Wolfskin

by W. R. Gingell

  “I never said I was,” I told him coldly. “It’s your own stupid fault if you thought so. When Akiva gets back–”

  “How do you think I was able to get to you so easily? Akiva is off in the southern woods. I put the path out in the opposite direction.”

  I went very still, considering my options. There didn’t seem to be many. “You put the path out?”

  “Of course.” His voice sounded bitter. “I might as well have spared myself the pains for all it got me. From the vibrations coming out of the garden I expected at the least a full-grown woman.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “If you’re under a spell it serves you right, and I wouldn’t break it if I could.”

  “Very dramatic,” he retorted, on a growl. “But since you can’t, it really doesn’t make any difference, does it? And I said vibrations because the whole forest has been humming with you for the last month.”

  I propped my elbows on my knees and sank my chin into the palms of my hands, frowningly considering this.

  “No,” I said at last, with certainty. “I don’t put out vibrations. And I don’t do magic, the forest does.”

  “Oh, really? That would of course explain why you happen to be sitting inside a casket made of willow saplings.”

  “That was the forest, too,” I told him. Stupid wolf. He didn’t listen. “I think it likes me. It helps me sometimes.”

  “Ignorant as well as half-grown,” said the detestable voice irritably. “In any case, you’re going to have to do.”

  “I won’t,” I said flatly. “I won’t do anything.”

  “If you want to stay where you are, very well. I’ll be here waiting when you come out.”

  I pondered this for some time, chin in hands again. There didn’t seem much chance that Akiva would come for me, and I knew I couldn’t count on another miracle like the willow casket.

  At last I said cautiously: “What do I need to do?”

  “Ah!” the wolf’s voice was spiced with mockery and, oddly, hope. “I can’t tell you. You have to learn it yourself.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Don’t sulk at me, I didn’t arrange it.”

  I made a face at the saplings that divided us, annoyed to be dismissed as useless and then summarily told what to do. Stupid wolf.

  “Is it something I have to find or something I have to do?”

  “The curse is in three parts,” the wolf said. “The first part needs you to find something, the second part needs you to do something, and the third part needs you to give something.”

  “It sounds stupid,” I muttered crossly. “Why is it so complicated?”

  “You need only do one part,” the wolf replied agreeably, but there was an undertone to his voice that made me wary. “That will be sufficient for now.”

  Sitting there in my safe little casket of willows, I knew he wasn’t telling me everything. I could almost feel the ruthlessness of his desperation, and the same instinct that had told me he was about to eat me, told me that the wolf was not far from madness in his rage and despair. It was just as clear to me that I had no other way out, and the savage madness I heard in his voice made me certain that he was capable of waiting with no other end in view but to tear me to pieces in revenge if I wouldn’t help.

  So I stood rather shakily in the middle of my casket, stooped and with my fingers interlaced in the nursery rhyme way, and took a deep breath. I disengaged my fingers one by one, each in order according to the rhyme; and as I did so, to my wonder, each sapling untwisted and became a separate young willow tree, allowing me to stand upright. Despite the danger, I grinned in fierce exultation: I had done this.

  “Impressive,” growled the wolf, but his voice was a threat. Through the newly separated willow trees I could see that his eyes had gone wild and almost black. I knew coldly that I had only so much time before his control snapped and I became what he had called me: fodder. I stepped through the trees toward him and his eyes followed me each step, hungrily. When I reached out one hand to place it on top of his huge grey head, the wolf ran his nose along my arm once, sniffing deeply and swiftly with his teeth just showing. His growl was low and hungry.

  I tried to ignore it, but I think my hand trembled, sending a harsh ripple of laughter through the wolf’s snarl. It made a scratchy cold something skitter across my back. I put up my chin, very slowly and deliberately, and thought that time and air had got very heavy suddenly. The forest was intruding on my sight: I could see curls of alternating pitch black and gold swirling around the wolf.

