a lick of sense, let down your walls. You sound–”

  “Mad?” Albi laughed humorlessly, “aye, maybe I am, too.”

  “It was no prophecy. And there is nothing else, no force that could send one, if it was one, and it was not, except the Mother.”

  “If that is the story that will give you better dreams, Fenris, then believe it.”

  He took her face then, the urge too strong to fight, and turned her to him roughly in the light of the flames. Her expression softened upon looking at him, dropping into a tenderness that was itself a pain of its own.

  “Let me in, Albi.” he whispered, searching her eyes.

  “I came here, Fenris–” the sweetness of her breaths falling across his face with each whispered word,“because this is the only place in the whole of the world where time has stopped.”

  And time is running out. She continued in his mind, unable to get the words out.

  He leaned in, putting his forehead against hers, begging through the bond to open the gate of the palisade that cradled her. Begging because he knew naught how to understand her anyway else. She was sobbing now as she spoke,“I asked the Great Mother for a sign. What did the Beast mean? What had I to do with it? I don’t understand any of it, none of it at all. Explain it to me, Mother. Explain it.”

  Albi let down her walls for him then, and he fell, staggering into her mind as if the door had opened with his weight fully pressed against it. Without mercy, she pushed the images on him. He saw the earlier moment, of her kneeling right there on the dais, on the cold floor before a sea of unlit candles. The blackness of the Cathedral was complete, the dark only a wolf-man could see through. Not one of the candles had been aflame.

  He heard her silent plea, her whispered prayer to the Mother for clarity; and the answer came, one by one, as the candles began to light before her. A ghostly torch touching each wick. One, then two, then ten, than a hundred, until the entire dais was ablaze with this silent fire that threw no heat upon her pale face.

  And in their sudden, overwhelming light, he saw the shadows in the niches move. The Ancestors, their wolves of old, massive and grey-furred, black and brown, snarling with eyes like banked coals. Their faces hovered along the walls, spectral and terrible, peering down at Albi with expressions of profound grief and burning rage. He felt their claws, like shards of ice, scraping at the back of her soul.

  She didn’t know why. The ‘why’ was a stone in her gut, a weight on her neck. But the ‘what’ was incontrovertible. This anger was for her.

  “For you, Albi?” He whispered, understanding and not understanding, in equal measures “or for the Great Mother?”

  Albi was sobbing now in earnest, deep, shuddering cries that shook her whole frame and threatened to wake the sleeping babe at her breast.

  There is no difference, Fenris.

  A chill ran through his body. He shook his head, disbelieving. Fenris reached out, brushing a strand of her white hair from her damp cheek.

  “Albi, my fierce one……..you are tired.” Fenris could hear a strange fright in his voice, a boy who heard a noise in the dark ahead and called for its presence to be made known, “your mind is exhausted from the birth and from this—from what happened.”

  Her sobs only grew louder; grew until they were nearly screams and not cries at all.

  “Shhh,” he murmured, his own heart hammering against his ribs, “Shhh, my love.” Gently, carefully, he pried Willa from her slackening arm, cradling the sleeping infant against his own chest. Then he gathered Albi to him, pulling her into the circle of his other arm. She collapsed, her face buried in his neck, tears hot on his skin.

  He held them both, rocking slightly on the cold stone bench. He poured warmth down the bond, the simple, safe presence of him into the lonely storm of her mind where he could now rescue her.

  He kissed her neck, her wounded cheek, each of her closed, weeping eyes. He kissed her temple, and whispered there nonsense; every sweet endearment she liked to hear, every name she liked to be called, every warm image that softened her, every phantom touch on a place that healed her. He didn’t know the right thing to say, he didn’t know what she needed to hear, because she didn’t know either, the solution was as lost as she was in that storm.

  “I will keep us safe.” He promised, over and over, grasping onto the phrase as if it were a page of parchment threatening to be whipped away in the winds of her mind; the one phrase, the only phrase, that could soothe away this storm. And with it, he conjured a confident image of himself upon the cliff of her vision, his arm down-stretched, reaching with a warrior’s grip into the water to pull up the first of the wolf-men from the long-boats below.

