by Selena Kitt
“Oh Raife,” she whispered against his lips, her own hands roaming all on their own, down the hard, muscled planes of his chest, feeling the ridges of his abdomen under her fingers. “Please tell me… please… how do you feel?”
“I can’na.” His voice was hoarse, pained. “Sibyl, do’na ask this of me.”
“Because it’s too dangerous?” she frowned, remembering Darrow’s words. “Because you’re protecting the pack?”
Raife nodded, slowly, that tortured look in his eyes like a knife in her heart.
“Your brother wants a war,” she mused, touching a finger to that sweet dent in his chin. “But you want peace.”
“We’ve sacrificed e’erythin’ for peace.” He sighed. “I can’na risk it all fer me own…”
“Your own what?” she whispered. She’d seen the way he looked at her, the way his gaze followed her wherever she went. She’d heard the way the wulver women whispered about it. That look. The same look Darrow gave his wife. The look a wulver gave his mate. “What am I, Raife? Am I anything at all?”
“Ye’re e’erythin’, Sibyl,” he said honestly, his big heart in his eyes. “Ye’re more’n I e’er dreamed of, mor’n I e’er hoped t’have. And still… I can’na…”
Sibyl nodded, feeling a lump in her throat, her lips trembling as she rose from his lap.
“Then I’ll go,” she said. Darrow had convinced her of the danger, and Raife had confirmed it. Just her presence here was putting them all at risk. “It’s better if I go.”
Of course it was better. She would find her way back to the village where they’d left Rose. The woman would be big with child by now. Sibyl could help. She could make her own way in the world, somehow. And if she carried a weight in her heart for the rest of this life, the heaviness of loss, the possibility of what might have been between her and this man, she could bear it. She would have to.
“Nuh, lass.” Raife stood too, looking down at her in the firelight. “Ye’re safe ‘ere. I said I’d keep ye safe, and I will.”
“You’ll keep me…” She turned her brimming eyes up to him, everything inside her aching. “But you won’t… take me?”
“I can’na.” He caught her tear with his lips, kissing her cheek before leaving her, closing the door behind him.
She didn’t ask Raife’s permission when Darrow asked her to go again, and Raife never gave it. But he was always there, waiting, when they returned with a good supply of useful herbs and sometimes wild berries or some other treat. Every time they came back, she thought Raife would rail at them, tell her she couldn’t go off gallivanting in the woods with his brother, but he didn’t.
He would glare at Darrow as the wolf changed back into his human form. The brothers wouldn’t say a word to each other as Darrow started into the tunnel to go see his bride, and Raife pulled Sibyl close, his arms tight around her, hands checking to see if she was whole and unbroken, as if he believed just stepping out of his sight would instantly cause her harm.
“I’m fine, Raife!” She would laugh and take his hand as they walked through the tunnels toward the smell of dinner cooking. And then she would tell him all about their trip, and show him what she found, and he would listen as if it was the most interesting thing he’d ever heard tell about.
Then, one day, she found it.
He had known instantly, just by the look on her face, that their trip had finally been a success. Raife had swept her into his arms, his embrace much tighter than usual, his face buried against her neck, his whispered words, “Thank God. Ye do’na hafta go back out again,” sending a shiver through her.
But now…
The willow Sibyl had found and transplanted was dying.
She’d found the plant Laina could not, much to Darrow’s relief, and she had transplanted it here near the stream. There was plenty of light, plenty of water, and yet the plant did not thrive. There was no reason for it and she could not figure it out.
“Tis the curse,” Laina told her simply when Sibyl went to visit her and the baby, bringing her broth to sip.
Sibyl once would have said she didn’t believe in curses, but she had seen things now most human beings would never witness. The sight of a half-man, half-wolf carrying a sword and riding a horse was something you would never forget as long as you lived. It made you doubt and believe everything at once, including all the fairy stories and legends she had heard tell over the years.
“Mayhaps,” Sibyl would say, whenever Laina blamed the willow’s slow death on the curse. But if it was the curse, and the willow was actually the cure for the change, as Laina and Darrow believed, then why would it not live here, in the place the wulvers called home?
Laina had an explanation for that too.
“It only grows in the borderland,” Laina told her, when Sibyl explained where she had found the plant. It had been too close to Alistair’s lands for comfort, and Raife had protested, but Darrow had been the one who agreed to take her out that far, to protect her if need be. “T’will not live on one side or th’other.”
This seemed ridiculous to Sibyl, and she was determined to prove Laina wrong, but so far, the frustrating plant had done just the opposite. She wanted one of the wulver women to try eating the leaves before the plant died, but Laina was insistent she be the one to try it first.
“I’ll pay the consequences, whatever they may be,” Laina told her. “I do’na want anyone else t’suffer any ill effects. I’ll try it first.”
