Wolfskin

by W. R. Gingell

  She stopped, frowning, but wasn’t slow to work it out. “Ah. Rose?”

  I nodded, wondering if I should curtsey.

  “You shouldn’t be about at a time like this,” she said. “Stay in Akiva’s wardship where she can keep you safe.”

  I nodded again and made my way back home without protest, but as I left deep forest for the path I wondered very much who was going to keep Akiva safe.

  As the spring wore on and Akiva didn’t vanish I was able to push my fears to the back of my mind. She began to teach me the proper modes of communication with mythics (by which I learned that I had not been nearly respectful enough to the gryphon I had met) and the forest began to feel safe again: or at least as safe as it had always felt. Akiva sometimes took me into other wardships: journeys to assist the birth of an oddly-coloured, less-than-human creature, or to find new plants; and once to help bind up a wound that Gwydion had gotten from a wild boar. His wardship was in late summer, only months ahead of Akiva’s, and the forest had begun to go wrong for him just like it had for the rest of the wardens. As we travelled through the warden-less pieces of deep forest, we saw the decay and general malaise that the forest had fallen into.

  “It looks like its fading away,” I said in sorrow, when we returned from patching up Gwydion. “Can’t it do without a warden?”

  “No,” said Akiva. “It’s the balance. Never a forest without a human warden; that’s the way it works. That’s how the forest remains Forest even though each of us are in different places and sometimes different countries. If there were no wardens there would be no deep forest.”

  I shivered. I couldn’t think of existing without deep forest now that I knew of it: there was such a depth of quietness to it, and at the same time such a heady excitement. I didn’t know how Mother and Gwendolen could exist in their flat, simple little lives with only parties and villages to brighten their days. I felt as though I had been blind and deaf before I went into deep forest.

  “Can’t Mara look after it?”

  “She is,” said Akiva shortly. “By and large. As are we all: the council as a whole is meant to care for empty wardships until a successor is chosen. But Mara has her own wardship to attend to, and it’s not so easy to meld wardships. It means more power, but a lot more work.”

  “How much more power?” I asked curiously.

  “Each successive wardship exponentially increases the power a warden can draw on,” said Akiva. “I’ve never known a warden to take on more than three at a time. Six is unheard of. The warden who took it on would be the most powerful warden the forest has seen.”

  I sucked in a breath and said: “That’s a pretty good motive.”

  “Perhaps, but no one could tell who the wardships would be appointed to. It would make the risk of killing hardly worthwhile.”

  “Who are the wardships going to be appointed to?”

  “It’ll be decided tomorrow when the council meets. The vote seems to be pretty evenly divided between appointing them all to Mara or distributing them amongst all the wardens. Mara is the elder, so it’s really her decision without need of a vote but she insists that a council vote shall decide the matter. Cassandra’s the dark horse: she could say yea or nay, whichever drops into her pretty little head at the time.”

  “Which will you vote for?”

  “With more power, Mara should be able to prevent another attack,” Akiva said, shrugging. “I don’t like any of us having that much power over the others, but if anyone has to do it, I would choose Mara. She hasn’t leapt at the chance, and she could have if she wanted to. I like that.”

  “So you’ll vote in favour of Mara?”

  “Most likely. We’ll see when the case comes up tomorrow.”

  “Can I come?”

  “No. I want you to be with David. I don’t think anyone knows that he’s alive, but I’d rather not take the chance while all of us are otherwise occupied.”

  “There’s no getting out of it, then,” I said gloomily. Akiva raised her brows at me, and I explained: “The first dance of the spring is tonight.”

  Akiva’s lips curved in the first real smile I had seen on her since the summer.

  “I am very much afraid that you will simply have to suffer, child.”

  I went to the dance that night feeling rather aggrieved. I felt that I had been shut out of all that was adventurous and interesting, and left to do the mundane chores. I sulked in the shadow of the refreshment table until Gwendolen came and adjured me not to be so grumpy, and David forcibly bore me off to dance. I kept an eye out for Gwendolen’s widower, but when I asked her about him she said airily: “Oh, he’s not here tonight; he doesn’t always come.”