  Her sobs subsided into hiccups, then into deep, even breaths of exhausted sleep, her body melting heavily against him.

  In his other arm, Willa slept with peaceful innocence, her small mouth parted just enough to show the pink of her gums, each breath a soft, shallow thing that carried the sweet smell of milk up to him. He drew her closer, pressing his nose to the crown of her head where the downy white hair was finest. Beneath the milk he found the scent of honeysuckle, warm and aching comforting, rising from her skin as though she had been bathed in it, though she hadn’t. He tilted her gently, careful not to wake her, and pressed his lips to her forehead before settling her back into his side.

  He sank tiredly down into the bench, the Cathedral now silent again save for the faint, collective crackling of hundreds of burning wicks.

  He looked up at the Great Mother Wolf painted on the wall above them; vast and luminous, holding the flickering burn of every candle beneath her. Her great head was lowered—almost bowed, now, in this light— her gaze resting on him with a loving scrutiny that he’d seen many, many times before in a face that was not the face of a wolf.

  He closed his eyes. He sent his own silent thought through the vast, listening dark—into whatever space it was that fell between a wolf-man's prayer and the tender, listening ear of the Great Mother Wolf.

  If it was not you, Great Mother, who sent the Beast and the vision. Give me a sign, as you gave your Daughter.

  He opened his eyes.

  The hall was as it had been. No shadow had moved. No sound had changed. The air smelled of tallow and dust. He looked left, then right, scanning the rows of the long benches down the Cathedral with a slow, methodical sweep. Nothing. No sign. Albi was wrong.

  The tight coil in his chest loosened, muscle by muscle, and he let out a breath he had not known he was holding.

  A night breeze fell silently through the white pelts of the archway, stirring them inward. Lazily, it swept down the full length of the nave, moving over the stone. It passed over him, too, the cold of its air almost a soothing touch on the back of his sweat-damped neck.

  It reached the dais. The candles fought against it, a stubborn irritation, the flames leaning sideways and stretching long and thin.

  Then they went out.

  All of them, snuffed in the same instant, as though a single breath had been released upon the entire hall.

  An Old Warrior

  Beeba’s grave-mound was a raw scour upon the earth, dug deeply on the bank of the creek and purposefully shadowed beneath the tickling leaves of a drooping willow. The dark soil rounded on the top still smelled of the deep, cold places from which it had been dug. The last of the pack had melted away, back to their duties, leaving only the two of them and the whisper of the water over stones. Albi stood before the mound with her face pale and set, her eyes dark pools of sorrow too deep for tears. Willa was a small, sleeping weight against her chest, wrapped in furs tightened close. The wind picked at the loose ends of Albi’s white hair, tugging them towards the forest like restless snow spirits.

  Fenris moved to stand beside her, close enough that their shoulders brushed. He could feel the gray haze of her thoughts through the bond, a numb, featureless plain where grief had washed away all color. He said nothing. Words were stones thrown into a deep well; they would only sink without sound and echo. Instead, he put his arm around her shoulders, drawing her stiff form against his side. He pressed his lips to the crown of her head, then rested his cheek there, holding her as the creek murmured its endless secrets below.

  After a long moment, she turned from the mound, and he turned with her, his arm falling to her waist. They walked back towards Black Rock in a silence that was itself a conversation.

  The path they chose led them the long way around, passing through the heart of Folkstead; alive with the rising excitement of a warm spring. Smoke rose from cook-fires; the sound of chopping wood and the chatter of children filled the air.

  Near the creek, Fenris spotted Hattie.

