by R. Lee Smith
16. Thin Ice
Nona walked to the pond and past it. Heather was already there, crying into Burgash’s shoulder. She didn’t ask if Leila was gone and Nona didn’t tell her. They were each lost in their own world of grief. Nona’s allowed for no sense of time or fatigue. She walked until the light began to fail. Then she just stopped.
The woods were the same woods. Big trees on all sides. The stink of sap. The sound of animals. She could be ten feet out of High Pack. She could be a million miles away. She could be lost out here for days and never find her way back.
But she’d be lost no matter where she went or how long she stayed and how well she eventually got used to it. She could keep going, just keep going. There was a whole world here, just waiting for her.
Like Heather would be waiting, alone in a pack of werewolves.
Nona turned back. She looked into the silent woods and sighed. “Come out where I can see you.”
A small flicker of white rose into the air and hovered. In the next eyeblink, it had become the crescent on black Nakaroth’s neck. He waited for her in the shadows beside the trail she’d made in the snow-powdered underbrush, waited so calmly and easily that she’d taken three steps to join him before she even realized it. When she made her feet stop, bizarrely, that was when her eyes burned. Just for a moment, she saw herself embracing him like Heather and Burgash at the pond. She saw Nakaroth’s arms curling around her, saw her pale face against his midnight fur. Saw it. Wanted it. Shaking her head could not dislodge those thoughts. She was cold, and he looked so warm.
“Why are you following me?” she demanded, swiping at her eyes until she was sure they’d stay dry.
“To keep you safe.”
She laughed, high and clipped and bitter. “There’s no such thing.”
He said nothing.
“Why are you hiding, then?”
“To let you grieve.”
“I’m not grieving.” Her feet took her towards him, though she refused to look at him. “I hardly knew her. I hardly knew any of them.”
“Yet you brought her a long way.”
“To die.”
“To die free.”
She caught herself leaning towards him and yanked herself away. It hurt. “I’m sure that’s a great consolation for her, wherever she is.”
“Yes.” His voice was free of recrimination and sarcasm. He watched her cross before him and fell into step at her side.
They walked.
“She should have never come with me in the first place,” Nona said suddenly. “I never asked her to.”
Nakaroth made a wordless growling grunt deep in his throat, neither agreeing nor disapproving.
“I never promised I could take care of her,” Nona insisted. A blob of wet snow fell from a high branch directly into her eye. She wiped it away. “What was she expecting? I can’t even take care of me.”
Nakaroth’s ears moved, listening. He did not speak.
“I don’t know what the hell I’m doing!” she argued (arguing with who? He wasn’t arguing). “I’m…I’m lost! I’m just as lost as she is! What business did she have following me? How did she think I was going to save her? Look at me!”
He didn’t.
Without warning, she was furious. Not just upset and certainly not sad—furious. Suddenly, she was in front of him, shoving and slapping at him, yelling, “Look at me! Look at me, you son of a bitch! Look—”
He brought both his hands up fast and caught her face between them, leaning close, so close that his two golden eyes blurred together into one, a grotesque cyclopean Nakaroth and still…still needful. “I see you,” he said. “See me.”
She shook. His hands alone held her up.
There was howling, deep in the distance. Many voices, raised in melodies that seemed to her ears discordant and random. But there was comfort in it somewhere. Like the comfort in Nakaroth’s rough hands, it was wild and alien, but all she had.
“I killed her,” she whispered.
“No.”
It was a simple statement, not an argument, but it gave her something to lash out at and so she did, shouting, “Don’t you ‘no’ me, I cut her fucking arm off!”
He didn’t flinch. “To give her three days of life.”
“Of pain!”
“Such is life.”
She swung away, meaning to storm off into the trees, to vent her fury by stomping on the stupid goddamn planet that was imprisoning her.
He touched her.
She stopped.
The pads of his fingertips were thick, calloused. It itched when he drew his hand down her arm to grip her wrist. His thumb traced the scratches left by fellcat teeth and her wrist warmed. Her wrist, and other places. Again she saw herself in his arms; something inside her cramped and she had to look away, but she let him keep on touching her.
“Let go of me,” she said, but didn’t mean it.
He pulled her to him, not harshly and not all at once, but step by reluctant step. She could have struggled and maybe broken free. She didn’t.
“I’m not staying,” she said.
“So you keep saying.” His voice was very close to her ear. Very close.
“And I mean it,” she said, but there was a hairline crack running through those words, and for the first time, they felt like a lie. “I can’t stay. I have to go. I can’t…I can’t…do this…alone.”
“No one can, Nona.” His breath puffed against her cheek, pushing back the numbness of winter. “We are not meant to run alone all our lives.”
“I am.”
“No.”
