Fear the Wolf

by S. J. Sparrows

  It felt wrong to me.

  Even so, I soon learned how difficult it was to forage enough edible plants in the wild. I began to understand why nomads, unless they wished to starve, had little choice but to hunt animals when other food was scarce. But then again, nomads could settle down and grow crops, like my people had. Instead, they chose to struggle in the forest; they chose to kill for sustenance.

  You’re a killer too. The voice came like a reprimand, entering my head as we traipsed through the forest one evening. It rang loud, in the same harsh tone my mother had always used to tell me to fear the Wolf. Right from the start, you presumed too much.

  Even in death, Mother criticized me.

  But she was right. I had killed two wolflings to save Nosy. And those beasts were just following their nature, hunting for food. Even the wolflings that had attacked my village were just doing their master’s bidding.

  I slouched as I plodded on, wearied by my warring morals. While growing up, I had known most of the time what was right or wrong. We were all raised to know the difference. Now, if I wished to survive, I could no longer live by this simple division. I had to kill to defend myself. And if I needed to slay a hundred wolflings to get to the Wolf, I would do it, because in the end more lives would be saved.

  Yes, I heard in my head, and this time it was my voice.

  A sense of calm settled over me. It struck me that perhaps this was the first time in my life I had managed to put aside the opinions of others and come to my own conclusion about something—about anything.

  I raised my chin, drew back my shoulders, and marched on with my head held high.

  30

  I lost track of the days. After what I guessed was about two weeks, Illus went harder on me. So far, we had trained sword-on-sword: one weapon against one weapon. Now the Tenniac wanted to use two weapons against me.

  In one hand, she attacked with her preferred blade, a long sword made of a glossy black metal I’d never seen in my village. Whenever she opened her mouth while brandishing the weapon, her slick black tongue matched the dark blade. The effect was terrifying. Using another hand, she jabbed at me with a long dagger. With her two remaining hands, she delivered punches and feints to confuse and unbalance me.

  After less than a minute of me fumbling around, getting nipped and slapped and bruised, I yelled, “Stop! This isn’t fair. How am I supposed to defend myself against four arms? I only have a sword!”

  Illus paused and stared at me without sympathy. “Do you think wild beasts will fight fair? Wolflings are pack animals. When you fight them, you cannot afford to give your attention to just the one in front of you. You must also put your mind inside the wolfling behind you, hidden amongst the trees, waiting to pounce. And what about the wolfling off to the side, pressing you into a corner?”

  Flustered, I shook my head and shrugged.

  Illus clicked her tongue. “You’ve had some training in sword-to-sword combat, I can tell. But a sword only delivers a single strike at a time. Wolflings come at you with teeth and claws, sometimes from low down, other times from high up, leaping from the shadowy bushes. If you fail to kill the beast first, it will tear into you in three places at once.” Illus bared her teeth as if to demonstrate a wolfling’s vicious bite. Then she clawed the air with her two empty hands. She huffed through her nose. “Again, you must learn to think like a four-legged beast with teeth and claws.”

  “But it’s … it’s too much to consider at once. I’d be overwhelmed.”

  “That is why I overwhelm you now,” she said and resumed her attack. “I won’t kill you, but a wolfling pack will.”

  I stumbled backward and managed to block the first few strikes. I tried desperately to think of each of her hands as a separate wolfling with a mind of its own. Within a few heartbeats, I was overwhelmed again.

  Each time I became flustered, Illus stopped and stepped back for no more than five seconds. “Try harder,” she would say before lunging at me again.

  We carried on like this, day after day, until I was able to consistently block more attacks in a row than when I had first started.

  My exhaustion returned worse than before, an invisible force pulling down on every part of me. Even my thoughts felt heavy. In my drowsiness, my head kept tipping forward as if filled with loose rocks that were sliding about and shifting the weight.

  The intense training awakened my hunger. After I devoured the last of my food one evening, Illus, Aldan, and even Nosy ate their meat around the fire. My stomach bubbled and groaned as I watched them.

