Fear the Wolf

by S. J. Sparrows

  On one of my days of rest, I visited the village weavers to thank them for making me some new tunics. Seeing them working at their loom brought up the bright memory of my first successful weave, of holding the plain length of linen in my hands, delighting in the hot thrill and sense of belonging I felt when mother had finally regarded me with approval. But that was many cycles ago now, long before I grew to dread the thought of taking over my mother’s duty.

  I became so lost in memories of Mother that one of the weavers asked if I was all right.

  “Yes, sorry,” I said.

  On my way out, an idea hit me. I turned and told the family what Illus had taught me about the laka plant. Just like in my old village, these people didn’t know the fronds could be used for clothing. I explained how to treat the giant leaves with oils and how to dry them correctly.

  “The laka tunic isn’t as thick or comfortable as this one,” I said enthusiastically, tapping the ordinary tunic I had on. “But perhaps it can be used as an extra layer in the winter. Or to keep people dry in the rain.”

  The family of weavers looked horrified. One of them mumbled a polite thank you while showing me out.

  Afterward, I worried that I had forgotten my place. A few days later, when I saw one of the weavers talking to Mira in the village center, I was sure he was reporting me for presuming too much.

  But I was wrong. The weaver spoke to Mira excitedly before pulling a laka tunic from his bag and presenting it to the elder. Mira nodded approvingly.

  Some of these people wanted to learn. Yes, they were afraid of presuming too much. But underneath that fear, they harbored a burning desire to know more, to do more, and to be more.

  Most of the villagers had followed Mira’s order to make me feel welcome here. Every day, people stopped me to ask if I needed help with anything. Some wanted to know about my village. “Was it like ours?” “Did your people know their place?” “Did just one person endanger the rest of you or did you all presume too much?”

  What the Wolf had done to my village frightened them, but not enough to kill their curiosity. I knew why they asked such questions. They hoped to discover a reason—the reason—why the Wolf had unleashed her wrath on my village. If they could find the cause, they could escape the same fate. They hoped.

  It seemed the only person who didn’t want to talk to me was the man with mismatched eyes. Oh, and the ill-tempered Snuttus Bot. But I had no interest in speaking to him either.

  Over the past two weeks, I had tried many times to confront my father, but he repeatedly escaped and hid from me. One day, though, luck was on my side.

  Without noticing each other beforehand, we collided in the village center.

  “You are my father,” I said without delay. My pulse quickened. “I know you are.”

  The whites of his eyes grew larger. He looked about nervously, trying to smile at people passing by to convince them there was nothing to see. “You’ve been in the wild too long,” he said in a harsh whisper. “It’s making you imagine things.”

  That thought had crossed my mind before, and now a brief panic rushed through me. But when I focused on his eyes, I found my confidence. It was him.

  “You’re name is Farrel Nora. You left me and my mother when I was a child.”

  “Stop following me.” He raised his voice loud enough for others to hear. “Or I’ll tell the elders about your bad behavior.”

  He stormed past me and disappeared down an alley. Too many people had seen us arguing, so I decided against chasing after him.

  I needed to get him alone.

  Today, Kuna Ruff rushed into the yard and pointed at me while I was training with the guardians. “You! You have experience fighting nomads. Come with me. The rest of you, stay on guard, and double up on border patrol.”

  Kuna led me to the village center, explaining on the way. “Patrol has brought in a nomad. They don’t know what she wants yet. She was lurking in the fields. Said she has a proposition. Will only speak to the elders. Probably wants to trade.”

  A crowd had gathered. A few people narrowed their eyes at me as if my arrival two weeks ago had opened the gates to a flood of outsiders. The shuffling mass of bodies seemed more agitated than when they had greeted me.

  After Kuna and I shoved our way through, my heart leapt.

  Neverdark.

  What was she doing here? She was supposed to be with her clan ransacking what was left of my old village. Had she been there and back already? If that were so, I had spent too long here. My mouth turned dry. Perhaps by the time Neverdark reached my village, there was nothing left worth having. I remembered her threat—her promise to find me if I had lied to her.

