Wolfskin

by W. R. Gingell

  “And you are always such charming company, of course, little witch. Never mind my glooms: I believe I’ve been wolf too long.”

  My eyes lit up at the reminder. “That’s what I was going to tell you about!” I said. “I think I know what the second part of the curse is!”

  Bastian straightened swiftly and leaned forward, his eyes sharply on me. “And, little witch? And?”

  I settled myself more comfortably on my knees, ignoring the dampness that seeped through the material at my knees.

  “I should have seen it before, when Liz told me. I hope you don’t mind, Bastian, but I think I have to kiss you.”

  I eyed him a little warily to gauge his reaction. He didn’t seem to be repulsed. His face was solemn, but I thought his eyes were dancing, and there was a slight tremor at one corner of his mouth.

  “Then by all means proceed, little witch,” he said.

  So I kissed him. Close up, Bastian the man smelt much as Bastian the wolf did, pleasantly of grass and rich earth. When my lips touched his I tasted the sharp tang of raspberries. For an instant I felt the soft huff of his breath, quick and uneven, on my cheeks. Oddly, the one thing that entered my mind in the spilt second before I kissed him, was the memory of Gwen’s voice telling me some few days ago how unpleasant wet kisses were. I was careful to make this one quick and soft and dry, since it didn’t seem fair to make Bastian suffer more than he really had to.

  When I sat back on my heels Bastian’s eyes flickered open. I realised with slight astonishment that he had closed his eyes, and that I had also done so quite naturally, without thinking about it. The fact seemed to bear out Gwendolen’s opinion, set against mine, that lovers would not eventually become crosseyed.

  For a moment neither of us said anything, Bastian pale and somehow startled, his eyes on my face; myself uncertain whether it had worked or not.

  “Did it work?” I asked, breaking the silence.

  “In what way?” he said. I had an idea that he was talking more to himself than me, and that what he had said was in some way a dry joke. His face was no longer so pale but it still seemed startled.

  “To break the enchantment, silly,” I told him impatiently, ignoring the joke with himself since I knew it was one of those that he wouldn’t explain to me.

  “I don’t think so,” Bastian said, and I remembered that the first time I broke part of the spell, the effect had been immediate. I could see no change in the gold swirls around him.

  “Well!” I said, in annoyance. “What a waste!”

  Bastian’s eyes leapt to mine, startled again, and he burst out laughing. “Don’t look daggers at me, my love. Your kisses must be defective. It is the second part, but there’s still something missing.”

  “I expect that’s because I haven’t had the practice. Gwendolen knows more about that sort of thing.” I brightened momentarily. “Of course! Gwendolen can come and kiss you!”

  “Certainly not,” Bastian said, and I knew the finality of that tone. Besides, it would be no good telling Gwendolen what to do – even supposing the curse would allow it – since the curse would require that she figure it out herself, just as I had.

  “Maybe I didn’t do it right,” I suggested miserably. “I don’t really know how to do it properly.”

  “I’ll teach you how sometime, when you’ve got a likely lad of your own,” Bastian said, grinning a little wolfishly down into my woebegone face.

  “If I had a likely lad I don’t think he’d care for that,” I pointed out. Besides, likely lads were in Gwendolen’s line, not mine.

  Bastian only said: “Hmm. I don’t think I’d care for it either. And we can’t forget that you’re sworn to a life of celibate piracy.”

  I frowned in thought. “I’ll ask Gilbert.”

  “He’s more likely to want to kiss you himself,” Bastian warned.

  “Piffle!” I told him loftily. “Gwendolen is the one boys want to kiss. I’m quite safe.”

  Bastian looked at me with something like exasperation. “Gwendolen has nothing whatsoever to do with the case. And as to safety, I’ve told you often enough that you need someone to look after you.”

  “All right, I’ll ask David,” I conceded, giving in to compromise. I had meant to have a talk with him in any case. I jumped to my feet with enthusiasm, and turned back to Bastian. “I’ll sneak away and meet you after the dance.”

  “Ah, an assignation!” Bastian said, grinning. “Where shall we meet, little witch?”