  She stood at the water's edge beside a man tall and broad through the chest and shoulders. He was shirtless, the skin of his shoulders and back browned and freckled by the sun and sheening with the sweat of their warm morning. He leaned over, and said something to Hattie that Fenris could not hear. Whatever it was, it made her laugh loudly across the clearing, her head tipping back and unfurling the loose waves of her hair. Her hand came up to press against the man's arm as though she needed something solid to steady herself against. Morgin grinned down at her, wide and easy, and said something else, leaning in closer, and she shoved him lightly.

  There was a looseness to her—a woman unburdened and unhunted, standing in the sun with a man who wanted only what she was and nothing more for himself.

  It ached; a clean ache, a wound tender to the touch but no longer open. More sweet than bitter. He was happy for her happiness.

  Albi's hand found his chest.

  Her palm pressed flat against his heart, warm through the linen of his tunic, and the touch was so sudden and so sure that his own hand rose without thought to cover hers, his fingers folding over her knuckles, holding her there. He turned to look at her. She was watching him, searching his face, and there was no accusation in them, only a quiet, tenderness.

  She leaned in and kissed him. It was a sweet kiss, unhurried, her lips soft and dry against his, tasting faintly of the mint she had chewed that morning to settle her stomach. When she pulled back, her mouth lingered near his ear.

  "I am meeting the Elders at the Cathedral," she whispered. "I am already late."

  "I'll walk with you."

  "There is no need." A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth, teasing, "You follow me everywhere in my thoughts as is, Fenris. I could not lose you if I tried."

  She pulled her hand from his chest, adjusted Willa's swaddle where it had slipped at the shoulder, and turned. He watched her go up the path toward the rise, her white hair catching the late morning light; until the trees swallowed them both and the path she left was empty.

  He stood there a moment longer, the heat of her palm still warm on his chest. Then he turned and followed the clean scent of his son to Jorik’s hut.

  He knocked on the door once before pushing it open uninvited. The old warrior was expecting him, anyways. The hut was small and orderly inside, as Jorik tried to keep all things. A single window let in a square of pale light that fell across the table where Jorik sat in his usual chair, a rolled leaf burning lazily between his teeth–when had the old warrior taken up the smoke?-- his thin hand wrapped around a smaller horn of mead. Across from him, Isangrim sat upon a stool that had been stacked with two folded blankets to bring him closer up to the table's tall height.

  Before his son, spread across the worn oak surface in a chaos that would have offended Jorik's sense of order under other circumstances, was a rather obnoxious collection of carved wooden animals all made for Isangrim. There were dozens of them now when there’d only been a handful before—some no bigger than a thumb, others the size of a fist—whittled from birch and pine and dark mountain oak and willow, each one rendered with varying degrees of skill and care.

  Isangrim was arranging them with tremendous concentration, his brow furrowed, his small fingers moving the pieces across the table's surface with the gravity of a general positioning his forces. It was random to Fenris, at first, but it was not random, in truth. There was an order to it, a logic that Fenris recognized only after he had settled himself on the bench across from his son and watched in silence for a time.

  Two piles. Two distinct kingdoms.

  On Isangrim's right, arranged in a loose, companionable cluster, were gentle animals. The hare with its long ears. The doe with her delicate legs. The fox—Isangrim touched this one most often, his fingers returning to it again and again, the wooden pendant of the same swinging at the hollow of his throat as he leaned forward. And others; a squirrel, a songbird, a river otter with a smooth, curved back. These were the ones he played with, walking them across the table in small, imagined journeys, making them visit one another, building a quiet world of peaceable creatures going about their peaceable lives.

  On his left, pushed to the far edge of the table where the light from the window did not reach, was his other pile. The bear, reared up on its hind legs, mouth open. The mountain cat, crouched and snarling. The boar with its curved tusks.

  And the wolf.

  Fenris looked at it. A simple carving, four-legged, head raised in a howl. It sat among the other predators, exiled there by the small, deliberate hands of a boy who had watched something wearing a wolf's shape try to take his sister.

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  Jorik met Fenris's eyes across the table. The old wolf said nothing. He inhaled on the leaf and let the smoke of his exhale curl upward, his expression unreadable behind the grey-white cloud of it.