  Snuttus was talking to the nomad. “I’m sorry, traveler, but you must leave. With word of the recent … cleansing of another village, we are not going to risk trading with you people. The Wolf is angered enough. You savage meat-eaters will be next if you don’t change your ways.”

  Neverdark threw up her hands innocently. “Okay, Friendly Villager Man, forgive me for asking.” She fidgeted on the spot, looking at the crowd as if expecting to see someone.

  Me.

  Our eyes met, and she smiled. She looked away before anyone could notice.

  Neverdark pointed behind herself while addressing everyone. “I’ll be in that direction, and I should be around most mornings, camping by the two massive boulders that look like a giant pair of—” She stopped and cleared her throat. “Anyway. Feel free to come find me.”

  “What are you going on about?” said Snuttus.

  “I just mean, if anyone”—she gave me a pointed look and bounced her eyebrows once—“changes their mind and wants to trade with us, come find me in the forest.”

  Snuttus Bot’s face burned red with rage. “Don’t be foolish, you foul-mouthed wild-woman. We don’t enter the forest. Now leave before our protectors have to drag you away.”

  Neverdark gave an exaggerated nod, then bowed in mock respect. “Of course, Friendly Villager Man. As you wish.”

  The nomad left, patrol tailing her with their swords pointed at her back.

  Had I imagined the pointed look Neverdark had given me? She must have known that no ordinary Wolf-fearing villager would enter the forest.

  That meant the invitation was just for me.

  The crowd broke up, everyone returning to their duties. Before leaving, Snuttus glared at me but said nothing.

  Across the evening, I considered Neverdark’s invitation. Fear prickled my skin as I remembered our previous encounter. She’d only spared me because I’d had information to trade. What if she was really as cruel and vicious as the three nomads who had attacked me?

  And what did she want? Was it a trap? Perhaps a rival clan had stripped my village bare before Neverdark reached it.

  These worries intensified my fear. But that fear only stoked my curiosity. I had to know what Neverdark wanted. If she truly sought revenge, then I’d be ready for her this time. It was a risk I needed to take.

  Intrigued by the mystery surrounding her sudden appearance, I drifted asleep with Neverdark’s face in my mind.

  42

  “I don’t know why I came here,” I said to the nomad on my next day of rest, sitting between two enormous round boulders in the forest. Having worked on patrol duty a few times, I knew the guardians’ routes well enough that I had managed to sneak out of the village this morning.

  “Well, something made you get off your ass and come find me,” said Neverdark. She sat cross-legged on the ground about four strides away. Morning birds sang in the treetops, and dew covered the undergrowth. The rising sun threw shafts of light between the trees at low, long angles. The rays became beams of glowing mist, revealing moisture in the air.

  When I had arrived here, Neverdark was already sitting down, chewing on a strip of dried meat for breakfast. I had approached with my fingers wrapped tight around the hilt of Illus’s fearsome black sword. But Neverdark had merely laughed at my vigilance before tellin
g me she was alone. My nerves had passed after a while, and I sat down on the damp forest floor.

  “You were going to kill me when I met you,” I said now.

  “Says the one who introduced herself by putting a sword to my neck. Anyway. I was never going to kill you. You weren’t a real threat to me. And …”

  “And what?”

  “I kind of liked the way you look.”

  “I—huh?”

  Neverdark laughed, but not in a cruel way. A ray of sunlight fell against the back of her head, tingeing the outline of her dark, braided hair with a fiery glow. As she quirked a smile at me, a glimmer entered her slate-gray eyes.

  My face set afire. I looked away in a poor attempt to hide my cheeks, which were surely red.

  Neverdark laughed some more. “I’m serious. You’ve … you’ve got a nice face.”

  A nice face? What did that mean? I turned back, opening my mouth to speak, but Neverdark added, “And, well, I don’t much like your heavy cropgirl clothes, but I reckon you’ve got a nice body under there too.”