  I couldn’t help but grin. I liked the man already.

  When David wasn’t dancing with me he was dancing with Mother. It had been years since I’d seen her dance: in fact, the last time I had seen her dance was with Father. I was surprised to find that she danced light and fast, almost like one of the deep forest dryads. With her face flushed and her blue eyes bright, she looked like one of the young people. I saw more than one knowing look exchanged between the matrons attending the refreshment table. David, his memory still not intact, looked happier than I had ever seen him. I wondered what would happen when he regained it – his attacker, Kendra, and all – and I wondered if I should mention Kendra to Mother.

  After David I danced with Gilbert and also Harry, who was now quite willing to dance with me when Gwendolen was otherwise occupied. Wanting to do Liz Gantry a favour, I’d suggested her as a likely partner, and I had the smug satisfaction of seeing them dancing animatedly together some time later. Harry had at first been doubtful, remarking that it was a bit too much like dancing with his sisters, but if Elizabeth wasn’t quite so brilliantly lovely as Gwen, she had her own mischievous charm, and she was looking very pretty tonight. Once he got over the habit of thinking of Liz as his sister, Harry might come to see things in a different light. It certainly wouldn’t do Gwendolen any harm to lose a few of her admirers to other girls.

  I found myself part of a noisy group of four at supper time, much to my surprise. Liz and Harry had joined Gilbert and me, and we made a cheerful ring around a flat-topped tree stump, which we had turned into our own refreshment table. To my amusement, Harry didn’t look as if he were pining to be a part of the crowd around Gwendolen. He joined with enthusiasm in the conversation that had somehow turned to a light-hearted discussion of what Gilbert in sepulchral tones called The Werewolf of the Forest, and volunteered the information that his second cousin twice removed had supposedly seen the creature.

  “And did your cousin have her heart eaten?” enquired Gilbert, cheerfully bloodthirsty.

  “Unfortunately not,” Harry said, likewise ghoulish. “She’s ninety if she’s a day and she must have been fifty then. I think her mangy little heart was so shrivelled and wrinkled that he took one look at it and ran.”

  I grinned, because I had gathered that Bastian did tend to like pretty women better. “Gilbert says that he’s a prince put under a spell by someone’s jealous stepmother.”

  “I think he was a villager who wanted to marry a duchess,” Liz said. “But her family was a wizarding family, so instead of just horsewhipping him they cursed him.”

  “How would they break the curse, if a witch did it?” I asked, always eager to hear anything that might help.

  “In the stories it’s always a kiss,” said Elizabeth. “They’d probably think it was poetic justice: a romantic boy steals a few kisses, so they curse him until a kiss frees him.”

  “It’s a good thing most families hereabouts aren’t witch families, then,” Gilbert said, grinning; “Or there’d be more than a few boys turned into whatever animal or plant came first to mind.”

  I considered the idea. It certainly sounded very like Cassandra. The irony of it would have appealed to her: a kiss to free the man who had broken her heart.

  “What if there was more than one part to the curse?” I a
sked, neatly snatching the last cream puff from the plate before Gilbert could.

  “He would have to grovel on his hands and knees in abject apology for a month,” Gilbert retorted, and threw the scrunched napkin from the cream puffs at me. “Not unlike young ladies who steal the last cream puff, I’ll have you know.”

  I gave him a creamy grin and licked my fingers.

  Liz said, in slow interest: “You know, I’ve never heard of a woman being cursed before. Isn’t that odd? It’s always the prince, or the woodcutter.”

  “That’s because villages are over-run by women,” Harry said immediately, and dodged an olive that Liz threw at him. “We’re all under the thumb, and we know it.”

  “Only men get cursed because only women are clever enough to break the curses,” she retorted, but she was laughing. “It’s the natural balance.”

