The Wolf

by Jean Johnson

  It was her.

  With a shrug, he transformed back to his human self. He had gone down to the beach to stare at the ocean, too restless to sleep, and had seen a shapeshifter changing shape on the beach.

  Alys studied him eagerly, drinking in the sight of his brown trousers, his gray tunic, and the untamable chest-length mane of mostly straight but thick, flyaway brown hair he had to deal with. Just as she had to deal with her own riot of old-gold curls.

  Wolfer blinked, assimilating her presence on the isle. “Alys?”

  Smiling, she stepped forward. So did he, as she nodded and spoke. “Yes, it’s me!”

  “Alys!” Wolfer broke into a grin. Charging forward, he caught her up in a bear hug, lifting her up off the ground and twirling his old playmate around. “Alys! Alys!”

  She shrieked and laughed, squirmed for enough room in his arms to breathe, then hugged him back. “Wolfer, oh Wolfer—I’ve missed you!”

  “I’ve missed you, too!” He cradled her body tightly to his, burying his face in her hair.

  Until his body started enjoying more than just their friendly reunion and started taking note of the breasts, the thighs, and the hips he held so close. Quickly, before she could realize he was hardening, he set her down and held her back from him. Ostensibly to take a look at her . . . though just looking at those curves, ones he couldn’t ever remember really seeing before, didn’t help matters.

  “You look—” Wrong topic! He dropped his hands from her shoulders and took a step back to gesture at her, seizing on her mode of arrival. “I didn’t know you had enough magic to change your shape!”

  “I finally settled into my power,” she admitted on a slight smile and a shrug. “It’s not much, but I can do it.”

  Wolfer looked around. “Did you have a ship, or come with any others? . . . Where is your uncle?”

  Alys was glad she could say what she had to say, at his less-than-happy tone for his last question. “I ran away.”

  Wolfer snapped his gaze back to hers. “You what?”

  She couldn’t tell him everything; if she did, she didn’t know how he would react—probably very, very badly, the moment he learned all the things she had had to do. They hadn’t seen each other in more than three years, and not too often in the years immediately before that. Since she had gone to live with her uncle, in fact. But she did trust him enough to tell him some things; there was no way she could not trust him.

  “I’ve hated every moment I’ve spent in my uncle’s house, Wolfer. He’s cruel and mean to a point you would not believe, and I’ve seen him do things that would shame your family, especially when your Uncle Daron died—”

  “Uncle Daron died?” Wolfer interrupted, frowning at her. “Who sits in Corvis, now?”

  She didn’t want to say it. But she had to. “Uncle Broger. He’s been the new Count of Corvis for almost three years, now. Pro tem,” she added quickly, as his chest rumbled, increasing in volume. “But he’s been acting as if it were the real . . . thing.”

  Wolfer cut off his reflexive growl, as her voice trailed off with that timidity he remembered so well from her. Gentle Alys. Honest Alys. He reined in his rage, automatically touching the bracelet she had given him years ago. “We have been receiving letters from our father’s brother, all this time. Daron has been claiming that everything is mostly fine.”

  Alys closed her eyes and nodded. “He’s like that,” she confessed under her breath, understating the matter thoroughly. She shook her head. “You don’t know what I’ve been through . . .” Opening her eyes, she looked up at him. “I could only think of one place to go, to escape him. To you—to Nightfall,” she added quickly, stepping forward and laying her hand on his folded arm. “Please, Wolfer, please let me stay with you? I have nowhere else to go.”

  He couldn’t resist her soft pleading; he never had been able to. There was something about Alys of Devries that had always softened him toward her, made him look out for her, ever since their first meeting when he had comforted her over a skinned knee. Her request would have been a difficult thing to grant, if this had been nearly two months ago, though Wolfer would have tried.

  Before Kelly of Doyle had arrived, Saber would have tossed her off the island, for fear she might be the woman bringing his prophesied Disaster upon him. That Disaster had already come to them, forewarned by the arrival of the outworlder woman Kelly and triggered in the form of the Dominor-kidnapping Mandarites that had visited them just half a dozen days ago.