  Chapter Fourteen

  I was glad to get away from the dance and even from Gilbert, who tonight was awkward and different. My life, I thought peevishly, had devolved into nothing more than a succession of village dances. Besides, Akiva was busy and secretive, hiding away most days in her library or out in deep forest, and hadn’t seemed at all keen for me to be back in the little cottage with her. I wondered if I’d done something wrong. At all events, I thought mulishly; after tonight I was going back to Akiva, whether or not she wanted me. I had an idea she was up to something.

  Bastian was waiting for me when I finally managed to slip away without being seen, familiar and wolfish. I had masked my forest signature immediately upon entering the forest, nervous about following Cassandra even on someone else’s wardship. Cassandra was not only clever, she knew every thread and vibration in the forest. I was careful not to use the rabbit signature this time.

  Bastian trotted forward to me meet me, casual and relaxed. “No movement yet, but it shouldn’t be long.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. “I thought I wouldn’t get here in time. What is she doing, do you think? Is she trying to make Mara disappear?”

  “Who knows what goes on in that pretty little head of hers? No, stay back, little witch. She’ll sense us if we get too close.”

  “Won’t she sense you at once? You most particularly, I mean.”

  “I’ve been hiding from Cassandra long enough to have learned a few tricks, little witch. The only place I’m not safe is in her wardship. Quiet now, here she comes.”

  We stayed nearly a full wardship behind Cassandra, pacing along the threads just quickly enough not to lose her, and just slowly enough to avoid putting out excessive energy that Cassandra would certainly have noticed. I walked with one hand buried in the ruff of Bastian’s neck, feeling somehow safer with the warmth of his fur beneath my hand.

  We trailed Cassandra until we were in the amalgamated section that had once been many wardships but was now Mara’s; then deeper still until we were in the portion of the forest that had always been Mara’s. The forest had changed from late summer to winter, to autumn, and back to summer by the time we reached Mara’s own wardship. Bastian and I prowled at the edges of the wardship, wary about diving right in. Faint lines still showed where the division between wardships had once been, and it felt safer to be on the other side of the faintly marked wardship from Cassandra. I gently pinched a forest line between thumb and forefinger, catching a vibration of Cassandra’s footsteps, and followed it until I could see her circling Mara’s house. Crouched beside Bastian as I was, with my arm around his neck, he could see all that I could see. He growled a low, soft, puzzled growl.

  “What’s she doing?” I whispered. Bastian’s ear twitched as my breath tickled his sensitive ear hairs.

  “I don’t know. I can’t sense any magic.”

  “Me neither. Perhaps she really is trying to take Mara.”

  “Mara would be the logical choice, before she comes into the full potential of all the wardships. Hold fast, little witch, something is about to happen.”

  I had sensed it, too, a gathering of power on the thread I held. There was a slight snap, and then Cassandra was no longer by the house or even on the same thread. An instant later she materialized some way behind us, sending a ripple through the forest.

  “The house, now!” Bastian shot at me.

  We turned tail and ran. Mara’s house, neat and square and orderly in the forest, was our only hope of safety. We
dashed through myriad, lightning-fast threads to get there ahead of Cassandra, shocked at the suddenness of detection. Blackness pursued us, long thin tendrils of Cassandra’s magic shooting along the threads after us at high speed. Tiny, fibrous filaments of the black stuff attached themselves to Bastian’s fur. His breathing became first laboured, and then strained as the spell took hold. At length so many threads had caught in the fur at the ruff of his neck that he was unceremoniously dragged backwards, growling savagely. I dashed back to help him, my eyes wide with apprehension, but Bastian snapped at the hand I stretched out, and snarled: “Keep going, Rose!”

  “No!” My voice squeaked with indignation. When I reached out again Bastian snapped more savagely, this time catching my hand between his teeth and drawing blood.

  “Get Mara!” he snapped. “She’s the only one who can help now.”

  I cradled my hand, staring at him in wide-eyed disbelief. “You bit me!”

  Bastian gave a truly vicious snarl, one I had not heard since he had tried to eat me all those years ago. “Go now, Rose!”