  I gazed at him, fascinated, for moments that turned into minutes, until at last I understood. The swathes of pitch black were the madness; the gold a touch of the man this wolf had once been. It had been so long ago that the gold was faded and tarnished, and the blackness of wild animal had almost taken over. He must have been driven mad by rage and despair, over centuries perhaps, and by now there was so little left of what he had been that the hope I’d caused to flare was eating away at him just as the desperation had.

  I knew this kind of swirling madness. When I was eight I found an old, mad soldier who didn’t know where he was and couldn’t tell me his name. I took him home to Mother, who shaved his beard and cut his hair, making him look much younger; but his eyes had stayed the same– old and desperately mad. He hadn’t known who he was, and it had eaten away at him like a maggoty-grub until there was nothing else to him.

  Distantly, I became aware that the wolf had begun to growl again in a soft, savage undertone. My hands dropped to my sides, numb and cold, as his growl crescendoed into a snarl; but I knew what to do.

  The soldier had wanted a name more than anything else. I was certain that the wolf needed his name just as badly. He needed to be reminded that he was human.

  “I know what you need,” I told him, finding my chin a little less mulish in the face of his growl. My eyes felt wide and fixed. “I just need to find it.”

  He snarled, teeth long and bare beneath drawn-up lips. “Hurry . . . little . . . girl.”

  I took one step back, then another. The wolf closed the gap with one swift stride, and I sucked in a quiet, hopeless breath, because his eyes had gone completely black.

  I didn’t know his name, I thought, ideas flowing fast and cold behind my frozen eyes– but I knew the forest. It did so love to be sung to, and I was certain it could be tricked. I grinned then; a fierce, humourless grin that made my cheeks hurt, and found the right song. It was a schoolyard song, a choosing rhyme to pick teams.

  “Arthur, Martha, Michael, John,” I sang, quick and low.

  I wasn’t quite quick enough, for with a suddenness that caught my breath in the back of my throat, the wolf leapt.

  I shrieked: “I name you Bastian!” completing the rhyme – or was it a spell? – then two huge paws punched me in the chest and my head hit the grass.

  Chapter Three

  I found myself crushed and barely able to breath, spluttering on a mouthful of hair that was long and dirty and very human. I gave a small, angry yell that was too breathless to sound like anything so much as a yelp, and struggled vigorously beneath a heavy body. To my annoyance I found that I wasn’t able to wriggle away. Someone’s bare, dirty chest was squashing the breath out of me, and two powerful human hands were pinning me to the grass by either shoulder.

  I scowled up at Bastian, for of course it was him squashing me. His eyes, deep hazel and confused, stared sickly down at me; then they sharpened and fixed on my face in fierce wonder.

  “I am human again! Little witch, am I dreaming?”

  My mouth opened uselessly, dragging painfully at my lungs, but the very breath had been forced from my lungs.

  Bufflehead! I raged silently.

  Bastian’s eyes flashed with the same dark desperation I had seen in his wolf-eyes, and one of his hands closed around my neck, further cutting off my air supply.

  “Am I dreaming?” His voice had become harsh and dangerous. “Am
I dreaming? Speak!”

  I groaned, shoving with both hands, and to my relief he pulled himself off me, allowing me to draw in a much needed gulp of air.

  “Horned . . . hedgepigs! Of course you’re not dreaming . . . stupid wolf! Couldn’t speak with . . . pounds of wolf squashing the breath . . . out of me.”

  He swiftly crouched, surprising a defensive scowl from me, and gazed at me with a kind of painful hunger in his face. “I’m human again?”

  “Yes.” I said it quietly, slowly; as if he were a small child.

  The next moment I was caught up and spun around, crushed breathless once more to Bastian’s chest, while he shouted in amazement and joy.

  “Little witch, little witch, you’re a wonder!”

  Both my cheeks were kissed soundly despite both my squirming and yell of outrage, and I was ruthlessly spun in another wild, euphoric circle. At last I worked an arm free and boxed his ear.

  “Put me down!”

  He did so, laughing; and I promptly collapsed on the grass, my head still spinning. Bastian lowered himself to the grass beside me more in the manner of a wolf than a man, and regarded me sideways.

