by Maria Vale
“That wasn’t three days,” he’d said as he’d struggled into his clothes. It never feels like it since there is no schedule and time is defined by the length of a hunt or measures of a howl. Especially now when the canopy is so thick that the sunlight that struggles through in mottled specks seems barely brighter than moonlight.
After checking on preparations for the Iron Moon Table, that one time when the whole Pack comes together with thumbs and words, I head outside. Constantine’s made it no farther than the corner of the Great Hall. He leans against a log end, watching Silver.
She sits in front of the three birches that burned the night the Shifters came to the Great Hall. The bark bubbled brown around the edge of blackened wood, but I would not have them cut down until spring came and we would know whether they survived. They did and put out bright-green leaves and stand here scarred and resilient, just like the Great North.
“Gehyrað,” Silver says. “Listen.”
I turn the gray weathered Adirondack chair to the corner to watch.
The pups who’d been running around Silver stop, their heads bending from side to side, questioning. One of the First Shoes has frozen her bare foot behind her head as she tries to scratch behind her jaw. Another, curled next to his packmate on the grass, stops his gentle gnawing on the other’s little, hairless, shell-like ear. There’s always a certain amount of backsliding after the Iron Moon.
“Gehyrað,” Silver says again, this time cupping her hand behind her ear.
A few adults have gathered around too. Some who know what she’s asking but who know better than to say anything and two who have not been raised Pack.
Thea pushes back the black cascade of hair from her ear to listen, revealing a pup clinging to her shoulder for balance, its bony, hyperactive tail wagging furiously. Even Tiberius with his freakish senses shakes his head, no.
“Gehyrað æfter stilnes,” Silver says, prodding them. “Listen to the silence.”
I lean back into the chair. I remember playing this game with Sigeberg. No one got it then either.
“Water,” rasps Constantine. His voice quavers in the way of someone reluctant to give up the silence of the wild.
“Gea, Constantine,” Silver says. “Listen if you like. There are no Pack secrets.”
He totters toward the edge of the porch, grabbing on to the peeled trunk that serves as one of the roof supports. Leaning against it, he sinks down, sitting with his knees bent, his bare feet near mine.
“First the water quiets. Then birds molt and become vulnerable and secretive and the noise of spring is followed by the Silence of Summer.
“Do we have time for the story, Alpha?” she asks. “I’ll make it short.”
I nod and settle into the corner of the Adirondack chair, one foot curled up against the strut, the other near Constantine.
“Wulfas,” she says and picks Nils up. “On ðære wald stearc and grim, alifde ðæt ðæt unasecgende sceolon.
“In the forest strong and fierce are lives that must be lived unspoken.”
Constantine sucks in a deep breath; he stretches out his arms behind him. Hidden by the chair, one hand sneaks around behind my foot, its rough warmth circling the back of my heel, the tendon there, the hard bone at the side, and the soft spot below where the blood runs quick and at the surface.
As with most our stories, the one Silver tells involves the heroism of wolves and the unredeemable shittiness of gods.
“The responsibility for the flow of days was given to two gods: Sol, the goddess of the sun, and Mani, the god of the moon. Like most gods, they were lazy and selfish and thought nothing about their responsibilities and everything about their own power and pleasure. But if Bragi indulges in too much drink, a writer’s words come slowly. If Njord lounges by the beach, a traveler is stranded on her voyage. It was different when Sol and Mani dithered around, because then the earth’s seasons stopped and life withered.
“The humans were terrified. They indulged in thoughts and prayers, which did exactly nothing.
“Wolves need the Iron Moon to knit the Pack together. To run the territory. To keep the land in balance. While Mani masturbated on the mountain top, there was no crescent moon, no quarter moon, no new moon, and no Iron Moon. While Sol slept, the sands of the desert turned to glass and the trees of the Ironwood withered.
“The Alpha of the Ironwood didn’t think and she didn’t pray. Instead, she called for her fastest hunters and sent them to chase the laggard gods.
“As soon as Sol and Mani saw wolves coming, they got off their asses and ran. The cycles of the earth started again. Life began and ended. The moon waxed and waned, and wolves could be wild together. For millennia, these wolves did what wolves have always done—kept the balance of life.
“At first Sol and Mani called those wolves Hati and Sköll—Hater and Betrayer—because like the spoiled children they were, they resented being forced to work.
“The wolves of the Ironwood, however, called them by their real names, Háte and Ceald, meaning… Aella?”
Aella looks abashed, caught with her hand up as she rubbed her ear against her shoulder. “I was just—”
“Your hand was raised,” Silver says. “So what do Háte and Ceald mean?”
She hesitates, looking around her. “Hot and cold?”
“Gea, Aella,” Silver says. Tiberius reaches out his curved fingers toward the girl’s scalp. She moves her head under his nails, thumping her foot on the ground.