  I did as I was told that time. I heard Bastian yelp once, high and sharp, before I cannoned into a sharp, wiry body which immediately seized me in an iron grip. One hand pinched the nape of my neck: the other forced my head back. I found myself staring wildly up at Mara and loosened my clutching fingers from her arm.

  The grip around my neck tightened painfully. “What are you playing at?” Mara demanded.

  “Bastian!” I gasped, breathlessly. “Please help him! Cassandra!”

  Mara seemed to understand my incoherent urgency, because she released me and strode down the thread I had arrived on without further questions. The forest was horribly silent around us after the yelp I heard from Bastian. As we travelled, cold and swift, I wondered sickeningly if Cassandra had actually killed him. A sob caught at the back of my throat at the thought, because no matter what the forest did to Cassandra in retribution, Bastian would still be dead.

  Cassandra was standing over Bastian’s motionless body when we saw her, a high colour in her cheeks that made her, if possible, even more beautiful than usual.

  Mara said calmly: “What have you done, Cassandra?”

  It was then that I realised the pinkness of Cassandra’s cheeks was not that of triumph, but fury; and I held my breath in sudden hope.

  “Breathe, child,” Mara said softly to me, and her assurance filled me with relief. “He is not dead.”

  I let my breath out in something very like a sob, and dropped to my knees beside Bastian, laying my head on his furry chest to hear for myself the faint but steady beat of his heart. He was not quite unconscious, because I felt the huff of his breath as he nudged his nose into my neck, and heard him say my name with a kind of wonder in his voice that he was still alive.

  “Why isn’t he dead?” demanded Cassandra. It certainly wasn’t from any lack of trying on her part. There was a blackness roiling about her slender fingers, and the same darkness clouded around Bastian. I began to wonder if the forest didn’t care more for preventative than punitive measures.

  “He should be dead! Why isn’t he dead?”

  There was a bitter kind of mocking to Bastian’s thready voice. “Self-sacrificing altruism, you old cow,” he jeered, and lost consciousness.

  Cassandra gave a scream of rage, her fingers curling into fists, and kicked Bastian’s prone body with her soft satin slippers as if they were metal sabatons. It would almost have been funny if I weren’t so concerned for Bastian. His chest still only barely rose and fell with his breath: there was no telling what Cassandra had done to him.

  “Stop that at once!” Mara said sharply, taking a swift step forward.

  Cassandra kicked Bastian one last time, viciously, and said sibilantly to his unresponsive ears: “I will kill you, wolf.”

  The quiet malice in her voice sent an involuntary shiver through me, but Mara stood her ground, unmoved.

  “You will harm neither the wolf nor Akiva’s apprentice on any of my wardship,” she said coldly. “Do you understand, Cassandra?”

  They locked gazes, violet eyes to icy blue ones. Cassandra’s gaze dropped first.

  Her smile was brittle and enchanting as she said: “I will see you another time, little rabbit.”

  I watched her go with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, but Mara allowed me no time to meditate on my fears.

  “Take his legs,” she said. “I’ll attend to his head.”

  We lifted awkwardly, out of time with each other. Bastian proved to be heavier than either of us expected, and Mara pitched forward into me, tumbling us both into the dew-wet grass. The wooden comb in her neat bun caught me painfully below one eye, leaving a throbbing indent that promised to become a splendid bruise before very many minutes passed. Mara, her bun ridiculously on one side, did not escape her share of mud and grass stains. As a result, she was rather waspish by the time she rose to her feet, scraping back tendrils of escaping hair with an attempt at dignity.

  “Clearly this is not the most sensible option,” she said, with a flush of pink in each cheek.

  Recovering her self-possession, she plucked several evergreen leaves from the surrounding trees and fixed them together with tiny threads of ice-blue magic that had little to do with the forest. The leaves grew brittly brown at the edges and drew away from the threads, but remained fixed together; and when she made a motion as if shaking the thing out, it grew with each snap and flick until it was some ten times its original size. Mara let it drift gently in the air before her, and then shooed it forward to wrap around Bastian swiftly and efficiently until he was a nondescript bundle hovering a foot in the air.

