Wolf-Days

  The hut was a stone’s throw from the village proper, tucked against the rocky slope where the tree line began. This had been Albi’s idea; she was tired of living within the village palisade. And now, with Hroth taking the Alpha’s longhouse, they had no excuse to imprison themselves inside and every reason to leave.

  The hut was built by the strong hands of Bodolf himself—the omega who had challenged Hrolfr the Cruel. Its walls were river-rock, moss-chinked and cold to the touch. The roof was sod and ancient thatch, sagging in the middle like a weary back. Albi had swept out decades of dust and mouse-nests, scrubbed the hearthstone until it shone pale grey, and hung bundles of drying tansy and mint from the blackened rafters until the air inside only held the chill of stone, the tang of herbs, and the warm, sweet smell of Isangrim’s sleep.

  Three moons had passed since Fenris had howled his surrender in the clearing. Two since the wolves of Deep Water had returned to their ancestral grounds, making their dens in the eastern hollow of the village where their forebears had lived before pride drove them down the mountain. They came not as conquering warriors, but as a people displaced: hollow-eyed elders, women with babes at their breasts, men whose hands were better suited to nets and fishing spears than to axes. Children who knew little about walking on mud and rock when all they’d known river stone and marsh.

  Fenris had buried Asger and Vgar by the creek. He had sent for Asger’s Hunters, half-expecting them to ignore the call, but they came. Torvald and Freki were the first to arrive. They were joined by Bor, whose great shoulders strained with each swing of the shovel, though Fenris had seen him carry elks and bears with better ease. Erlend and Erland came down the path to the creek with Rusk, solemn and red-eyed from his newborn who had been born only the night before. Others trickled in over time after them.

  They dug in turns, the thud-thud-thud of iron biting into thaw-softened earth keeping time with the steady creaking of the willows bending to the wind. Sweat stung their eyes, and the rich, dark smell of upturned soil filled the clearing. It was hard, honest labor. It was a true warrior’s send-off.

  When the hole was deep enough to keep the carrion-eaters at bay, they lifted Asger and Vgar’s body, and laid them both together. Haggatha and Yglr had washed them both in the icy creek water, scrubbing the battle and blood from their skin until they were clean and pale and strangely young-looking in their deaths.

  Over Asger’s naked form, which lay closest to the top, they draped a pelt; the sacred white wolf pelts kept for such passings—a symbol of the Great Mother opening her arms to receive one of her own. The winter-white fur seemed to glow against the dark earth; a stark and pure shroud.

  Fenris waited until the pelt was settled. Then he turned to the small, rigid figure of Torin, Asger’s son. The boy’s face was pale and his storm-gray eyes held Asger immortalized within him. They were dry and too wide, as if he had forgotten how to blink. In Fenris’s hands was Asger’s cloak. It was a heavy, oiled leather he had worn in man-form, scarred from brambles and stained with old campfires, the fur at the collar worn thin from use.

  Fenris knelt before the boy, the damp earth cold through his breeches. He did not speak at first. He simply unfolded the cloak and swept it around Torin’s narrow shoulders. It was far too big. The hem pooled on the ground, and the weight of it made the boy stagger a half-step before he caught his balance. He looked drowned in it; a child playing at being a man. But that was the point.

  Fenris rose, his hand resting on Torin’s cloaked shoulder. He looked not at the boy, but at the faces gathered around the raw earth—Haggatha, Lilla and Yglr, holding each other; and the hunters with their heads respectfully bowed and old Jorik leaning on his freshly carved, wolf-headed cane.

  “Asger and I were pups together,” Fenris began, his voice low but carrying over the water’s sound. “Our mothers would nurse us side by side before the great front hearth in the Alpha’s longhouse. We fought as boys with wooden swords and fake claws. Then we hunted together as wolf-men. I was there when he had his First Change. He was there when I had mine. He had a temper on him, hot as a forge-fire. But there was no cruelty in it. I always knew that. Anyone who really knew him did. He was a wolf of bravery; a wolf of fierceness—for his family, for his pack.” His gaze found Haggatha. “He also had heart. He was fair to the slaves of his house. I respected him dearly for the way he worried over his father on his death-furs. It had been I who walked him from his home-hut while he held back the grief-tears he did not want to shed in front of me. We grew apart, but…we grew up together.” He paused, his throat working. “I wish I had been stronger. In whatever way I should have so that he would have lived. I will carry his death, and his brother’s, on my shoulders until the day I am too bent to carry it and the Mother pelt covers me, too.” He looked down at Torin, then back to Haggatha. “We did not always see eye to eye, your mate and I. But we were brothers. It did not matter where our eyes laid, as long as our hearts were sure. I loved him. I truly did.”

