King of Wolves

by B. Kristin McMichael

  “Come on, man. I don’t need to see all that.” I covered my eyes as I hoped he was putting the pants on I had just tossed him.

  “What’s wrong with being natural? To us wolves, you’re the strange one with weird customs,” Nikkan replied.

  I shook my head at him. We both knew the wolves in human form wore clothing. Nikkan was from one of the wolf villages. He knew that too. They didn’t run around naked unless in the furrier form. He just didn’t like clothing.

  “So, why do you think Red is crazy?” I kept my hand over my eyes. The fabric rustled as he slipped on the pants and saved me from having a full conversation with my eyes closed.

  “The wolves are never going to show up at some festival. Don’t you remember the stories of like thirty seasons ago when the tree people invited the wolves to come to a truce and then attacked them? There’s a reason we keep away from them. Tree people can’t be trusted.” Nikkan walked over and flopped down on my couch.

  “I’m a tree person,” I reminded him, at least, I had been raised as one.

  “Not even close,” Nikkan replied.

  I shrugged as I sat beside him. I wasn’t technically a tree person, but I wasn’t a wolf either. I was just a human that didn’t belong in either world, and my mother expected me to somehow bridge the gap between them.

  “And there’s the fact that the wolves are getting sick. Probably not the best time to be making a good impression if the tree people are really extending a peace offering.”

  “Getting sick?” I asked. I hadn’t been back to the wolves or tree villages in over a moon cycle. Nikkan went back often to check on his family.

  “My father told me to stay here with you, so I don’t catch it. Not sure what it is, but probably best to stay away from tree people.”

  Great. Not only was there distrust between the two sides, but now there was a sickness he conveniently forgot to tell me about. I looked at Nikkan. Illness with wolves was serious. Whatever caused the curse also caused very good health. Wolves aged but rarely got sick. Why hadn’t he told me sooner?

  “I was promised to secrecy,” Nikkan replied, answering my unspoken question with his hands in the air as if he was giving up.

  “So, if I’m not a tree person or a wolf you can tell secrets to, then who am I?”

  Nikkan raised an eyebrow at me. We had debated this for as long as we had been friends. Nikkan was convinced I was a prince from a hidden valley of fairies since I loved the forest but couldn’t shift into a wolf like him. I personally thought he chose fairies so that he could picture me with wings and sparkles. I told him I just was probably not from Elder; some traveler left me on their way through when I was too young to notice. It wasn’t like Red ever told me much, nor would she answer questions. We had to come up with our own stories, which ended up being a traveling group of fairies left me.

  “Not like I have a choice in this,” I reminded him. “The Red ordered me to invite them.”

  “And we could just get distracted for six moons and not invite them. What good will come of it? Either it’s a trap on the humans' part, or the wolves will bring sickness to the tree people. Neither is a good thing.” Nikkan had a harder time following rules than I did. He tolerated Red and respected her like most wolves did, but he didn’t really like a single other tree person.

  “What harm could it do to just invite them? Not like many would consider going.” Usually, I’d be on board with Nikkan and ignoring it, but something about Red made me pause. She was different today, and I kind of didn’t want to disappoint her. “Red would never let it be a trap, but like you said, most of the elders remember the wars, so they won’t go. And the younger ones tend to follow the older. So, where is the worry? You know how Red is. All she wants is a couple of honorary wolves to show up, and she will consider it a success.”

  Years of wars between the two sides had left everyone mistrustful. Red had been the only one able to call a truce between them, and so far, she'd been able to uphold it for over eighteen winters. But the truce was tenuous at best. It was hardly as though either side put in any effort, they just kept to their own parts of Elder, but I guessed it was better than constantly fighting.

  “And what if they do show up?" Nikkan countered. "What if they bring the sickness to the tree people? And worse, what if they transform? Are you willing to be the one that starts it all over again?”

  Okay, he had a point there.

  “And what if the sickness isn’t as bad as you think. You want to be the one that keeps the tree people and wolves apart?” I really wasn’t into the peace thing like the Red, but I couldn’t help arguing the other side with Nikkan. It was just something we always did.

  Nikkan grinned at me. He knew how I felt about being the bridge between the two sides that neither wanted me around. Even that didn’t stop him as he went to open his mouth again. He was always ready to argue. This was going to be a long night.

  27th February

  We had stayed up way too late into the night, and when the sun rose in time for our morning patrol, I didn’t want to move. I reached for the blanket to pull it back over my head and found it wasn’t on me. In the corner of the room, the wolf Nikkan was curled in the one blanket I owned. I threw my arm over my eyes and tried to block the invading sunlight. Why the heck did I let him get me going last night? We were up until the moon shifted toward day, and now I had a job to do.

  Slowly, I rolled off the couch and stood to stretch. Nikkan didn’t even move.

  “Get up, you lazy mutt,” I grumbled as I took my blanket back and shook off the blond wolf hair now covering it. I placed the blanket over the back of my couch.

  Wolf Nikkan rolled on the floor, pretending to be still asleep.

  “Fine. I’ll patrol without you and stop by the wolves. I’ll tell your father you say hi, and maybe I can talk to Grace.”

