The Wolf Wilder

by Katherine Rundell

  She ducked outside and caught Alexei by the coat as he ran past.

  “Lady Wolf!” He snapped his ankles together and saluted, laughing.

  “I need help.”

  “Name it!”

  “You said you’d tell me about the gates?”

  “Ah! The gates. The gates to the city?” He seemed giddy, fire crazy. “The gates to heaven? Please specify.”

  “Alexei.”

  “Sorry. Right, yes.” He grinned. “But you’ve got to admit it’s exciting! It’s happening!”

  “The gates, Alexei. To the center of the city. Please. It’s important.”

  “Well, they’re guarded. They didn’t used to be, but now Rakov has proxy rule over the whole city. He’ll have put them on watch for you, I think. And they check the papers of everyone. At least, everyone who looks like they might be trouble. Everyone poor.”

  “And how do I get past?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Feo stared at him. “You said you did!”

  “No, I didn’t! I said I’d tell you what I knew, that’s all.”

  Feo turned away from him without a word. She didn’t glare; this was too serious for glaring.

  “No, wait, Feo!” He sounded more sober. “I’m sorry. There’s a castle a day’s ride from here. It’ll be useful if there’s another storm. Once you’re there, it’s only four hours’ walk to the city gates, or two hours on a horse. We can go there tomorrow. We can get the rest of the village to join us. It’s a good place to spend the night. It’s northwest from here, to the left of the big pine wood as you approach. Nobody lives there: It was burned out in a fire years ago. The tsar thinks it’s bad luck, you know, to live in a house that burned down, and so everyone who’s fashionable has to believe it too. Ironic, when you think how much his army enjoys setting fire to things.” Clara came running, and he scooped her up. “Come and find some shashlik?” he said to Feo, but he didn’t wait for the answer, leaping off into the dark with the little girl squealing in his arms.

  Feo looked around, her mouth growing dry. Many of the adults had started to sing, to dance erratically. One of them accidentally put a cigar out on the chin of another.

  I should never have agreed to come, she thought.

  Feo ducked back into the house. She pulled on the freshly laundered shirt Yana had given her in exchange for her wolf-stained one.

  Ilya won’t help me, she thought, and tipped out Ilya’s bag. She pulled out the lantern and the bowl for the compass. Mama doesn’t matter to him. And Alexei only cares about his revolution. And if he won’t help me, why should I help him?

  She picked up the pup from his place by the fire and pushed him down her newly clean shirt. He was affronted but made no noise.

  I’ll just have to find Mama by myself. I work better alone, anyway. I know about alone.

  The wolves were standing guard outside, and they, too, made no sound as Feo led them, crouched low, out behind the buildings, away from the great oak tree, and northward into the night.

  They’d gone an hour, through scattered trees, the lantern swinging from Feo’s wrist, when both Feo and Gray heard the noise that was neither their own breath nor the wolves’ paws.

  The wolf growled.

  “What is it?” Feo breathed.

  But it wasn’t hard to identify: It was the sound of a horse neighing, and then, just audible, the coughing of a human. Feo held the lantern high, but there were only trees. She spat on her fingers and pinched out the lantern’s wick.

  “It’s probably just a traveler,” she whispered to Black. “Or”—as a sudden warm thought came to her—“Ilya’s followed after all!” But she dared not call out.

  White, next to her, stiffened. She had smelled him.

  “Hush, lapushka,” whispered Feo. She knelt in the snow to stroke White’s head, to quiet her. “We’re alone. We’re not here to fight. No howling, not now.”

  It was no good. Feo had never taught the wolves to be silent. White flicked her nose to the moon and howled.

  There was an exclamation from the left. Snow-covered branches moved.

  Feo’s whole body blanched with fear. She stared around. The thicker trees were a hundred meters away; Feo ducked her head low and tugged at the three wolves, urging them to go ahead of her. “Quickly!”

  The going was harder as the canopy closed over them and the moonlight grew dimmer. There were fallen trees and bushes with snaking roots. Black, by far the largest, slowed them: The bushes grew too thickly for his bulk to slide between them.

