Wolfskin

by W. R. Gingell

  They hustled me inside without further ado, and in very short order I found myself wrapped in a blanket, sitting in Akiva’s chair with a cup of strong tea. Everything was so real, so solid, and the room seemed unusually crowded to my eyes. It took me some time, wrapping my hands absently around the hot tea mug, to understand that this was because I was used to seeing only Akiva and myself in it. With Mother and Gwendolen in it as well, the room became suddenly small and overcrowded.

  “You shouldn’t have gotten up straight away,” scolded Gwendolen, trying to push a biscuit into my already full hands.

  “I’m fine,” I told her. And I was. I felt healthy and strong and wide awake. “Stop fussing at me, Gwen!”

  I shoved the blanket away impatiently but didn’t attempt to get up, since the look on Mother’s face told me that she would only push me down into the chair again. Besides, the tea was good.

  I looked up at Akiva as the most likely person to know, and asked: “What happened?”

  Akiva’s smile became somewhat grim. “You, my child, have been sick with dragon-fever.”

  Remembering the odd passage of time, and Gwendolen’s first words to me upon waking, I said shortly: “How long?”

  “Ten months,” she said. “We’ve come into summer again.”

  “How did you find me?” I asked, frowning. I remembered the gryphon and the horrible, burning heat, but only vague snatches of stumbling through snow until I reached Akiva’s wardship again.

  “When you didn’t come back that night I went searching for you. You were out on one of the westward paths: in a fair way to setting the forest alight, I might add. It was clear enough what was wrong.”

  “It was a gryphon, not a dragon,” I muttered. “And what about all my chores?”

  “Gryphons and dragons are distantly related,” Akiva said, matter-of-factly. “The fever’s been known to mutate. Of course, most people have the sense to keep away from gryphons. And despite what you may think, child, I am not yet decrepit! I managed the chores just as I always did before you came; if a little more peacefully.”

  I grinned in relief, because even if Gwen had grown older and Mother had gained a few more lines to her face, at least Akiva was still the same.

  “You were like stone,” Gwendolen told me. She was crouched at my feet and evidently felt that she had been left out of the conversation quite long enough. “You went hard and grey, and it took all of us to carry you inside.”

  I looked at Mother for confirmation, sceptical of Gwen’s exaggeration, but to my surprise, she was nodding.

  “Every time we heaved you into your bed you managed to get back into the forest somehow, though how you did it I’ll never know. In the end we left you there because you weren’t breathing or eating, and the rain didn’t seem to touch you. Akiva said that you didn’t need care, just time.”

  I threw a grateful look at Akiva, remembering that it was her I had to thank that Mother hadn’t worn herself to the bone in looking after me.

  “How did you know I was going to wake today?”

  Akiva shrugged, tending to her pot of tea.

  It was left to Gwendolen to answer: “We didn’t. Akiva only said that it would be this week, so we took it in turns to watch over you.” Her face was flushed with triumph as she added buoyantly: “But you came awake in my shift.”

  They left me alone very soon after that. Mother bundled me to bed despite my protests that I wasn’t tired, and that I had spent enough time sleeping; and left me there with the curtains drawn open to admit warm sunlight. I was thus at leisure to study the ceiling, which was dancing with prisms of light; and my plait, which had grown a full three inches longer while I was sick. I did eventually fall asleep, comforted by the usual sounds of Akiva fussing about in her dried herbs, and the now less-familiar but still welcome sound of Gwendolen and Mother talking. I slept long and dreamlessly.

  Mother took me home for a month shortly after my recovery, much to my annoyance. I wanted to go on with my work as usual, gloomily conscious of having missed nearly a full year of my apprenticeship, and of all the things I would have to catch up on. After the incident with the gryphon, it had become blightingly obvious that I could no longer afford my ignorance.

  Mother, protective and intractable, insisted. Even Akiva, when pressed, said dryly that she thought I had packed enough experience into one year, thank you. I took this to mean that she was sorry she had taken me on as apprentice and nodded shortly. I fiercely resented not being good enough.

