Red Wolf

by Rachel Vincent

  “It isn’t marriage she objects to,” I assured him, because as with my own potential betrothal, I suddenly understood her hesitance to remarry. She didn’t want to keep her secret from a husband.

  Yet according to Gran, my father had known. What about my grandfather? If my mother and grandmother had married and confided in their husbands, I should be able to as well. Shouldn’t I?

  “Were you able to find out anything about the boy from the woods?” I asked, reminded of him as a gaggle of children raced past, chasing a leather-wrapped ball. “Was the watch aware of a merchant headed toward Oakvale?”

  Grainger blinked, caught off guard by my change of subject. “No, but in the morning we’re sending some men to look for the wagon you saw. Hopefully some of the supplies can be salvaged and we’ll be able to tell where the merchant hailed from, so we’ll know where to send the boy, after the thaw.”

  “No one in the village recognizes him?”

  “Not so far,” he said, and that wasn’t unexpected. Most of the villagers—myself included—had never left Oakvale. “Madame Laurent has family in Westmere, which she last visited right before the freeze, but she says she didn’t see him there.”

  “He must be from Oldefort, then.” I scanned the village square until I found a familiar blond head. The boy from the woods was sitting on the other side of the bonfire, between Jeanne and Romy Paget, while Madame Paget spoke with several of the other village women nearby. Romy and the boy each had a wooden bowl of vegetable stew, and Jeanne was poking at the fire with a stick.

  “He’ll be fine here until the thaw,” I said, as Grainger followed my gaze. “The village won’t let him starve.”

  The boy scraped up the last of his stew with a wooden spoon, then he let his bowl clatter to the ground, earning himself a startled look from several nearby villagers. He glanced around for a second, then his focus locked onto Romy Paget’s still half-full bowl. His lips curled back from his teeth in a snarl I couldn’t hear from halfway around the fire pit. Then he snatched Romy’s bowl from her and held it up to his mouth, drinking from it like a cup.

  “Hey!” Romy grabbed her bowl back. “That’s mine!” She dipped her spoon into it, but before she could lift the bite to her mouth, the boy shoved her to the ground, where her bowl fell in the dirt.

  Grainger and I were up in an instant, rounding the fire pit, but it was Jeanne Paget who hauled the boy off her little sister. “Non!” she shouted, waving her index finger in his face. “We do not push people!”

  Madame Paget picked little Romy up, and while she brushed dirt from her daughter’s clothes, she patiently explained to the boy that there was a proper way to ask for more food, and that bad behavior would not be abided.

  “Why don’t I take him home with us tonight?” I said, while Grainger refilled the boy’s bowl.

  “Nonsense,” Madame Paget insisted. “You don’t have the room. And Romy’s fine, aren’t you, dear?”

  Romy gave her mother a teary nod.

  “Our little guest has been through something very difficult. He’s lost his parents, and it stands to reason that he might have lost his manners for a bit, as well. But we’re going to be patient with him, aren’t we, girls?”

  Romy and Jeanne both nodded dutifully, while the boy tore into his second bowl of food, oblivious to all the fuss.

  “We’re going to have to come up with something to call him, too,” I said.

  “We call him Tom,” Jeanne said, smoothing down the front of her skirt after the little scuffle.

  I glanced at her in surprise. “Has he spoken to you?”

  “No,” she admitted. “But he looks like a Tom, and he turns when you call him that.”

  “Really?” I glanced down at the boy, but he hadn’t looked up from his bowl once since Grainger had handed it to him. “Does he understand what you say to him?” I was starting to wonder if he spoke a different language.

  “He seems to.” Jeanne squatted in front of him, her hands folded in front of her skirt. “Tom, would you like a bit of apple tart? It’s a special treat.”

  Finally, the child looked up. His gaze found Jeanne, and he nodded. Once. Then he went back to his bowl of vegetable stew.