  For a long moment, Haggatha searched his face, her own a mask of flint. Then she stepped forward and pulled Fenris into a fierce, brief embrace. Her body was tense as she fought to suppress her sobs. It was for her children, Fenris knew, that she willed herself to be strong. When she pulled back, her eyes were dry but brighter. “There will be no bad blood between our families,” she promised, her voice rough. “The Deep Water wolves are here now. They outnumber us. We must stay together. You have my honor on that. For my children, and for yours. You will always be our Alpha, Fenris. I know you will try to fix things, I know you will find a way. I will support you, with whatever it is you need. We all will.” It was more than forgiveness; it was more than Fenris deserved.

  The old warrior limped forward, his cane sinking into the soft earth. He looked at Torin, who was standing very still under the immense weight of his father’s cloak.

  “Your father was a fine hunter,” Jorik said, his voice like stones grinding together. “But a pack needs more than those who can kill. It needs wise heads who can lead. Hilda and I are teaching Alfric the Old Stories, and the Old Laws; and all the ways of leading men through heart and tongue when the sword is not enough, and rarely it ever is.” He nodded toward Haggatha, “I would like to take your lad on as well, Haggatha. As my apprentice.”

  Haggatha looked from Jorik to her son. She gave a single, sharp nod. “He will do it. That will be good for him, Jorik.”

  Torin, his small face serious beneath the drape of the oversized cloak, looked up at Jorik, and nodded once as his mother had, the movement causing the heavy leather to shift on his shoulders. “I will, Elder Jorik.” he said, his voice clear and firm, a man’s answer from his boy's throat.

  Fenris placed the first stone from the riverbed on Asger’s white-shrouded chest. One by one, the others followed; Torvald, Freki, Bor, the twins, Rusk, and on, each adding a smooth, water-worn stone until a cairn began to form. Then they took up the shovels again, and the dark, sweet-smelling earth began to fall, covering the white pelt, covering the stones, covering their brother. In the end was the soft murmur of the water murmuring over the creek rocks; a sound as endless as death.

  In the weeks that followed after Fenris’s surrender and return to Black Rock, life in the village re-formed itself around the new, heavy silence where his formal authority had once resided. It did not vanish; it simply went underground, flowing through the settlement like a hidden spring. Albi had been right. The pledges whispered at Asger’s graveside were not the last.

  Men came to him, but never in the open light. The wolf-men of Black Rock were loyal to their laws, and breaking them, even quietly as they did, was done as if in shame. They sought him in the grey hours—in the damp chill of dawn as he broke the ice on the water barrel, or in the deep dusk by the woodpile, their faces hooded and their voices low. Their troubles were no longer matters of war and vengeance, but the gritty, domestic friction of two peoples forced to live side by side when they’d been a day’s man-walk apart.

  A Deep Water hunter, Gunnar had said, killed a prime elk that Egil, one of Asger’s Hunters, had been tracking for days. The Deep Water hunter had cited some obscure hunting tradition of first-blood right that contradicted the Black Rock’s on the matter. Lyris, a rather irritable shopkeep, had beaten her laundry out on the smooth stones of the creek, downriver from where Deep Water women were making their woad dyes, and unforgivably, harsh words had been traded over her blue sullied linens. There were disputes over the use of the large grinding stone, of which there was only one in the village. Arguments over the allocation of land, tift-tats over the way the Deep Water children played their rough, shrieking games too close to the smokehouses and Elders huts; of which, Hilda had gotten a good tongue-thrashing from a Deep Water mother when she’d taken matters into her own gnarled hands and hit one of their sons.

  Their ways were subtly, maddeningly different. The Deep Water wolves spoke with a thicker, more lilted accent, rounding and drawing out their words where the Black Rock tongue tended to clip short and was more gutteral. Erland had threatened to take both his own ears if he had to endure another tavern conversation with a Deep Water drunkard. They seasoned their stews with pungent, unfamiliar roots that made the whole settlement smell foreign. Their mourning rituals included keening wails that lasted long through the night, unsettling the Black Rock folk who were accustomed to a quieter, more private way of grieving. And, according to Elitha, between her newborn having the colic and the mourning wails of her neighbor, she was going to become mad by lack of sleep; I have want to be gravely concerned, Fenris, there is always someone a’dying over there. If we could figure it out maybe they would shut the fuck up and let me sleep. Or it was that they did not orient their beds north-south, as was traditional for a peaceful sleep in Black Rock, but east-west, which some of the Elders muttered was an affront to the Great Mother’s path across the sky.

  Fenris listened and tried to keep his face a patient mask when he had had little of it left. He offered what advice he could for their troubles; an order to share, to yield, to take turns, to try to understand. And when he was tired and had not an inkling what to say anymore, it was Albi who knew, and would whisper it privately to him through their mind-talk so that no eyes would ever veer from him alone. The weight of all their loyal faith was a yoke he had not shrugged off in exile; and if anything, it had grown heavier, forged from a thousand small, necessary compromises.

  Fenris, in the quieter places only Albi knew, regretted his own ambition.