  "How is Albi getting by with things?" Jorik asked, his voice low, pitched beneath the boy's attention.

  "She is getting by with them," Fenris sighed. He did not elaborate. The words were enough.

  Fenris reached across the table and found the wooden wolf. He picked it up, turning it once in his hand. Then he set it down, gently, among the hare and the fox and the doe and the other gentle things.

  Isangrim saw it immediately.

  The change that came over his face was swift and total—the calm concentration crumpling like parchment thrown into a fire. His brow crumpled inward and his cheeks flushed a dark, mottled red. His amber eyes locked on the wooden wolf sitting among his peaceful creatures as though it were a spider that had crawled uninvited onto his cot.

  His hand shot out, trembling, and snatched the wolf from the pile. He held it at arm's length for a moment, his breath hitching, then shoved it back to the far side of the table with a force that sent the mountain cat skittering off the edge and clattering to the floor.

  Fenris's chest ached.

  He leaned over the table and placed his hand on Isangrim's head, his palm covering the dark hair, brushing his thumb at the throbbing vein in his boy’s temple.

  "Look at me, Isangrim."

  The boy did not look. His eyes were fixed on the table, on the space where the wolf had been, his small jaw clenched tight enough to grind the teeth.

  "That is an order of your Alpha, boy."

  Isangrim looked up then. His amber eyes were bright and wet and afraid.

  "What you saw in the bedchamber," Fenris said, his voice steady and low, "was not a wolf. It was a beast. Do you hear me? It was not one of us."

  Isangrim stared at him, his chest rising and falling in quick, shallow breaths.

  "I will keep you safe," Fenris said. "I promise you, on my blood and on the blood of every Alpha who came before me. Nothing will hurt you. Not while I breathe."

  The tears came silently, spilling over Isangrim's lower lashes and running down his round, flushed cheeks in two bright, unbroken streams.

  "I lost my bead, Papa," Isangrim whispered. "The one Mama put in my hair. It's gone."

  "I will find it for you," he said, his voice rough with emotion, but gentle for the boy, "It will be all right, Isangrim."

  He leaned across the table and pressed his lips to the top of his son's head, breathing in the scent of him and held there, his eyes closed, his hand cradling the small skull, until the boy's breathing steadied and the tears slowed to a stop.

  The door opened with a bang that made Isangrim jump beneath his father’s hand.

  Fenris turned, growling on instinct, but the figure in the doorway posed no threat—unless one counted the threat to the door's hinges, which groaned in protest as a small, wiry body wedged itself through the gap while simultaneously hauling a wooden cart over the threshold. The cart's wheels caught on the doorframe, and there followed a brief, furious struggle between boy and carpentry, accompanied by grunting, a muttered oath that was impressively foul for someone of eight winters, and the scrape of iron-rimmed wheels on packed earth.

  Torin had no luck with things on wheels. Fenris had half a mind to tell him so. The cart lurched through the doorway and into the hut, its bed piled high with scrolls and leather-bound books that shifted and slid with every bump. Torin behind it was red-faced and drenched in sweat, his tunic dark with it, his arms trembling from the effort of hauling his cargo up the path from whatever mother-forsaken hole he had dug it all out of.

  Fenris rose and caught the cart's edge, steadying it, and between the two of them they guided it against the wall where Jorik pointed with the end of his leaf, never rising from his chair.

  Fenris poured a mug of ale from the jug on Jorik's shelf and pressed it into Torin's hand. The boy drank greedily, foam catching on his upper lip, and Fenris set a hand on his shoulder and looked at him—properly looked, as he had not done in some time.

  Torin had grown, filling out through the chest and shoulders, the softness of childhood burning off to reveal the harder lines beneath. His jaw had squared. His hands had thickened. And his eyes—grey as iron, ringed with a thin band of gold—were his father's eyes. Asger's eyes. The resemblance was sharper now than it had been a year ago, and it struck Fenris with a complicated pang.

