by Maria Vale
“I made it for you,” he says and begins to slide down the gentle slope of the back of his granite perch. Then he limps around front. “But maybe you can wait? Until I leave?”
“Yes.” I wait while he retrieves his stick and tucks it under his arm, then we silently walk back toward Homelands.
The wind slips under one of the signs, making it heave, then collapse against the pole with a bang. Eyulf stops, his eyes closed, breathing in, his mouth barely open. He sucks in breath after breath, too fast and too deep. I put my hand at his back.
Then he sighs, and we keep moving.
I did the same thing that first time I crossed the boundary and smelled the thick crisscrossing scent of wolves who were nowhere and everywhere, who had marked the perimeter, the browse lines, favored watering places, and unstable bluffs. Of wolves who had turned and twisted in the earth, leaving that peculiar muddled scent of two wolves announcing to the Pack that they are together.
It was the freedom to be wild, and after so many months of wandering frightened and alone, hiding from moon to moon, to realize that the Deore Norþ wasn’t a place that wolves went when they died. It was a place where wolves lived.
I threw myself into the promise of those markings. I dug, trying to find the end to it, but I couldn’t. Just layer after layer of wolf. I lay in the trough I’d made and rolled around in it, nearly sick with the need for it.
That’s how they found me. A perimeter wolf discovered me squirming in a damp hollow at the border. She tried to take me in her jaws, but however young my body was, my soul was too old. Having traversed and survived half the world, I was ready to match my experience against any wolf here. I would not be carried the last miles like a pup.
Nils took a look at me leaning into my front legs, ready to fight or flee. Not that I was going to do either; it was just the way I was. In a constant state of readiness.
He said something to his mate, Alexandra, in the tongue I now speak but didn’t then. Then he spoke to me in the Old Tongue, and because it had been so long since I’d heard it, I mewled from the perfect cadenced beauty of it.
“Þu þearft bæþes, wulfling.”
You need a bath, little wolf.
Jean—she hadn’t moved to the Great Hall and wasn’t yet a gran—marched me to the Bathhouse and told me to change. But I just couldn’t let them see me naked. Exposed. They would see the mark that every wolf knew meant I was a lawbreaker and an anathema. Wearg. I hadn’t found another pack, and I had no confidence that I would. Even if I did, I would never find another land so deeply marked with wolf.
I became, I think, a little unhinged: running and scratching and snarling until finally Alexandra came. She was a towering wolf. Amazing that her one offspring should be so small. She leapt at me with her long arms. I bit at her and fought, and she dunked me in the cold bath and held me down and scrubbed hard until she felt my belly under my fur. In her hesitation, I knew she’d discovered what I’d been so desperate to hide.
She kept washing, more gently now, because the fight was lost and I’d gone limp. When I was all clean, she told the wolves in the Bathhouse to leave. Then she gave me a little pile of clothes and privacy.
I remember those clothes. Brown corduroys with bald spots on the fronts of the thighs and knees. A yellow striped shirt dotted with a dozen watchful blue eyes. I saw them on subsequent generations of pups, though I presume they’re gone now, like everything else lost in the fire.
Alexandra combed my hair with a lice comb, while the Alpha asked how I, a child, had come to be marked as Wearg. I told him. I didn’t embellish, but I didn’t leave out the important facts. I told him what had been happening to our Pack and what had been happening to me. He looked to his mate and said something in this new tongue. She responded with a sad smile. Then he bent over, cupping my little face in his big hands and marked me.
Alexandra marked me too. Not long after that, Nils was shot ripping his unborn pups from his dead mate’s womb. He ran toward Homelands, but by the time the Pack located him, only the minuscule silver runt was still alive.
“When wolves mate,” I tell Eyulf, even though he didn’t ask, “they are braided—bound—with the land and the Pack as well as their mates. So it’s a thing. That feeling for the land.”
“And you? Are you braided?”
Lorcan has asked me more often recently to go through with it. I’ve done my best to avoid answering.
“Varya?” Eyulf asks. His hand touches my arm and then slides down to my hand.
“No,” I say, staring at his cool fingers loosely coiled around mine.
He lets go.
“I’m glad,” he says.
I miss his fingers.
Chapter 19
The food that I brought back from Home Pond is almost gone. Even the dehydrated tofu skins and freeze-dried eggs. If he wants to eat, he’s going to have to hunt, and if he wants to hunt, he’s going to have to change.
But first, I need to make sure that he’s healed enough. That his skin won’t tear and his veins won’t rupture during the stretching and torquing that comes with turning from a hairless biped into a wolf.
It’s hard to judge the texture of a scar or the sponginess of the tissue through denim. “You need to take those off.”
“Off?”
I push a little harder.
“Off. They’re too thick, and I can’t feel through the—”
He makes a half-hearted attempt to pull up the cuff, but he already knows it’s too narrow. After an exasperated grunt, he asks me to toss him the towel.
“I have seen naked males before. Many. Hundr—”
“I’m happy for you,” he snaps, grabbing the towel himself and wrapping it around his waist. “But you haven’t seen me.”