  One afternoon at the beginning of their Summer season, the she-wolves and slave women started trekking down the path to his hut in broad daylight, uncaring who saw or didn’t. They were coming for Albi, who had taken a sharp interest in the lives of Black Rock’s wolf-mothers and slave-mothers. The children of Black Rock had taken ill, exposed to Deep Water’s new diseases. Whelps came with fevered brows and racking coughs; small bodies burning in the furs of their mothers’ arms. Slave children and Old slaves both were given brief refuge on furs before their hearth while they clung desperately to life.

  “Where are Black Rock’s healers and mid-wives?” Albi had asked Bolga, who brought Elka’s feverish young daughter to her at the command of Rusk.

  “They are overwhelmed. There are too many who need of them.”

  “I heard from my sweet Agnes working in the Longhouse that Hroth has seen the superiority of our healers over our land and herbs and all their uses, and has commanded them to focus on Deep Water wolves alone.” Minsa had told this to Albi, sipping the medicine broth Albi brought to the old slaves' trembling lips.

  “It is a decisive cruelty.” Albi had said through clenched teeth, “they have plenty their own healers and mid-wives, and if they will not lend their hand to help Black Rock, what does he believe will happen? Is he the Alpha of Deep Water or of Skoltha whole?”

  “It is not for a slave to say,” Minsa pressed her lips together into a hard frown that answered Albi’s fierce look anyway.

  It had been Fenris who dug the old slave’s grave when Minsa passed of her wet-lungs, and Albi had cried through the night afterwards for her. In the morning, against Fenris’s strict command, Albi had marched herself straight through the palisade into Black Rock and told Hroth, who’d been bathing in her bedchamber basin, exactly where he could put his healers and mid-wives if he wasn’t going to use them, and that she would gladly rip his throat out where he soaked unless he relented to leaving their people alone so they could help themselves; since it appears, Alpha of Skoltha entire, you give not a damn about your own pack.

  Hroth must have found his half-sister amusing that day, because it had worked; and from then on, the mothers and old women started visiting Albi less and less.

  Fenris watched after her, he always did, but it was Albi who watched him the more now. She felt the hollow hunger in him after a long day. The soreness of his throat when parched and forgotten to drink. She saw the weariness in the slope of his shoulders when he returned from the village after mediating some petty quarrel or another.

  You would still find worry, she had once told him. And though she knew he would, that he must, she wished, with a fierceness that ached, that the weight did not seem bent on crushing him.

  Hroth, thankfully, paid him less mind than his half-sister; who he often sent for, and was promptly refused, requesting her company for a break-fast or a mid-day meal. But soon the new Alpha was consumed with the issue of the wolf-hunters and his calls for Albi waned. They’d begun pushing past the riverlands, their numbers swelling. Hroth’s hatred of humans was no idle boast; it was a weapon that he fully meant to wield. His war councils lasted deep into the night, Jorik had told Fenris, the longhouse glowing like a tired forge. Fenris heard of the wolves Hroth lost, and of the battles he won from afar. Hroth had not asked for him to be part of it, and for now, this was fine; there had been no more deaths of his people, and Fenris’s quiet hut in the western shadow might as well have been in another world.

  Fenris got to taking Isangrim on early walks through the village; dawn was the best time for this, so that the Deep Water children would not scare him with their loud play, and so the Water’s loud tavern music did not assault his small ears grown accustomed to quiet. He saw not the invaders of his people’s complaints, but farmers mending fences, fishers mending nets to attract new kinds of fish from the creek, children with the same wide eyes as the Black Rock young, tentatively playing with newfound friends. To Fenris, when taken as a whole, the meshing of the two sister packs was a peaceful blend more than a harsh one. Deep Water’s people were not Deep Water’s leaders, and the village, once echoing with empty spaces, now thrummed with a warm vitality.

  It wasn’t until the end of Summer, after the Black Rock and Deep Water packs settled and learned one another’s rhythms, that Fenris had, for the first time in his life, stretches of time that belonged to no one but himself. Days could pass without a single cloaked figure haunting his dusk or dawn with their grievances. The vast, unclaimed silence of these empty hours was both a wonder and a disquiet. For a man could lose his purpose in such stillness.

  To fill it, he turned to the hut. Bodolf’s old home was a sturdy thing of notched logs and hard-packed earth and built by a stubborn man who valued function over grace. It was for this reason alone that the hut had survived over so much time. The hearthstone was a single, massive slab of slate, its surface worn smooth by decades of boot soles and cookpots. Carved into its edge, almost worn away, were the faint, swirling lines of a story—Bodolf’s own, perhaps, or some older tale. Fenris left it untouched, a ghost in the stone. He spent days chinking gaps in the walls with new clay, adding a loft above the main room for storage and Albi’s quiet domain. She directed him with a patient certainty he lacked, sending him into the woods for bundles of sweet-grass to weave into mats, or for swathes of lichen she could use to dye linen and hang on their narrow windows. He was no decorator; his idea of improvement was a new, stronger door-hasp, but he fetched what she asked for, and in the doing, the space became theirs through her vision.