  That was all it took. Wolf Nikkan was up on four legs and ready to go for a run. I shook my head at him. That was all it took.

  Before we left, I grabbed some jerky I had stored from last week's large kill and tossed a piece to Nikkan as I began my run. With a toss of his head, he caught it. While he could hunt for his own breakfast, I didn’t want to wait for him to catch and eat his kill. He chewed away beside me as we kept the jog light.

  Unlike most people of the wolf villages, Nikkan preferred his wolf form over his human form, especially if any physical activity was involved since the wolf was stronger than his human side. Nikkan wasn’t alone in his preference to use his wolf for strength, but in the village, most people stayed in their human form. In fact, I had found over time, most of the people preferred being human and pretending their wolf didn’t exist.

  The wolves had spent the better part of their existence feared by everyone, not just the tree people of Elder, but everyone in the neighboring kingdoms too. The curse could be inherited from your parents, as was the case with all the wolves under the age of eighteen winters, or could be transferred via a bite from an infected wolf. Not a single wolf in the wolf villages was there by choice. They had all inherited or had been made into wolves.

  They all were at least as much human as they were wolf, and lots of them were more human than anything. If it wasn’t for the variety in hair and eye color, you’d never be able to guess who was a wolf in Elder. The tree villagers all had brown eyes, and most had varying shades of brown for hair. Wolf humans had every color of hair you could think of because it usually matched their wolf fur. Nikkan had a head full of blond hair since his wolf was blond. But it was the eyes that gave away wolves. Born and transformed wolves all had blue eyes. Even if a tree villager was bitten, their brown eyes would change color.

  The curse was where it had all begun. No one knew who the first person was or how they ended up a wolf, but we all knew what came of it. One person was the start, and once he found he could increase the wolf people’s population by biting tree people, he grew an army of wolves. It was like the curse just appeared. The wolves were the reason t
hat the humans lived in the trees in the first place. It was just safer that way. I supposed that at some point, humans would have made their homes on the ground like I did, but the wolves had forced them to build entire villages in the trees. Houses, bound to the trees with rope walkways connecting the dwellings, became the norm, and while we looked strange to outsiders, living in a tree hut was as normal to us as any other house in the other kingdoms.

  And then it changed further. There were too many wolves, and they were running out of food in the forest. Rather than turning back into humans and raising their own crops and animals as the tree people were doing, they chose to eat humans. The first human kill elevated the curse to a whole new level. Where the wolves once had control of their changes, they no longer could control their changes or the wolf they became. They were a danger to all of Elder.

  To counter the possibility of the wolves wiping out the humans of Elder, the Red of the village went to the witches to get a spell that would make them powerful enough to fight back. That’s what my mother was part of; she carried the power the witches gave to the first Red that fought back. While I asked many times as a child, my mother never told me how she got the power or how she used it to defeat the curse. But since the day she did, the wolves had gone back to being peaceful. They didn’t lust after human flesh, and luckily for Nikkan running beside me, they regained their ability to transform at will.

  Nikkan and I kept our light pace as the sun moved higher into the sky. Micco’s village was the closest one to the safe zone between the two sides. Before our normal pathway turned back south to head back to my house, we only needed to turn north for a bit to find the wolves. It was a pathway we both knew well. Nikkan actually grew up in the village that Micco lived in.

  While Elder was divided into the plains where most of the farms were located, the northern half of the kingdom had always been covered by forest. The tree people lived in cities such as Azren at the southern side of the wood, while three main wolf villages were located in the northern half of the kingdom. Micco was the strongest wolf leader and had the largest pack, which also happened to be the closest to the tree villages.

  The wolves were technically under Elder law, but Micco had ruled the wolves as long as I could remember. The Red was now welcome in the wolves’ villages, but my mother tended to only visit for formal meetings when she absolutely had to. She let Micco rule them as he saw fit even though they were now safe for any human to visit. In fact, when I was a child, Red would take me with her to see the villages when she had meetings. Most tree people still harbored a distrust of the wolves, but not Red. She saw the truth. None of the wolves chose to be wolves, and they were still humans, good humans at that.

  We had already veered left and begun making our way into wolf territory. Things were quiet, but that was normal. The animals knew they had more predators than normal living nearby, like a whole village of them. It wouldn’t take the village long to realize we were there. Nikkan, at least, still smelled like a wolf, but I was sure they would know a human was coming closer. It was best we approached the village slowly. Micco would certainly know my scent, but other wolves could see me as an intruder. At most times, their furry half would be prone to attack first and ask questions later.

  As the huts of the village came into sight, I slowed our pace to a walk. The wolf village was several huts that circled around the central shelter in the middle of the small clearing. As this was the largest village, there were close to a hundred huts that circled a considerable meeting lodge.

  The huts were more basic than what I had built but looked very similar on the outside. Wood was used to frame the house, and clay dirt was then put on the frames to give the hut insulation in the cold winter weather. I knew from visiting and living with them for a time that the inside had just a sleeping side and a cooking side to the hut. The rest of their lives was spent outdoors. Most wolves preferred to cook outside, too, when they actually cooked. Hunting as a wolf could feed them for up to six moons depending on the size of the kill.