  Jeanne stood, beaming a proud smile at me. Then she frowned. “I suppose now I have to go get him a bit of your mother’s tart.” Grainger laughed, and Jeanne skipped off toward the banquet table with a good-natured smile on her face. She was every bit her mother’s daughter.

  “Madame Paget, I believe we may still have a couple of my brothers’ old toys at home,” Grainger said. “Would you like me to bring them over in the morning? For . . . Tom?”

  “Yes, please,” Romy answered, before her mother could even open her mouth. “I don’t think Tom knows about sharing.”

  Six

  Sweat gathered on my brow, despite the frigid morning air, and I paused in my chore to wipe it with the back of my sleeve. My wood-splitting maul—the marriage of an axe and a hammer—was once my father’s, and this morning, for the first time in my life, it didn’t seem heavy and unwieldy in my hands.

  Not unmanageable, anyway.

  I swung the maul over my right shoulder, going up on my toes as my hand slid down the handle, just before impact. The maul landed in a preexisting crack in the log—a crack I’d aimed for—with a satisfying thunk, then slid into the wood, splitting it all the way down.

  “Nicely done,” Grainger said. “May I help?”

  Startled, I whirled around, pushing hair back from my forehead with one hand. “I’m perfectly capable of splitting my own wood, thank you,” I informed him with a good-natured smile. And since my ascension the day before, the chore required less effort than ever.

  I bent for the larger of the split pieces, positioning it on the stump.

  “Well then, may I watch?” Grainger asked with one saucily arched brow.

  “Don’t you have chores of your own, Grainger Colbert?”

  “Done as soon as the sun came up, Adele Duval,” he teased.

  “Well, you have three brothers to help,” I pointed out as I adjusted my grip on the maul. “Here, it’s just my mother and me.” Sofia could gather eggs, darn stockings, and fetch water, but she was too small to help with anything like splitting logs.

  “That’s true. We’re decidedly short on women, in the Colbert household. A problem I am trying my damnedest to remedy.”

  “How would your mother feel if she heard you say that?”

  “Where do you think I first heard it?” Grainger’s smile lit a fire in my belly. “She would love to have a daughter-in-law around to help out.”

  And yet I doubted I would be Madame Colbert’s first choice. Though my grandfather had passed away in his sleep several years before, rumors persisted that, like my father, he’d been attacked in the dark wood, and despite the courteous smiles tossed our way around the village, there wasn’t a mother in Oakvale who would want her son to marry into such a “cursed” family.

  Fortunately, Grainger wanted me in spite of the rumors.

  “Now the truth emerges.” I swung my maul again and split the wood into two smaller, more manageable pieces. “You aren’t looking for a bride. You’re looking for another set of capable hands,” I teased.

  “Well, I do like your hands.” Grainger dropped the sackcloth bundle he was holding and took the maul from my grip. He let it thunk into the stump, then he captured my hands in his. “Though I’d prefer to see them a little less calloused. Marry me, and you’ll never have to split wood again.”

  “You think married women don’t split wood?”

  “My mother doesn’t. She has a husband and four sons to keep firewood stacked against the walls of our cottage.”

  “I have no sons.”

  “I would give you sons.” Grainger pulled me closer, his gaze burning into mine. “And daughters, if you insist,” he added with a crooked smile.

  I pulled free and smacked his shoulder as I wrenched my maul from the stump again. “And
if we had only daughters?” Only redheaded daughters, saddled with a secret that could get us all burned at the stake?

  “I would split wood for you all. I would split wood all day and all night, so my wife and daughters need not develop callouses from rough handles and cold climes.”

  I considered listing for him all the different ways a woman could develop callouses in her daily work, without ever touching a maul. Instead, I just smiled up at him. “If you spend all night chopping wood, I don’t know how we’ll ever get sons or daughters.”

  A giggle from behind the woodpile made my face flush. Sofia. She was supposed to be weaving nettlecloth. Not spying on me.

  “Sofia! Inside!” I ordered, and as she danced out from behind the woodpile, I turned to Grainger with a smile. “Pray for sons.”

  He laughed. “Sofia. Tell your sister she should marry me.”

