I waved a hand in front of him. “Aldan.”
He looked at me and then appeared to start taking in my words. “It’s not dinnertime yet,” he whined.
“I know, Aldan.”
“It’s not dinnertime. I don’t want food.”
“I know. We’re just getting the food for later, all right?”
“How come we need it for later?”
“Because we’re leaving!” I snapped.
Aldan recoiled, then waddled away with his head hung low.
I huffed. Too many emotions spiraled inside me, leaving me overwhelmed.
For a moment, I seriously considered leaving Aldan behind. I could tell him to stay in the village, and then try to forget he had ever existed. Perhaps I could convince myself that he had perished in the attack along with everyone else.
I shook my head and stared at my feet, disgusted to discover such a callous side to myself. That side of me wanted to abandon Aldan, just to make things easier for me. Still shaking my head, I killed the cruel fantasy and looked back up.
“Aldan,” I said softly. “I’m sorry I shouted at you. Will you do as I asked?”
He approached me cautiously and then nodded. “But I’m not allowed to touch swords. Father says.”
I gave him a reassuring smile. “You’re allowed to now.”
Aldan appeared to think hard for a moment. Then he grinned and tucked his chin to his chest. Still smiling, he shuffled away with a big bunch of flowers in his arms.
14
I was glad to be alone for this. After finding what strength I could, I headed home. As I stepped through the door, I braced myself for the sight. I hated leaving Mother’s body the way I had found it, but if I attempted to remove her from the broken, tangled loom, things would only get messier.
Another dizzy wave of exhaustion passed over me. I felt as if my head were full of sand, which was occasionally sliding out through my ears, unbalancing me each time. I wondered how much sand was left.
Taking a deep breath, I grounded myself before approaching Mother. While I placed three flowers in the pocket of her tunic, all I could hear were her last words ringing in my mind.
You did this. Right from the start, you presumed too much.
“Shut up.” I pressed my eyelids together to silence the voice. When my head cleared, I looked at Mother again. She looked peaceful in death. All the stresses of life were gone—the constant fear of presuming too much, gone.
I squeezed her hand, which had turned stiff and cold. “I love you,” I said, permitting a few tears before wiping my eyes dry. I gulped hard and stood up.
Before leaving I changed into a dry tunic with a belt, for tucking a sword under, and a pair of sandals with thick wooden soles. Along with as much food as would fit, I crammed a full water pouch into a large satchel that I slung over my shoulder.
Without looking back, I left my home for what I suspected would be the last time.
Outside, I took a small wooden shield from a dead guardian, Lerrin Teena, who had been my friend. I thanked her, placed a flower on her chest, and moved on. After putting flowers on everyone, I returned to the well.
Aldan had one flower left, which he was about to put on a—
“What are you doing?” I yelled, running over to snatch it from him.
Aldan’s face fell slack below the eyes, but his brows soared. He shuffled away, scratching his head. “It’s dead,” he murmured, pointing at the wolfling.
“I didn’t mean put flowers on them! They did this.”
After a tense silence, in which I feared Aldan would become angry, he finally smiled in his forced way. “You didn’t mean them, did you?” he said merrily and shook his head. He even laughed.
“That’s right, Aldan.”
“Silly Aldan,” he said, without any seriousness.
The tension evaporated. I felt a tingle of shame over yelling at him, but it soon passed.
Aldan had done as asked. A shield hung on his back, over a stuffed satchel. On the ground beside him was a sword. I picked it up and handed it to him.
“You got everything I asked you to?”
He nodded and took the weapon, holding it limply in one hand.
With the weight of everything strapped to my back and Reni’s sword in my uninjured arm, I doubted I’d make it out of the village without collapsing. But I would try.
“Come on,” I said. “We need to leave.”
15
Aldan and I followed the water-filled paw prints in the soggy earth. At first, we walked the perimeter of the village, trying to determine which way the wolflings and their master had gone, but I soon figured it out. It appeared the beasts had converged on the village separately, from all directions, but they had fled together down one path.