  “Let me teach you to hunt,” Illus offered again, “so tomorrow, you might eat.”

  “Tomorrow,” I said bitterly, “I’ll find other food.”

  “Will you?” She tinged her smooth, steady voice with disbelief. “To become a master of the forest, you must grow comfortable with killing to survive.”

  Exasperated, I shook my head and sighed. “I won’t kill for food. And I’m not doing this to become”—now I tinged my voice with sarcasm—“a master of the forest. I’m on this quest for revenge. Once the Wolf is dead, I don’t much care what happens to me.”

  “Your life means so little to you, does it? You survived the Wolf’s fury once. Do you think, if she sent her wolflings after you again, you would be so lucky? What if you die before we reach the Wolf? What if, after we have found a village for your big friend to live in, the Wolf strikes there? Do you not fight for the survival of your kind?”

  Confused by the barrage of questions, I said, “What? Of course I want to stop the Wolf from killing anyone else. But once she’s dead, what does my life matter?”

  As Illus blinked and looked away, her dark tongue flicked out and back in. What did that mean? With humans, I could sometimes read the signs that suggested they were annoyed with what I had said, or pleased, or bored, and so on. But the Tenniac’s smaller expressions were a mystery to me.

  I tried harder to sense what she might be feeling. “Is that why you are on this quest, for the survival of your kind?”

  Illus looked through the trees, ignoring me. Dusk thickened all around us. It seemed the only thing holding it back was our small fire, bravely growing brighter as everything else grew darker.

  I realized my misstep. “I’m sorry. I forgot. All your people are gone. You seek revenge, just as I do.”

  Her head swiveled back to me, pinning me in place with the divided yellow orbs she called eyes. “What do you know of my kind?”

  “You … they … presumed too much. They didn’t know their place. So the Wolf came for them.”

  Illus sniffed. Her upper lip raised a little, baring the tips of her pointed teeth. “And now the same fate has befallen your village, would you say your people presumed too much?”

  “How can I know the mind of the Wolf?”

  Illus appeared to smile. Briefly. “That is exactly what you claim to know. Your every thought, your every action, revolves around the fear of how the Wolf will judge you.”

  I went to speak, but I found I couldn’t. The fear enveloped me now. It was part of me. Deep in my center. It lay dormant most of the time, waiting for me to make a brazen mistake, so it could erupt and scream, Fear the Wolf, fear the Wolf, fear the Wolf!

  With enormous effort, I said, “Well, what do you expect of me? She massacred my village.”

  “And before that? When the wrath of the Wolf was but a collection of stories with little evidence?”

  Again, I opened my mouth to talk, but it wasn’t fear that stopped me this time: it was curiosity. My mind flew back to the many times I’d had similar thoughts while growing up. Why had my people feared a creature none of us had ever seen? Why did we live our lives based on some barely readable lines carved into an ancient tablet? But whenever suspicions like these had entered my head, the old mantra erupted to silence them. Fear the Wolf. Looking back now, I saw that my people were raised, generation after generation, to distrust our own experiences, to be afraid of even daring to think for ourselves.<
br />
  Illus watched me closely, her head at an angle. “Your obsession with the Wolf blinds you, as it did your people.”

  “But … but we were right, weren’t we? We were right to fear her. My people are dead. And what about you? Are you not the last of your kind?”

  As usual, Illus avoided the questions she wished not to answer. “There are other Wild Forces than the Wolf, you know. You suspect this already. You question why the Wolf spared you. You question your old beliefs—as you should. For when reality contradicts your beliefs, you are right to uproot them. And just like roots below the ground, your beliefs must be exposed to be examined—to see how deep they once ran.”

  “Other Wild Forces,” I repeated dazedly. My mind dizzied with a sense of expansion, my idea of reality feeling much larger than before. I began to tremble, but I didn’t know why.

  “Yes,” said Illus slowly, satisfaction in her voice. “You fear the Wolf. But another fiendish creature roams these woods: the sly, deceitful Fox.”