  Behind their hut, where the tree-line grudgingly gave way, Albi had scratched a garden from the stubborn, rocky soil. It was Fenris who broke the earth, his already sore back protesting as he wrestled stones from the ground, heaping them into a low, crooked wall. It was Albi who knelt afterward, her hands black with dirt, working a mixture of ash from their fire, crushed eggshells from Haggatha’s hens, and dried out manure, down into the sour earth.

  This soil is no good, fierce one. He’d told her, exhaustingly.

  It just needs to remember how to be alive. That is all. Leave me be. She’d said back sternly, and he did, lightly smacking her bottom while she bent over.

  They planted late, to Fenris’s despair, but Albi carried always a maddeningly determined hope. And sure as the Great Mother, rows of tough, blue-green kale took root, their leaves ruffled like the feathers of some strange bird. Turnips and radishes were sown where the soil was deepest and sprouted green shoots, their promise hidden safely underground. Albi had poked the holes with a sharpened stick, her pale brow furrowed and her movements dramatically precise, while Fenris—or sometimes a solemn, mud-smeared Isangrim held carefully in his arms—dropped the seeds into the hole she’d made, one by one; a quiet, shared liturgy between them.

  Albi had not wanted animals. It had been Fenris who procured them for her anyway, through a complex web of new alliances. Bor had brought two nanny goats, one slung over each of his large shoulders, their horns swept back like wicked smiles. The smaller, a dun-colored thing with clever eyes, took an instant dislike to Fenris, butting him in the thigh angrily whenever he turned his back. It was this animal, and no other, that Albi admired; a sentiment that the piss-goat seemed to share, as she would come to Albi’s call at will, nudging her hand for the dried apple slices she saved for it.

  Torin had soon after brought them down five half-grown chicks from his mother’s coop. They were loaded into a mesh-wrapped cage set upon the barrow he wheeled unsteadily through the soft grass down the rise. He had not seen the rock half-sunken before him, but the rickety wheel of the old cart had found it with a jarring spasm that tilted over boy and barrow both, scattering the chicks about the clearing.

  If they wish to be free, let them. Albi had begged; though they’d spent near the entire rest of the afternoon trying to gather them all back together again. Albi had no affection for them left after that; they were scrawny things besides, and pecked incessantly at everything. Torin, to his young credit, had apologetically stayed to help them build a pen for their new animal kingdom; a wide square of carefully woven hazel wands that trembled whenever the piss-goat leaned purposefully against them in defiance.

  It was in this little kingdom that Isangrim had chosen to declare his official independence on one particularly hot summer day. Fenris was mending a stretch of the hazel wall, booting away, off and on, a chick trying to peck at Isangrim’s toes. He felt a small, determined weight leave his thigh and he looked down. Isangrim swayed like a sapling in a high wind, his fat arms held out for balance as the focus of his dark amber eyes fixed with absolute concentration on a plump, oblivious chick scratching in the dirt three paces away. He took one wobbling step. Then another. On the third, his momentum overtook him and he pitched forward, landing with a soft thump face-first in the loam. The chick, startled, had fluttered away with an indignant squawk.

  Albi, who had been weeding between the kale rows, had happen-chance to see the entire miraculous event with Fenris and froze. A sound tore loose from Fenris’s chest, rusty and unexpected—a true, deep laugh that startled the piss-goat to screaming. Albi looked at him, her own lips curving into a smile that reached her eyes, a sight that had become rarer than sun in a rainy season. Isangrim pushed himself up, blinked mud from his lashes, and let out a howl of pure frustration that quickly dissolved into confused giggles when Albi scooped him up, kissing through the dirt and muck on his cheeks.

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  That same night, as Albi stirred a pot of goat’s milk and herbs over the fire, she began to hum again. It was a familiar tune, one Fenris had heard in small fragments during the courtyard wanderings she used to take. And through their bond, Fenris heard the words softly sung in the mind that her mouth only hummed the soft cadence to out loud.

  They said the shadow on my back. Would starve my seed and blight my stack. I sowed the earth through all my tears. And waited all these empty years. And from this dark it did appear. one tiny thread of green. we made it through this empty fear, fairest shoot to ever be. and when I go to cave and stone. Your light above all I’ve ever known. But if that light does nothing grow. come home, come home, to me. Come home, come home, to me.

  It was a low, mournful melody. It made Fenris’s chest ache with some forgotten sadness, but seemed, for Albi, to hold all her silent, contented thoughts together. Isangrim, clean and wrapped in a soft fur between her legs, stood watching her, mesmerized by the sweet sound.

  Later, while the boy suckled contentedly at Albi’s breast, she had made a show to Fenris of how long his son’s hair had gotten; letting the dark silken strands fall completely over his eyes; a cause for irritation that pulled Isangrim’s small, dark brows together. With gentle fingers, and while distracted with the business of suckling, she had taken a slender section from the front of his head and braided it back, taking more strands into the building section as she went. At the end of this tiny plait, she reached over into a drawer beside the bed where she’d safe-kept a single, polished bead of bone and fasted it there.