Silver pulls at her smile and begins again. “One night, Ceald could not move anymore. She was after all a wolf, not some mythical creature. Mani was just that, and being deathless and omnipotent, he escaped, happy with his freedom, far from the wolf who had chased him so long. He went back to his old ways, masturbating on mountaintops, spilling more stars in the sky. He drank mead. He played several rounds of Halatafl, Kvatrutafl, and Hnefatafl, even though one round is dull as dirt with only a single player. He kicked comets, and before the first comet found its orbit, he was bored.
“He returned to Ceald, who had changed into skin. ‘What do you want, god?’ she said, still panting from the millennia spent keeping him on course.
“‘Aren’t you going to chase me?’
“‘Now you want me to chase you?’ She looked at him disdainfully.
“‘Isn’t that your job?’ he asked, peeved that she’d dared look at him disdainfully. He was Mani, the bright and shining moon, seeder of stars and kicker of comets.
“‘No, it’s your job,’ she said, kneading her knotted calf. ‘I should not have to hunt you across the skies to make you do it. My duty is to make sure the world lives and dies and lives again in time. To make sure that my Pack has an Iron Moon so that they can be wild and together.’
“Mani saw the knotted muscle under Ceald’s fingers. He saw a rim of sweat on her dark brow. He saw the depth of her purpose and her love for something that was not herself, and he reached out his hand to his ancient enemy. Under his cool fingers, the knot unknotted. His hand moved up, bringing peace to the still-vibrating length of her bare leg. Then he touched her hip and Ceald felt something beyond peace and reached for him, taking the sharp cold of his body into her own.
“Háte saw his packmate with her god lover and herded Sol, keeping her in place for the longest day, so that Mani and Ceald would have time.
“In time, Mani became one of the few gods who understood that the world did not revolve around him. From then on, he revolved around the world, no longer chased by Ceald but accompanied by her. Hand in hand or hand on ruff. Later, when Háte put off his wild form to take Sol’s burning body, too searing for anyone except Heat itself, Mani and Ceald held on to the sky for the longest night.
“After that long day of the summer solstice comes the Silence of Summer, the quiet time while earth’s children busy themselves for the coming season of death. After th
e long night of the winter solstice comes the Silence of Winter, when earth’s children rest in preparation for the coming season of life.”
Aella squints up at the sky and the sun.
“Are they fucking now?”
“Not until the solstice. Remember, what is important is not the wolf or the god or when they are fucking. What we should take away from this story is that wolves have responsibility not only to themselves and their pack but to the entire balance of life.”
Tara calls, announcing the beginning of the Iron Moon Table.
“Coming,” I say, my tendon tightening under Constantine’s hand. He pulls his hand away and flattens it against his chest.
Chapter 28
Constantine
Cassius has a lean and hungry look.
I ate well during the Iron Moon. Feral bacon. Leftover turkey. Frog: it looked like it would be cool and refreshing, an amuse-gueule, but it wasn’t and I will not make that mistake again.
Cassius clearly ate nothing and falls on the serving platters like a… I’d say “wolf,” but it hardly seems appropriate. He always sits in the same corner of the 9th’s table, hunched over his food as though it’s the only thing that matters, but I see the glint of his eyes as they sweep the room, watching. I see the way he turns his head, listening.
I don’t disguise the fact that I’m watching him. He doesn’t acknowledge me, beyond a malicious smile. When he is done, two wolves who had been lying unseen on the floor follow him out.
Poul hovers behind the Alpha, and even though I know that when she did what she wanted to, she did it with me, it still makes me angry that he is allowed to touch her openly and I am not. To leave traces of his DNA on her cheek and take hers onto his. Just because he is Pack and she is his Alpha.
Her top lip flickers upward, showing her canine, but then purses tightly, the only sign of her exasperation.
“Why doesn’t she like him?”
“Who? Pass the bread.”
“Poul, Ziggy.” I push the big basket toward him. “Why doesn’t the Alpha like Poul?”
He tears off a piece of black bread. When he looks toward the 10th’s Alpha, he frowns.
“Before Quicksilver, the noseless dog”—Ziggy spits three times, puuh, puuh, puuh—“was our Deemer.” I remember the body of the man with the small hole in his chest. The one whose face had been gnawed by the Alpha so he would wander alone for eternity. Dog, Tiberius had said, spitting less symbolically, followed by a forceful kick to the spleen.
“Some of the Alphas followed his”—he spits again—“lead. Poul was one.”
A dark-red stain seeps across my vision, watching the 10th’s Alpha hovering around her, his nose to the face I have held in my hands. His cheek near the ear that has heard my whispered groans. His chin to the velvet mouth that I have tasted.
His very presence marking her like one of the hundreds of No Trespassing signs ringing Homelands, because he is a strong wolf and would fight off any other males who might be interested.
The whole Pack sees him, and everyone knows he sided with the shit who planned to take over the Pack once August’s hunters tore its heart out. Tore her out. But the Alpha doesn’t flinch as his breath touches her hair.
The membrane covering my eyes ripples in time with the hollow lapping at the walls of my skull. I stumble over the bench, out the door, down the sloping lawn, and to the solace of water that shimmers bright and colorless as mercury.
