The Sianian Wolf

by Y. K. Willemse

  “Get out,” Wynne said again, moving left toward the doorframe of Erasmus’ bedroom. A messy red stripe stained the wooden jamb. “Where have you been these five weeks? Father helped you for aye, and you run when he needs help. Get out.”

  Rafen was sure he’d scarcely been away a day. His mouth was suddenly dry. “Where is Erasmus?”

  Wynne clutched the cauldron tighter.

  “Where is he?” Rafen demanded, stepping forward.

  Trembling, Wynne recoiled against the doorframe. “Don’t come near me,” she said in an unnaturally high voice.

  Rafen lunged at her. “Where is Erasmus?” he bellowed in her face.

  “He’s dead!” Wynne screamed.

  Rafen felt her spit on his nose. He froze before her. “You’re lying,” he said quietly.

  “I’m not lying.” Tear tracks ran through the dirt on Wynne’s face. “The Lashki… took him away. They searched the house… I came back, but he was gone.”

  “Where?” Rafen said.

  Wynne kept sobbing.

  Rafen grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “Where? Where did the Lashki take him?” he shouted.

  “Don’t!” she cried, tearing free. “He took him to New Isles – Talmon executed him!”

  Rafen recoiled, suddenly numb. “You’re lying,” he said again stupidly.

  “I’m not,” Wynne choked. “They killed him because they thought he was the Wolf…”

  Rafen shook his head, backing away from her, almost tripping over Ahain. “This is a lie,” he said, his voice shaking. “It’s a mistake.”

  “It’s not,” Wynne said. She was abruptly calm, looking him coldly in the eye. “Aye, it’s your fault. They thought he was you, you dog.”

  Rafen was breathing heavily like he’d run a marathon. Without thinking, he turned and rushed from the house. He pelted across the packed dirt and into the Woods, shoving through red cedars and fiddlewoods, his lungs burning. Ahain pounded along behind him, barking as if this were some ludicrous game. Rafen didn’t know where he was going until he was back in the clearing in which Erasmus had always trained him. He stood in its center, where he usually lit his fire, and yelled into the boxelders and swirling white specks above, “Erasmus! Erasmus!”

  His throat hurt. He crashed onto his knees and crawled like an animal to the bole of a stout oak. Throwing his back against it, he allowed pain to reverberate through his body. He remembered Erasmus hitting him with the flat of his sword, how that had hurt, and how angry he had been each time.

  Putting his head into his freezing hands, he wept brokenly.

  Chapter Eleven

  Bitten

  Ahain lying next to him, Rafen stared into the fire in the center of the snowy clearing. He didn’t know how long he had been awake. He couldn’t remember having slept. Yet night had fallen, and someone had lit a fire. Rafen desperately hoped it was Erasmus.

  He hadn’t thought this would happen to him again in a hurry, this pain that made him feel betrayed, crushed, wormlike. He had wept about the Selsons. He had thought he would die. He had lived as an animal, and Erasmus had rescued him from that hollow life and filled his world with meaning once more.

  And then, like Zion was jealous of the attention Rafen gave his mentor, He took Erasmus away. He let the Lashki seize him and Talmon execute him in the name of the Wolf. Yet Rafen had to live on.

  A shadow blocked the firelight briefly. Rafen glanced up. Pale and pinched with cold, Sherwin bent down, looking at him sitting against the oak trunk. His forehead was furrowed, and his one good eye clouded.

  “Am I dead?” Rafen croaked, because that was the only way he and Sherwin could have met again.

  “No,” Sherwin said in his funny accent. “Tha’s what I was checking, yer see. Yer were lookin’ so intently at the Jeremiah, tha’s all. Kinda like a dead man’s stare.”

  “You just think I’m alive,” Rafen said.

  “Naw. It’s true, yer know. Yer are alive. Jus’ like I am, though after fallin’ through those flames this afternoon, it’s pretty hard to believe.”

  Sherwin had followed him then. He stooped, poking the fire with a stick. He wore his strange, short-sleeved shirt with an elongated skull on it. In the light, his forearm was streaked and ribboned with angry red burns. Trembling a little, Rafen rose, his back aching. Sherwin turned to him quizzically. Rafen gently gripped Sherwin’s cold forearm and pulled it toward himself, fingering the burns. Sherwin winced.