  What is this? Fenris asked amusingly through their mind-talk, rolling his eyes as he’d lifted the bead–and braid attached–slightly.

  It is from Elitha. A gift for helping her daughter through the coughing sickness.

  I should have known it would be from Bor.

  Her fingers traced the smooth whorl of the bone.

  “Bor took the bone of this little bead in your hair from the leg of a mountain cat he killed.” She’d looked down at Isangrim then, her voice dropping to a storytelling rumble the boy loved. “There’d been three of them. Three big cats that had Elitha’s mother cornered, see it? Back against a rock. Bor came as a big, pepper black wolf. But the cats were not afraid. They were hungry; so hungry that they no longer had fear in them, even at an animal as giant as Bor’s Wolf. And Bor saved the beautiful woman. And that is how they found one another, sweet one.” She’d unclenched Isangrim’s lazy fist against her breast and brought his opened fingers to his braid to feel the roundness of the bead there. “It’s a brave-bead, little wolf. So you remember to be brave, too.”

  Fenris reached out and tucked her own strand of wild hair behind her ear as she nursed.

  To Albi’s growing weariness, Isangrim had begun to favor her cooking over her milk. A non-problem, Fenris had assured her, and only a testimony to the quiet, perfecting alchemy she performed over their hearthstone each night.

  A scrawny hare, caught in one of Fenris’s snares, would be jointed with swift, precise cuts of her knife. She would sear the pieces in a cast-iron skillet she had stubbornly haggled Lyris for, the fat sizzling and spitting, filling the hut with a smell that made Isangrim’s pup mouth water. To this she added what the forest and their garden offered: wild onions, their papery skins discarded to reveal the pungent, white bulbs; woody carrots she had coaxed from the stony earth, chopped into coins; a handful of dusky, wrinkled mushrooms foraged from the damp shade under the pines; and always the tough, dark greens of kale, shredded fine.

  But her true gift lay not in the ingredients, which were often meager, but in her hands. She knew how to brown the meat until it was just shy of toughness, then let it simmer in both with a splash of sharp, fermented goat's milk until it fell from the bone. She crushed dried juniper berries and wild thyme between her palms, letting the fragrant dust rain into the pot. A pinch of precious salt, hoarded like gemstones, was added at the very end. Where she’d found that, he could not say and she had given no answer, through mind or mouth, how. What emerged was not a lord’s stew, but something better—a deep, savory gravy clinging to tender meat and softened roots, a meal that tasted of the forest itself, transformed by care into sweet, tangible comfort. It was the same deep, earthy warmth Fenris tasted when he kissed her deeply, a flavor of home and hearth and patience.

  Her flatbread, too, was a marvel. It was mostly for this that Isangrim would fuss without relenting. She would mix coarse-ground barley flour with water and a pinch of ash from the fire, kneading the dough on a slab of clean stone until it was smooth and elastic. She would tear off palm-sized pieces, pat them into thin discs, and lay them directly on the hot, soot-darkened surface of the hearthstone, lightly smacking Isangrim’s impatient hand. They were never scorched, as some cooks did often. Instead, they puffed and blistered, developing a crisp, nutty crust while staying soft and pliant within. She would brush them with a scant smear of precious goat butter, melting instantly, before stacking them in a cloth to keep warm.

  They ate, as if in ritual, by firelight, cross-legged on the pelts before the hearth. The stew steamed in wooden bowls, its aroma mixing with the woodsmoke and the faint, clean scent of the pine logs above that smelled of the fresh resin Fenris had laid. He would tear the hot flatbread, using it to scoop up the rich stew, the flavors of game and earth and herbs bursting in his mouth. Isangrim, his day of staggering adventures done, would become a fattened, warm, heavy weight against Albi’s breast, drowsing to the rhythm of her heartbeat and the soft, contented sounds of their eating. The fire would crackle, painting their faces in flickering gold and shadow, and for those moments, the world beyond their log walls fell away, leaving only the simple, profound kingdom of a full belly, a sleeping child, and the quiet companionship of shared warmth.

  The tension of these wolf-days did not vanish with the sunset. Their coupling in the furs was a way for them both to release it and was never hurried and never frantic. It was a slow, deliberate unraveling. A deep and wordless re-weaving of the day’s frayed threads.

  It fell upon them after a honey-slow build. His calloused hand brushing the nape of her neck as she passed him a cup of tea. Her foot lightly set upon his under the table, a point of warmth and silent solidarity as Isangrim worked a stack of whittled blocks before them. It was a look across the firelight while eating that held a shared exhaustion, and beneath it, a spark of singular, focused hunger.