I stretch out, letting my back absorb heat from planks that have been warmed by the sun and textured by wolf claws, bending my arm to protect my eyes from the too-transparent sky and overly bright sun. The variety of calls that bounded across Homelands when I first came here has quieted. Now it’s just the hollow thocking of a woodpecker.
Wolves are nearby. I can’t see them or hear them, but I feel them watching from the cool and subtle forest. Before I can ask what they’re looking for, a tremor runs from the soil into the timbers of the dock with a heedless thumping louder than that of even the biggest wolf.
“Cassius.” I don’t move the arm bent across my eyes.
He sits next to me.
“I’m not doing that again,” he says.
I recognize an opening salvo for what it is and say nothing, hoping he’ll go away.
A boat bumps against the side of the Boathouse.
“I hear you swum all the way to the other side,” he says conversationally, trying another tack.
“Swam,” I answer less conversationally.
Just because I have my arm cocked over my eyes doesn’t mean I don’t catch the way his eyes narrow and his jaw tightens. Or the way he manages to corral the tiny twitch at the corner of his mouth into a smile. “That’s right, ‘swam.’ I hear you swam all the way to the other side.”
Something disturbs the water, sending minute waves into the water plants at the edge. What do you want, Cassius? What is so important that you would let me chide you like that?
“Did you hear the cars?”
The bells that had been chiming are now warning tocsins that race across the landscape of my brain. I think about those last meters I swam, Evie’s head against my shoulder, pretending she needed to be rescued though we both knew she didn’t. Did I hear the road? I have no idea. It was the last thing on my mind.
“I wouldn’t know. I didn’t make it that far. And just so you know, I’ve seen you swim. There’s no way in hell you could make it that distance, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
He stills for a long time, staring out over the water, then the wood creaks and he leans in close enough for me to feel his breath. “Just so you know, you’re not one of them. You never will be,” he says, his tone quiet and petty.
My fingers feel the splintering planks of the dock. I’ll measure it tomorrow. Tell Sten we need to fix it.
“What do you want, Cassius?”
He knows I meant it rhetorically, but he answers it anyway.
“I’m doing you a favor,” he says. “I’d hate to see you humiliated when you find out that the Alpha has no interest in you beyond the fact that you look like her dead husband.”
“What?”
“I heard Elijah say it. When he thought I wasn’t listening.” Cassius’s malevolence grows once he sees he’s fingered a sore spot. “He said you look more like him than ever. Now that you have the beard.”
I touch the edge of my lip.
For winter, she’d said.
I don’t know when Cassius left. I only notice the hole left by the absence of the watchers in the woods.
* * *
I’m jealous of a dead man. Did he really look like me? Or rather, do I really look like him? When she said I should grow out my beard, was it because it would keep my face warm during the winter or because it would make me look more like John?
“Are you fucking me because I look like John?” I close the door behind me.
It’s taken me the better part of the day to find her in her office alone. She is looking between something on her laptop and a spreadsheet on her desk. She makes a mark with her pencil and looks up at me with genuine confusion.
“What?”
“Are you fucking me because I look like your dead mate?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Elijah says I look like him. Like John. I want to know if that is why you’re fucking me.”
She closes her laptop and turns around, looking me up and down.
I spread out my arms.
What do you see, Evie?
“I have no idea if you look like John,” she says with a shrug.
“How can you not know?”
“Because that’s not the way we think.” She breathes deeply, her nose flared, her head turned, listening at the door. “I have to sort something out,” she whispers hurriedly. “But me
et me in my cabin later and I’ll try to explain.”
Now even I can hear the creaking of the floorboards.
“When?”
“When the moon”—she holds up one hand like a mitten—“is in the Endeberg Notch.”
She taps her finger webbing between her thumb and forefinger, and as she does, Poul opens the door. Alpha once again, she dismisses me with a nod.
I do not try to accommodate his girth in the doorframe, punching into him with my shoulder.
* * *
“Close it,” she says.
The screen door is already closed, so I push the heavy wooden door closed as well. I’ve come to realize that closing both doors is what she does to signal wolves to give her a tiny modicum of privacy.
“I don’t know what Elijah is talking about,” she says, opening a narrow closet under the stairs to the sleeping loft, “but he has spent most of his life Offland, and sometimes he thinks more like a human than he does like a wolf.” She digs around inside the dark, finally pulling out what looks like a waxed suit bag, the kind of thing that usually holds a tux waiting for those twenty pounds to disappear and wide lapels to return.
I hope it’s not a wedding dress.
Evie opens the zipper and reaches in, gently extracting not formal wear but a beat-up old flannel shirt with green and gray and black plaid.
“You want to know what John looked like; I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you whether his features were symmetrical or the angle of his jaw was square or whether his hair curled.” She moves her hands in the air. “I think maybe it did. I know nothing about his eyebrows or the shape of his lips.”
Her fingers run along the aged cotton and she brings it to her nose, taking a deep breath, before holding the shirt out to me.
“I am not putting that on, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I don’t want you to put it on. I’m trying to help you understand what he was like. I don’t know if you two look alike, but a wolf knows that you are not at all the same.”