  “Much better,” Mara said in satisfaction. “You’d better walk with me, child; Cassandra won’t have gone far.”

  I nodded meekly, relieved that I hadn’t had to ask for her escort. Neither of my attempts at spying had gone particularly well, and I was feeling nastily vulnerable. I trailed humbly along behind Mara as she strode through the moonlit forest at incredible, soundless speed, and found that we had arrived in Akiva’s wardship almost before I was aware of it.

  I had no time to worry about what Akiva was going to say, but fortunately enough I wasn’t called upon to explain myself. Mara commandeered the explanations, and I was grateful to her for failing to mention that Bastian and I had been following Cassandra, or that we had trespassed extensively on her wardship. She said only that Cassandra had attacked us, and that she had been near enough to help. I could have hugged her for her kindness.

  “The wolf will need some time to recover,” Mara added briefly.

  To my annoyance, they then held a murmured conversation from which I was pointedly excluded by magic that was as impenetrable as it was insulting.

  At length Akiva said to me: “Rose, I am afraid that Bastian will have to go with you.”

  Mara nodded a goodnight to us both and took herself off, and I was left to gaze worriedly down at the tightly wrapped figure of Bastian.

  “Bastian said the change will be permanent if he gets caught out of the forest when he changes.”

  “Yes. You’ll have to take some of the forest with you,” Akiva said. “I won’t be able to care for him. I have business in deep forest that can’t wait.”

  I looked swiftly up at her, alerted by a change in her usually steady cadence. “You mean deeper forest,” I said accusingly.

  Akiva’s brows snapped together. “That is not something you should know about! Hold your tongue, child, and do as you are told! We will take him to your mother tomorrow morning; my business can’t be detained any longer.”

  “I could help,” I said, a little sadly. I felt oddly abandoned and useless.

  “You could help, or you could be killed,” Akiva said, and the stiffness in her voice caused an absurd little bubble of happiness to break at the back of my throat. She was concerned for me.

  “I want to be sure that no more wardens disappear. I will call on you when I need you.”
>
  And so, discontented, I was forced to be content.

  Akiva and Mother discussed the matter in the kitchen, voices low and hard to hear. Bastian was in front of the hearth on a rough mattress, with a fire lit to combat his fits of shivering, while the rest of us gazed curiously on him. Gwendolen’s expression was one of nose-wrinkled curiosity, Thomas’ of understanding, and David’s face was furrowed with a thoughtful frown.

  None of them had objected to being woken in the wee hours of the morning: in fact, Thomas and David hadn’t yet gone to bed and Gwendolen had only just returned from the dance.

  The boys spent the night absorbed in a game of chess with a quickly dwindling bottle of brandy to keep them company, and Gwendolen, satisfied that she was beautiful in the entrancing disorder of loose curls, was perfectly content to be a party to night time adventures so long as no one expected her to be more than decorative.

  I fell asleep crouched uncomfortably beside Bastian some time before Mother and Akiva finished their discussion, and awoke many hours later to broad daylight and the information Akiva was gone. Mother was in a surprisingly good humour. Thomas and David were still at their chess match, but Gwendolen had flitted back off to bed. Bastian, deep into a fever, was changing constantly from wolf to man and back again, surrounded imperceptibly by the forest spell that Akiva had worked on him.

  “He’s been doing that for the last few hours,” Thomas told me, looking up while David made his move. “Two changes every hour, like clockwork.”

  I stayed by Bastian’s side all day, taking my meals by the uncomfortably warm fire, and anxiously noting each change as it occurred. He didn’t recover consciousness, but neither did his fever grow worse. When night drew on without any change, Mother chivvied me into my own bed to spend the night, and set her rocking chair by Bastian’s side. As I crawled beneath the sheet, David’s shadow slipped past my open door to keep her company.

  It wasn’t until nearly a week had passed that Bastian regained consciousness. I wasn’t there to see it: Gilbert had called around to take me for a walk, and Mother had insisted on my going with him, if only to get us out of the house. She seemed anxious to prevent anyone from seeing Bastian, and in his present state, I was no less anxious.