  “You should marry him, sister,” Sofia said. “Before he stops asking.”

  “Grainger . . .” I scolded.

  He picked up his sackcloth. “For now, I will accept your company. I’m on my way to the Pagets’ with toys for Tom. Will you come with me?”

  “I want to go!” Sofia spun away from the back door. “I want to play with Jeanne!”

  There were only a handful of girls her age in the village, so she and the oldest of the Paget girls were frequent playmates. But that wasn’t the real reason for her request.

  “She wants to meet Tom,” I told him. Madame Paget had taken the strange boy home last night after he’d pushed Romy, and he’d been the talk of the celebration, much to Madame Rousseau’s chagrin. And Elena Rousseau’s relief.

  “Everyone wants to meet Tom,” Sofia insisted. “Maybe I can make him talk.”

  “Get your cloak,” I said with a sigh. “And tell Mama where we’re going.”

  Sofia raced inside, but she was back a minute later with a gray cloak draped over one arm, clutching a cloth-wrapped bundle in both hands. My mother appeared behind her and pulled me aside while Grainger tried to get Sofia to actually put her cloak on.

  “I gave your sister a rye loaf to take to Madame Paget, to help feed Tom,” she said, crossing her arms over the front of her flour-splattered apron. Because even though the thatcher’s family had taken him in, the community would come together to help support him. “I didn’t get a chance to see the boy before they took him home last night, but, Adele, there’s something really odd about a mute child found alone in the dark wood. You’re sure he wasn’t scratched or bitten?”

  “I watched Madame Paget wash him, before she gave him a tunic. There wasn’t a mark on him. But he just saw his parents slaughtered by a werewolf,” I whispered. “That would torment any adult, much less a small child. Don’t you think?”

  She nodded, then her gaze flicked toward Sofia again. “Still, I want you to let me know immediately if you notice anything else odd about the boy.”

  “I will.” Though so far everything about Tom could be described as odd.

  “Come on then!” Grainger said, as my mother headed back inside to begin the day’s orders. He threw his sack over one shoulder and gestured for Sofia to head for the village square.

  “Cloak!” I ordered as I plucked the loaf of rye from her hands.

  “Where’s your red one?” Grainger asked me, as Sofia finally tossed her own cloak over her shoulders, without bothering to tie the cord.

  “It isn’t really suited to chores.” Though, evidently, it was perfectly suited to shielding my clothing from a splatter of blood.

  “Mama said Gran made a red one for me too,” Sofia told him. “But I can’t have it until I’m older.”

  The very thought gave me chills. I didn’t want my baby sister out in the dark wood. Not after what Gran had told me about her own sister’s death. I couldn’t lose Sofia. My mother couldn’t lose Sofia.

  “When am I going to be old enough?” Sofia asked, walking backward on the dirt path, in front of us.

  “When you can split logs with a maul,” Grainger told her.

  “No,” I insisted, a little harsher than I’d intended. “When Gran says you’re old enough.”

  “Maybe she meant you to wear the red cloak at your wedding!” Sofia shouted, spinning in a circle with her arms out at her sides. Without missing a step. Her balance was certainly good. And she ran like the wind. I had to believe that by the time she was my age, she would be well prepared for her own trial.

  “Yes,” Grainger teased, bumping my shoulder with his. “Maybe that is what your grand-mère intended.”

  “Maybe so,” I hedged.

  “And she’s going to line the hood with white fur!” Sofia added. “It would be beautiful at your wedding!”

  “White fur?” Grainger’s left brow rose. “Rabbit?”

  I could only shrug.

  “The watch went into the dark wood this morning to search for that wagon,” Grainger whispered. “They found it and were able to salvage some of the supplies, though a lot of them had already been destroyed, and the food was long gone. But they weren’t able to tell for sure where the merchants came from.”

  I sighed. That was no surprise.