  “Are these from the silver flames?” Rafen asked.

  “And this Jeremiah.” Sherwin indicated the fire. “Took me a while to light it, yer know.”

  “Are there more burns?”

  “A little bit on me other chalk.”

  “Your what?” Rafen said impatiently. He was too tired for this. “You have to talk Tongue; I can’t understand—”

  “Sorry, on me other arm, I meant.”

  “Right.”

  Drunkenly, Rafen pushed through the boxelders and oaks surrounding the clearing, gesturing for Sherwin to follow. Confused, Sherwin stumbled after him.

  Once, when Wynne was making soup for Erasmus and Rafen in that same clearing, she had burned herself on the fire. Erasmus had found the herb plaventer and healed her remarkably quickly. It took Rafen a while to find the plant. When he did, he led Sherwin to the freezing river and made a paste in half the leathery skin of a Sianian lemon. After he applied this paste to a grimacing Sherwin, the burns looked significantly better.

  “Thanks,” Sherwin said, examining his arms.

  Rafen was already returning to the clearing. His feet felt unnaturally heavy. Sherwin pounded after him, nearly tripping over an armadillo.

  “Say,” he said as Rafen slumped down against his oak again, “any chance of something to eat?”

  Rafen already had his eyes closed. Everything had been so unnatural over the last day that if he fell asleep, perhaps normality would return. Erasmus wasn’t really dead, he told himself. He was being absurd.

  And yet, as he felt the heavy full stop of death descend on him again, he wanted to scream.

  Beyond his dark eyelids, Sherwin sighed and lay down on some twigs. His hum of satisfaction told Rafen that he was used to sleeping outdoors.

  *

  Rafen woke achy the next morning. His muscles were tense, and his back felt like someone had attacked it with a hammer in the night. Sherwin still slept on his side near the fire, grunting and snuffling, his yellow hair hanging over his face. Ahain had departed for an early breakfast. Traces of last night’s light snowfall still lingered on the ground.

  Sparrows and bluebirds called overhead, and the ground was wet with ice and dew. Through the snow-powdered branches above, Rafen could see a little flock of warblers rush across the sky in late migration. Rafen’s early mornings with Erasmus rushed back to him. He felt Erasmus’ rough, hairy hands shaking him. He saw Erasmus limp into a starting position with his sword and despised himself for mauling the man at their first meeting. And why had he killed Erasmus’ rooster?

  That last conversation with him had been so wrong. What would have been so bad about trying to help the Selsons, rather than running into hiding with them for his own satisfaction? However, that was all pointless now. He didn’t know where they were or how many of them were alive. Additionally, he had no way of contacting Alexander to aid him in the fight for Siana.

  Rafen turned to face the bole of the oak. He tried losing himself in the maze of brown roads in the wood, his eyes burning.

  He wanted to pound the oak with his fists until it gave way and became dust on the wind like everything and everyone in his life. Then he would lie down and wait until he was blown away. Instead, he inserted a finger into a knothole in the tree, and traced it over and over again. How fast could he go round the knothole without dislodging his finger? He timed himself; three seconds. Could he go clockwise and counter-clockwise, and still beat his record? He tried and failed. He practiced. He could. Now he tried two fingers simultaneously:
both his index finger and middle finger on his left hand. It was a challenge, but he managed.

  Behind him, Sherwin stirred. He yawned profoundly and sat up. “What are yer doin’?”

  Rafen ignored him.

  “Blimey,” Sherwin said, “tha’ looks really borin’.”

  Rafen kept it up desperately. Sherwin came over to him. “Hey, when are we going to eat? I’m starvin’. I’ve been in this place for a ruddy day, and no food! Not even a potato chip. Yer not listenin’, are yer?”

  Rafen’s breathing quickened. When he had healed Sherwin’s burns the previous night, he hadn’t realized fully that he was stuck with this fool. What in the Pilamùr was he to do with a blundering companion who could barely light his own campfire?

  “Well, I am sorry,” Sherwin said, with an expansive gesture. “I didn’t really know what to do, eh? I’ve never known anyone who died. I suppose—”

  Rafen leapt to his feet and faced him. “WILL YOU STOP?” he screamed in Sherwin’s face.

  Sherwin looked genuinely scared.

