Fear the Wolf

by S. J. Sparrows

  I followed the whines and whimpers until I reached the smithy. Markus Bennan lay where I had seen him earlier, slumped over a dead wolfling. I knelt down and shook him, but it became clear the sounds hadn’t come from him.

  Another whimper. I looked toward the closed smithy door, then scurried to it and knocked. “Are you in there? Can you let me in?”

  “Father said I’m not allowed.”

  I glanced over my shoulder at Markus’s body, blinked slowly, and then spoke through a slit in the door. “Don’t worry. You won’t get in trouble. Open the door for me. Please.”

  Aldan Bennan let me in.

  He wasn’t injured, thankfully, but he made nervous whining and sniveling noises. I resisted my instinct to console him; I wanted to approach him and rub the side of his arm, but I doubted he understood what had happened. I had to remind myself that he was older than I was, much bigger and stronger, and potentially dangerous.

  He stopped moaning and leaned toward me. “Father put me in here,” he said excitedly. “He told me not to come out, didn’t he?”

  Feeling weary and uncertain, I watched him for a moment. “I don’t know. Did he?”

  Aldan’s face twisted into an angry frown. He turned, and then paced about the room. My eyes flew to the forging tools lying around—dangerous instruments if used as weapons. Desperately urging my thoughts, I tried to remember what people had told me before about interacting with Aldan, how to prevent overwhelming him. To my relief, the bits of advice began trickling back to me.

  Aldan liked definite answers. Yes or no. He hated uncertainty. He liked rituals. He sometimes needed things explaining more than once, slowly, or in simple terms. He became obsessed with things, and he liked it when others showed an interest in his obsessions. If he jumped about, spun on the spot, or waved his arms, it was best to say nothing and leave him to it. But if his eyes flooded with malice, it was vital to distract him with something unexpected before he unintentionally hurt himself or someone else.

  “Yes, Aldan,” I said firmly. “Your father told you to stay in here.”

  Aldan stopped pacing and smiled. “He told me to bar the door.”

  My stomach lurched with sadness. How was I going to tell Aldan that his father had died to protect him?

  Aldan tilted his head and stared at me blankly. As though he’d heard my thoughts, he said, “Are people outside dead?” He asked it plainly, innocently, as if asking who had been on well duty today. “People was shouting, like when Mother was killed.”

  “I think everyone’s dead.” Unsure how else to word it, I added, “Including … including your father.”

  Aldan’s brows lifted. He pressed his lips into a pout and said nothing, swaying. After some time, his expression brightened again. In a childlike manner, he asked, “What does that mean?”

  “Dead?”

  “No! What does including mean?”

  I sighed, the tingle of impatience rising in me. “It means as well as.”

  “As well as what?”

  “It doesn’t matter!”

  Aldan’s face switched to anger again, but he seemed sulkier this time. His expressions were so sudden and extreme that I wondered how genuine they were. Did he actually feel the emotions he was portraying or had he just learned reactions that he thought were expected of him?

  He looked me in the eyes. Again, I felt as if he could see my thoughts, or as if he were picking up on senses and signals that other people didn’t notice.

  Another quick shift: he pulled a sad, twisted-up face and came toward me. His expression pierced my heart. I instantly regretted doubting the authenticity of his feelings. He did feel emotions; he just experienced them differently.

  “I’m sad,” he said.

  I put my hands up in a soothing gesture, but also in defense. It was subtle enough that he didn’t pick up on my fear. When he stopped approaching, I lowered my arms and sighed.

  He said, “I’m supposed to be sad when someone dies, aren’t I? That’s what Father said when Mother died. He told me to be sad.” He peered at the floor. “I’m sad now …”

  My legs buzzed with impatience. I didn’t have time for this. I had to find other survivors. “Aldan, just stay here, would you? Bar the door again, and I’ll come back for you.”

  “All right.” Tears dropped from his nose to the floor. As I neared the door, he mumbled, “Useless Aldan.”