I remembered the Wolf’s summoning howl, the call that had saved my life when I was pinned beneath the vicious wolfling with its mouth around my arm. Before me now, hundreds of paw prints joined into a messy, pitted trail in the mud. We followed this path until the trees of the forest’s edge stood before us. There was a big hole in the forest wall, where smaller trees had been toppled and snapped in two, and shrubbery flattened to the ground.
“The Wolf went this way,” I muttered to myself.
I looked down at my feet, and for a moment they were locked in place. This was it. Time to leave. Considering I had entered the forest earlier today, with barely a thought of how dangerous or stupid it was, I should have been able to take this next step. But it felt different now. I was suddenly unsure of everything. The insides of my stomach swayed, my heart beating irregularly.
Closing my eyes, I took a deep, calming breath. The fresh air brought order to my mind. Whatever decision I made now—to stay or leave—danger would lie ahead. But with each passing moment, the Wolf was getting farther away. How much time had we wasted already?
I opened my eyes and turned to face Aldan. “Come on, it’s time to leave.”
He frowned in disgusted disbelief, which made me wonder what he thought we’d been doing all this time. Had he thought we were following the paw prints just for fun?
“I can’t go anywhere,” he complained. “It’s nearly dinnertime now!”
“Aldan—”
“No one’s allowed to go into the woods, not even my father.”
“Aldan, we have to leave,” I said slowly and clearly. “There’s nothing left for us here anymore. Everyone’s dead. If we stay much longer, we’ll die too.”
Aldan stared at me, tilting his head. “Everyone’s dead?”
“Yes. And if we stay, bad people will eventually come here. There’s no one to protect us now.”
“Bad people killed my Mother.”
“That’s right. But if we leave, we can try to stay away from bad people in the woods. It’ll be easier to hide with all the trees and bushes. We just need to keep safe until we find another village that will take us in. Then we can live there with good people again.”
Achieving this would be much harder and far more dangerous than I had made it sound, but I wasn’t about to tell Aldan that. Nor did he need to know about my quest for revenge. The fire burning in me wanted nothing more than to find and kill the Wolf. That would be the only way to stop other villages from meeting the same fate as ours.
Aldan looked around for a few seconds, squinting. “Like a game?”
“Sort of.” I smiled, but when Aldan scowled, I quickly added, “Yes, it’s like a game.”
We turned toward the forest. I looked at my feet again. This time, they were under my control. I took my first step into the terrifying unknown.
16
“Turn back,” the voice boomed through the trees as I lurched onward in desperate pursuit. I recognized the inhuman ring to it, the same haunting sound that had filled the Wolf’s howls. It was her. But I couldn’t see the beast. The floating voice came from all directions at once, as though the forest itself were talking.
“You were spared. Accept this gift and turn back.”
&nbs
p; I pushed on. Exhausted, straining to breathe, I wiped sweat from my forehead, then stared at my wet hand. My whole body zinged with pain and nausea, but I couldn’t stop. I wouldn’t stop.
All around me the forest was darkening. Behind me, Aldan whined incessantly. It was the only reminder that he was still following me. I hadn’t looked over my shoulder once since leaving the village, and the longer I trudged through the woods, the more single-minded I became.
“It’s dinnertime,” said Aldan. “I don’t like this game. It’s getting dark … I always eat at dinnertime.”
I mentally swatted his voice away, opening my ears to the other voice instead. But the Wolf had fallen silent. Fatigued, I struggled to think straight. Had I actually heard her voice? Were the stories true? Could she speak in our tongue? Perhaps it had been my own senses coming to me, urging me to abandon this foolish quest.
“No!” I said aloud. The Wolf was taunting me. A gift? A gift! She had murdered everyone I loved. Squeezing the hilt of Reni’s sword, I buried the awful images that leapt to mind and tried to think of anything other than my slaughtered neighbors.