“I am,” she insisted, shivering so hard she could barely understand the words coming out of her own mouth. God alone knew if he did. “I shouldn’t be here. She should never have followed me. I can’t save them. I already lost the others. Look at me. Look at me! I’m going to lose them all just so I can die alone!”
Then his arm was enfolding her shoulders, wrapping her in his warmth. His tongue would be next, she thought, stealing in for one of those tender wolf-kisses such as she’d seen other lycan couples exchanging, and though she refused to look at him or acknowledge anything he did, she knew her chin was lifted slightly, inviting. The slope of her neck tingled, anticipating.
She felt snow and that was all.
She had just time enough to feel ridiculous and angry and a little ashamed of herself for feeling like this at all when Leila’s death was still being howled, and then his arm tightened and his muzzle shoved in under her jaw, forcing her chin further up. His teeth closed over her throat, making her pulse jump and her breath quicken. Then he licked, not just once, but over and over, as if he were covering her in kisses. They were not precisely tender, either. All his touches were like his hands, rough and deliberate and sure.
Nona’s hand sank into his fur and pulled, making him embrace her fully, but making it impossible for him to continue mouthing at her neck, too. The closer she got, the closer she needed to get—she, who had never needed anything or anyone. Who was she?
“I’m cold,” she said, her mind whirling.
He rumbled and held her tighter. She felt his claws combing down her hair, carefully detangling it in long, even passes. She felt herself relaxing, pressing even closer. She hadn’t thought about her hair since the days of Earth, and even then, it hadn’t occupied too much of her time. But she felt better with him doing this. Cared for. Safe.
And that was such a stupid way to feel. Nothing had changed.
Nona pushed herself out into the freezing air. “I’m not staying,” she said. “So you can stop now. You…We’re not friends, damn it!”
His ears cocked forward. Otherwise, he did not move. The howls at High Pack went on and on as Nakaroth’s eyes pierced her. At last he looked away, gazing meditatively toward the discordant howls.
But they weren’t just howling, Nona realized. There were words twisting through their wolfish voices, lycan words. And Leila’s name. They were singing for her, singing her deat
hsong.
Nona looked at Nakaroth. He pretended not to notice. She knew he noticed everything.
“What are they saying?” she asked finally.
He gave her a glance. “Ah and now we are friends?”
She ducked away, her jaw clenched and cheeks burning.
“They sing to Anu, black wolf of the River That Flows Between. Come, they say. A brave bitch has died. Come and bear her on your pale ferry. Upon the far shore, her true pack is waiting.” He listened a few seconds more, then turned around to fully face her. “You should return to High Rock. You are her chief. She may try to follow you and lose herself in the dark place this wood must seem in death’s eyes.”
It should have been easy to sneer at that, but she could somehow think only of Leila’s weak words on the morning she’d begged Nona to cut her arm off. I’m scared to ask anyone else, as if the woods were filled with faces. Or the staring eyes of the wandering dead, perhaps.
“Go back,” said Nakaroth again. His yellow stare remained fixed upon her even when she refused to return it. “I will hunt for you.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I will not feed you. I hunt so that you may honor your fallen packmate with meat, burned in friendship with Anu. It is our way.”
Yes. He’d mentioned something like that before, back when all of this had been hypothetical. It had seemed good enough then, but now, with the reality of Leila’s death…
“You’re just going to dump her in the woods,” she heard herself say.
“She will be given to the land.”
As if there were a difference.
‘It could be worse,’ some part of her thought. ‘They could be eating her.’
His eyes narrowed so intently that for a moment, she was afraid she’d said that out loud. Then, with uncharacteristic hesitancy, he said, “I will find her, if you wish, and put her in the ground.”
That the prospect disturbed him was evident in every constrained twitch of his ear, but she knew he’d do it. He might do it thinking he was damning Leila’s soul to an eternity of wandering lost in the dark—or even his own—but he’d do it.
For her.
In High Pack, the wolves howled on. They howled in ways that surely carried for miles around, even in the thick of these dark woods. They howled to Anu on his River and to Leila in the Deathlands, and they howled loudest of all in Nona, and she still couldn’t understand what they were saying.
“Don’t,” she said and turned away, walking fast back down the path to hide her eyes from him. “Wherever she is, just…leave her alone.”
17. Burned Bread
But she thought about it. All the rest of that day, she saw Leila in her mind. When the wind gusted, she saw dead leaves blown uncaringly over her sprawled limbs. When the snow fell in its brief evening flurry, she saw it filling Leila’s glazed, half-open eyes. When the lycan gathered around the horrible horned thing that Nakaroth brought back from his hunt, Nona sat well apart from them and saw Leila’s death-grey flesh and bloody meat torn open by animal teeth and animal claws. But when she lay wrapped in her borrowed furs that night, it was Heather’s face that haunted her and she thought, ‘She’s the only one I have left now. The rest are dead. They trusted me to save them and now they’re all dead.’