  “WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING ANYWAY? WHY DID YOU COME HERE? WHY?”

  Sherwin rearranged his face into an apologetic grimace. “I wanted to foller yer, all right? No need to take it tha’ way.”

  He gingerly patted Rafen’s shoulder. Something snapped within Rafen. His fist shot toward Sherwin’s unharmed eye; Sherwin tried dodging too late, and the blow hit him on the side of his head, sending him sprawling.

  Rafen stormed into the boxelders, sending tiny puffs of snow into the air. Sherwin must have followed him to Erasmus’ house yesterday. And now he was following again, flapping through leaves behind Rafen. Rafen didn’t look, because he was crying and didn’t want Sherwin to see. His throat hurt, and he wanted some water.

  At the river, he lay on the bank and thrust his head underwater, drinking. Icy liquid pulsed in his ears and against his eyeballs. He held himself there momentarily and then pulled free, shaking his head and rubbing his eyes. Sherwin was standing right next to him when his sight cleared. Rafen wanted to throw him headfirst into the river.

  “Good point,” Sherwin said, rubbing his sore head, and Rafen wondered if Sherwin had read his mind and approved of this latest thought. “I need a tiddlywink meself, yer know.”

  Rafen stared at him blackly.

  Sherwin lay on the bank too and started lapping up water furiously. His arm burns were virtually gone. Now he looked peaky and white. Hungry, Rafen thought. Sherwin needed more food than he did. He came from a place of abundance, and was already a head taller than Rafen, despite being a similar age.

  Rafen swallowed, feeling frustration building in him. A wood stork stirred in a baldcypress nearby.

  Sherwin had finished lapping and now dunked his head fully underwater, which was unwise, because unlike Rafen, he did not have a coat, was barely able to make a fire, and was thus more likely to freeze. Yet now Sherwin couldn’t see him! Rafen leapt to his feet and plunged back into the hollies and stunted elms. He shot through them, putting as much distance between himself and the river as possible. After fifteen minutes of mad running, Rafen paused in a crowded green grove. He leaned against a basswood tree, panting.

  Thud-thud-thud-thud.

  Unbelievably, Sherwin was catching up. Rafen would have preferred to see a Tarhian. Turning his back on the trees from which the sound came, he allowed the transformation to wash over him. He hated himself for doing it, because it was the Wolf, in the end, who had killed Erasmus. Yet Rafen really had nothing else left. He fell to the ground on paws and bolted through the trees, away from Sherwin’s footsteps.

  Though it took him five minutes to escape Sherwin, Rafen kept running for an hour, deeper into the Woods, always keeping near the river. He had learned from experience – and Erasmus – that Creatures dwelt in the deeps of the Woods, and they were not friendly to people. Tree spirits, changelings, dragons, chirops (a type of goblin with bat wings), and whistlers (a thieving moth-like thing with the tiny form of a person) had all been seen there. The worst were the oxalum – nasty little potato-headed creatures that ate everything in sight, including people. Oxalum also had paralyzing poison in their fangs. They hated water, so Rafen stayed close to the river, sometimes running the length of it, other times crossing it and gamboling in the shade. When he had had enough, he transformed and lay on the bank opposite where he had drank that morning.

  His stomach was cramped, and his romping left him languid. He realized he hadn’t eaten for two days, not since entering Sherwin’s world by mistake.

  He didn’t want to eat. He didn’t want to do anything. Even his desire to search for the Selsons had vanished. He wanted to find them, he really did, but something inside him said he couldn’t. The Lashki might be hunting in the Woods, and Rafen’s activity would increase their danger. What was more, how would Rafen be helping them by hiding with them?

  His mind wandered. Obviously, his actions for those few peasants had reached Talmon and Frankston. They had been angry enough to speak of it to the Lashki. And the Lashki had captured Erasmus and done Zion knew what to him before handing him over to Talmon, who had framed him for Rafen’s supposed crimes. Rafen pressed his nose against the moist dirt with a groan.

  It was doubly his fault then, because his loud arguing had undoubtedly drawn the Lashki’s attention as well.

  If only he had listened…

  Gasping shallowly, Rafen rolled onto his side, staring at the fast ripples on the river. This couldn’t be entirely his fault; it wasn’t possible.