  I thought about it later, on my way home. I had absentmindedly set the wards for David and said goodbye to Mother and Gwendolen at the house, but Liz’s voice stuck in my head, saying: “It’s the natural balance.” It cheered me, because I knew then that whatever Cassandra had intended, and whatever the evil little man who wrote my curse book intended, curses were meant to be broken. Just as man was for woman, and woman for man, or medicine for illness, there was always a remedy for a curse. They balanced each other so that nature always remained in harmony. I thought I understood, dimly, the fairies and their bloody sacrifices.

  I arrived home quite late, but Akiva hadn’t returned. I sighed a little as I pushed open the door to an empty house. The salamander was a glow in the fireplace that faintly lit the room, and despite the moonless dark, I didn’t bother to light a lamp. The peach-desk had begun flowering again and the leaves whispered to themselves in the darkness, active in their spring newness. It was a comforting sound in the semidarkness.

  I took myself off to bed early, overtired enough to be brightly wide awake, and spent the next few hours sitting bolt upright on my mattress, staring at the lightened square of my window. I don’t remember what I thought about, but when I woke the next morning it was with the pleasant feeling that my sixteenth birthday wasn’t far away now. I scrambled out of bed, displacing the salamander, who hissed at me, and dressed myself. The silence from the outer rooms had already told me that Akiva wasn’t back yet. It was going to be a busy day.

  When at length Akiva did return, it was with the information that Cassandra’s deciding voice had swung the vote in favour of Mara. She’d told me herself that Cassandra could decide either way, but I could tell the result puzzled and worried her.

  “Cassandra helps no one unless it helps herself as well,” she said grimly, when I asked her why it should bother her. “And at the moment I can’t see any reason for her to help Mara. I’m flying blind and I don’t like it.”

  I didn’t like it, either. Cassandra was in this up to her white, slender neck. Why was she giving power to someone else? A small germ of an idea came into my head: an idea that said Cassandra needed watching.

  How, I wondered speculatively, did a person go about following an enchantress? Whatever else it involved, I was pretty sure that a big part of it would be keeping Akiva from finding out.

  Fortunately for my plans, Akiva was kept so busy for the next few months that she barely noticed if I was there or gone. The wardships didn’t take kindly to being amalgamated into one wardship, separate as they were physically, and so long as I did my chores and continued to travel back and forth to put up wards around David, Akiva allowed me to come and go as I pleased. She wouldn’t allow me come with her when she travelled out in deep forest, and before long I stopped asking.

  I wasn’t naïve enough to imagine that Cassandra wouldn’t know immediately the moment I stepped onto her wardship. I spent the first month in investigation: wandering Akiva’s wardship and analysing the vibrations that the forest put out every time a human stepped into the forest. Before long I was familiar with the particular hum the lines put out, but though I could recognise it I couldn’t yet stop it from happening. Unless I transformed myself into a tree or an animal it didn’t seem possible to walk into Cassandra’s wardship without her knowing. For a week or more, it seemed as though I might have to give up on my idea, until it occurred to me that if I couldn’t prevent the disturbance from my presence, I could at least alter it.

  Bastian had told me once that I set the forest buzzing when I went into deep forest, and I regretfully found out that he wasn’t exaggerating. No one else who strayed into deep forest set off half the row that I did when I stepped from the paths. Akiva always made the forest lines sing almost audibly, but the repercussions didn’t last nearly as long as they did with me. I wasn’t sure if this was because the forest liked me or because I was still too unlearned to be able to manage better.

  I first taught myself to soothe the lines as I walked, and practised until they barely murmured when I slipped into deep forest. When I’d succeeded pretty well at the exercise, I turned my attention to altering the type of vibrations I set off in deep forest.

  By the time I knew that I was ready, late one night on my way home from drawing the wards over David, the knowledge was bolstered by the equally pleasant knowledge that tomorrow was my birthday.

  Chapter Twelve

  “It’s my birthday,” I said aloud, to no one in particular. I felt as though it needed to be said aloud, because I didn’t feel any different than usual. Sixteen, I thought in dissatisfaction, ought to feel different.