I wondered how long I’d been stumbling through the trees and undergrowth now. The trodden path from earlier had disappeared only a short distance into the forest. The wolflings must have split off, unable to keep following their master in unison, because of the increasingly tangled wildwood.
For a moment, I thought I had lost my mind as well as the trail, but there were still signs of the Wolf’s movements: her ripped white fur clinging to branches, small snapped trees, and paw prints at least five times the size of a wolfling’s paw.
Needing to believe I was on the right path, I forged ahead. But an odd sensation gnawed at me. The small hairs of my body stood up as I sensed someone watching me. Someone other than Aldan. Something other than the Wolf.
My thoughts slipping, wooziness threatened to topple me. Yet it was the sudden, overwhelming fire in my left arm that pulled me down. Since being bandaged, the wound had seethed and itched. Now the pain was worse than ever. On my knees, I stared at the darkly blood-soaked fabric as it came loose.
My stomach twisted at the sight and smell. The oozing blood had turned thick, clotted with yellow and green lumps.
Healer, I thought in a daze. I need a healer. Luna Fairnnan’s old, wrinkled face came to mind, and all the times she had poulticed the cuts and grazes of my childhood, and all the thick, vile medicines she had forced me to swallow. Every time, she would insist her remedies tasted to the tongue as sweet as the sun’s kiss felt to the skin. But the added sweetleaves had never masked the bitterness of her healing herbs.
Luna’s dead, I reminded myself. Everyone is. And as I wondered why I was thinking such unimportant thoughts, I twisted to fall on my back. I gazed at the canopy above, trying to remember what I had been thinking just a moment ago and what I was doing on the ground in the forest and why I was in so much pain. Oh, but what’s that? Running through the trunks and branches were glowing white worms. Not worms, stupid. Poison! It was the sickness, the sickness from the depths. The white sickness.
Then my mind failed to produce words at all. My awareness held on, but I gaped about mindlessly. Aldan stood above me, looking nervous. He fidgeted. Just watching his movements made my nausea worse. My mouth went cold and watery as my body burned up.
Grief finally escaped that numb place deep inside me. But I dug even deeper and found just enough energy to twist my grief into rage. I imagined cutting off the Wolf’s head and feeding it to her wolflings before setting the whole forest on fire—just to kill them all!
I laughed, perhaps, or maybe I laughed in my head, delighting at the violent, bloody images. Then those pictures fell away. Shock cleared my mind. It was the shock of seeing someone else stand above me, next to Aldan.
The thing in the forest.
Its frightening face smiled down at me as my vision faded. Then all I knew was darkness.
The Thing in the Forest
17
The nightmare had me in its grip, throwing me from torment to torment for what felt like a thousand cycles.
I loped through the village. As my friends and neighbors spotted me, their faces transformed in terror, and they ran. I ran faster. I hunted them down, tearing at their throats, ripping them limb from limb. The whole time, a heavy shame pulled inside of me. The shame was me, inside myself in the night terror, screaming at myself to stop the killing.
You did this …
When I looked down at my body, it was covered in white fur. Enormous canine legs and paws with long, sharp claws preceded me. Although I sensed my broad snout, vicious teeth, and the tall ears at the sides of my head, I had no clear perception of what I looked like.
One thing I did know: I was the Wolf.
The slaughter went on until my fur ran red with blood and my tongue tasted of metal. My latest victim was Reni. I stood over her corpse, grieving inside; my true self yelled at my Wolf self to take back the murder, but my Wolf self delighted in the sweet satisfaction of the kill.
Right from the start …
Then instantly I was my normal self, and one goal dominated my dreaming mind. I have to save my mother.
With human legs now, I sprinted homeward—or at least I tried to. No matter how much I strained, the nightmare fixed me in place. My legs ran on the spot, digging deeper into the ground until I was buried up to my neck. I wriggled and twisted and pushed against the earth. No use.
Then the nightmare took me home. And there she was. Alive.
“Mother,” I said through a sigh of relief. But as I approached her, my hands turned back into paws, and I somehow shoved her instead. She fell violently and smashed into her loom. As a piece of wood speared through her, she stared at me in shock and disgust.