  “I was wrong about you. Infuriating little witch, yes; but not so young. How old are you?”

  I looked at him in disfavour. “I’m fourteen. I am not a witch.”

  “You look like you’re ten,” he said. He looked me up and down critically. “Possibly it’s the dirt. What’s a horned hedgepig, by the way?”

  I scowled at him, because he wasn’t so clean himself. “If it comes to dirt–”

  “It does. You’ve got it all over you.”

  “So do you,” I pointed out, not to be put off.

  “You have a smudge on your nose,” he added, flicking it carelessly as he spoke.

  I scrambled to my feet, eyes snapping, but Bastian lounged where he was, wolf-like and grinning. “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going home,” I said coldly. There was always a smudge on my nose, but I didn’t think it was polite of Bastian to bring it up when I had just helped him break his spell.

  “Don’t sulk, little witch, it’s not becoming. Besides, how will you find the path?”

  I shot him a distinctly nasty look. “I’ll manage. You and your flower!”

  Bastian grinned even more broadly.

  “I knew you wouldn’t get off the path unless I told you I could help find Akiva. No, don’t scowl at me; I’ll show you how to get back.”

  “Fine,” I grumbled. “But no twirling! And leave my nose alone.”

  Bastian did leave my nose alone, but after he led me to a huge oak that had been felled in some long-ago storm, there was another mad twirl as he threw me up on it.

  I gave a muffled snarl of annoyance that made him grin and said: “Bufflehead! What are you doing?”

  “I thought you wanted to get back to the path, little witch?”

  “The path was much further back than this,” I said haughtily. It was easy to be haughty when I was taller than him.

  “Don’t I know it,” he said feelingly. “You led me a merry dance to get here. Near or far is not the point; the point is the path.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Only if you don’t have any sense with which to make it,” he retorted unkindly. “Don’t think about it, and don’t look for it; just jump backwards. The path will find you.”

  I sucked in my cheeks and regarded him in stony silence for a long moment. “I helped you break your spell, wolf. You could at least say thank you instead of insulting my wits.”

  He shrugged. “You haven’t broken the curse, little witch; only a part of it. I reserve my thanks for a completed task.”

  “How do you mean?” Interested in spite of myself, I sat down on the oak log. This allowed me to be even haughtier since I could now dangle my feet in Bastian’s face.

  “I told you the curse was in three parts; one to find, one to do, and one to give. You’ve done the finding, and I’m man again for two hours of my choosing each day, but there are still two parts to go.”

  “Well, I did the first part,” I pointed out, lightly drumming my heels into the dry bark.

  “That was the easy bit,” mocked Bastian. “I told you, I reserve my thanks for the completed task.”

  I glared down at him. “You aren’t the least bit grateful, are you?”

  To my surprise, instead of answering, Bastian bent his head and gravely kissed first one and then the other of my bare, grass-stained feet.

  “I am more than grateful,” he said gently. “Thank you, little witch. Now, jump.”

  So I jumped. I meant to argue, but the kisses put me so much off balance that I obeyed unthinkingly, scrambling to my feet and leaping backwards from the log. I found myself back on the path with a jarring bump, and just barely escaped biting my tongue. There was a frantic whirl of skirt and torn petticoat as I very nearly rolled off the other side, and when the world stopped turning I sat up carefully, feeling more shaken than I liked to admit.

  The lunch basket proved to be within reach when I looked around to gain my bearings, and although the sandwiches in it were a little squashed and grass-stained, they were still mouth-wateringly edible. I stayed where I was and ate them in the middle of the path, so worn and tired from my adventures that it seemed the only sensible thing to do. When I was done I shook the crumbs out beside the path, watching with owl-like attention as they disappeared before they ever hit the grass.

  Then I said: “Ouch,” in a thoughtful voice, remembering my various injuries, and climbed painfully to my feet. It was time to go home.