  “There he is!” Her gray cloak trailing behind her, Sofia took off across the square for the thatcher’s cottage, where Tom sat on the front steps watching Jeanne tie a scrap of coarse nettlecloth into something that resembled a doll. Next to her, Romy was playing with a doll made of the same material. “Tom! We brought you some toys!” The boy looked up as my sister raced toward him. “Isn’t there something you want to say?”

  “She means ‘thank you,’” Romy supplied, when Tom only stared at Sofia with a blank look.

  Grainger knelt to show the boy what was in his sack, and I stepped past Tom to knock on the frame of the front door. “Madame Paget, it’s Adele. May I come in?”

  “Please do!” she called.

  “Will you watch her?” I asked Grainger.

  He nodded, but Sofia huffed at me as I stepped into the cottage, where I gave Madame Paget the cloth-wrapped bread. “My mother sent this.”

  “Oh, do thank her for me.” She set the loaf on a shelf.

  “How is Tom? Has he said anything yet?”

  “Not a word.” Madame Paget returned to a half-sliced turnip at her table, where she picked up a knife and continued her work. “He grunts occasionally, which seems to be an affirmative answer to a question. And he shakes his head. But I’ve only seen him open his mouth in order to put food in it.”

  Seven

  “Where’s Sofia?” my mother asked as I stepped into our cottage. Despite the open front door, the heat from the oven was nearly overwhelming.

  “She’s kicking a leather ball in the square with the Martel boys.” Despite the chores she was behind on, I had let her go play with the blacksmith’s children after our visit with the thatcher’s family because I wanted to talk to my mother in private. “Mrs. Paget thanks you for the bread.”

  “How is the boy? Is he speaking yet?”

  “No, but he seems fine other than that. Grainger took him some toys. He likes children, you know.”

  She paused in her kneading to give me a look.

  “Gran said Papa knew,” I continued as I exchanged my cloak for an apron.

  “Knew what?”

  “About you. About guardians.”

  My mother sighed. “Of course he knew, chère. I don’t know how one could hide a secret like this from her husband. But your papa’s mother was a guardian, so he found out about all of this on the day of his sister’s trial. By the time we met, he had no superstitious beliefs to hold against me.” She stopped kneading, and the grief that passed over her features, even eight years after my father’s death, gripped me like a fist tightening around my entire body. “As deeply as he cared for me—as perfectly as we fit together on a personal level—he was also uniquely suited to be the husband of a guardian.” She turned back to her dough, but that old pain still echoed in her voice. “I miss him every single day. And I
wish you could have had more time with him.”

  I wished that too. My memories of him seemed to fade more every day. “So, both of my grandmothers are guardians?” Which meant my father had an advantage as a suitor that Grainger would never have. He wasn’t considered a threat to our family, because he came from a family like ours.

  If I wanted my mother’s blessing on my marriage, I’d have to convince her that Grainger wasn’t a threat either.

  “Yes, chère. This is in your blood.” Her hands paused again, and pride echoed in her voice. “It’s your legacy to uphold.”

  My father was from a town several days’ ride by carriage to the west, but I’d never been there, and I hadn’t heard much about his family. Including his mother.

  “How many other guardians are there?”

  “I don’t have a number. I only know that there are guardians nearly everywhere the dark wood stretches.” My mother stepped back from the dough she was working and gestured for me to take over. “And the wood seems to stretch farther every year, infecting the landscape like a disease.”

  I turned the dough, pressing the heels of my palms into the warm, soft ball as I thought about that. There were forests in other places that were not like the dark wood. I knew that, but I found the idea difficult to truly understand. Woods where no monsters lived? Where normal daylight fell? Where travelers could move about in peace? Where people could hunt and forage? We’d never had such a luxury in Oakvale. Not in my lifetime, anyway.

  As much wood as they cut, Monsieur Thayer and his sons never truly seemed to make a dent in the dense forest. And they certainly hadn’t been able to prevent it from surrounding the village.

  “Can the dark wood be stopped?” My stomach pitched at the thought that it might continue to devour the land, eventually overtaking little hamlets like Oakvale.