“No, no,” I began to mumble, but my voice changed into an animal’s snarl. This time when I glanced down, my fur was auburn, and the fur confused me. With no sense of who or what I was, I tried to go to my mother again. But there was no point. She was dead.
Yet she spoke. “You did this. Right from the start, you presumed too much.”
I tried to say, “No, it wasn’t me,” but more snarling and snapping replaced my words.
Then the disembodied heads of everyone I’d ever known danced around my mother, growing larger until they filled my vision. Their expressions were still, their eyes sealed in death, but their lips moved together as they echoed, “You did this. Right from the start, you presumed too much.”
Right from the start, you presumed too much.
Right from the start, you presumed too much.
Right from the start, you—
I woke with a gasp and jolted upright.
For a short spell, I had no sense of self, no awareness of what had happened to bring me to this moment. But slowly the details of the nightmare tumbled into my mind. And the memories of yesterday. I blinked frantically to clear my sleepy eyes.
I was in a clearing surrounded by forest. Even above, the branches reached across to interlace and overlap as if trying to block out the sky. The weak light filtering through suggested it was early morning. But it was hard to tell in a place so shrouded. I spotted Aldan sleeping not far from the remains of a small woodfire in the center of the clearing. A delicate tendril of smoke rose from the ashes, the final breath of the dying embers.
Sitting across from the ash pile was the mysterious being that had stood over me before I’d lost consciousness.
I drew my legs in quickly and pushed up to my feet to stand. As I rose, I noticed my freshly bandaged arm. The wound barely seethed now. A bright greenish-blue paste had crusted around the edges of the fabric, a strong medicinal smell wafting up from the balm underneath.
I stared at the being who must have done this. “What are you?”
My sudden demand came out much louder than intended, a shout in the quiet forest. Birds flapped away, beating through the thick foliage in fright. There had been gentle sounds before—rustling, shushing
wind, birds singing softly—but those sounds died at the emergence of my voice.
Aldan stirred and sat up expectantly.
“You know what I am,” said the mysterious being. From the creature’s appearance, I had expected its voice to be sibilant, or possibly harsh and guttural. But it was a steady, soothing sound, like the whispering hum of running water.
With no air of haste, the being stood. Its movements were both smooth and forceful at once, as though it were wading through thick liquid. Watching the creature move was almost spellbinding.
“You’re a Tenniac,” I said. “One of the Old Ones, the first beings born into existence, save the Wolf.”
The being left a pause, before carefully confirming, “In your tongue, I am known as a Tenniac.” The answer seemed measured, as though the Tenniac didn’t agree with everything I had said.
Despite my wariness and lingering disorientation from the nightmare, I was deeply intrigued by the Tenniac. I made no attempt to hide this as I looked it up and down, taking in its form.
It was human-shaped, mostly, but not much else about it was human. Its skin shone white with a scaly surface. A hint of lime green ran underneath, showing through more strongly around the Tenniac’s joints and fleshier areas. Two long, lean legs led down to perfectly symmetrical feet. Extending from the front and back of each foot were two equally sized toes, each with a fat claw at its point.
The Tenniac hunched slightly forward, but it didn’t seem to arch its back out of ill health or injury; rather, the posture was a natural stance, giving the creature a constantly vigilant appearance. Slitted yellow eyes added to its alert air; they reminded me of a wild bushcat’s eyes.
Running down the middle of the Tenniac’s face was a fine ridge of wrinkled skin. Two small round nostrils stood out on either side of the ridge, tucked under the skin flaps on its snout, which harbored the creature’s wide mouth. Sharp teeth filled the dark cavern.
Around its head, scraggly hair fell to shoulder-length. No, the strands were not hair. They were too thick, and the same color as the Tenniac’s skin. They looked like little lifeless snakes hanging limply around the creature’s face, coming directly out of its scalp.
Fear the Wolf Page 6