  “I suppose you want the day off,” remarked Akiva, surprising me. It surprised me not only because it was the first remark she had addressed to me in a week, but also because it was the first time in nearly as long that she had acknowledged my presence. Still, a day off was not to be sniffed at, and it would give me the opportunity to try out my new skills at sneaking into Cassandra’s wardship.

  So I said: “Yes please!” happily; and Akiva gave her dry crack of laughter.

  “Off you go, then. Mind you come back for the usual start tomorrow.” She went back to her work and appeared to forget about me again, so I left while I could do so unnoticed.

  My pounding heart lent speed to my feet, and I fairly flew through deep forest. I knew that if Cassandra caught me things could get very nasty, very quickly. There was a sparkling feeling in my stomach that wasn’t quite pleasant; but with the forest suffering and wardens disappearing, it didn’t seem right to give in to cowardice. This conviction lasted until I was standing at the very cusp of Cassandra’s wardship and gazing into the expanse of forest that belonged to her. Then I had to blow out my cheeks and scowl before I could persuade myself not to turn around and simply go home as Akiva thought I had.

  “Contemplating suicide, little witch?” asked a well-known voice, mockingly.

  I turned my head to see Bastian leaning casually into a pine trunk some feet away, arms crossed. His hair had been cut and his chin shaved, and he looked rather . . . different.

  “It’s my birthday,” I said, to give myself time to think over what exactly was different about him.

  “So I was led to believe,” agreed Bastian, strolling closer. He was smiling in a way that I didn’t quite like, and it struck me suddenly that what was different about him was that he was like the old wolf-Bastian I had met at the start. The one that had wanted to eat me. I looked at him more carefully with my forest sight and sure enough, there were tiny tendrils of black mixed in with the gold around him. I narrowed my eyes at him but he only grinned more widely.

  “What are you doing, little witch?”

  “Wardens have been disappearing,” I told him succinctly, fighting the urge to keep a wary eye on him.

  “And yet, I find I don’t care,” said Bastian lazily, playing with a strand of my hair. It had regrown well down my back and could now be plaited again, but my plaits have never stayed tidy for more than five minutes. “Cassandra?”

  “No, she’s still here,” I said regretfully. “I think she’s got something to do with it.”
<
br />   Bastian stiffened. “So you were contemplating suicide.”

  “I’m just going to have a look around her house,” I told him lightly, but Bastian’s eyes had narrowed. His hand closed vice-like, around my wrist, and there was no trace of the blackness swirling in his aura. He was for a moment the old, bossy Bastian I knew.

  “You are going nowhere but back to Akiva, my love.”

  I grinned up at him and said: “Catch me if you can!” Then I did the little Lacunan wrist slip that Father had taught me years ago, and took off running.

  I heard explosive cursing behind me, and sounds of pursuit, but human Bastian was not as quick as wolf Bastian, and I had a head start. He was still some feet behind when I took a flying leap into Cassandra’s wardship.

  In my hurry I only barely remembered to mask my entry, with a quick stab of pure terror a moment before my feet hit the ground. I’d chosen to disguise my signature as that of a rabbit, since I mimicked that particular signature best; and when the faint forest lines I could see showed only the presence of a rabbit, I was able to let out the breath I had been holding. I waved gaily to Bastian, who was prowling furiously on the edges of Cassandra’s wardship, and flitted off through the trees in search of Cassandra’s house.

  The forest around me rustled like dry paper as I walked deeper into Cassandra’s wardship. My forest sight clashed confusingly with my normal sight, and I was left with the impression of deadened trees and dying grass. Thanks to my months of practise, a small bracelet of blue flowers from Akiva’s wardship now allowed me to faintly see the lines; but in Cassandra’s wardship, this was more confusing than helpful. I briefly let the forest lines fade and blinked with normal sight at the panorama around me, but the trees looked green and lush, and the grass was plump and fat as it should be. It was only when I allowed my forest sight to come back that I saw the true state of Cassandra’s wardship: dying and old. A kind of deadening drain was preying on the forest’s energy but I couldn’t tell where it came from. I kept walking, following the thread that led to Cassandra’s house.