  By the time the embers glowed low and Isangrim’s steady breathing whispered from his corner, the knot of the day had drawn them tight together. He would pull her into his lap by the dying fire, or she would guide him down onto the pelts with a hand on his chest; a mutual seeking of a solace in one another that had become a place of profound healing.

  For Fenris, it was an exploration he never tired of. You will ask for me on your death-bed, Albi had teased him. In the daylight, she was his mate, his partner, the fierce mother of his child, her mind often leagues away wrestling with shadows he could not see. But here, in the dark, she was a heavenly territory of warm skin and whispered sighs. He learned the map of her by touch: the faint, perfect crescent on her hip from a childhood fall on wet rocks jutting out the river; the particular way her breath hitched when his mouth found the soft hollow behind her knee, one of many sensitive places; the taste of her neck, which was sun on wild thyme and woodsmoke, and beneath it, the dark, clean salt of her sweat.

  He looked forward to her surrender to him all through the day. The thought of it was a steady pulse beneath his weariness, a promise of uncomplicated belonging and simplistic focus. And Albi, for all her quiet, was no passive ground to be explored. Her hands were just as eager, just as knowing. She would trace the old scars that laddered his back, her touch neither pitying nor worshipful, but simply acknowledging them as part of the rugged landscape that made him. She would learn the rhythm that made him faint-headed from loss of breath, the exact pressure of her teeth on his shoulder that drew a choked groan from his throat. It is a strangeness in you that you like being bitten, Fenris. Her curiosity was just as deep as his, her giving as generous as any taking. She met his exploration with her own; for she, too, was discovering a country she owned half of.

  Afterward, spent and slick, they would lie tangled. Sometimes she would fall asleep upon him, her head a comforting weight on his chest, her breath a warm tide against his skin. Other times, it was he who succumbed first, his face buried in the scent of her that would always drag him down quickly to restful slumber.

  In those moments, with her breath warm against his ear, the world outside their walls ceased to exist. The surrender of his title, the ever-present shadow of Hroth, the gnawing mysteries, the tangled loyalties—all of it fell away and burned to ash in the simple heat of her. There was only this, he’d tell himself: the solid reality of her body beneath his hands and the profound peace that seeped into his bones. A small, fierce kingdom they had built with touch, and breath, and this nightly, wordless re-founding of their bond. It was a dream, Fenris thought in the hazy moments before sleep took him, from which he never wished to wake.

  At the Creek

  The sun bled out over the western ridges, painting the sky in washes of ochre and bruised purple. Down by the creek, where the water ran slow and amber in the fading light, the last of the season’s light-bugs kindled in the damp air, floating like tiny, errant stars.

  Isangrim, sturdy as a young badger could be at eight moons old, sat in the cool mud at the water’s edge. The dark, silken hair that had once lain flat like his father’s now showed a tendency to curl at his temples and neck, a soft, sweet echo of Ygrid. For the day, Albi had braided a single small braid down the center of his rounded head, and he could see the tiny bone-bead fastened there on the tip, swaying with each rapid turn of his neck. He was watching, entranced, as one of the glowing light-bugs drifted past his eyes. With a grunt of effort, he pushed up onto his hands and knees, then, wobbling dangerously, onto his feet. He managed two lurching steps, chubby arms outstretched, before gravity reclaimed him with a soft plop back into the mud. His brows pulled, a clear expression of some pensive thought, then stared at his empty hands.

  Around him, the creek bank was alive with a quiet, domestic peace. Jorik had made the journey down, grumbling that Fenris would have to carry him back like a sack of bone-meal. The old man sat on a sun-warmed rock beside Isangrim, his gnarled hand cupping gently around one of the glowing bugs, holding it out for Isangrim’s wide-eyed inspection. Nearby, Rusk and Elka lounged on a fur. Elka nursed their daughter, Hanna, now five months old and fat as a little loaf, while Rusk skimmed stones across the placid water. A family from Deep Water—a quiet man named Lark, his mate Brynna, and their three flame-haired children—had joined them at Elka’s enthusiastic invitation. The children splashed in the shallows, their loud laughter mixing with the gurgle of the creek.

  Fenris leaned against a willow, shirtless in the evening warmth, watching it all. But his eyes kept returning to Albi, and the sensation of something being off that came with it.

  She moved through a patch of wild mint and chamomile farther down the bank, her back to him, a worn satchel slung over one shoulder. She sang out loud now as she worked, that same bittersweet melody, her fingers deftly plucking leaves and the small, pale mushrooms that grew in the shadow of the rocks.

  “They said the shadow on my back…..starve my seed and blight my stack…..the earth through all my tears…..waited all these empty years…. from dark it did appear…..you tiny thread of green…..fairest shoot to ever be….. when I go to cave and stone and your light above is all I’ve ever known…..if that light does nothing grow…..come home, come home, to me. Come home….. come home, to me.”