  The moment I heard the word fox, my stomach clenched in agony as if punched. I wrapped my arms around the pain, around my waist, and keeled over onto my side. My skin turned hot and clammy, yet I shivered. My heart hammered before exploding into grief. As I found my breath, images gushed into my mind in great detail, and I remembered … I remembered …

  Mud. Rain. Agony. I thrashed in the puddle, afraid I was drowning, afraid the wolfling pinning me down would rip through my forearm at any moment and clamp its jaws around my face. But far worse than the fear for my own life was the terror that Mother was in danger.

  Desperately, I twisted my head to look toward her house.

  A great auburn beast appeared.

  The Fox.

  It was much like an ordinary fox, except far bigger—larger than a wolfling, but nowhere near as big as the Wolf. It had black-tipped ears, and dark legs, as though it had dunked them in wet black mud and let it dry on. At its back end was a long, bushy tail with a white tip. Blood covered the Fox’s maw, staining the white underparts of its fur vibrant red.

  Before dashing off, the Fox looked straight at me. I thought I saw a flash of the white sickness in its beady eyes, but I couldn’t be sure. I was distracted by the most unexpected sight: the Fox’s tongue was like a snake’s.

  The long, thin tongue slipped out of the Fox’s mouth like streaming water. The forked end curled upward and whipped about, before being sucked back inside the Fox’s pointed face.

  Then the giant auburn creature was gone.

  I came slamming back to the present, to here, to the forest, where I began weeping inconsolably. My breaths shuddered in and out as I sobbed and tried to make sense of the memory. A sharp pain sliced through my head. It seemed as if my mind was taking this recollection and trying to cram it back into the place in my head where it should have been to start with. I supposed the memory had already been there. Buried deep out of reach. I just hadn’t wanted to see it. I hadn’t wanted to know which cruel beast had killed my mother—because it had made no sense.

  I went on sobbing, struggling to breathe, and my mind’s eye ran over the memory again and again. I was shocked when I felt Illus’s big, bony arms wrap around me. I wanted to disappear. I wanted to vanish out of existence and stop feeling anything. In my raw grief, I felt too vulnerable to be touched right now, but I didn’t push Illus away. My cries twisted into wailing, a wailing that couldn’t be stopped. The sound frightened me. I sounded like a wounded, lost animal waiting to die, yet mournfully howling for help and comfort anyway.

  To my own surprise, the wailing did eventually stop. My body seemed weightless after the tears were all gone. Curled up in Illus’s arms, I felt like a hollow shell. When I tried to think over the recollection of the Fox again, it seemed less vivid now, almost like any other memory.

  “You knew,” said Illus, her smooth, humming voice loud in my ear. “You yourself have seen the Fox. He was there when the Wolf attacked your village. You’ve known since then that there is more to this land than just fearing the Wolf. You knew, but you hid the truth from yourself.”

  I tensed up, in Illus’s embrace, but said nothing. The relief and lightness I had felt evaporated. I wondered—not for the first time—if Illus could hear my thoughts. How many times had she said almost exactly what I was thinking? It angered me, the way she reflected my inner world back at me. It was never done delicately. Even when I knew she was speaking my truth, the way she said it made my body go rigid. Was it just me, or did nobody like to be told what they already knew but weren’t ready to face?

  Illus’s breath tickled my ear. “The Fox killed your mother, Senla, the Fox killed her.”

  I pushed away, disentangling myself from her arms, and stood up. My sore legs wobbled as I stumbled back a few steps, my body weak from crying, weary from training.

  Dusk had deepened into full dark now. Only the fire illuminated us, turning Aldan and Illus red-orange in its light. The dancing flames flickered in Nosy’s big saucer eyes as the bushcat watched the fire.

  Turning to Nosy, Aldan mumbled something like, “Senla’s not sad no more, is she?”

  The bushcat hissed at him, padded a short distance away, and then settled back down.

  I snapped at Illus, “Just give me a moment. You might be right … you are right. But I need … time. You can’t just tell someone what you think they know. You can’t tell me what I’m thinking.”

