Tales of Arilland (5 page)

Harvest looked for the wolf every night, and every night it was there. It never approached the house, simply watched the house from the same spot at the opposite edge of the garden. Harvest felt an irrational kinship with the wolf. She imagined that they were both lonely, both burdened by responsibility, both waiting for something they weren’t exactly sure of, and both wanting something they knew they only had a slim chance of obtaining. But the hope was there.

Harvest began leaving food out for the wolf, sometimes not finishing her evening meal on purpose so that there would be scraps left. She walked them as far as she dared, to the near edge of the garden. She never saw the wolf’s eyes in the daylight and she never saw it eat, but come dawn the bowl was always empty.

The first night of the full moon, Harvest walked the bowl of scraps out to the garden and saw an old man standing where her wolf had been. Short, dark gray hair covered his skin evenly, barring shocks of pure white on his forehead and temples. He was darkness, but for his sharp teeth and those piercing yellow eyes. Harvest dropped the bowl and squeaked out a tiny shriek, immediately wishing she was a braver woman.

“I liked you better as a wolf,” she said.

The wolf-man laughed hoarsely at her statement, baring his mouthful of deadly teeth in the process. Harvest froze, ordering herself to remain calm and show no fear. This was one of the last times her baby would be able to feel her every emotion, and she refused to let cowardice be one of them.
See, baby, your mother is strong. One day, you will grow up and be this strong.

“You must come with me,” said the wolf-man.

“I do not have the dreams,” said Harvest. “That is my husband.”

“It is for your husband’s sake that you must come,” said the wolf-man. “I fear for the loss of your husband to the wolves.”

Harvest found his phrasing odd—it sounded more like the wolves would steal him away rather than kill him. “He will come back to me,” Harvest said defiantly.

“The wolves can be rather persuasive,” he said.

“He will come back to me,” Harvest repeated. “He promised.”

“Yes,” said the wolf-man. “But what if he is not capable of keeping that promise? What if he needs your help?”

“Then I would come with you,” said Harvest without hesitation. She pulled her kerchief from the pocket of her apron, tied her hair back, and walked across the garden to the wolf-man’s side. With a nod and a blur that sparked through the hair on her arms, he quietly transformed back into a wolf and bound into the darkness, leading Harvest step by trotting step to the heart of the Wild Wood.

She followed him to the top of the hill that overlooked the Wood, recalling the many evenings she had sat with Bane and Aurelia or softly sang along while they serenaded the sunset. Harvest had a small voice, like a chickadee, but her notes still rang true. Aurelia had the voice of a whippoorwill, throaty and loud, with seemingly endless stamina. Bane’s voice was a dove’s, low and haunting. When he sang of love it made her yearn, and when he sang of loss it made her cry. Harvest placed a hand on the cool, smooth bark of the tree where she had sat to watch him, an invisible silhouette against the moon, and she felt both those things. The wolf huffed to get her attention and she followed him down the hill, into the Wood.

The pair of them made good time, for all that she was so heavily pregnant and he was so terribly impatient. The wolf would growl every time she had to stop to rest, but she knew him for the old man he was and could tell it was all bluster. He growled as well when she paused to look for herbs: greens to keep her strong and flowers to keep her nourished and roots to keep the baby from kicking his way out of the womb before she was ready. Before her beloved sweetheart fulfilled his promise.

They walked in fits and starts until dusk of the next day, or when the trees grew so thick it was hard to tell when day ended and night began. Harvest found a mossy patch on the north side of a large tree that seemed the least rocky and bug-infested. She sat with her back to the tree and crossed her arms over her belly. She wished she had thought to bring a blanket, or a slice of bread, or a chunk of cheese, or her sanity. She wished she had something of Bane’s with her, something that might draw him like a lodestone. Something that might speak to him if he could no longer understand her words. The baby flipped over inside her, settling down for the night and reminding her that she did have something of Bane’s. The most important thing of all.

She shivered again and the wolf approached her, slinking out of the shadows with his head and tail down to show that he was not a threat. Not knowing the proper way of things, Harvest risked stroking the wolf’s muzzle with a gentle hand. The shock of white stared up at her like a third eye seeking deep into her soul. His charcoal fur was thick and rough and smelled of pine and grass and dirt and musk and blood and strength and ferocity.
You have some of that strength in you, baby. One day you will grow up to be this strong
. She sighed.
And one day, I hope your beloved is not chasing you into the Wild Wood
.

The wolf knelt down and laid that giant, dark head full of teeth in her lap. Harvest stroked his fur absentmindedly and let his warmth seep down through her legs and up through her belly into her neck and shoulders and arms. Still worried, yet safe from harm, Harvest let herself sleep.

It took Harvest and the wolf less than five days to reach Bane’s rock, as they were tracking prey and not lost or wandering or falling asleep and waking up somewhere else every other evening. And all the strength and all the stamina Harvest had been absorbing from the moon and the wolf and the Wood suddenly left her. She stretched her arms up until she felt her shoulders pop, pulled her husband’s fiddle down from the rock, and collapsed. The tears she shed over the mahogany fell in the same places as the tears he had shed over her, before he had transformed into a beast that did not keep promises because he no longer knew what promises were.

Grief and fear and sadness overtook Harvest, seizing her body in violent spasms, and the babe—rightfully so—decided he wanted no part of it. Harvest screamed into the empty daylight. The wolf snapped at the air in frustration. The ground beneath her, already damp with her tears, now muddied with the babe’s rushing preamble. “Come back to me,” she whispered to no one. “Sweetheart, come back to me.”