  A twinge of pain in my chest. I turned back to gaze at Aldan for a moment, thinking. Another sigh escaped me.

  I stepped closer to him. “Would you help me with something, please?”

  Distracted from his sadness, he looked up and assessed me. A mischievous smile spread over his face. He squirmed enthusiastically. “No!” he said in an overly rebellious manner.

  I tried a different tactic. “Aldan, you have to help me, so please follow.”

  He sulked again, then trailed behind me out the door.

  12

  Aldan reacted as well as I could reasonably hope he would to seeing his father’s dead body. He seemed more confused than upset, and he asked some odd questions. I decided to shift his attention before he dwelt on it too long. I suggested we split up to search different parts of the village. I doubted we’d find anyone alive—it was too quiet—but we had to try.

  I told Aldan to shout for me if he found someone or needed help. Otherwise, we were to meet by the well when we were both done searching. We went our separate ways.

  As I checked house after house, confirming more dead by the second, it began to feel uncomfortably like a simple task the elders had assigned me. My duty. Something I had to do, no matter what I thought or how I felt about it. My feelings? I had shoved them deep down inside me, somewhere so deep they were numbed for now.

  I refused to let myself think of the bodies as people I had known. The only way to keep going was to carry on counting another one dead, carefully tamping down the memories and emotions that attempted to rise each time.

  It became much harder when I entered the learning court. Even the children were dead; even the ones who were too young to have had their night of the telling.

  They had been innocent; they hadn’t known any better; they hadn’t even been given a chance to learn their places.

  My people had always believed that the Wolf didn’t kill innocents, that she spared those who were too young, or simply unable, to understand what it meant to fear the Wolf. After finding Aldan alive, I had hoped at least the young’uns had been spared, too.

  My mind was shocked into a kind of involuntary repetition. This isn’t possible, this isn’t possible, this isn’t possible. Surely it was all a nightmare. How could almost everyone I had ever known be here one moment and then gone the next?

  Mother, Reni—the two people I loved more than anyone—gone.

  I took a deep, slow breath. Tamp it down. Tamp it down.

  I moved on to the village hall, where I found my close friend Cerik. He had died among what he’d loved most: the written word. Books and scrolls were piled around him, under a broken shelf that must have been damaged in the attack. Except for the entrance to the elders’ meeting room, which lay off to one side, the walls were lined with shelves, all laden with books and papers.

  How many times had I come here on my days of rest to read with Cerik? I had cared little about the subjects, only the thrill of reading the words, discovering unfamiliar ones, and being swept away by the rhythm of a sentence, a paragraph, an entire piece of text.

  Words were so giving. I would learn a new one, and then an experience I had struggled to accept or let go of would take on a wholly different meaning. I gained the ability to view those experiences from different angles. Or my vague, muddled feelings would take on clarity, yet somehow become more complex than before. My senses were enriched, my empathy enhanced, and my mind sharpened—all because of words.

  As the village scribe, Cerik’s duty had been to simply document facts and to detail the steps of each person’s duty. Even so, I fo
und there were magical moments in each thing he wrote where the words seemed to escape the page and embody a life of their own. But I also sensed where Cerik had reined in his flamboyance to avoid a scolding from the elders. His writings were meant to serve the next generation—and they would have. He hadn’t just written instructions; he had illustrated what couldn’t be adequately described in words. Unlike his writings, the drawings were dull. Purely technical. He had once told me that when he started his role, the elders tore his early pictures apart in horror.

  “They saw too much of me in my illustrations,” he had said to me, with a quirk in his lips. We had muttered together, jokingly, about fearing the Wolf.

  Now, that seemed like the most foolish thing to have done.

  I peered down at my hands. Although it felt like many cycles ago, I remembered earlier today: the fantastical drawing of the village hall I’d scratched into the ground. Before my rising shame could submerge me, I pushed the feeling into that numb place. I threw all memories of Cerik and me down there too.