  "How are you, Torin?"

  "I'm well, Alpha." The boy wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and grinned—a quick, bright flash that was entirely his own and none of his father’s, "I am excited for spring. The ice is off the creek and Erlend says the trout are already running thick. We’ll have some competition with the free-folk for them."

  “Aye, you will, son.” Jorik quipped from his seat.

  He turned to Jorik then, straightening, adopting the slightly too-formal posture of a boy who took his responsibilities with tremendous seriousness. "I'm heading back up to Black Rock now, Elder. Alfric and I are having a play-war with the Deep Water children. We've challenged them for the ridge behind the woodshed and they've accepted."

  "Take the boy with you," Jorik said, gesturing toward Isangrim, who was watching Torin with the wide-eyed fascination that all small children reserve for older boys. "Bring him to your mother for a turn. I've a matter to discuss with the Alpha."

  "Yes, Elder."

  Fenris lifted Isangrim from his stool and held him close, pressing kisses to his cheeks, his forehead, the tip of his nose, the crown of his head—a barrage of affection that made the boy squirm and giggle despite the tear-tracks still drying on his face.

  "I will see you soon, Big Wolf," Fenris told him purposefully, seeing the squinted reaction of the endearment and kissing him once more on the temple. "Be good for Lady Haggatha."

  Torin unloaded the scrolls and books from the cart in quick, careful stacks against the wall, then lifted Isangrim onto the empty bed of it. The boy's face transformed, all his grief vanishing in an instant beneath the pure, uncomplicated joy of sitting on a cart with wheels that promised to carry him astride.

  “You must hold on tight, like this–” Torin tells him carefully, and shows him, putting Isangrim’s hands on either side of the wooden lips of the cart. Isangrim nodded, his mouth open in a grin that showed every one of his small milk teeth.

  Fenris helped Torin guide the cart back through the doorway—a less dramatic exit than the entrance—and stood in the frame, watching as the older boy took up the handles and started across the clearing.

  Isangrim bounced on the cart's bed, chattering at Torin, pointing at the sky, at the creek, at a bird that had landed on a fence post. Torin answered him with patient, one-word responses, pulling the cart steadily up the path toward the rise, and Fenris watched them go.

  It dawned on him too late, they were nearly out of sight now, that it was likely not a good idea for Torin to be pushing his son on his cart.

  “Mother protect him.” Fenris whispered under his breath.

  A heavy hand settled on his shoulder.

  “A word, Alpha Fenris,” Jorik said, his voice a low rumble. He gestured with his cane back to the table inside, and the mess of wooden animals upon it.

  Fenris followed him and pulled the door shut behind, clasping it to its hook. Jorik set his rolled leaf between his chapped lips and silently began to gather the boy’s animals off the table one by one. He took a time to bend down, but even swept up the jossled mountain cat off the rushes, too.

  The wooden wolf gave him pause. Jorik picked it up, holding it for a moment between his thumb and forefinger, his peppered brows furrowed deep in thought. Then he placed it in the wooden box with all the rest, gentle and predator together, and closed the lid.

  “I, too, have felt a resentment about what I am.” Jorik said around his leaf as he carried the box across the room, speaking to Fenris, and speaking it also to Isangrim, who was not in the room with them, “but it can make you work all the harder to be something better. There is a saying, the wolf you feed is the one who grows. Resentment is a good start to starving the wolf that does not serve us any good.”

  He put the box down on a low stool in the corner of the room and pushed down the tiny clasp of the hinge to hold the lid shut. The click of it settling into its groove sounded, in the quiet of the hut, like a small and final thing.

  Jorik nodded to Fenris, gesturing to the hearth with a flick of his wolf-headed cane; which had become so much an extension of his arm Fenris rarely saw it these days.

  He lowered himself into one of the chairs beside the hearth with a grunt, his joints protesting, and Fenris crossed the room and sat across from him in the other. The fire had been banked to embers, putting out a low, pulsing heat that barely reached the edges of the room. Between them, the smoke from Jorik's rolled leaf drifted in lazy, blue-grey ribbons toward the ceiling.