  We walked into the village, and not a single face turned to stare. Everyone was trudging on with their daily duties. About two oak saplings away, three girls not even ten winter seasons old were each carrying full buckets of water from the river. Children weren’t playing in the streets like they might in other kingdoms, but tending to fires, carrying wood or water, stirring pots of food, and basically doing any chore that needed to be done. We continued to walk further into the village and found most of the men in threadbare pants or shirts that had holes in them big enough for a third arm as they lay about by their house. A few men seemed to be trying to pack stuff into carts, but most seemed exhausted to the point of sleep.

  The people of the wolf village had seen much better days. Even moons ago, when I last visited, they would run up to me to see if I was friend or foe before Micco stopped them. There was no fight in them now.

  “We should see your father before we go to invite Micco to the festival,” I told my wolf companion quietly. I almost didn’t want to speak out loud, afraid it would startle the closest wolf into changing and attacking, but no one paid me any heed.

  Nikkan took the lead and began to weave through the huts with new vigor. I couldn’t talk with him when he was in wolf form, but I knew this had to make him feel off too. The wolves weren’t tired, lazy animals. They lived a harder life than the tree people, but they could as they were stronger and always had more vigor. To see them so worn down was more than a little shocking.

  “Castiel?” a large man boomed as he made his way through the people milling about. They didn’t even turn to his voice as they would only a moon cycle ago. I turned to Micco calling to me. “What in the world are you doing here?”

  Nikkan doubled back to where I had stopped to wait for Micco. He nipped at my hand and whined.

  “Go check on your family," I said to him. "Find me when you know they’re okay.”

  Nikkan nodded to me and took off, weaving through the people and under the legs of some.

  “Son, you shouldn’t be here,” Micco told me as soon as he was closer.

  “What’s going on?” I asked as a man nearby finally noticed me. He was so thin you could tell from how his shirt hung on him he didn’t have much muscle. Wolves were never that skinny. I knew for a fact that the forest had plenty of food. There was no reason for a wolf to go hungry.

  “Let’s talk inside,” Micco replied before ushering me towards his hut in the center of the village.

  It wasn’t a long walk, but I couldn’t help but look at the people around us. They were sick and tired. Children seemed to be doing the majority of the chores as the fathers lay around. Most looked like they hadn’t eaten or bathed for weeks. I should have noticed the smell as we approached, but it seemed the children were doing an excellent job of keeping things running for the most part.

  Micco stopped at the door to his hut and ushered me in. He closed the door behind us, which was a little strange. One of the reasons he was leader was that he kept no secrets from his wolves. I couldn’t recall ever seeing him close his door. Now, I stood in a dimly lit room as it seemed he already had candles lit. He must have had his door closed when I entered the village.

  “So why are all the wolves looking like that?” I asked as I was finally alone with him.

  “We have a small problem,” Micco replied cryptically. He took a deep breath and looked around his sparsely furnished hut. His was in better repair than most, without any noticeable cracks in the wall or ceiling as several were that we passed on the way.

  “Problem?” I asked, trying to get him to continue talking.

  “The wolves are sick,” Micco continued after he seemed certain no one was listening. “It started a few moon cycles ago, right before the new winter. A wolf here or there would black out at night time. As long as there’s a sliver of the moon in the sky, they are changing. Not everyone. Just one or two here and there. They came to me to complain, and I brushed them off. We’ve had com
plete control of our wolf side since your mother saved us. I figured these people were just drinking too much and didn’t want to admit it to their wives.”

  Micco paused to wipe his brow. He was sweating even though his hut wasn’t heated. I wasn’t cold, but it wasn’t hot enough to make me sweat, yet the older wolf was drenched.

  “I let it go. It was only a couple of the men. I didn’t think anything of it.” Micco wiped his brow again.

  “You might want to sit down,” I suggested, wondering if he was sick also.

  Micco walked over to one of the chairs at his small eating table and sat down. I dipped a ladle into his bucket of water and filled the metal cup beside it before joining him. I handed him the cup. He needed to replenish all he was losing. He took a deep swig of his drink, and I had time to look at him. Micco had lost some weight. He was always a large man, at least a head taller than me, but he weighed twice as much. He didn’t look sick like the few men lounging around by their huts, but he did look thinner.

  “I realized too late that they weren’t making it up. The wolves are sick, and it’s spreading. At first, it was only eight men. Now it’s close to twenty. Soon enough, all the men of our village will be infected.”

  “Infected with what?” Wolves couldn’t get sick; how could they get infected?

  Micco looked around again like he was worried someone could be listening.

  “With a disease that turns them back into hungry wild wolves,” Micco whispered. “Any sign of the moon and they change and hunt. They’ve been killing all the animals for miles, so the rest of the village is starting to starve, but it doesn’t satisfy their hunger. Each night they change and keep hunting. Men come back covered in blood and don’t remember what they killed or ate, and the next day, they are hungry enough to hunt again. They are turning into monsters.”