  Newly wed, the eldest of the eight brothers had softened his stance toward women living on the isle. One couldn’t escape one’s Destiny, after all . . . and thankfully, there was only one Disaster predicted.

  “Come,” he told her, holding out his hand. “We’ll go up to the castle and let everyone know you are here.”

  “Will there be food up there?” she asked wistfully, as she took his hand and started walking with him, though she didn’t see any castle on the green-covered mountainside before them. “And water? I haven’t eaten since noon yesterday . . .”

  “Plenty of food, but it will take us some time to walk there—”

  Alys tugged him to a stop. “Why don’t we just change our shapes and fly there? It would be faster.”

  He flushed with embarrassment. Making her blink and stare. “I’m only just learning how to fly, and I’m not very good at it.”

  Her brows rose at that. “You’ve been a shapeshifter in full for, what, ten, eleven years, and you haven’t got a winged form?”

  “I’m afraid of heights,” he mumbled. At her skeptical look, he clarified. “High heights. Cloud-height. Towers and trees, I can manage—and don’t you laugh at me, Alys; it wasn’t that long ago I locked your head under my arm and tried to start a fire in your curls with my knuckles!”

  “Oh, I’m not laughing at you,” she promised, eyes lowered demurely. Though for a moment he almost swore she had started to smile, before an oddly bland expression covered it up. A moment more beyond that, and her features relaxed into their normal expressiveness. “I have a pookrah form that can run really fast, faster than a wolf—”

  “Pookrah?” Wolfer demanded. “What made you choose such an idiotic form, Alys? Do you want an army of mage-warriors on your trail, determined to kill you before they think you’ll kill them?”

  She shook her head; oddly, his anger gave her the courage to explain, instead of shrink back from him. Probably because she could tell it was out of his caring for her safety. “I had to learn how to make a pookrah shape, to escape my uncle. You don’t know what it’s been like, Wolfer—I had to create an illusion that a pookrah pack abducted me, then run off in pookrah form to leave a trail of paw prints behind, if multiplied many times by a spell, so that everyone would think I was dead.”

  “Why in Jinga’s Name would you do that?” he demanded.

  Shaking her head, Alys unclasped her cloak, then tugged down the demurely high neckline of her gown, just enough to reveal the four-point star of metal there. “I had to create this. It’s a very special amulet; it severed all ties to my uncle. Every spell he placed on me, to obey him, to never run away, every spell set to find me, to tell him where I am, to allow him to scry for me—he could feel through the aether that his blood-kin is alive, though I am ashamed to be of his family.

  “I had to create the illusion of the pookrah pack so that his soldiers witnessed me being dragged away from our camp, then enspell this pendant to my flesh, so that my uncle would then believe me to be dead, killed in the attack.” She lifted her anguished gray eyes to his golden ones, willing him to understand how much she couldn’t yet say of what her life had been like, through what horrors she could relate. “I did my best to put him off, but he sold me, Wolfer. He sold me in marriage to the Baron of Glourick for land, for spell ingredients, and chests filled with gilder. And he had enough spells wrapped on me to enforce his will and bring me back if I simply ran without planning anything.

  “So I planned very, very carefully
and made my escape. I have nowhere else to go—I even saw my Uncle Donnock in Orovalis City just a day ago, though he didn’t see me, thankfully. You don’t know what I’ve been through. Please, let me stay!”

  Wolfer growled softly again, but this time in impatience at her begging. “I’ve already told you that you could. And your uncle should be whipped to the bone for treating you that way. Women are not chattel!”

  Her face melted into a smile, and she threw herself at him, wrapping her arms around his broad chest. Wolfer hugged her back, until the traitor in his breeches insisted she wasn’t just his childhood friend anymore. Easing her away, he was grateful when she ducked her head and stepped back.

  “I think I can remember a horse form, though it’s been a little while,” he rumbled, trying not to let her know how embarrassed he was by being aroused by her mere closeness—it was his blasted twin’s fault, after all, taking his wife to bed so often and so vigorously every one of his brothers could hear it more often than not, and thus remember their own state of uncomfortable celibacy.