  Fenris watched the old wolf draw on it, the ember at the tip flaring orange, the herbs crackling softly. He tried desperately to know what it was that had the old warrior so out of sorts that morning.

  "Since when do you smoke the green herb?" Fenris asked.

  Jorik inhaled, held it, then let the smoke pour from his nostrils in two slow streams. The leaf had not left his hand since he had arrived, Fenris noted.

  "I used to smoke them all the time," Jorik said, his voice roughened by the draw. "In the years after Aula. They steadied my nerves. The twin’s mother, Erlin, grew the herbs for me in this wicked garden she had down in her cellar. She had a heavy taste for them herself—meadow-sage and dried thyme and a pinch of something she’d never say what, but I do think now it was probably a kiss of henbane, by how many conversations I would have with those faces on the tapestries; they would talk back, they would say the most….perplexing of things. I smoked them every night for three winters after my Aula. Until the cave in my head did not scare me, and I could sleep beside it without fearing I might become weak and wander in." He looked at the leaf between his fingers, studying the thin curl of smoke as though it held some answer he had mislaid. "I have not touched one in eighteen summers."

  "So your nerves are unsteady now, Father?"

  "Aye," Jorik said. "They are, son."

  He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, the rolled leaf held loosely between two fingers. The firelight caught the deep creases of his face. He looked old on this morning. Not the dignified, weathered old of an Elder Warrior who had earned his rest, but a haggard, sleepless old man who was no longer certain the ground would keep him upright.

  "The things I told you," he said slowly, "That Beeba's state had been a madness. A grief-sickness from losing her Imprinted mate. That was my own blubbering fear talking, Fenris. My own wantin’." He glanced toward the corner, toward the wooden box of animals, "The truth is, I do not know what animal that was in your bedchamber. Beast or Wolf. And if it be a creature of madness and grief, it is not by the Imprint alone that brought it to life."

  He drew on the leaf again, deeper this time, and the ember ate halfway down its length.

  "I'm hearing all manner of things from the sentries. From Ninny and the healers. That Beeba was possessed. That she spoke with many voices and howled with many howls. That she broke the stone floor with her bare fist and snapped a sentry's leg like kindling." His golden eyes found Fenris's through the haze. "Is that the truth of it, son?"

  "You have the right of it." Fenris said.

  Jorik was quiet for a long time. The fire popped. A log shifted in the hearth, sending a brief shower of sparks upward. Outside, through the thin walls, came the distant shrieks of children in the clearing, formless sounds that belonged to a world that suddenly felt very far from them.

  The old wolf reached into the pocket of his thin cloak and produced a small wooden box, no larger than his palm. Inside, nestled in a scrap of cloth, were half a dozen more rolled leaves, each one tightly wound. He held the box across the gap between them.

  Fenris looked at it. Then he took one, placed it between his lips, and leaned toward the hearth. He found a thin stick among the kindling and touched its end to the embers until it caught, and brought the flame to the leaf's tip. The first draw was harsh, the smoke hot and herbaceous, filling his mouth with a taste that was equal parts meadow and ash. He exhaled through his nose and felt the warmth of it settle behind his eyes.

  "My mind is a dark place now, son," Jorik said, “When you lose an Imprinted mate, the mind that was stretched to hold two does not shrink back to fit one again. It stays open. It is a cave where once there was a wall. And in that cave, there is nothing. No voice. No presence. No echo. You know only that something used to live there and now it does not."

  He stared into the fire, the rolled leaf burning unattended between his fingers.

  "Every day since Aula's death, that cave has been silent. Twenty-one winters of silence." He paused. The muscle in his jaw worked. "But it was not silent this morning."

  Fenris went still.