  He had learned her easy rhythms like a painting he never grew tired of appreciating. He knew the landscape of her mind better than the paths of his own. And he knew, with a certainty that bordered irritation, that she was hiding something. The song was a curtain, drawn carefully across a room she did not want him to see.

  She looked up suddenly, though he had made no sound. Her eyes found him across the distance. Her cheeks flushed a soft, rosy pink in the golden light. Through the bond, he felt a flicker of amused resignation—she had sensed his attention, felt him brushing against the edges of her guarded thoughts.

  What do you want, Fen? I am minding my business, as you should mind yours. Her mind-voice was warm, teasing.

  He pushed stiffly off from the tree and walked toward her. She watched him come, her gaze tracing the hard lines of his shoulders, the definition of muscle earned from the quiet, constant labor of their new life. The work had broadened him, carved him into something even more solid and strong than he’d already been.

  You, shirtless, is unjust to my nerves, she thought at him, the sentiment tinged with a wry, private affection.

  I am just watching you, he confessed silently, is that not allowed? What else prettier in the Great Mother’s earth is there to look at? If you tell me now, I will gladly look away.

  But he reached her before she could come up with a weakened reply. Then it was too late for her to think of one. He cupped the back of her neck, his thumb stroking the delicate skin beneath her ear. He tilted her head and pressed his lips to that spot, the place where her scent was always strongest, where her pulse beat a steady rhythm against his mouth.

  He breathed her in. Wild thyme, sun-warmed skin, the clean smell of creek water. And something else. Something new woven through the familiar tapestry of her; a scent sweet. It was warm, profoundly comforting, yet utterly foreign to her. It tugged at a memory he couldn’t quite place.

  “Is this a new soap?” he growled the question against her skin, his voice a low rumble.

  A shiver ran through her, a swift, electric current that danced down her neck and pooled deep in her belly. He felt the immediate, answering heat of her arousal through their bond, sharp and unmistakable.

  She laughed, the sound breathless. You know it’s not, her thought whispered, threaded with a nervous excitement she tried to cloak. She tried to push gently at his chest, but he dipped his head down again, tracing the same spot with the tip of his tongue this time. The taste of her skin, salt and sweetness, carried that same elusive note. It was familiar, yet not. It was her, but also….more than her, at the same time.

  Her legs seemed to go soft beneath her.

  “If you don’t stop that nonsense now,” she said aloud, her voice husky, “I will be very displeased.” She smiled, an attempt at sternness that was a transparent lie.

  Fenris pulled back just enough to look down at her, his dark eyes searching hers. “You have not guarded your thoughts from me since we returned to Black Rock,” he said, his voice quiet but firm. “What is it you don’t want me to know? Just tell me, and I won’t have to work it out of you. Or perhaps this is the new game? Perhaps you want me to?”

  She laughed again, shaking her head, a glint of mischief in her honey-smoke eyes. Before he could anticipate her move, she swung the satchel of herbs from her shoulder and tossed it at him. He caught it against his chest on instinct, and in that moment of distraction, she was gone, a flash of silver hair and laughter as she spun and sprinted down the creek bank.

  A slow smile touched Fenris’s lips. He dropped the satchel onto the grass. A game it is then.

  He was faster, his long legs covering the ground in easy strides. But she could hide her thoughts, slipping into a mental silence as smooth as a stone in a pond. One moment she was ahead of him on the bank, her bare feet flying over the mossy stones. The next, and with a gleeful shout, she dove into the creek, a movement so fast and fluid he could not anticipate it.

  The water was lazy there, deep and slow-moving. She surfaced a few yards out, her hair plastered to her skull like a silver cap, her face alight with triumph.

  “You cannot swim, Fenris!” she called, treading water, “which means, you cannot follow me!”

  Without a word, Fenris sat on the bank and began to pull off his boots.

  “What are you doing?” Her playful worry rang across the water. She could see the image forming in his mind—a running leap, a tremendous, clumsy splash. Her eyes widened with true terror. “Okay, Fenris! You win! I will get out! Do not come in here. I might not be able to save you. The water is deep, my feet—they do not touch the bottom!”

  He sent her the image again, more vivid this time: himself airborne, hitting the water like a felled tree.

  “Fenris!” It was a genuine yelp of panic. She turned and began swimming frantically back toward the bank.

  He was waiting for her, his arms crossed triumphantly. If she could play mind-games with him, so would he with her. As she hauled herself onto the muddy shore, gasping and streaming water, he was on her with a wolf’s reflex. Gently, but with undeniable strength, he caught her shoulders and wrists and guided her down onto the soft grass, pinning her beneath him. The evening air was cool on their wet skin.

  “You tricked me,” she laughed, breathless, as she brushed a strand of damp hair from his forehead. He didn’t answer. He lowered his head and lapped the cool creek water from the hollow of her throat, then her collarbone. When his mouth found hers, the kiss was warm and soft, a contrast to the chase.

  On her lips, he tasted it again—that same sweet, warm, unplaceable scent. It was on her breath. It was in her.