  Night had fallen when I emerged from the forest. The great, bright, full moon shed a glowing twilight on the forest that had deceived me into thinking that the afternoon was still lingering, and it was a shock to find that it was already night. Apparently time ran more quickly in the different kind of forest I had found myself in. My footsteps dragged as I made my way wearily to the side gate and into the back garden: I was more tired than I ever remembered being before, and so far behind my work in the garden that I knew I wouldn’t ever catch up, even if I worked all night.

  I was so gloomily caught up in my thoughts that I was partway through the garden before I realised that Akiva’s two daily garden beds were tended. I gazed at the garden for a long, stupid moment, then threw my basket aside and dashed for the house.

  Akiva was sitting in her chair as if she had never left when I crashed through the door.

  “Shut the door, child,” she told me placidly as I stood staring. “Good gracious! What a mess to bring into my nice clean house!”

  I grinned ruefully at her, causing a jagged slice of pain across my split lip. I was almost overwhelmingly glad to see her again. If I had been Gwendolen I would have rushed across the room and hugged her.

  I was glad enough to see her that I didn’t even protest when she jabbed one bony finger in my back by way of encouragement to enter the bathroom, in which a tepid bath had already been drawn.

  I might have enjoyed it. I don’t know. I think I was nearly asleep by then.

  I slept until nearly noon the next day. The first thing that I saw when I woke was a golden beam of early afternoon sunlight, swimming with dust motes at the very end of my bed. I sat upright in horror, tumbling my pillow to the floor. Horned hedgepigs, why hadn’t Akiva woken me?

  There was a mad, fumbling hurry, as in my haste I took twice as long as usual to button myself up, then I scurried out to the main room, plaiting my hair as I went. I was prepared to encounter sarcasm, irritation, or even weary resignation. Instead, I found breakfast ready for me on the table.

  Akiva, eyeing me with what I thought was grim approval, only said: “Sit down and eat your breakfast.”

  I opened and closed my mouth twice before I finally found my voice. “I thought you’d be angry.”

  She said: “Ridiculous!” but I saw the shadow of a smile at the corners of her mouth. Akiva was only being gruff. “Deep forest
is not to be toyed with, and it’s important to rest well after your first taste.”

  I was blissfully helping myself to bacon and eggs, but at that point I slid a sharp look at her. “Did you leave me alone on purpose so I’d have to go into the forest?”

  Akiva gave a dry cackle of laughter. “You’re not nearly as important as you think you are: I left because there was a need. I was in deep forest myself.”

  I stopped mid-mouthful of bacon, assimilating the term. Deep forest. So that’s where I’d gone when I stepped from the path after Bastian. “How did you know I was?”

  “Child, if you imagine I wish to see your breakfast in that disgusting state, you’re fair and far off. I knew you were in the forest because every tree and energy thread in the forest was humming about you when I got back. I suppose you helped the Wolf?”

  I closed my mouth and contented myself with nodding, eyes wary.

  “Hmm. That could bring more trouble than you’re prepared for. Never mind, it can’t be helped now; and something certainly had to be done.”

  “Why trouble?”

  “The person who laid the curse on him won’t be happy,” Akiva said. “Eat up, child; work goes on.”

  And so it did. The next day, I found myself carting the weekly washing down to the creek behind Akiva’s henhouse. I was burning with excitement. Washing was, after all, washing; but Akiva had tacitly repealed her orders for me to stay on the path, and the entire forest was now at my disposal. There was also a part of me that expected, and was excited at, the prospect of seeing Bastian again. I hadn’t met anyone quite like him before.

  This time, prepared for the disorienting shift between path and forest, I didn’t fall over. The wash basket jerked and the chookhouse disappeared, but the stream was directly ahead and just a few steps away, sparkling golden and cool in the warm sunshine that broke through the trees. Autumn hadn’t yet overtaken the afternoons, even if the mornings and evenings were cooler.

  Gleefully, I skipped from stone to stone until I was within leaping distance of a huge, sun-warmed rock that had caught my eye; and in a matter of moments I and my basket had made it safely there. I found it as promising as it had looked from the bank; flat and baking hot, perfect for drying clothes and for sitting on to dangle my feet in the water.