I have. But then he was a dying stranger and now, even though I’ve only known him for a short while, I understand him better than any of the Great North. Is it because he’s an Arctic wolf? Or because he’s a survivor? Or because he doesn’t know that he is supposed to be afraid of me?
Whatever the reason, it feels different somehow.
His back to me, he starts to unzip his jeans and shift them slowly down, all the while clutching at the frankly inadequate bit of terry cloth. Finally, he kicks his pants away and turns, the faded turquoise rectangle covering front and back—but only just—and leaving his wounded leg exposed. That and the sloping hollow above his muscled thigh and below his hip bone. A part of no great importance.
On another body, it would be of no importance whatsoever.
I focus on the still-pink circlet of scars around his leg, pulling the scar tissue gently apart with two fingers to see how elastic it is. Then I push down, softly at first, and gradually harder. If it starts to swell or bruise, the change will tear apart the underlying network of blood vessels.
He jerks.
“That’s a bad sign.”
“What?”
“Well, it shouldn’t hurt that much.”
“Doesn’t,” he says.
“This is not the time to hide what you’re feeling. If you change before you’re fully healed, you will tear yourself open again. I know what I’m doing.”
He leans forward, his arms draped between his legs.
“I’m not sure you do.”
Ah. The towel that was barely adequate before is simply laughable now that it is also responsible for covering a thickly engorged cock.
I look up, up, up to his eyes. They’ve changed, darkened. They are no longer the pale blue of old ice and bright variegated green of forest depths, but the deep blue of late evening and the dark green of rain-drenched fir. His white hair loops forward and then falls over his shoulder. A sharp, green muskiness like rubbed coriander bothers my nose with something warm and dangerous.
I jump away, like a skittish fawn.
“I don’t think it’
ll open up. Remember, your trigger is here.” I point without touching toward the place I’d found before. “It’s inside, not outside, so you need to tighten those muscles. But take your shirt off first.”
“Okay,” he says, pulling off his shirt. “Why?”
“Because if by some miracle you get it right, I’ll have to cut you out of it, and we don’t have that many changes of clothes.”
Turning away, I smooth the T-shirt still warm from his body against my chest. Philadelphia Frostbite Regatta, it says. When I glance back, his eyes are closed and a tremor roils through the cut muscles. Parts of him around his pelvis that don’t look like they could tighten any more ripple.
Sitting down on a dry trunk, I stare at the lower slopes of Norþdæl, blanketed with wine and gray and dark gold, dotted with dark-green evergreens and occasional skeletal fingers of white birch.
“How are you doing over there?”
“Working on it.” He coughs a handful of fake coughs, trying, I suppose, to reproduce whatever caused that earlier change.
“Hey?” he says.
“Yes?”
“I’m going to be able to change back, right?”
“Of course. Once you learn what your trigger is, you’ll never forget it.”
“Like riding a bike.”
I scratch my ear. “It’s nothing like riding a bike. You’re changing into a wolf. Wolves don’t ride bikes.”
“It’s a… That’s not what I… Never mind.”
A squirrel squats on his hind legs, eyeing me from a distance. At this moment, from this angle, the daylight moon forms a curved crown above his head. “Except…you do know not to change before the Iron Moon, right?”
“Why?”
The squirrel’s whiskered nose twitches, worriedly.
“Because the Iron Moon takes us as she finds us and makes us wilder. If she finds us in skin, she makes us wild. But if she finds us wild, she makes us æcewulfs. Real wolves. Forever wolves.”
“And you don’t change back?”
“That’s why they’re called forever wolves.”
He stares down at his feet, clenching and stretching his toes, as though confirming that for now at least, he still looks human. “Is it like when you’re a wolf, but you still know who you are? You still remember everything?”
“Nobody knows what they remember or don’t, but they’re definitely not the same. They’re not Pack anymore.” Over my shoulder, I see the panic on his face, his hand clinging to the little towel, like the last vestiges of his humanity.
“Don’t worry. I won’t let that happen to you,” I say.
His eyes consider mine for a moment. I nod at him, and he starts again, pressing harder, moving, clenching, roiling, undulating.
The squirrel takes advantage of my distraction and bolts up a nearby tree. High up, he hangs, head down, legs splayed, and chitters at me for invading his territory.
“Varya!”
I leap at Eyulf’s strangled cry, just managing to catch him as he pitches forward, his feet narrowing, arch elongating, calf muscle tightening.
How did I forget to tell him to lie down?
I stagger to the ground, his body writhing in my arms. His green eye searches blindly, his grotesque mouth mangles a groan before going silent. The towel drops away from his narrowing hips and his clutching fingers. My hair falls forward over him.
Astille, wulf. Þu eart gesund mid me.
Hush, wolf, you are safe with me.
My hands run over his skin, like water.
Chapter 20
I certainly don’t remember all the steps I took to end up here, naked and exposed on the promontory, waiting for the change to take hold while the rain beats strangely sharp against my skin.
I watched Eyulf through his change, then took myself off at a discreet distance, because I know how we look in this grotesque between stage. I curl myself tight, my arms over my head, and give in to the sense-dulling oblivion of the change that for once doesn’t last nearly long enough. Shaking out my fur with a shudder that starts at my head and then dominoes all the way to the tip of my tail.