  I took a moment to pace and breathe and mull things over. I had enough sense to stop myself from berating Illus any further. A few times during training, when Illus had become impatient at my slow progress, I’d seen the white sickness ripple in her eyes—the uncontrollable rage bubbling beneath the surface. Some days, she had even stalked off into the forest to calm herself before returning.

  I didn’t want to evoke that anger now.

  I waited until my mind and breathing were settled. “I must have known. I must have seen what I now remember. But it was too much … too much to bear. The Fox … whatever it is—”

  “A Wild Force,” said Illus.

  “Yes,” I said tentatively. “Whatever it is, it’s a special being like the Wolf. Something powerful. But how could I accept what I had seen, when I was raised to believe that the Wolf is everything? How could I accept the impossible?”

  “Do you accept it now, that there are other Wild Forces?”

  Acceptance. The word echoed in my head, rattling against the insides of my skull. Something felt wrong. It wasn’t just a matter of accepting a different reality. This new information had shifted something much deeper in me. It dislodged the rage that had sat firmly in my gut since the attack on my village. Now, that anger found another target—its true target.

  “Illus,” I said, my voice solid and clear, “before we kill the Wolf, I have to avenge my mother. I have to kill the Fox.”

  My words hung in the air for a long while. As if trying to fill the silence, the crackling of the fire grew louder. I waited so long that I thought Illus had no intention of responding.

  Then she said, “I have no quarrel with the Fox. If you must kill him, you will do it alone.”

  “Are you afraid?” I asked, annoyed at the rejection.

  Illus rose in an instant, lifting and rolling her shoulders to appear more imposing than she already did. In the dark, she was a tall black shadow, half lit by the orange glow of the fire. I stepped back, out of fear. Illus did not attack, though, and I caught no signs of the white sickness flaring up in her.

  “I believe I could kill the Fox,” she said calmly, “if I wished to. He is not as powerful as the Wolf, and I know where to find him. However, for you, defeating the Fox would be a test of your skills. If you survive, then perhaps I have trained you well enough. Perhaps, together, we will stand a chance of slaying the Wolf.”

  “What? I don’t think I can do it alone. I’m not strong enough. You’ve only been training me for … I don’t actually know how long. But I’m not ready.”

  It was too da
rk for me to tell if Illus was looking at me or not. All I heard her say was, “We will see, Senla. We will see.”

  31

  The next morning, I woke alone. At first, I stirred slowly, pleasantly, my eyelids fluttering out of the heavy sleep brought on from exhaustion. But when I saw no one else lying around the burned-out fire with me, I shot to my feet. Fully awake.

  “Aldan?” I called. “Illus? Where are you?”

  There came no response as I spun on the spot and stared through the trees.

  I brought my eyes back to our little camp. What had happened to my companions? My satchel was gone. Everyone’s possessions were gone. Even Nosy was gone. The only items left were my sword and shield. They lay next to where I had slept, neatly positioned, as if placed there for me to discover. I couldn’t remember if I had left them like that before falling asleep last night.

  I inspected the ground. There were no signs of disturbance—no scuffs in the earth, no torn clothing, no blood, nothing. If my companions had been attacked or taken in the night, surely I would have heard something. Surely I would have woken up.

  I pressed my fingers to my forehead, rubbing between my eyes. Thinking.

  Last night’s conversation struck me like a gust of wind. I stiffened my back, standing tall in shock and realization. After a sigh, I tutted and shook my head.

  This was a test.

  “Funny, Illus,” I shouted toward the trees without a hint of humor in my voice. “Very funny. I take your point now. Look at me, surviving alone in the forest.” I stretched out my words sarcastically as I turned on the spot with my arms up in mock triumph. “I am strong enough after all! Now can you come back? We’ve got more serious things to do, like finding a new home for Aldan and training me to defeat the Fox. Oh, and there’s still the Wolf to kill, if it hasn’t slipped your mind!”

  I remained standing, waiting for a response, for a long while. Then I plunked myself down and crossed my legs. If I sat here long enough, perhaps Illus would get my point: that I wasn’t going to play her foolish game.