  Akiva, with a sharp look, said: “You’re not a bad apprentice, as apprentices go, and I’d be sorry to start again with anyone else, but your body can only take so much at a time. You need rest. Go home, rest, enjoy yourself. You’ll be working hard enough to make you happy when you get back.”

  It was nice to rest and do nothing in particular, I suppose. My birthday approached, startling me with its rapidity, but Mother didn’t attempt to hold a party for me and conveniently wouldn’t hear Gwendolen’s increasingly broad hints that one should be held.

  “Plan your own parties, Gwen,” I said at last, the day of my birthday. Fifteen didn’t feel any different to fourteen, and I found I didn’t care very much. “Stop fussing at me.”

  “It’s not fussing to want your sister to have the treat of a birthday party,” retorted Gwendolen, nettled. “You’re fifteen; you’re getting old.”

  “I’m surprised the wrinkles haven’t started yet,” I said caustically. “I don’t want a party. It’s not a treat for me.”

  “Oh, well,” huffed Gwendolen, but not really crossly. She knew me too well not to see the truth in my protest. “At least let me dress you and do your hair!”

  I groaned at that, but more for the form of it than because I really minded. Being dressed like a doll was annoying and tedious, but having Gwendolyn ‘do’ my hair would be a treat. It wasn’t just that she seemed to be able to do wonders with even my fine, messy hair: it was relaxing having my hair braided and combed and twisted. Gwendolen had once thrown the brush and comb at me for falling asleep while she was fixing my hair.

  “I’ll make you look beautiful,” she promised, and I made a rude snort of laughter that sounded eerily like Akiva’s.

  “Even you couldn’t do that,” I told her. I had been correct in thinking that I’d grown while I was ill. I’d grown so much that now I was an inch taller than Mother; and my arms and legs, which had been scrawny, now looked distinctly coltish. My face, once cheerfully round under my heavy head of butterscotch hair, had gone surprisingly thin and narrow, causing my grey eyes to look too big.

  Gwendolen said: “What rubbish!” with perfect amiability. She was used to my protests by now and was satisfied merely to get her own way in the matter for once.

  Some time later, my scalp tingling and well brushed, I was bundled into one of Gwendolen’s least favourite party frocks; a grey-blue confection that had never quite suited her as to colour, or her fancy as to ruffles and ribbons. The hem was six inches short of my ankles, almost the same length as my kilted skirts rose to, and it was distinctly tight under the arms. I didn’t dare move my arms any higher than my waist for fear that the sleeves would part company from the bodice.

  “I feel like a stuffed chook,” I grumbled, making small, jerky movements with my elbows. “All tight skin and silly little arms.”

  Gwendolen managed to scowl and laugh all at once. “Stop it, Rose! You look beautiful.”

  “So you say.” My voice was glum. Even Gwendolen’s partiality could not change the fact that, with a girdle band by far too high, and sleeves by far too short, I looked like the nightmare of a clothes dolly. Even the loose, elegant coiffure that Gwendolen had achieved in my hair couldn’t draw attention away from it.

  “You are; you just can’t see it,” complained Gwendolen. “Dear, silly Rose; I knew the dress wouldn’t fit you: it’s the colour I wanted you to see.”

  I flapped my arms rather helplessly, which made Gwendolen cover her mouth to stifle
the giggles, and looked in the mirror again, pursing my lips.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Of course you don’t,” Gwendolen said soothingly. Horned hedgepigs! She was talking to me as if I were an idiot. “Look again. See what the colour does for your eyes. I knew I should have told Mother to make this dress up for you instead of me.”

  I studied my eyes doubtfully. They were still too big now that my face was narrower, but something about the light (or perhaps it really was the dress) made them look somehow luminous and blue-grey instead of just the usual grey.

  “Huh,” I said, tilting my head. “Odd.”

  “Odd!” almost shrieked Gwendolen. “Oh! After all the trouble I took, all you can say is ‘odd’!”

  “You said you wanted to do it,” I said defensively. It seemed highly unfair to be trussed up like a blue-grey turkey and then blamed for the trouble of being served so.