An owl flutters on his branch, then rearranges his wings. He snaps his beak shut while I head back, watching Eyulf test his wounded leg in his changed body. He is beautiful wild: lithe and strong and long-legged. His head sleek, with long, sharp fangs. His fur is, as I expected, longer than usual and catches each breeze. When he takes a step forward, muscle and bone roll gracefully, except for a slight hitch at the end.
He turns his head, looking along the length of his torso at me. Earth-green and sky-blue eyes and a thin thread of bright blood trickling from the healing ring around his leg are the only colors on the pale canvas of his body.
We turn our heads in unison, leaning into our front legs, eyes scanning the sky for the group of straggling snow geese who are searching for a place to rest. They would never choose Clear Pond, which is too hemmed in by trees, or Home Pond, which is too hemmed in by wolves, so they will head to Beaver Pond. I wouldn’t bother with them if Beaver Pond was open, because wolves really only have one chance in the water.
But it’s still mostly frozen, which will force the geese into a tighter formation and give us more opportunity. Together, we move around the easy slope at the back of Westdæl.
At the base, we pause behind a still-snowy shock of Labrador tea. I lay my chin across his forehead, then take off. He follows me, even though I had told him clearly to stay put. I have to remind myself that he has never been in this form with someone he might need to communicate with. It is a language I take for granted. I snap at him with bared jaws; that he understands.
The geese drop out of the sky, some of them leaving silty contrails in the gash of open water, but others find themselves on ice where big Arctic paws and long legs are so much more useful than webbed feet and stubby stems. I move along the edges of Beaver Pond until I get close enough to burst toward them.
They begin flapping off, focused only on me and not on the white wolf who jumps out and catches one slowly struggling goose.
Repositioning his jaws, he bites hard and the hunt is over. It is, as wolves like to say, a good kill.
There is an invisible perimeter surrounding an eating wolf. The larger the prey, the tighter it is, because our law requires that we make a death count by eating everything. A buck will be shared; a goose will not.
I stand outside that invisible perimeter, keeping watch.
With one paw, he holds down a wing and immediately starts to tear at the goose. The blood is hot enough to release a tiny breath of steam into the mountain air.
A hawk circles overhead, but I can already tell he is going to be disappointed. Eyulf’s dismemberment is slow and deliberate, and he eats everything. The Great North wolves often leave the fleshless ends of a bird’s wings, but not this one. He keeps chewing and swallowing until finally the last tip of the last feather disappears down his gullet.
The hawk catches a thermal and drifts away, disgusted.
With a long, luxurious swirl of the tongue, Eyulf cleans his mouth, then wipes his muzzle with his foreleg and shakes out his fur.
He splays his paws out in front of him and leans into his hind legs, shivering his hips like a pup who wants to play. I’m not sure how old he is, but almost as old as I am, and I’ve been too old to play since…well, since forever.
I head back to the northern slope of Westdæl. I’ve fulfilled my responsibility to him, and now it’s time to fulfill my responsibility to the Great North, running my slice of the perimeter again and again and again until long after the light has left.
But as soon as my back is turned, teeth nip my left flank. With an awkward jump, he just clears my snapping jaws. I move away, my nose to the ground, because I have responsibilities.
He jumps, putting his forelegs across my shoulders; I whip around, snar
ling, my ears horizontal and my tail up. I move in close, muscled chest against muscled chest. He doesn’t back away or back down. Instead, he does the unthinkable.
He raises his front paw and pats my nose.
No one pats my nose.
I charge after him, but he hides, and as I run past, sharp teeth grab hold of my tail.
And no one nips my tail.
I round on him, but he won’t let go and I can’t catch him, because he’s holding my tail and dancing just out of my way, so I twirl around and around until I leap up and change directions, giving his jaw a little wrench. Then I grab his tail, see how he likes it, but we go around the other way, until I feel giddy and scattered.
He trips—his leg, no doubt—and we start to tumble down the side of Westdæl. I slide to a stop as the land levels out in the emptiness near the Gin, and he rolls to a stop next to me. I jump up and on top of him, snarling as I take his muzzle in my jaws. He slips out and takes mine in his, and we jaw spar.
We tussle hard until he tires and hesitantly taps at my withers, patting me down. I sink onto the ground, my chin on my paws, and then feel his strong body beside mine and feel his head near my shoulders. One paw against mine. After a minute or two, he sighs, the smell of goose blood on his breath.
I should get up, but not quite yet. Wait until my mind stops spinning and my heart settles. Let him relax, panting warm and heavy against my fur.
Listening to the fast, regular-beat heartbeat strangely loud in my ears.
He lifts his head suddenly. There are shadows streaking across the ground. Birds race for tree cover, emptying the sky. If I’d been paying attention like I was supposed to, I would have realized immediately that it wasn’t a heartbeat.
Thuppathuppathuppathuppa.
Both of us jump up, scrambling to get away from the exposed spaces of the Gin and up toward the forests of Westdæl. I am already at the tree line when I realize that he is still struggling to get up. A white beacon against the loose gray stone.