  “I’m not very good at riding anymore, so you’ll have to promise not to throw me,” Alys warned him. “Uncle never let me go out riding very much, unless I absolutely had to go somewhere.”

  He started to growl at that, broke off to touch his left wrist . . . and raised it with a faint, sheepish smile as she glanced down in curiosity. “I’m still wearing it, your gift to me. You’ve probably saved my brothers from a lot of grief over these past three years. I’ve learned how to control my temper, touching it and thinking of you.” His smile shifted to a wolfish one. “At least, I control it a little bit.”

  She smiled and stroked the braid, first one way, against the grain of her old gift of hair, then with it, trailing her fingertip all the way around. Just that touch, indirect and not even on his skin, made Wolfer want to shiver, to feel more. He lowered his arm, cleared his throat, and concentrated.

  A moment later, he stood before her, a brown-coated, golden-eyed stallion. Luckily, she got too busy trying to mount him to look below his hindquarters. Trying to get up onto his back. She hopped and squirmed and tugged gingerly on his withers, but never quite made it all the way up, always dropping back into the sand with a thump.

  “I can’t get up on you!” she finally exclaimed, whapping him lightly in the shoulder. “You’re too big, Wolfer!” As he whuffled her hair with his muzzle, she twined her fingers in his mane and tugged him up the beach. There was a rock nearby on the southern spur of land, where the sand turned to pebbles, then stones, and jutted out into the bay a little ways, dividing it from the next sandy gray white bay with a low finger of somewhat rocky land. Climbing up onto a small boulder, she tugged him a little closer, tried to get on, then blushed and gripped her skirt. “Look away, Wolfer; you’re not wearing a sidesaddle, and my skirt isn’t exactly sewn wide enough for this.”

  Snorting, he swung his head away and watched her hike her plain brown skirt up above her knees anyway, with his excellent equine peripheral vision. There was an awkward moment of boot and knee and elbow, of a hand fisted in his mane for balance and control, and then she slid home on his back, settling perfectly in place just behind his withers. Just the thought of his spine being where another part of him wanted to be . . .

  He snorted again, glad she was on his back now and couldn’t see under his belly. That’s the gods-be-damned problem of being a shapechanging male; most animal forms are not designed for physical privacy. The mage silently berated himself for being unreasonably randy, just because there was now an unattached female on the island again. Never mind that he hadn’t felt anything for his brother’s wife, Kelly, when she had first arrived, before his twin had come to his senses and claimed the petite virago. Shuddering in an equine sigh, Wolfer started toward the line of trees bordering the beach.

  When he stopped and nudged a tree, it took Alys a few moments to realize he was indicating that the tree they were under had edible, ripe fruit on it. She had been marveling at the feel of riding bareback for the first time in her life and what it did to her, knowing on whose back she was riding, to the various intimate parts Cari had explained to her. Hungry, she exclaimed her thanks and plucked a trio of the fruits, trusting him to carry her gently while she peeled away the rinds with her fingers and bit into the flesh hidden by the pulpy skin. She was starving, and the fruit was tangy-sweet, succulent.

  While he crested the rise and dropped down to stride on the damp-firm sand near the waterline in the next bay, Alys ate her breakfast, rocked gently on his smooth-striding back. She mmmed and she ahhed, and she moaned and sucked her fingers, reveling in food, real food, her first meal since the middle of the day before . . . and stopped with about half of the third fruit left to go, realizing that Wolfer wasn’t moving anymore.

  It slowly dawned on Alys that she had just made many of the sounds the wench Cari had demonstrated for her, the ways women often vocally expressed their passion. For a long, long moment, they were perfectly still together, he standing as stiff as a statue, she sitting as tight as a sculpture. Their shadow stretched out to the right, away from the morning sun.

  Something about that stretch of gray caught her attention, but when she glanced that way, it took her a few moments to realize exactly what that something was. Horses only had four legs, and their tail. Since all four of his hooves were planted firmly on the sand, and his tail was that shadowy fall at the back, stretched out on the sand by the morning sun, that shadowy bit stretching out perpendicularly between his four legs could only . . . be . . .