Laina had been doing so herself all along, harvesting and drying various species of willow, from roots to leaves to bark, and taking them to test their effects. That was how she ended up nearly bleeding to death during the birth of her son. She had lived through the ordeal, but just barely. It had taken her weeks to recover from something Kirstin said wulver women usually bounced back from right away.
And in the time Sibyl had spent with them, she’d seen this for herself. Wulver women changed when it was time to give birth. They had one pup, two at the most, and their births were short and painless. They changed back immediately, as did the male pups. The girls took a little longer to change into human form, but babies, regardless of gender, stayed human until they came of age. Girls changed when they began to bleed, and they would continue to do so for the rest of their lives, until their moon time was done. Boys could not only control when they changed, they could also transform into halflings, half-man, half-wolf. Female wulvers were either human or wolf. There was no in between.
It was Laina’s desire to stop the change, so that female wulvers weren’t slaves to their own bodies. Wulver traditions were oral, passed down from generation to generation, but there was one text they considered their “bible” of sorts, and Sibyl had spent time going over it herself since she’d come to live with them. It was told in pictures with only some words—human wulvers were incredibly deft with their hands and could draw anything, their mountain walls were covered with beautiful drawings—but Sibyl’s father had taught her to read.
While most wulvers did not read, Sibyl understood the words in the book. Laina had been excited to learn this, and wanted Sibyl to pour over the text, to find the things Laina could not. Sibyl understood the woman’s urgency, at least to some degree. She, herself, felt trapped by her own gender. All of the things her father had taught her—to ride, to hunt, to shoot, to track—were useless to her sex. She understood Laina’s anger at feeling trapped in her body, unable to change what nature had made her.
But she didn’t fully understand until, one early morning while she helped wash clothes in the stream with Kirstin, she was told the story of Laina’s mother and how she had died. It was so eerily similar to how Laina had been caught, Sibyl found herself getting goose flesh at the telling of the tale.
The women took turns telling it, each of them bringing something new to the story as they went on. They told of a time when wulvers and wolves were trapped, hunted and killed. It had been just twenty years ago when “the MacFalon” and his bloodlust for wolves d
rove the wulvers underground. He would capture them in cages, torture and kill them. There was even a mandate from the Scottish king that wolves must be hunted at certain times of the year.
Sibyl wondered if this man they called “the MacFalon” was Alistair’s grandfather, a man whose reputation had been far worse than his son’s. Alistair’s father, according to Donal and everyone who spoke of him, hadn’t been the type of man who would shoot an animal for sport. She couldn’t imagine he had done what these women described “the MacFalon” doing.
The tale took another turn when the women told of two young female wulvers becoming trapped in a MacFalon cage. One was in estrus, they said—in heat. The other was heavy with pup and the trauma of the cage had forced her into labor. Neither female could change back to free themselves, and they had been separated from their men folk.
In the morning, the MacFalon himself had come to see what he had trapped in his cage. He found both of the wolves, the one in heat snarling at him, the other just birthing her pup. The young wolf pup, eyes hardly open, slipped out of the bars of its cage and ran.
“I thought wolf pups change when they’re born?” Sibyl had asked, pounding cloth against the rocks.
“Boys do, right away,” Kirstin explained. “Girls, they take longer. It can be up to a day afore they turn human.”
So it had been a girl who had escaped that day. A young wolf girl who would later be called Laina, a name her own mother, the wolf the MacFalon had shot through with an arrow while still in the cage, had chosen before she was born. He would have shot the other wolf as well, if she hadn’t changed. Her heat was nearly over, so mayhaps it was time, the women said. Or mayhaps it was the shock of seeing her friend murdered.
But the MacFalon, suddenly faced with a dead wolf and a very alive, nude woman, decided to drag his wolf kill behind his horse and throw the other woman across his saddle—after he restrained her, of course.
“T’would’ve been war then,” Beitris, the old wulver midwife, had told her with a nod. “Once the wolfen warriors heard wha’happened, they took to their horses and went ridin’ after the MacFalon armed wit’ claymores.”
“What happened?” Sibyl had asked, glancing down into the valley where the wulver men practiced the art of warfare every day, keeping their bodies in condition, just in case.
“King Henry.”
Sibyl had stared at them in disbelief, but they weren’t jesting. Not even a little.
“He was’na the king then,” the wulver women explained. “Nuh yet.”
“He came ta Scotland seekin’ warriors t’win the crown.”
She knew King Henry VII had been in Brittany, recruiting the French troops, when this incident was supposed to have happened. Had he really come to Scotland in hopes of finding more?
“And got ‘em, he did!” One of the other older wulver women cackled, her rheumy blue eyes flashing.
“He came lookin’ for the wulver warriors,” Kirstin explained. “King Henry wanted ‘em t’fight for ‘im. Dis was all before I’s born, a’course.”