  She tasted it too, through the bond. A shared secret, now on the verge of breaking. She gently pushed against his shoulders, and he relented, rolling to lie beside her. She propped herself up on one elbow, looking down at him, her expression shifting from playful to something tremulous and fierce.

  “I planned this entire day today just to tell you this, Fenris,” she whispered, her voice thick with a nervous emotion and her rounded accent. “And you have ruined my big announcement by being so….nosey.”

  She opened her mind to him fully then, though she hadn’t wanted to. The sudden, bone-deep weariness in the afternoons that had nothing to do with their chores. The unconscious singing, the song she sang not just to the babe in her arms, but to the tiny, secret life within her—a life too small for ears, but perhaps not for a heart to hear. The feeling of a companion in her solitude, a rough, fierce joy that filled her when she was alone, weeding the garden, feeding the piss-goat, or watching the chicks.

  I am with child, Fenris.

  She could not stop the smile that spread across her face, wide and radiant and full of a hope so powerful it hurt to look upon.

  The rush of feeling that flooded Fenris was not his alone. It was a torrent of his own joyful nerves, his fierce anticipation, tangled with the bright, singing glee that poured from Albi through their bond. It was a cascade that stole his breath. He leaned over her and gently lifted the sodden hem of her tunic to expose the pale, smooth skin of belly beneath.

  Have you some gift to see beneath skin? She laughed nervously, running her fingers through his hair.

  He pressed his lips to the soft skin there, supple from the other times it had stretched to create life. A tremor of loving emotion went through him, or through her—he could no longer always tell. But beneath this radiant joy, a colder current trickled in. A memory that was sharp as a shard of ice, of the beautiful curly-haired Ygrid. In what felt like another lifetime, it had been her who carried this same sweet scent—a smell like warm bread and sugared-milk. He had buried it deep enough to forget, but his nose remembered it now. He remembered, too, the constant shadow of worry that had dogged her pregnancy, the sickness that had hollowed her cheeks, the fear in her eyes that she tried to hide. And then the birth–the blood and the screams that had turned to a haunting silence; the midwife, Ulga, whose kind-face had gone grey and flat with a shameful guilt; which had stayed no matter how many times he told her it was the Mother’s Will and not her fault. M’lord, I am…desperately….I fear she is gone…..He hadn’t thought of it in weeks; the longest span of peace he’d known since her death. Now it crashed over him with the force of the sea, drowning the present moment in its old, familiar, terrible sadness.

  Albi’s cool, damp hands came to his face, her fingers scratching gently through the rough stubble of his beard; her touch a solid bench to rest his weary heart.

  Why must you always think of what will go wrong? Her mind-voice was soft, chiding. You will not lose me, Fenris. My body knows this work. It has done it before.

  He couldn’t help it. The image forced its way into his mind’s eye: Albi, pale and sweating, replacing Ygrid on the bloody birthing bed. The same silence, the same emptiness waiting to claim her, the same consuming despair waiting to claim him as he stood alone with nothing except a wet, flailing newborn in his arms.

  She kissed him then, a sweet, lingering press of her lips to his.

  You do nothing but worry, and it is a pain.

  “Is it a pain for me to not want you to succumb to death?”

  “It is dramatic.” She laughed, “because I will be fine, Fenris.”

  He splayed his hand over her stomach, as if he could shield the life within from his own dark thoughts. He tried to feel her hopeful glee, to let it burn away his gloom. It was a struggle.

  “I know you would rather have me alive than a babe,” Albi said aloud, her voice quiet but sure, reading the fear correctly through his thoughts, “But you can have both, Fenris.”

  “What if they are right?” he whispered, the old village superstition a cold stone in his gut. “What if my seed is cursed?”

  She kissed the tip of his nose, a swift, affectionate gesture. “They say our Imprint is a curse, too. Perhaps two curses will cancel one another out.” Her tone was light, but her eyes held a steely certainty. She pushed herself up to her feet, brushing grass from her wet leggings.

  Now come. I would like to tell Jorik and the others. Together.

  He stood beside her, feeling unsteady on solid ground. As they walked back down the bank toward the gathering, Albi quietly wrung the water from her silver hair and twisted it out the hem of her tunic.

  Albi was the first to catch the new scent on the breeze. She stopped, her body going still.

  Fenris smelled it a heartbeat later. Musk. Wet stone. The faint, lingering tang of the herbal smoke Hroth favored.

  He followed her gaze through the bond.

  There, seated casually on a fallen log beside where Isangrim played in the mud, was Hroth, his golden hair loose around his broad shoulders, his ice-blue eyes watching the child with an unreadable expression. He held himself with an easy, predatory grace, as if he had always been part of the circle and they’d only just noticed now.

  He had come alone.

  The laughter from the creek was slowly dying. The children’s splashing ceasing. The last of the light-bugs seemed to sputter out, and the gentle peace of the evening left with the harsh demand of the Alpha’s presence.