I think there was more, but I fell asleep very shortly after– if I had ever really been awake. When I woke the next morning I was in my own bed, with curious glimmerings of a dream that contained Akiva, Bastian, and red-gold flames.
The fading memories of the dream vanished over breakfast. Akiva was in a mood, and the bacon had burned to crisp, blackened chips; perhaps as a result of her mood, perhaps causing it. I didn’t know which, but I was glad to escape into the garden for the morning’s work, leaving Akiva to stomp around the kitchen washing dishes; and afterwards around her workroom to prepare more potions.
I was horribly heavy and sore from my magical exertions of the day before. The only thing that really seemed to make the day worthwhile was the fact that now that I could see the forest lines properly, I could also see the garden as it really was.
Each of the garden beds had its own specific threads, some crisscrossed with millions of tiny, fibrous filaments that told me the earth in them was bespelled very heavily. Akiva’s aloe bed was one of those that sparkled the brightest.
I observed the lines in great satisfaction, because now I understood how Akiva remembered them all: each bed knew its own specific needs and all I needed to do was pay attention.
My morning’s work was done in less than half the time it would have taken just a week – or even a day – ago. I poked my head back into the house a little after mid-morning to find out what Akiva wanted me to do next, very greatly pleased with myself.
Since there was no washing to be done that day, I was able to make my escape to the forest earlier than usual. It was with a sense of relief that I stepped off the path to find the herbs Akiva needed, and with a sense of real pleasure that I felt a familiar tremble to the forest threads that meant Bastian was nearby. I followed it almost without thinking, and after a moment of swift travel I cannoned into his huge, hairy body. Bastian gave a startled yip as I crashed into him, and then we tumbled head over heels in a tangle of paws and arms and legs and tail, before coming to rest under a blackberry bush.
Bastian wheezed for breath and I giggled. I had come off rather the better of the two of us: my head was cushioned on his furry side, my face just inches from the threatening blackberry brambles. Bastian was tangled in the thorny vines and it would take a little trouble to extricate him.
We stayed as we were for a little while, me still giggling madly and quite comfortable with my wolf-pillow, until Bastian began to laugh as well. His flanks heaved underneath my head with his laugh, an odd feeling that made me laugh all the more.
At last I sobered and lay there looking up at the patches of leaves and blue sky through the brambles, smelling the Bastian-smell of rich earth and grass, and enjoying the peace. Bastian’s flank contracted, and I felt the snuffle of his nose in my hair, nudging my resting head.
“What’s amiss, little witch?”
I sucked in a deep breath and huffed it back out again. “Akiva is in a mood.”
Bastian stretched out again. “Akiva is always in a mood,” he said lazily. “It’s merely that some of them are worse than others.”
I heaved a second sigh in agreement and relapsed into silence, prompting another contraction of Bastian’s stomach muscles as he swivelled his huge head around to look at me.
“You’re a child of surprisingly few words,” he remarked. “It makes me nervous.”
I turned my own head to observe him sideways. “Why?”
He gave a lazy shrug. “I’m not used to it. In my experience a woman is quietest when she’s plotting something, second only to when she’s sulking. What are you thinking about, little witch?”
“Rosemary and rue,” I told him. The herbs were the only two ingredients that Akiva did have out of a list of nearly twenty that she insisted had to be gathered this afternoon. She had told me to make myself useful in the forest by collecting them; and I supposed, puffing my cheeks out, that my task was no closer to completion while I lay under a blackberry bush with my head cushioned on my Bastian-pillow. But I was comfortable and disinclined to move, so instead of climbing to my feet and going about my business as I ought to have done, I continued to lie where I was, gazing dreamily up at the alternating views of sky and tree that could be seen through the brambles. We continued in companionable silence until it occurred to me to ask: “Bastian, what is the first thing you would do if you could break the spell?”