  “Head west a little now. We’ll be faster like this,” Feo whispered. She walked carefully, her hands outstretched to feel for trees. “Come on. We’ll find a willow or something: somewhere to hide.”

  But as she spoke, Gray turned and began to run, head down, back the way they had come.

  “Gray, come back!” Feo hissed. The other two wolves sniffed the air, nudged her, and followed. “White? Black? Please?”

  Feo scrubbed the frost from her upper lip and stared around. She took the pup out from inside her top and stroked him, more to calm herself than to calm him. Something rustled near her feet, and she jumped so violently that she squeezed him too tight and he mewed loudly in protest.

  The something rustled again.

  “Black? Gray?” whispered Feo. She looked over her shoulder. The shadows moved. “White?”

  She could neither smell nor hear anything, but her skin was prickling with fear. Something nearby was breathing: human or wolf? Feo unsheathed her knife and ran to stand with her back against a tree.

  A young soldier came bursting out of the undergrowth, a lantern swinging from one hand, a gun in the other. Feo had time only to let out the first half of a scream before he grabbed her and smashed a hand over her mouth.

  The trees parted and out of them rode Rakov, his horse led by another soldier on foot.

  “Halt!” Rakov called into the night. “Feo Petrovna!” He pronounced it “Fear.”

  Feo struggled, kicking at the soldier’s ankles.

  “My head requisitioner reported having seen you. It seemed profoundly improbable that you would be so stupid. But apparently not.”

  She tried to bite the soldier’s hand, but he slapped her face and she screamed, “Help!” Who, though? There was only her.

  She stamped hard on the soldier’s instep, pulled one hand free and threw her knife into the darkness: It grazed past the foot soldier’s shoulder and he swore, both hands on his gun, trying to cock it in the darkness. Rakov sat, unmoving, on his horse. The lamplight shone directly on his smile.

  Gray came flying out of the wood. Feo had never seen anything run so fast.

  The soldier near Rakov aimed his gun at her head, but the wolf was on him. She rose on her hind legs and tore at his arm. He shrieked and ran, and Rakov’s horse reared, its hooves drumming at the air.

  Feo screamed and kicked out at the soldier holding her. As she did, Gray leaped at his shoulder and tore at his skin. The man screeched like a drunkard and turned, bleeding, clawing at the wolf with his nails. His face was lit up with rage and pain.

  It was like being protected by a myth, by legend and spit.

  Feo’s legs loosened. She ran stumbling through the dark, heading for the pine trees with low branches, the pup in her arms, looking over her shoulder as she plowed through the snow. She reached the nearest tree and scrambled against the trunk for a foothold, trying to close her ears to the hideous screaming and growling coming from below. Feo hauled herself into the lowest branches and turned to see the second soldier run, stumbling, into the woods.

  There were pine needles in her face. Her heart was beating so hard it shook her cloak.

  A shot rang out.

  “No!” Feo screamed, but it came out as a wordless roar.

  There was a growl of pure animal fury, and Black rocketed out of the shadows, followed by White, making straight for Rakov’s feet. His horse let out a shriek, and Feo twisted in the tree to see him jerk si
deways, away from the wolf, his gun dropping into the snow. The horse kicked and turned to gallop through the trees, tearing through the branches and whinnying in terror, the rider pressed flat against its back.

  She had expected White and Black to chase him, to kill him, but they stood, their noses touching Gray’s fur.

  For one terrible moment Feo thought they were biting her. Then she saw they were licking a wound in Gray’s side, and she let out a cry, higher and louder than the last. Snow fell from the tree into her face and mouth. The wolf was not moving.

  “No!” Feo dropped to the ground, landed in shin-deep snow. “I’m coming!”

  She ran, tripping on roots under the snow, toward her trio of wolves, then stumbled to a halt, digging her fists into her eyes. Her mother’s favorite wolf lay on her side, her body on top of the pistol. There was blood in her breath.

  “Where are you hurt?” Feo crouched, laid a hand on Gray’s muzzle. The blood was spreading through the snow, still running from the wolf’s stomach. Feo whispered, “No. No, no, no, no.”

  The wolf’s eyes opened, rested on the girl’s face, closed again.