The old wolf was gone even before she finished speaking, leaving Harvest alone with only the wind and the air and what courage she was able to summon between bouts of racking pain. Her baby was tearing her body apart, her husband had shattered her heart, and she had clearly lost her mind. She wondered how much of her soul had to be torn away before even the gods didn’t recognize her anymore. She wondered about the color of the sky, and exactly how much grass she could pull up with one handful. She thought about her own mother, and Bane’s. She thought about the tune they played to sing down the sun, the tune that called the wolves. The fiddle reminded her of the melody, but she couldn’t remember the words through the pain, so she made up her own.

Harvest laughed loud, giddy, hysterical, frantic, and on the next wave that lifted her back off the ground, she saw the wolf pack surrounding her. There was too much love and too much hate and too much of every other emotion warring inside Harvest for her to pick one. As there was only a half moon peeking through the twilight clouds, the female who spoke to her changed only her face so that her words might be understood. She sat neatly, with her long tail wrapped around her paws like a canine sphinx with a mouthful of knives.

For a moment, the pain was so sharp Harvest could not feel her legs. She broke a sweat maintaining a level voice. “Let him go.”

“Our cousin runs with us by choice,” said the face.

Harvest bit the inside of her lip until she tasted blood. She refused to lose her courage in the face of her adversary. As the pain tore through her in deeper, more frequent bursts, she repeated the only words left to her.

“Come back to me,” she asked the sky, for she knew not which wolf in the pack was her husband and that pain dwarfed the babe’s like a tear in a rainstorm. The charcoal wolf—her wolf—nudged one beast forward and she saw that its eyes were blue-green, not yet the bile amber-yellow of the rest of the pack.

“Come back to me,” she said to him. Her husband recognized her with those still-human eyes—eyes that had traveled just as hard a road as she—but she could tell he did not understand her words.

“Come back to me,” she whispered once more. It didn’t matter that he had left her. It didn’t matter that he now wore a skin of fur and walked on four legs. It didn’t matter that she had been forced to walk leagues to track him down. He was here and the babe wasn’t born yet; there was still time to keep his promise.

“If he returns to you,” said the sphinx, “he will forsake every part of his wolf blood.” The bitch had the nerve to preen after her statement. Had she been within arm’s reach, Harvest was sure she could have snapped her neck.

Harvest lay back on the rough ground. Invisible thorns pushed their way into the ends of every nerve in her body. She took deep breaths and saw pinpricks of light. Beyond them, a few bright stars sprinkled across the heavens like the rocks under her spine, stars she had wished on since she was old enough to know what wishing was for. “Go then,” she said to those stars. “For he has now forsaken me.”

A wolf approached her, but it was the charcoal gray. The elder brushed her neck with his muzzle, then leapt over her seizing body to follow the tails of the pack that had already left him behind.

Harvest broke her nails in the dirt and concentrated on the wind and the air and the babe tearing its way out of her.
Courage, little one
, she told it.
It’s just you and me, now
. Wind and air and pain. Breathe. Wind and air and pain. Breathe. Wind and air... and a hand on her forehead. She opened her eyes to see Bane standing over her, scrawny and shaggy and smelly. His blessedly furless skin was riddled with angry scratches and bruises as deep and purple as the skin beneath each of his blue-green eyes, and it was the most beautiful sight Harvest had ever seen.

The remnants of his wolf magic fled from his palm into her body, Harvest could taste and feel and smell and live it as it waned, healing her heart and filling her womb before it died completely. As her burdens lifted, the babe escaped her body in a rush of fluids. Bane wrapped his son in the blanket he had left behind and the three of them lay quietly together under the stars.

I
n addition
to a certain amount of strength, stamina, and the ability to see in the dark, Bane lost his voice. He still spoke a little, but his words growled out from low in the back of his throat. There would be no more singing for him. He could still play, though, and when the rest of his memories came back to him, he accompanied his mother to the top of the hill in the evenings to sing down the sun. Harvest made the journey as well, carrying baby Hunter until he was old enough to walk. She sang as well, and though her voice never carried the force of Aurelia’s, it grew from that of a chickadee into a lark.

It was spring before any of the wolves dared show their faces. When one did, it was that of the charcoal gray elder. He came to them at the full moon, and it seemed that his coat was sprinkled with far more white than Harvest had noticed previously. She was glad he had returned, so she could properly thank him for fetching her and protecting her. Bane was less happy about the wolf’s presence.

“Why are you here?” he snapped. For all that he was pure human now, he acted more like a wolf than before.

“I have come to ask your forgiveness,” said the elder. “Our female trapped you, and in doing so, she put you in danger.” He looked down at the babe Harvest cradled in her arms. “She put all three of you in danger.”

“I want nothing from you,” Bane growled.

“The gift is already given,” said the elder. “Whether or not you use it is up to you.”

“What is it?” asked Harvest.

“The gift is the song,” said the wolf. “We took much from you that made you valuable, and for that we must give something in return. Balance must be maintained.” He motioned down to the fiddle that hung at Bane’s side. “Play the song you know,” said the elder, “the song with which you farewell the day. The song with which you called the wolves. If you play the song as you walk through the Wood, no harm will come to you.”

“There is no song,” said Bane. “I can no longer sing.”

“The magic is in the melody,” the wolf said to him. And then to Harvest, “The words are yours alone.” He placed a palm on Bane’s chest. It startled him out of his scowl, but he did not flinch away. “You may not have yellow eyes, cousin, but you still have a golden heart. Perhaps one day you will find forgiveness there.” He let his hand fall. “Not today. But one day.” He turned to leave, but Harvest stopped him.