  Gone. It was all gone.

  I checked the elders’ meeting room, knowing what to expect from the silence, and returned to the main hall with more names added to the count in my head.

  About to leave, I remembered the inscribed stone tablet in the center of the hall. After their night of the telling, children were regularly brought to the tablet to be reminded of its message. I’d seen it so many times it had become part of the background scenery to me. But after what had happened today, how could I not be drawn to the tablet?

  I approached it, slowly.

  The ancient, weathered slab of stone lay atop a pedestal. As far as I knew, it was the only thing in the village—or perhaps even in this land—that had come from the time before the Tearing, over a thousand cycles ago. All other writings in this hall had been created by Cerik and the scribes that had come before him.

  The inscription on the tablet was severely faded, written in the old language, which nobody knew anymore. Large chunks of the yellowish stone had worn away to a smooth surface. On display below the tablet was the transcript I knew, word for word, written on hemp. It read awkwardly, perhaps because it had been translated by one of my people many cycles ago when our own language was new.

  Still, the underlying message was clear enough:

  be afraid … of your desires.

  feel fear if you … wish to live.

  you must live in fear

  … of every … thing you desire.

  never presume too much.

  fear is your captor …

  never … be something more,

  never dare to do something new,

  … never challenge …

  you must … fear the wolf.

  I reread the transcript now. A tear tickled the ridge of my nose as it ran down. The droplet fell and landed on the paper, darkening the word ‘fear’ in the last line.

  My anger returned like a fire instantly enveloping me. I reached above the translation to grab the original. The ancient tablet was heavier than I had expected, sending a knife of pain through my bandaged arm. Its coarse edges chafed my hands, but the back was smooth against my fingertips. My thumbs vibrated as I ran them across the engraved letters on the front.

  I gripped the tablet harder. Channeling pure rage, I stared at the thing as though it, not the Wolf, had killed everyone I loved. My hands turned pale and numb as I squeezed the stone with more force. Shrieking loud enough to taste blood, I raised the tablet above my head and slammed it into the ground.

  There was a heavy, echoing smack. I had imagined the tablet shattering into many fragments and flying everywhere. Instead, it cracked neatly into five pieces, leaving dark crevasses between each segment.

  I surprised myself with a scoff, almost a laugh. A thrill like nothing I’d experienced before shivered through my bones: a sense of freedom, mixed with a mighty bloodlust for the Wolf.

  With a new resolve, I left the village hall.

  13

  Out in the open, I shouted Aldan’s name repeatedly and then waited by the well until he arrived. He came alone, but he looked excited to see me.

  “Did you find anyone?” I asked.

  He nodded vigorously.

  My heart skipped; it hurt, but it felt good. “Alive?” My pitch soared.

  “No,” he said, neutrally, as if he hadn’t just raised my hopes and then crushed them.

  My whole body sagged. I shook my head and fought off despair, deciding to cling on to my anger and newfound determination instead.

  I gave Aldan a firm look. “Help me with something, please.”

  He followed me out to the hills … to Reni. Seeing her body again threw me once more, nearly taking me under. I couldn’t bear the thought of her being out here all alone.

  “Help me carry her to the village, please,” I asked Aldan.

  “No!”

  “Aldan, this is really important to me.”

  Aldan huffed and glared at me, but when I didn’t look away, he picked up Reni’s body from under her armpits. I moved around to her feet. Because of my injured arm, I had to hook her legs over the inner elbow of my other arm and press them against my side.

  “Wait,” I said, noticing something nearby. “Sorry, Aldan. Let’s put her back down.”

  Aldan dropped Reni, her head and upper body slapping to the wet ground.

  “Aldan!” I complained. He wandered a few meters away, grumbling something.

  I placed Reni’s legs down as gently as I could and then scurried over to what I had noticed. There, in the soggy mud, near the bush I’d hidden my drawing sticks under, was a fresh drawing. It must have been done after the rain had stopped, else it would have washed away. Reni couldn’t have drawn it; she had died before then.