  “I’m so sorry—I . . . What’ve I done?” Feo thought of Ilya sleeping by the fire, of Alexei’s ax, of the safety of the vast bonfire. The pup nuzzled at Feo’s hands: Feo brushed him away.

  “I’ll get a—I’ll make you a bandage. Like we did for White. It’ll make it better.” Feo fumbled for the hem of her cloak to tear off a strip of cloth. “Think of Mama, yes? Think of how happy she’ll be to see you when we find her.” Tears were casting the moonlit night into a blur. Feo’s chest heaved, and she struggled to rip the material. “Please, please stay with me,” she whispered. “Don’t—don’t go.”

  The wolf’s breath was more audible now: It sounded thick and wet.

  “I think”—a gasp, and she controlled her voice—“I think this will help.”

  Feo tried to wrap the bandage around the wolf’s wound, but it was so dark and so cold. She had never known snow so cold. Gray shied away from the bandage and shivered. Feo had never seen a wolf shiver.

  She untied her cloak from under her neck and draped it over Gray’s flanks.

  The wolf gave a growl of pain.

  It was like watching a forest burn, like watching an army fall.

  Feo lay down beside the she-wolf, slipping in the ice and snow. Gray’s side barely moved as she drew slow breaths, but she moved her muzzle to rest against Feo’s chin. Feo touched her nose on the wolf’s nose and bit her lips together with a desperate effort at silence. She kissed Gray’s ears.

  She had never dared to kiss a wolf as proud and royal as Gray.

  Every minute fresh sobs racked Feo’s throat and chest, but she beat them down so that they could not shake the wolf where she lay.

  Black came and sat on the other side of Feo, and breathed wolf breath into her hair. White stood guard.

  Feo and Gray lay side by side until sunrise. Feo’s body went from cold to agonizing to numb. Shivers ran through every inch of her skin, but she clenched her fists.

  The wolf began to move her shoulders as the dawn came. Her movements were very slow.

  Feo whispered, “Please don’t go. Wait until we find Mama. She’ll know what to do.”

  Gray gave a little panting, whistling noise. Feo gulped in breath. “You can’t die. I love you. I love you too much for you to die.”

  She focused on breathing onto the wolf’s nose, so that the air the wolf inhaled would be soft and warm and familiar. She screwed up her eyes so that they could not leak. Gray had never liked tears, nor rain: only snow.

  The sun rose over the forest in splashes of red and purple. When the light hit the wolf’s closed eyes, she must have felt it, for her hind legs quaked with the pain as she heaved herself to her feet.

  “Gray!” Hot hope surged into Feo’s chest, and she sprang forward to help. “Are you feeling better?”

  But Gray’s footfall was not steady. The wolf paced to the edge of the forest and dropped there. She arranged her great paws to point north. Her muzzle, rough and soldierly, faced the dark and the journey ahead. Her chest rose, and fell.

  And did not rise again.

  Feo curled up into a ball and stuffed handfuls of hair into her mouth, and roared into the snow.

  The pup was nuzzling at her neck, mewing feverishly, trying to get back close to warmth, but when Feo tried to reach out to scoop him nearer, she found she could not move. Misery and guilt had frozen her joints where ice and snow could not.

  The pup stumbled away from her toward Gray. When he reached the body, he clambered up onto her side, nuzzling at her jaw. It seemed to take him several moments before he realized something was wrong. He sniffed the blood. He gave a tiny, piccolo growl. And then he set back his head and howled.

  Feo’s hands shook so hard they lifted her gloves off her fingers. The pup’s first real howl was thin and high. It made Feo want to cover her ears or to scream. But she sat on her hands and kept her eyes open.

  “I’m so sorry, Gray,” she whispered. “I’ll kill him.”

  Slowly, she got to her knees. The trees and wind together sang a nothing song.

  Black and White howled too, then. The sound pulled down icicles from the trees. It was rougher and more ragged than any howl Feo had heard. It sounded of things lost and not regained. Feo crawled over to Black and knelt with her head against his chest, and, dizzy and exhausted, she wept as if the world itself had broken.

  Marina had always said that the Russians, of all nations, know best how to meet death. You treat your wounded, bury your bodies. You cry, and you sing, and you cook. You do these things not for yourself but for the people left behind.