  “It isn’t the trouble,” Gwendolen said tartly, sounding very like Mother. “It’s you: being so stubborn and stupid and blind, and– Rose! What are you doing?”

  I looked up absently. I had just that moment discovered the faint lines of forest magic running through Gwen’s old dress in the plant-based threads; and, amusing myself by tugging on them, I had made the left sleeve an inch longer. Some of the things I had learned in the dream-forest must have stuck.

  I met Gwendolen’s startled eyes and then suddenly we were giggling like children as I stretched out the sleeves to ridiculous lengths and back again. Mother came up to see what the fuss was about, but by that time we were sensible again and I was looking most respectable in grey-blue satin that fitted as perfectly as any expensively tailored dress. Mother eyed the dress appraisingly and said: “Very impressive, Rose. I see your apprenticeship is coming into its own already.”

  “I didn’t think it would be any use whatever, apart from charming freckles and such,” Gwendolen said, with the gracious air of one making a concession. “But I quite see how it could be useful after all. I– why are you laughing?”

  She was prettily offended; but Mother and I, who had each unfortunately met the other’s gaze at the wrong moment, couldn’t bring ourselves to explain that adjusting dresses and charming freckles were hardly the most important things that one could accomplish with magic. She would have listened perfectly politely, and then said in mild disagreement: “Yes, but I still think that dress altering and charming freckles is more important than growing odd plants and messing about with curses in the forest.”

  In fact, she had already said something quite similar earlier, and her only interest in the wolf curse I had partially broken, was to ask me whether or not Bastian was handsome.

  I had eyed her, perplexed, and said: “I don’t know; he’s quite old really. Almost thirty, I think.”

  Gwendolen looked disappointed, but left it at that. I had a feeling that she was disappointed in the whole thing now that it had lost the romantic element of a handsome young prince rescued from a terrible curse by my hand. I thought that this was unfair, since old or not, the curse really had been a horrible one for Bastian. It was no less horrible because he wasn’t young, or swooningly good-looking, or a prince.

  All in all I rather forgot about Akiva and Bastian in the next few weeks. There were walks into town with Gwen, where I was dragged about from satins to silks to cottons, and from thence to the newest, most fashionable dancing slippers. Then there were afternoons with Mother, sitting companionably opposite each other over a tub of washing water, elbow deep in suds, cheerfully occupied with the washing. There was always some little thing to be done, or something Gwendolen simply had to show or tell me, and it wasn’t until the middle of the second week that I came to feel with certainty that something was wrong. I had been conscious of a niggling discomfort in the back of my mind, something akin to discontent or annoyance that I had assumed to be because I was almost constantly wearing boots. It was only when Gwendolen said exasperatedly to me one morning that week: “Oh, Rose! Stop scowling at everything! You’ve frightened two of my beaux away with your frowning!” that I realised there was something really and undeniably wrong.

  I said absently to Gwen: “Good”, because as far as I could see, Gwendolen was by far too caught up with those beaux of hers. The next morning my boots were not beside my bed, and when I asked Mother about them, feeling rather relieved than otherwise, she only said: “Akiva was just the same whenever she came back from the forest for a week or two. Never mind the boots.”

  I walked outside in my blissfully bare feet, feeling the faint but certain hum of living threads along the ground and realised how much I had come not only to enjoy, but to need the thrumming of life and light that the threads gave me. It wasn’t so much that I hated my shoes. I had always hated them. I simply couldn’t do without the constant humming of threads any more.

  The feeling of discomfort left with the disappearance of my shoes, and Gwendolen’s admirers, no longer discommoded by my scowl, came back again. Life regained its constant swing, and the only reminder of my life with Akiva in the forest was the fact that I woke each day promptly at first light as usual, instead of rising with the second sun. Apparently the habit was not easily to be broken despite my ghostly time in the forest. I used the extra hour in the mornings to potter about in Mother’s garden, singing silly little nonsense ditties to the plants that seemed to suit the garden very well, judging by the plump, healthy look to the vegetables. Before long the threads running through the garden, though by no means as vivid or powerful as the ones in the forest, glowed and thrummed at my approach into something approaching the liveliness of the forest.