  Oh my . . . She was not ignorant of equine anatomy. Male equine anatomy. Alys barely breathed, waiting for revulsion to hit her. Her long and frank discussion with Cari seemed to have worked, though; she felt hot and liquid instead, not sickened and disgusted, especially by how his back spread her thighs wide. Where his spine rubbed against her mound. Her body relaxed, accepting that fact, knowing before she consciously did that she accepted it.

  Then her mind caught up, and her heart skipped a beat.

  He wanted her.

  Well, either it’s that, or it’s just morning, and Cari said men are more “ready and able” in the morning . . . Oh, but Kata, I hope it’s me! Alys prayed . . . because she had been in love with Wolfer of Corvis, now Wolfer of Nightfall, ever since they had met when he was eight and she was three.

  She still clearly remembered their first meeting. She had wobbled across one of the castle’s courtyards, while her parents had been visiting to attend to some business affairs with the count and countess, shortly after moving away from her uncle’s region of Katan. Toddling about on the flagstones, Alys had fallen and scraped her knee. Wolfer had come along, seen her on her bottom and clutching her knee, bawling at the little scratch that had already stopped bleeding, and had picked her up in his young arms. He had dusted her off, hugged her to make her feel better, and helped the three-year-old Alys onto his small but growing eight-year-old back for a cheer-her-up piggyback ride.

  From that point on, Alys was his.

  Not normally adventuresome, she had joined in his and his brothers’ playing, because he had been in those games. She had pestered her parents until they visited often, more often than they had reasons of their own to, all so she could play with Wolfer, her friend. Wolfer, her hero. Wolfer, who had paid attention to her when his brothers didn’t always want to play with a little girl, at that girls-are-icky stage young boys often went through. Wolfer, who had taught her how to hold a knife and how to climb a tree . . . and who had allowed her to try four kisses on him when she was just beginning to blossom with female curves and everything. Before her parents had died, before her eldest uncle had taken her away, and before everything had changed . . . he had been hers, though only she had known about it.

  Finally, Wolfer snorted and shook his head and started across the sand again at a walk. A discreet glance at the shadow dancing across the sand showed he wasn’t as aroused anymore. Disappointed, she finished the last half of her b
reakfast fruit in silence and discarded the peel to the tide and sand. Licking her fingers as clean as possible, she shifted the grip of her thighs, sat forward a little, and twined her fingers in his mane.

  “I, um . . . thanks for breakfast! I haven’t eaten since noon yesterday,” she avowed in a rush. “You could, uh, try a canter, now. If you wanted to.”

  What Wolfer wanted was to get her off his back and onto hers in the sand. Snorting, he lunged into a canter, hoping a good run would get the urge out of his system, as exercise often had in his three years of exiled celibacy. She yelped and clutched him with those thighs of hers, her fingers twining in his mane. He smoothed his gait enough for her to get used to his rhythm, which she did fairly quickly. He moved faster when she laughed and leaned forward more, moving with him in the exhilaration of their race over the beach.

  “Faster! Faster!” Excited by the wild bareback ride, Alys felt no fear as he pounded across the sand, rocking smoothly, swiftly under her; this was her Wolfer, and she trusted him completely. The rhythm of his run rocked her back and forth, forward and back, and just a little from side to side; Alys was glad she was wearing knee-length under-trousers, because of the friction.

  The rubbing motion felt wonderful, actually. As he lunged up the next low slope to the next cove, she shrieked and ducked low against his mane to avoid the oversized, overgrown, almost tropical leaves. Thin branches whipped at her body while they dashed through a short stretch of the jungle to get to the next stretch of beach.

  The new position increased the pressure against the “pleasure pearl” that Cari had talked about—which looked nothing like a pearl, but was supposed to be as treasured and priceless as one for a woman, according to the wench. At least, Alys was fairly sure it had to be her pleasure pearl. Shivers of silk-like lightning crawled up through her veins, tickling her heart, her spine, and all over that place between her legs, deep inside as well as out on the surface. She shuddered, biting back a cry at the last moment as everything coalesced in a roll of ecstatic, silent thunder. Her eyes closed for a long moment, then snapped wide in shock.