  I looked down at my tunic, crossing my arms to cover myself. “You presume too much!” Instantly, I felt like a fool and a fraud when I realized I sounded just like my mother. I shook off the feeling and huffed indignantly. “Are you mocking me?”

  “Not in the slightest.” She gave another lopsided smile, holding my gaze.

  A soft trembling began in my stomach. Feeling uncomfortably hot all over, I forced myself to break our shared gaze by looking at the forest floor.

  When Neverdark spoke again, she asked in a serious tone, “Do you really want to return to that life?”

  I kept my eyes fixed on the twigs, leaves, and dirt. “What do you mean?”

  “That boring village with that unbearable man telling everyone what to do. My parents told me about him before; they thought me insane for trying to ask him to trade. They tried once. Never again, they said. Never again.”

  A laugh escaped me, but I still wouldn’t meet her eyes—her dark, intense eyes. “Did you really want to trade?”

  “What do you think?”

  Unsure of what she meant, I finally met her eyes. She winked at me. The heat in my body stirred deeper and lower. I felt out of control.

  “Did you find my village?” I asked.

  Neverdark’s playful expression vanished. “I did. I saw …” Stopping to swallow, she shook her head. “I saw how rough it must have been for you … to, you know, be there when that happened.”

  The warmth in me moved higher, up toward my heart. Out of all the villagers I’d met over the last two weeks, none of them had asked what it was like for me to see everyone I had known and loved be massacred by wild beasts. No one had acknowledged my pain. All they’d wanted to know was how and why it had happened. But this stranger—this nomad—was able to see my suffering without fearing it or shying away.

  “Thank you,” I said, managing to smile.

  Neverdark brightened. “On the other hand, my clan looted enough food to keep us eating like squirrels for the rest of the summer. I don’t know how you people eat like that all the time.”

  That was one way to ruin the moment. I was about to reply that I enjoyed my food, actually, and that I didn’t just eat nuts and grains all the time, but Neverdark went on. “Ah, yeah, which leads me back to what I was saying. After all the freedom you had in the forest, why would you want to go back to a dreary place like that village?”

  I scoffed. “I don’t view the few weeks I spent trying not to be killed, eaten, or—” I paused, remembering Taker, and I went quiet for a moment. “It wasn’t freedom. I had to keep moving to survive.”

  “Exactly! That’s what I love about it.”

  I rolled my eyes, sighing. I would be fooling myself if I didn’t admit I was curious about Neverdark’s way of life. So much of the forest had seemed beautiful to me, early on in my journey, but as Aldan and I ventured deeper, the forest grew sharp teeth and claws. How could anyone survive for long in such a dangerous, mysterious environment? Why would anyone want to?

  “Anyway,” said Neverdark, “when you’re with a clan, you’re never alone. Staying alive’s much easier. Hey! Why don’t you join my clan?”

  I ignored her ridiculous offer and asked, “Do you know anyone called Taker?”

  Neverdark tilted her head, blinking rapidly. “I know of a nomad called Taker. Travels with two other outcasts. They’re bad people. Yes, I know … some of you village folk think we’re all bad people, but those three—they really are.” With a frown, she added, “Why’d you ask?”

  “They attacked me. They paralyzed me. They tried to—”

  “Oh.” Neverdark’s face softened. She got up and came to me. I stiffened at first, but Neverdark raised her open hands to show she was unarmed. I noticed the thin scars laddering her wrist; they had stuck in my mind after seeing them when we first met. How did someone get scars like that? Had something scratched her?

  Neverdark crouched and put her hand over the back of mine. At her touch, a shiver ran through me. I froze, unable to say or do anything for the moment. Her skin felt good against mine. Warm. But I struggled to focus on the sensation as my mind filled with memories of the nomads’ attack.

  Gently, Neverdark asked, “Did they …?”

  “No!” I snapped. It was just too much. The images. Their voices in my head. How close Taker had come to hurting me.