  There were no major alarms or disturbances to spoil my weeks at home, and the third month of summer sped by in a warm, golden haze, pleasantly restful. I took to my old pastime of climbing the cliffs, easier done now that I could go barefoot with impunity. Gwendolen even condescended to accompany me on the occasions when all her beaux were in default due to a prize fight in the next village. She was inclined to sulk at these infrequent defections and her company was not so congenial as it would otherwise have been. Still, a silent, sulky Gwendolen was better than a bright, talkative one when it came to climbing. While she was brooding over her wrongs she climbed automatically, as light and nimble as she danced, across gaps and up rock faces I could never have persuaded her to attempt if her attention were not wandering. By the time we reached a broad, sunny cliff top, Gwendolen would have worn out her fit of the sulks and be as sunny as the day itself, making the walk back home a much pleasanter one.

  Mother, pleased to remark that I seemed to be more sensible lately, despite my triumph against the tyranny of shoes, again undertook to give me the cooking lessons that Gwendolen had mastered some years ago. To her dismay, I commenced, with the best intentions in the world, to burn everything that was really flammable, and a few things that weren’t. In the end she had to give up, and the only two things that I learned to cook with any proficiency were apple pie and rice pudding; neither of which could really be called sensible. I’ve since become convinced that I was successful in those two instances only because I enjoyed eating both so much.

  In fact, I had just got back into the lazy swing of life at home when I realised with some shock that the new year was fast approaching. I was due back at Akiva’s little cottage in less than one week. It wasn’t an unpleasant shock, but it startled me, and I packed my things that very night with an odd sense of urgency. I wasn’t sure whether the feeling was one of eagerness to get back or of foreboding that something was about to happen, but in either case it seemed only sensible to be ready.

  With my everyday dresses and skirts and blouses, I also packed a light blue-grey jumper that Mother had knitted from finest sparkling wool, and the little matching cap that went with it. I packed them with some care: they were the first pretty things I had owned that I had taken any pleasure in. Perhaps my mirrored reflection in grey-blue silk had done more than Gwen thought. Whatever the reason, I
packed them where they wouldn’t tumble to the ground if my trunk came undone, and took myself out to the kitchen for supper.

  I woke from a deep, dreamless sleep the next morning to the insistent sound of my name being spoken. I sat up in confusion, blinking, because the voice was Akiva’s.

  I was scrubbing one hand over my eyes when her voice said matter-of-factly in my ear: “Hurry up, there’s a good child. I need you.”

  I scrambled out of bed with a cold thrill that had nothing to do with the slight chill of the early morning air, and forced myself into the only dress that I hadn’t packed, turning in clumsy circles to chase the sleeves.

  Gwendolen, still in bed and frowning in her sleep at the noise I made, murmured: “Wassamatter Rose?”

  “I have to go,” I said aloud, giving up any attempts at stealth. Gwendolen frowned again and stirred restlessly.

  “But what about the dance?” she mumbled, no more than half awake. I scrambled back over the bed to hug her, grinning; because it was so like Gwen to think of an upcoming dance before she was even properly awake.

  “Can’t go. Akiva needs me and I have to leave now.”

  Mother appeared in the doorway, roused by the noise, and silently took in my packed trunk. “Already, Rose?”

  I nodded, bouncing off the bed on Gwendolen’s side. “Akiva needs me,” I said again. “She just called.”

  One of Mother’s brows rose, but she didn’t comment. “Can you stop for breakfast?”

  “No,” I said regretfully; thinking wistfully of Mother’s huge weekend breakfasts. “She told me to hurry.”

  “Very well,” Mother nodded. “Tie your pinafore tapes, Rose; or you’ll fall over them.”

  I tied one set and Gwendolen tied the other from her huddle of sheets and blanket; then I hugged them both fiercely.

  “I’m sorry about the dance,” I said to Gwendolen, because she still looked disappointed. “Love you, Mama.”

  “Love you, Rosie,” she said, and hugged me one last time.