I knew what I would do: I would hug my mother, revelling in the dexterity of human limbs; and then I would eat a full, cooked meal with herbs and spices. I had a feeling that even in the guise of a wolf, raw meat would not be so palatable for a human to eat.
Bastian’s sides shook slightly, informing me that he was laughing softly.
“Never mind what I’d do first, little witch. What I’d do next would be to find Cassandra and make sure I made her life as much of a misery as she’s made mine.”
“How long have you been a wolf?” I asked, tilting my head to see his face. His voice had gone quite hard after the amusement. His curse was old, I knew that: exactly how old was another matter.
Bastian only looked at me with his golden-hazel eyes expressionless, and said: “Too long.”
“Come with me to the village when you change,” I said gruffly. “See the people and the fuss and the stalls.”
“Too dangerous,” he said, though his voice was dark with regret. “If I’m caught out of the forest when I change to wolf, the change will be permanent. It’s built into the curse.”
“That was cruel,” I said fiercely. I could understand and even approve of the curse on principle, but there was a point at which punishment became torture, and Bastian’s curse had long since ceased to be punishment. The enchantress was more vicious than I had expected. If Bastian had no contact with humans during the entire length of his enchantment as wolf, then it was no wonder that by the time I met him he was more beast than man.
“I thought you were convinced it served me right?” enquired Bastian. His wolfish face was somehow smiling: I think my fierceness amused him.
“Yes, but that’s cheating.”
“She wanted to make sure it was unbreakable.”
I wondered in sudden coldness where Cassandra was now. Akiva had suggested that she wouldn’t be terribly happy with me for beginning to break the curse, and if Bastian was anything to judge by her wrath wasn’t to be encountered lightly. As I huddled back into Bastian’s warmth, a fine sense of self-preservation suggested that it might be wise to ask Akiva a few, pointed questions when I returned home.
We spent almost the whole afternoon beneath the blackberry bush, sometimes talking, sometimes silent. It felt oddly like a goodbye. The time passed so quickly that I was startled when Bastian’s furry flank rippled and changed into a smoother, harder, human stomach beneath my head. I found myself lying with my head on human Bastian’s stomach and sat up regretfully.
Bastian opened one eye and demanded: “Where are you going?” He seemed to notice the change for the first time, and said: “Ah. That’s interesting.”
“I have to find herbs for Akiva,” I explained. I detached the few blackberry briars that had caught in my braid and stood up, slowly and stiffly. Bastian stretched and yawned wolfishly, and then also stood. He was wearing the same clothes he had been wearing yesterday: at least, as far as they went. His chest was bare, as usual, and he was wearing the same grass-stained and dirty fawn-coloured trousers as he had been yesterday, down to the deeply red-and-orange woven belt that was tied around his trousers at the hip. The trousers seemed to blend with the colour of his skin, and it came to my mind that he had also been wearing the same clothes when I had broken the first part of the spell, and that his chest had been just as bare.
I gazed at him curiously and came to the tentative conclusion that it was just something that Bastian would do, a kind of show off.
Testing the idea, I said bluntly: “Why don’t you ever wear a shirt?”
There was a band of dark red high on Bastian’s cheeks b
eneath the stubble. “Because that’s how I was dressed when Cassandra found me,” he said, running one hand through his hair. “Enough of my sordid past, little witch; what are we searching for?”
I recited the list hopefully, and Bastian’s expression grew rueful.
“You should have told me earlier, while I still had my wolf nose. This short human one doesn’t seem to work as well.”
“I didn’t think of that,” I said. “I got distracted.”
“So did I,” said Bastian. “That is, if you call being knocked to the ground by a little girl who has had one too many good meals, being distracted. If that’s what you would call being distracted, I was very distracted.”
I stuck my tongue out at him, hands on hips; but he only laughed at me and headed further into the forest, so I abandoned my offended attitude and dashed after him. We stayed on the same thread this time, the forest rushing past around us as we strolled along it. I wanted to move more swiftly and cover more ground, but Bastian said that the slower we moved the easier it would be to see, and I reluctantly yielded to his superior knowledge.