  Without even flinching at my outburst, Neverdark gripped my hand tighter.

  “I … stopped them,” I said.

  “You killed them?”

  I nodded.

  With her other hand, Neverdark slapped my shoulder. “Oh, good for you! Those sick wretches deserved no better.”

  “It didn’t feel good,” I mumbled. A small voice protested inside me. Yes, it did. You know it did. I tried to bury that voice.

  Neverdark said, “Well, it should have. Because, however you managed to kill them, they would have done much worse to you.”

  I shrugged.

  “I mean it, Senla. Wait. Your name is Senla, isn’t it?”

  That made me laugh. “Yes.”

  “See. I remembered your face, and I remembered your name. What was I saying? You have a way of getting me all distracted, you know.”

  “You want me to feel good about killing people.”

  “I don’t want you to feel good. I was saying you should feel good that you killed them before they killed you.”

  Again, I shrugged.

  Neverdark’s brow creased. “Not all nomads are like those three.”

  “I know. You seem different.”

  “Yeah.” She nodded enthusiastically. “I wash myself from time to time.”

  I began to laugh again before falling quiet. Finally, I said, “I don’t want to think about them anymore.”

  “Yeah, I get it. So … do you wish to come deeper into the woods and join us wild people? You’re tempted. I know you are. I saw it in you when we met before; you’re not like other village folk.”

  “Oh. I … I didn’t think you were serious about that. I—”

  “It’s fine,” Neverdark cut in. She got up, releasing my hand, and walked back to where she’d been sitting cross-legged before. “It was just a thought. Anyway, my clan will be in the area a while. We have a camp nearby, but I come to this spot in the mornings to sharpen my blades and have some time to myself. Maybe I’ll bump into you here again?”

  My heart stung a little when Neverdark had pulled away, but now it raced with hope.

  I smiled at the nomad. “Maybe.”

  Later, after sneaking back into the village, I went to my room and reflected on everything. My days of rest were the only time I had to devote to thinking now. So I thought long and hard.

  I thought about the Fox. Something had settled inside of me the moment I crushed that wicked creature’s skull. I had avenged my mother. The anger—the rage over everything I’d lost—had still not left me. I was beginning to suspect it never would. But,
now, underneath that fury lay a small measure of peace.

  I thought about Aldan. He seemed to be doing well, but it was too soon to know for sure. If I left now to search for the Wolf, what would happen if Aldan became overwhelmed and lashed out at someone? Despite Mira’s assurances, I didn’t know these people well enough to be certain they wouldn’t cast him out.

  I thought about my father. It would only be a matter of time before I managed to get him alone. Could I really leave this village without knowing why he’d abandoned me and Mother all those cycles ago? The question had haunted me since I was a child.

  I thought about Illus. If she were alive, how would she feel about me staying in this village for so long? What would she have done if I told her I was considering giving up on our mad quest?

  I thought about the Wolf herself. I hadn’t so much as glimpsed the beast since she’d attacked my village. Up until that awful day, my people had never seen the Wolf; they’d known of her only through the words on the ancient, weathered tablet. The villagers here had a translation of that tablet too, on display in their village hall. But the Wolf had never attacked this place. Perhaps the capricious beast wouldn’t strike here for another thousand cycles. How could I know?

  And finally, I thought about Neverdark. Recalling the way she had gazed at me made my body ache to be around her again. Maybe she would stay in the area for longer than she planned. I imagined myself sneaking off to see her on my days of rest, like I had done so many times in my old village to secretly meet with Reni.

  With a sigh, I curled up on the straw bed and tried to sleep. My body was weary from the many losses I’d suffered. I needed this time for me. I needed to heal inside. And in many ways, I felt I deserved this respite. So, as sleep crept over me, I wondered if I could learn to know my place again and to do as I’m told—at least enough to blend in.

  If that were possible, then perhaps—just perhaps—this village could be a new place to call home.

  PART THREE

  The Wolf

  Never Return

  43