  In this case, for two grown wolves and a wolf pup with a runny nose and a shiver, there was nothing to cook, but Feo shared out some of the dried elk in her pack. She ate some snow. She wiped her face. She retrieved her knife from where it had fallen, tested the edge with her thumb.

  Then Feo began to dig using her gloved hands. Digging through the snow was not difficult, but every inch of her body ached, and her arms were slow and unfamiliar. The thought of what her mother would say when she knew was terrible; it sat blackly in her insides.

  Soon Feo’s gloves met earth, earth frozen solid and harder than rock. She sat back and wiped sweat and snow and dirt across her face. White seemed suddenly to understand what she was doing; the wolf edged Feo aside with her bloody muzzle and set her claws into the earth. Black joined her. At first each went straight down, two separate holes in a row—and Feo couldn’t think of a way of showing them what she wanted. Cautiously—she did not know what sort of blood thoughts they might be having—she nudged Black and thumped her glove at the untouched earth between their holes, collapsing it.

  Feo paused, and warmed a little snow in her mouth for the pup to eat. She felt very old and tired, more than she had felt in her life before. She had never been more ready to kill.

  She scratched Gray’s name into a tree and, below it, Rakov’s. Below that, just in case he returned—just in case—she scratched: “We are coming.”

  Gray was far heavier in death than Feo expected, and she staggered sideways, but it would have been wrong to drag her. At the last moment her arms gave out and she half lowered, half dropped her into the grave, then pushed the earth back. The wolves let her. Feo stamped on the earth and kicked snow on top, ignoring the numbness in her feet.

  The snow was mixed with mud, and it was obvious someone had been there, but when she felt sure the smell of blood had gone and no stray foxes would come and find Gray, she sat down on top of the grave, stroking the disordered fur of the pup, and rocked backward and forward with her chin on her knees. The pup’s tired keening kept time. As she rocked, Feo sang a lullaby mothers sing to newborns.

  Black and White lay around her in a ring, tail to nose and still as stones. Their eyes were open. Surrounded by their warmth, Feo had a last waking thought of small victories: There will always be things that
money cannot buy, things that you have to earn. It seemed right that Gray, the bravest creature Feo had known, should have her grave marked with something beyond the reach even of the tsar: a wreath of wolves.

  TWELVE

  Feo had been riding on Black’s back for what felt like several hours when they first spotted the castle. Or rather, not a castle, but the ghost of one.

  The gate was black and gold, wrought with angels and eagles, and stretched as tall as two men. Set on top of the only hill for miles, it was devastatingly imposing. “But I am not,” said Feo, “going to be intimidated by architecture.”

  Feo found a stick and poked it through the gates to test the snow’s depth: It had gathered waist high on the tree-lined path—“A winter’s worth,” whispered Feo—and except for the bird marks there were no footprints. The chain on the gate, when Feo scraped the snow off, showed a year’s worth of rust.

  “What do you think?” she asked Black. “Does it smell safe?”

  There was no wind. Feo pushed her hair back and brushed the snow out of her ears, but no sound of any living thing came to her. Around them were snow-thick fields, and the trail the wolves’ feet had left.

  The wolves slid between the bars of the gate. Feo leaned through and balanced the pup on Black’s back. “Don’t run anywhere, please,” she whispered, and then to the pup, “and don’t pee on his head.”

  With both her hands free, it should have been easy for Feo to climb over the spiked railings, but her whole body ached and she tumbled the last meters. The snow broke her fall, though she ate more of it than she would have liked. Her body was slipping out of her control, she thought: She needed somewhere safe to sleep. She would stay only long enough to recover her breath, to make a plan, and they would be on their way.

  The fire, as Alexei had said, had not been recent. The trees looked as if they had once been sculpted into the shapes of animals, but now they were sprawling, monstrous shapes, and thickly frosted. Nobody had cleared the autumn leaves before the snow came. Feo sniffed the wall as she approached: The soot barely smelled at all. The castle was a long, low rectangle, with turrets at each side and two balconies, both crumbling and dripping with icicles. The stones were tawny and gray—wolf colors—streaked with the fire’s black, and the pillars on each side of the doors were caked in soot.