  “Who did this?” I whispered to myself.

  The drawing was of a woman raising a sword in the air victoriously. By her feet lay a dead wolfling, its severed head to one side.

  I stumbled backward. At first, I had thought the woman in the drawing could be anybody. Then I had wondered if it was supposed to be Reni, if perhaps someone had seen her fighting the wolfling out here and had drawn what I wished had been the outcome. But as I moved toward the intricate lines in the mud again, and leaned forward, squinting, I realized it was supposed to be me.

  The air around me seemed to churn as I imagined myself being watched by someone nearby, someone hiding out of sight with eerie perfection. My soaked tunic had turned cold and heavy, the chill wetness adding to the trembling that began to wrack my body.

  “Where are you?” I shouted, twisting around. “Who did this?”

  Only silence responded.

  I screamed, “Who did this! Where are you!”

  After a while, Aldan ran over. “Are you talking to me?”

  I lowered my voice. “No, Aldan.”

  My thoughts spun and ran and collided with one another. No villager would have dared to draw a person slaying one of the Wolf’s creatures. Perhaps, after the attack, a nomad had come from the forest. But why would a nomad draw this? Besides, Aldan and I had searched the entire village. We had found no one alive and no outsiders lurking about. Why would a nomad do this, and then just leave?

  I looked at the drawing again. My heart thumped. The picture spoke to me so strongly I had to consider another possibility. Maybe I had drawn it, and I was losing my mind.

  “Did I draw this, Aldan? Did you see me draw this?”

  He swayed from side to side. “Did you draw that?” he asked as if it were a game.

  I puffed out a breath and tried to clear my thoughts. No, I wasn’t losing my mind. But I was losing my patience. Whoever had drawn this picture, whenever they had done it, and for whatever reason, I didn’t care anymore.

  After smashing the tablet in the village hall, I had decided I must leave the village. There was nothing left for me here. If Aldan and I were to stay, it would take days or weeks for us to bury everyone. Burning the bodies wouldn’t be much easier
. Either way, the stink would be unbearable.

  Whether attracted by the stench of dead meat or the smoke from a pyre, wild animals and nomads would eventually show up. If nomads found our village full of food and other goods for the taking, they would kill me. Or worse. Those forest-dwellers didn’t share our rules regarding sex or being partnered with someone for life.

  Old Fendra used to warn me of wild men. Not all nomads were monsters, but some were known for stealing young men, women, boys, and girls, and forcing themselves upon them. Whatever that meant. I knew it was something sexual. Something awful. Something almost unspeakable.

  And I would not let it happen to Aldan or me.

  Before leaving the hills, I gathered up my drawing sticks from under the bush and tucked them into my pocket.

  Aldan and I picked up Reni again. To avoid dropping her, we had to stop and readjust a few times on the way back to the village center.

  When we made it, we placed Reni beside her father’s body. Garrut lay where I had last seen him, surrounded by wolflings. He had slain at least three of the beasts before he had fallen.

  “Thank you, Aldan,” I said, meaning it wholly. “Come with me again, please.”

  We walked to the fields.

  The sight was too beautiful for such a horrid day. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of stempus flowers formed a bright yellow blanket over the plowed earth. Now the storm clouds had cleared, the late afternoon sun shone down on the fields at a low angle, illuminating the petals.

  We picked as many flowers as we could carry. I placed one each on Reni and Garrut and then led Aldan to his father’s body so he could do the same for Markus.

  “Let’s split up again,” I said. “Place a flower on every dead person you find. When you’re done, find a big satchel and fill it up with as much food as you can. Dry foods, things that’ll last. Then fill up some water pouches and wait by the well for me. Oh, and if you find a good sword and shield, take them for yourself and—”

  I stopped. I must have overwhelmed him; he was staring off into the distance with a strained expression, ignoring me.