  "I heard voices in it," Jorik said. "Angry voices. Howls. Many of them, tangled together, the way you say Beeba's were. As though the cave had filled with... company." His hand trembled around the leaf, and he steadied it by gripping his own knee. "And I heard Aula, Fenris." The name fell coldly in the room. "I have not heard her voice, in mind or ear since the noon of my hunt on the day that she died.”

  Fenris drew on his leaf and held the smoke in his lungs, letting the heat of it burn away the chill in his chest. He exhaled slowly.

  "What did she say?"

  Jorik turned his head, searching through Fenris’s eyes.

  "She told me to follow the Black Wolf," Jorik said. "Not the White One."

  The silence that followed was heavy enough to press the air out of the room.

  "The White Wolf is Albi," he guessed.

  "And the Black Wolf is you, Fenris."

  Fenris stared at the fire. The embers pulsed, orange and red, and the shadows they threw on the wall shifted and writhed like living things. He brought the leaf to his lips again and drew on it until his lungs ached, then let the smoke out in a long, thin stream that curled toward the small, open hole in the ceiling.

  He chuckled—a low, humorless sound, dry as the ash in the hearth. "I do not know where I am leading anyone, Jorik. I do not know where I am."

  Jorik did not smile. His expression remained grave with his eyes fixed on Fenris.

  "Have you told anyone else?" Fenris asked. "The other Elders?"

  "No." Jorik shook his head. "The only Elder among them who is not stuck in their own frightened superstitions is Hilda. But she will not speak to me."

  Fenris inhaled again, turning it over in his mind; not knowing what to think of the other side either.

  "Since this Beast business, she has locked herself in her hut. Barred her door. She will not come out and will receive no visitors. Not even her own kin-folk.”

  “She was not there at the mead-hall this morning.” Fenris affirmed, seeing it now.

  “Aye. All the rest of the Elders gather up in the Cathedral, falling over one another to piece things together. But Hilda will have none of it. She has exiled herself." Jorik's mouth twisted.

  “So she is scared.” Fenris sighed, the smoke of his exhale casting a long shadow between them.

  "I have watched Hilda a long time, son. There are few things that scare her.” Jorik tapped the head of his wolf-cane as though it were his own mind, “I do think it has more to do with Albi than the Beast.”

  “She has had a wariness of Albi. That is no secret. But to exile herself over it? For what purpose, Jorik?”

  “You’ve seen how the Elders worship at The Seer’s feet. Likely they are doing the same now. Hilda has confided to me that it sickens her so, and they no longer see reason with her around.”

  Fenris turned the leaf between his fingers, watching the ember eat slowly toward his knuckles.

  “Albi does not like their….worship of her, either, Jorik. It is not by any intention of hers that they act that way.”

  “Aye, but that is the way of it now. Intent or not.”

  “Perhaps Hilda exiles herself because she has nothing to contribute but scowls and complaints.”

  Jorik flicked the end of the leaf into the hearth’s flames, watched it only for a breath before pulling another one from his case, lighting it directly over the flame.

  "I tell you this, son. I have known Hilda my whole life.” He inhales the flame, the smoke saturating the dried cracks of his lips as he settled himself in his seat again, his eyes firmly on Fenris, “where for old warriors like me the years do round the edges, for Hilda it only sharpened them to blades. She denies it behind that scowl, but she knows things, Fenris. She does not hide away because of fear. She hides because she has seen something they refuse to see and she has gotten out of the way. Her wariness of Albi is not simple spite. It is reason. And I would hear her reasons, be I you.” With weak fingers he grasped at a small bit of cloth set on the side of the hearth, dabbing at the beads of sweat that have built on his brow.

  “You would have me hear her slander my mate?”

  “Council that is not tainted by personal conviction.” Jorik corrected, “It will be welcome to ears that the other Elders only fill with honey.”

  “You believe she will speak to me?”

  “You are the Alpha of Skoltha.” Jorik reminded him, “or are you so tired you have forgotten already, my son? She cannot refuse you, if you command it.”