“King Henry fell in love wit’ Avril,” the wulver women told her. Sibyl listened to this tall tale with big eyes. She knew the name Avril belonged to Raife’s mother. “She was wit’ child when he rode back t’England.”
“And the warriors promised t’fight for the future King of England, if the MacFalon would agree t’keep the peace. So they brokered a deal.”
“The wolf pact.”
That’s what the wulver women had called it.
“King Henry VII?” Sibyl had wondered aloud, utterly enthralled with the tale, even while she doubted its veracity.
“He could’na take her back wit’ him, ya ken?” the old woman said, shaking her head. “So she came back t’us.”
“Birthed her child ‘ere wit’ us,” the old midwife, Beitris, said. “And Garaith raised him like ‘is own.”
“Garaith?” Sibyl knew this name too. “Raife’s… father?”
“Darrow’s father,” Beitris countered. “Raife is descended from King Henry VII ‘imself.”
Sibyl had smiled then, thinking it had to be more stuff of legend.
“So King Henry negotiated a peace pact between the wulvers and the Scots,” Sibyl had mused. This tale was so fantastical, it was hard to believe. “And the MacFalon honored that pact?”
That seemed unlikely, given the man’s penchant for violence and hatred of the wulvers.
“The MacFalon was killed in battle,” the old midwife told her.
“His son had become laird by then,” one of the wulver women explained.
“And there’s been peace for nigh on twenty years.”
“Until now,” Sibyl whispered to herself, thinking of Alistair’s wolf hunt.
If there had been such a pact, Alistair had to be aware—so why was he breaking it?
She didn’t understand, but she knew it wasn’t good for the wulvers.
It wasn’t until she heard this story that Sibyl finally understood Laina’s passion for breaking the wulvers’ curse. Sibyl had never been close with her own mother, but she couldn’t imagine losing her in such a traumatic way. The wolf-child—Laina—had been found by the wulvers in the woods and taken back to the den, adopted by another female who had just had a pup. Kirstin and her adopted sibling, Laina, had been raised together as sisters, although everyone knew what had happened to Laina’s real mother.
Sibyl had done her best to help the young wulver woman and her cause, and she redoubled her efforts after hearing the wolf pact story, if for no other reason than she didn’t want the girl to take any more chances with her life and her health. Sibyl had poured over the wulver text, had read and re-read the legends, had listened to story after story told around the fire, at the dinner table, at the stream while they washed or in the kitchen where they prepared meals.
Sibyl had seen pictures of the huluppa tree, and had recognized it as a willow, just as Laina had. But it was Sibyl who had found it growing in the forest at the side of the very stream she had crossed to escape Alistair’s men. Now, as Sibyl stared at her little transplant, she knew it would likely be dead by the time Laina was ready to venture out of the den.
And what then?
Would Laina go out on her own to find it growing on MacFalon land?
Sibyl knew she couldn’t let that happen.
Chapter Eight
“Tis time t’sup.”
Sibyl shaded her eyes and looked up at Raife. The wulver men fought bare-chested and bare-legged, like any Scot, but they were far bigger and more muscular than most men, even when they weren’t transformed into half-wolf form. Raife’s body glistened with sweat, his dark hair damp with effort as he squatted beside her near the stream. They spent the morning training but their afternoons in various other pursuits. Today they had sheared sheep and he had bits of fluff stuck in his dark hair.
“Tis dyin’,” Raife observed, pinching another brown leaf off the plant—Sibyl could have sworn it turned brown just in the time she’d been watching. “Laina will’na be pleased.”
“I know.” Sibyl sighed, reaching out to pluck a bit of white from Raife’s hair. “We will have to keep her busy here until I can go out and find another.”
“N’more woods fer ye.” He scowled at the little smile that came over her face.
“Darrow will protect me,” she said. Darrow would have done anything for Laina. If that meant going out into the woods with Sibyl, well, he would even venture to do that.
“I can’na let ye go again.” Raife shook his head, frowning at the dying plant as if it was all the fault of the willow. “Tis far too dangerous, lass.”
“No more dangerous than a human living in a wolf’s den.” She teased, laughing, standing and holding her hand out to him.
“Ye’re safe ‘ere, Sibyl.” That scowl on his face deepened as he stood, ignoring the hand she had held out to help him. “Have we not proved it t’ye?”
“Of course. You know I jest.” She blinked at him i
n surprise. “You have proven to be a perfect gentleman. Far less of an animal than my…”
She didn’t finish the sentence, both of them knowing just who she meant.
“Aye.” Raife grimaced, turning his back on her and heading toward the mountain. “The perfect gentleman.”
“Where are you going?” she called after him.
“Dinner!” he yelled back, not turning. “I best eat somethin’ afore I decide t’devour ye instead!”
“Raife!”
But there was no way to catch up to those big, long, heavily muscled legs of his.