  His accusations fell on the Lashki, and Talmon and Frankston, and the Tarhians: all the intruders in Siana. It was them. A heaving, bubbling mass, his anger overflowed and covered images of individuals, until they melted into one slick whole. It was them, all of them were responsible for this. His arms shook. Lying there, he replayed memories of killing Tarhians. At the time, he had made quick work of it, savoring nothing. This time, he imagined drawing the whole thing out, making it as revolting as possible, humiliating those men to red pulp. His imagination moved from them to the bigger culprit, the Lashki. Alexander and Erasmus had wanted him to fight the Lashki, and it was so much easier in his mind than it was in reality.

  Rafen stirred. He had slept. Panicking, he sat up. He shouldn’t have slept here. It was too open. He rose to his feet, his body sluggish with cold.

  The sky was now dark, and the water lapped and swilled within the river banks in a sinister way. In the trees, an owl called.

  Rafen didn’t know what to do. With Erasmus, he had had aim: training, raising supporters, and eventually assaulting the enemy. Erasmus had even had contact with Alexander.

  Now there was nothing.

  The clouds burst, and frigid rain descended in gleaming curtains, antagonizing the river. Rafen walked along the bank, head bowed and face wet. He distinguished one spearhead of rational thought amid the senseless chaos in his head. Why?

  The rain fell thicker now, and thunder boomed vaguely around him.

  “WHY?” he shouted. “Zion, why are you doing this?” he screamed at the blank-faced clouds.

  Once Zion had answered him, even called him. Now He shut Rafen out. The rain kept falling. No answer materialized, though his demand was so urgent the world should have stopped to address it. He

  The scent of a person, which the Wolf in him detected, reached him. Someone was watching. Rafen glanced around. Sparkling, the swaying trees to his left and the blackened river to his right were lit up for one crazy second of lightning. A shivering form crouched in the hollow trunk of a baldcypress ahead. Rafen moved toward it, heart hammering.

  Lightning once more. Huddled in the encircling tree trunk, Sherwin was missing half his skull shirt. His wet hair hung slick and shiny over his pale face. Darkness fell again.

  “Is that yer?” Sherwin said, strangely subdued.

  Smelling blood, Rafen kneeled beside Sherwin, feeling his torso and arm. Sherwin submitted to his touch. His shoulder bore tooth marks, from
which a stream of sticky blood flowed. Rafen put his head against Sherwin’s chest, listening to his rasping, shallow breathing.

  He resurrected one of Erasmus’ oaths.

  Chapter Twelve

  Saving Sherwin

  “Get up,” he said, nudging Sherwin’s unharmed arm. “Up. Now.”

  Sherwin struggled to his feet, swaying. Rafen grabbed his healthy shoulder and shoved him through the baldcypresses and bluff oaks, making for a clearing hemmed in by squatting hawthorn. Reaching it, he propped Sherwin against a rock and flicked his fingers toward the center of the clearing. Sparks flew from his fingertips, landing and exploding in a dancing crowd of flames.

  Sherwin’s eyes were half-closed, and his mouth hung open. White foam had crusted on his lower lip. Rafen grabbed Sherwin’s left shoulder, from which his shirtsleeve had been torn. Blue-purple circles surrounded tooth marks. The skin around was pearl white. Sherwin had tied a strip of shirt tightly around his arm directly above the bite. Rafen knew it wouldn’t stop the poison traveling.

  Sherwin had been to the places Rafen had avoided that day.

  “Little brown thing,” he said inarticulately. “Bit me. Like… piranha.”

  “How long ago?” Rafen said, breathing fast.

  “Maybe… ten, fifteen minutes… dunno. Got lost. Chased by these… men. And then… brown things.”

  Rafen felt strangely hot. Sherwin was dying.

  “Zion please,” Rafen said. “Don’t let it happen.”

  Remembering some of Erasmus’ advice, Rafen grabbed Sherwin’s shoulder again. Sherwin moaned as Rafen sealed his lips around the tooth marks and sucked savagely, drawing his abdomen into his spine with the effort, siphoning out tangy, acidic liquid. Rafen spat violently onto the ground. Purpled blood bubbled on the twig-covered earth. He sucked again, spat again, sucked again, spat again. Sherwin’s eyelids drooped down. Rafen slapped his cheek. Sherwin cracked opened his eyes.