I was scouting ahead for signs of the last of my quarry when I saw the danger. It was shooting along the threads at an incredible speed; black, sticky, foul-feeling tendrils of black that seemed either to be consuming the threads as they came, or to be wrapping so tightly around them as to make no distinction between the two. I saw them and stumbled with a sudden flash of knowing that they were searching for Bastian. Bastian’s firm hand under my elbow steadied me, but the tarry tendrils had found us by that time, reaching hungrily for him. Seizing him around the waist, I hauled us both off the path.
I heard Bastian howl: “Not while I’m taking a step!” and then we were both thrown violently to the ground, jarring teeth and bones. I found myself on my back, shaken and headachy, and tasted blood. Bastian’s face appeared somewhat hazily above me, first concerned and then furious as I sat up dizzily.
“You had better have a good reason for tossing us off the path, little witch,” he growled.
I groaned and cautiously explored the interior of my mouth, searching for the source of the blood.
“It’s your own fault,” Bastian said roughly, but he took my face between his hands and tilted it for inspection. “You’ve split your lip, and serve you right. What were you thinking?”
“Didn’t you see the blackness?” It hurt to speak, and I tasted fresh blood. Bastian was right: the cut in my lip had opened again. “It tried to wrap around you.”
Bastian’s face went quite pale. Something came and went rapidly in his expression: panic, or determination– or perhaps both. I didn’t know his face well enough to be sure.
“Rose, go home as quickly as you can; find Akiva and stay with her.”
I scrambled to my feet. “What about you?”
“I won’t argue with you, Rose. Go.”
There was a finality to Bastian’s tone that I obeyed instinctively. He disappeared on another thread before I had a chance to say goodbye, so I found my own thread, this one home-bound, and travelled down it a good deal more swiftly than last time.
When I stepped from the thread to the path leading to Akiva’s front gate, there was a woman between me and it.
She was so beautiful. I’m not sure why I expected her to be otherwise. Her hair was black and glossy, and hung loose to her waist in a sleek, rippling sheet that mingled with royal purple satins and silks that were as sleek as her hair. Her eyes, framed by impossibly long, dusky eyelashes, were of an equally impossible shade of violet. I saw them and my herbs scattered themselves on the path, dropping heedlessly from my nerveless fingers. Those twin violets gleamed with the same darkness I had seen in Bastian’s eyes the first time I met him.
Horned hedgepigs! I thought, swallowing. It could only be Cassandra.
She looked me up and down with those brilliant, purple eyes while I regretted fervently that I hadn’t been a moment quicker, and then said: “You’re not pretty.”
Her voice was bell-like in consideration; and, like every other part of her, breathtakingly beautiful.
“I know,” I said. Even if I had been as beautiful as Gwendolen, I couldn’t have hoped to compare with Cassandra. I eyed her unblinkingly, wondering why it mattered to her.
“You’re not pretty,” she repeated; a statement, not a question. A crease appeared between the perfectly arched brows. “I didn’t expect that. He must be desperate.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, scowling. I was coldly frightened, and that made me angry. Black, tarry magic was stirring around her, creating nasty pockets of corruption in the air that made me feel ill: it was vastly more powerful than anything I had ever seen.
She looked at me contemptuously through the haze. “Beauty is all that matters to him, stupid child. You can only lose.”
“Bastian isn’t here,” said Akiva’s voice suddenly and startlingly. I tore my eyes away from Cassandra’s and saw her, knobbly and infinitely welcome, leaning on a stick behind the enchantress. For a horrible moment it had felt like I was drowning in the brilliant lavender of Cassandra’s eyes.
Akiva hobbled past her and put a hand on my shoulder. I felt a sense of her power, welling up deep inside her, warm and comforting. I think I was still looking up at her with wide eyes when she said quietly: “Go into the house, Rose.”