  Fenris's jaw tightened. He thought of Hilda—the woman had a gift for making a room, and everyone in it, smaller simply by being present inside.

  "Fenris." Jorik leaned forward, and the old warrior's voice took on an edge, “The Elders in that Cathedral will not give her impartial council. Worship makes for poor advisors. They will see what they wish to see, and they will tell her what they think she wishes to hear." He tapped his rolled leaf against his knee, scattering ash. "But Hilda will not. You know that already. She is the only Elder among them with the spine to tell you what you are or aren’t. You could seek counsel from her for Albi and she will benefit from an Elder who is not afraid of her. That is what Albi wants now, and what she is not finding in that Cathedral." He held Fenris's gaze. "And it might….. give you some answers, too."

  He drew on his leaf and felt the smoke fill his chest and held it there, the heat of it spreading through his ribs.

  "Aye, alright." he said, and exhaled, “I will do it.”

  Jorik nodded, a single, satisfied dip of his chin, and rose from his chair with labored slowness. He crossed to the wall where Torin's scrolls and books were stacked, their leather covers dusty, their spines cracked with age. He began sorting through them, his thin fingers unsurprisingly deft, lifting one, setting it aside, lifting another, blowing dust and dirt and pine-needles from their surfaces and squinting narrowly at their markings on the leather.

  Then his hand stopped. He drew a book from near the bottom of one stack, a messy pile closest to the door. It was a thick, heavy thing bound in dark leather that had gone the color of pooled blood. Scratched into the cover Jorik held before him, crude, was a symbol Fenris recognized: a loom weight, the kind the old tapestry-women used to anchor their threads—a flat, rounded stone with a hole bored through its center.

  “The mark of our weaver-woman.” Fenris pointed to it.

  "Aye," Jorik murmured, turning it over in his hands. "That it is." He brought the book to Fenris and held it out. Fenris looked at it, then raised a brow.

  "I did not ask for a book."

  "I know you didn't," Jorik said. "It is not for you. It is for Hilda."

  Fenris took the book. It was heavier than it looked, the leather warm from Jorik's hands. He tucked it beneath his arm and stood. Jorik's hand found his shoulder.

  Fenris did not think about it. He wrapped his arms around the old warrior and pulled him close.

  Jorik stiffened for a moment, the way men of his years and his kind always did when tenderness catches them unawares. Then his arms came up, his hands pressing flat against Fenris's back, and he held on with a fierceness that trembled in his fingers.

  "I have not been strong enough to say it yet," Jorik said, his voice rough and muffled against Fenris's shoulder. "But I am sorry. For what happened to Ygrid."

  Fenris closed his eyes. The name moved through him like the milk of poppy, numbing and heavy.

  "The thought never crossed my mind that you should feel sorry, Father. It was not your fault. The ones whose fault it was have been dealt her justice." His arms tightened around the old man's frame. "You grieve her the same as I."

  Jorik pulled back. His eyes were bright, the tears at the rims, held there by the same iron will that had carried him through twenty-one winters of silence outside the cave in his mind. He raised his hand and tapped Fenris's cheek with his palm—twice, gently, the way a father taps a son's face to say I see you.

  "You look so much like your father," Jorik said quietly. "The more every day. Alfric was a good man that I miss very much"

  Fenris swallowed against the thickness in his throat. "Your service to my father, and to me—these are debts I can never repay, Jorik."

  "You already have," the old wolf said simply. "By giving me the chance to live a peaceful life at the end of mine."

  How precious that gift truly is, Fenris thought, a sad smile on his lips. It is a hut with a hearth and a view of the creek. Wooden animals on a table and a boy to play with them. It is the warming of his bones by a fire, his wars behind him, his debts paid, his nights no longer haunted by the things he had done to survive. It was the simplest of gifts, and the rarest.

  He did not say this to the old warrior. He pulled Jorik close again instead, and held him, and the old warrior let him, and for a long moment neither of them spoke, because some things lived only in the holding and would die if given words.