As I closed the gate with cold fingers, I heard Akiva reiterate: “The wolf isn’t here.”
“I can smell him all over her!” hissed Cassandra.
There was a silence suggesting that Akiva was shrugging; then her old, firm voice said: “I sent him away: he knows what I think about him. Today was goodbye.”
Their voices faded with distance, but as I loitered on the garden path I saw the warm glow of a formidable power rising to meet and match Cassandra’s. I recognised it as Akiva’s, hale and hearty, and stronger than I could ever have imagined. After that I hurried to get into the safety of the cottage, feeling the hairs prickle on the back of my neck, because I knew that it was no longer safe for me to be out in the open. Once inside, I plumped myself down in Akiva’s chair, absently staring into the fire and contemplating the extraordinary power I had just witnessed. For the first time in the excitement of my new magical prowess, I felt thoroughly humbled and weak. My own power, puny in comparison to that shown so effortlessly by both Cassandra and Akiva, was pitiful past thinking about. I was suddenly very thankful for Akiva’s protection. In the coldness of the moment, I knew there was no chance that I could ever hope to fight against Cassandra and win.
I sat in Akiva’s chair, cold and unmoving; and then, as the minutes lengthened into an hour, I fetched out my pinafores and worked on them with glazed eyes. It felt as though there was a soundless, savage storm raging outside.
A little later I rose and prepared myself supper. Along with the usual bread-and-cheese I hung the kettle over the fire, ready to brew one of Akiva’s strong, restorative teas. She would probably need it when she came in.
It was some time later that I heard the sound of her foot on the threshold. I had taken up my sewing again after supper, and as the door opened I threw it down, regardless of the loose needle, and dashed to hug her. She looked weary but well, and suffered me to hug her for a moment before disengaging herself.
“Gently, child, on my old bones,” she said. “Here.”
It took me a moment to realise that she was holding out my stray needle. I looked at her inquiringly.
“It’s difficult to stop sometimes,” she explained; and it occurred to me, belatedly, that her magic was still swirling around her in a state of excitement. The needle had been a reflex action. I felt enviously that it must be wonderful to have such power.
“What happened?” I asked, conscientiously affixing the needle to my half-finished pinafore and hanging the kettle a little lower. “Did you kill her?”
Akiva’s eyes came sharply to bear on me. “Of course not! My wardship doesn’t permit me to kill anyone except in s
elf defence.”
“Well, I thought she was going to kill you,” I argued. “That’s self defence. What’s a wardship?”
“The villagers call it being the Witch of the Forest,” Akiva explained, accepting a mug of strong, milk-less tea from me and allowing herself the weakness of sitting down. “My magic is bound up in the forest and I have power in it. I am the caretaker of this portion of the forest and I may not kill without sufficient reason.”
I sucked in my cheeks. “What would happen if you did?”
I was very certain that Cassandra was not going to be as understanding about killing without reason.
“I don’t know for sure,” Akiva said shortly. “Most likely the spell would rebound and I would be stripped of my power. Wardship power allows bending of the rules, but not outright breaking of them. Even the bending comes at a cost.”
I cupped my hands around my own mug of tea and regarded Akiva thoughtfully. “Does that mean you’re more powerful than Cassandra, being a warden?”
“Cassandra is also a warden. I’m stronger in my own wardship, in her wardship she has the balance of power.” Akiva roused herself a little and sat upright. “Which means that you, child, will keep strictly to the boundaries of my wardship and go no further.”
“I didn’t know there were boundaries,” I said, a little aggrieved. I hadn’t even known that there were different– what had Akiva called them? Wardships? I had thought that the forest was simply forest, as far as it extended. It seemed that there were many things I didn’t know. And now that I thought of it, that was the word Gwydion had used, too.
I opened my mouth to ask another question, but Akiva sank back into her chair with a groan and said: “Tomorrow, child; tomorrow.”
Chapter Five
Wolfskin Page 8