She lay down with that for as long as she could, and then got up and walked away from it. Not into the woods, not at night. She only went as far as the firepit—scarcely six walking steps—and stopped there, looking down into the embers at the charred bones of Leila’s funeral meal. She couldn’t feel any heat, standing over it. They were only red lights and black shapes far below her. A little movement, a little feeble life, but it was dead, really. Dead or dying.
Nakaroth nudged at her. She knew it was him without looking, without even a word between them. He had something in his hand, something too dark to see against his black silhouette. His eyes caught the only sparks the fire had left in it; two crimson points of light stared her down from the darkness, silent.
She took it and immediately knew she was holding a cold, greasy chunk of roasted meat. Nakaroth hunkered down to stir at the coals, leaving her to stare sightlessly into her hand. He’d saved it out for her. She hadn’t even noticed.
“You don’t really think this means anything, do you?” she asked dully.
He put a handful of small sticks on the fire and gently blew until they caught.
“It doesn’t. There’s nothing after this, Nakaroth. There’s no ferry and no far shore and no friends and family waiting for you. There’s nothing but what we have now. There’s nothing—” Her voice caught. She stopped talking, dry-eyed.
“If you believed that,” he said, rising, “you would be sleeping now, knowing your packmate was in no more pain.”
She tried to laugh, but the sound choked itself out in her tight throat. “Her ghost is not sticking around here waiting for my permission to go into the fucking light. And if it is,” she said suddenly, viciously, “I’m not sending it to the light you’ve got over here! That’s not fair, goddamnit! Let her go home!”
He looked at the shred of meat in her hand until she realized she was squeezing it and made herself open her fist. Then he met her eyes again and quietly said, “I do not guide the ferry, Nona.”
She shivered and glared at the fire, now burning tall along its sticks, hot against the backs of her knees. He said nothing more to convince her, but when his hand nudged at her again, she moved instinctively the way he wanted: Facing into the fire, she took a single savage, tasteless bite and threw the rest of it into the flames. “Take her home,” she hissed. “Don’t you goddamn dare make her stay where they brought her, where I…Take her home!”
Nothing. Cold grease slowly warmed and bubbled down the uneven slab of meat. She could see it drying out, see the edges begin to curl and briefly blacken before they caught sparks of their own. Nakaroth’s hand rested on her shoulder, heavy and rough and stronger than it had any right to be.
She didn’t try to throw it off.
She stood and watched until the meat was burned away and the fire starved itself back into embers, and he didn’t take his hand away until it got too cold to stand there any longer. At her first shiver, he released her and turned away (which was enough to make all the watching lycan she had only been peripherally aware of in all this time move back and feign sleep). He returned to the snow-damp rock where he’d been sleeping and lay down, his back to her. She returned to her furs and crawled up close to Heather, who let out a little moan at how cold she was before snuggling up to share her warmth.
Nona slept holding on to the only thing she had left.
But she slept.
18. Bitches
And life went on, because life doesn’t care.
Nona got hungry and cold and tired. She ate and drank bitter tea and slept. Time neither sped up to dizzy her nor slowed down to torture her. It just passed.
Each morning before true dawn, Madira woke her so that she and Gef could take Nona out to a clearing and try to teach her how to use a stupid slingshot. Using rocks and crusts of dry bark as targets, she aimed and fired, aimed and fired, until her arm ached and her fingers felt raw and the sun finally came over the horizon. Then she stumbled along behind them through the freezing forest (where, somewhere, Leila’s body had been ripped apart and eaten by scavengers) and shot dutifully at whatever they pointed out, trying as hard as she could and hitting nothing while they barely seemed to aim and hit everything. When the lesson was over, it was back to High Rock, to watch the real hunters gather themselves together under Kruin or Sakros…or Nakaroth…and know she wasn’t good enough to join them.
For every other empty hour, she was expected to rest. Nona’s was not a restful nature, not even back in the real world when her goddamned life did not depend on her being able to shoot a bird with a goddamned slingshot. And more than the frustration of endlessly doing nothing, it bothered her that Kruin was right to make her rest. She hadn’t realized just how b
adly weakened she’d become until she felt her strength returning, and every day brought her a little more.
All the same…It was strength dependent upon someone else’s goodwill. She drank tea made from leaves that Sangar had dried and saved and then brewed for her. She ate meat from someone else’s hunt and only if it was Kruin or one of the females who brought it, since on the Planet of the Werewolves, a girl accepting a guy’s handful of raw organ meat meant she was down to clown. At night, she slept beside Heather in the furs Mika had given them, trying to pit their little warmth against the whole of the winter while ignoring the staring eyes of dozens of hungry wolves.
It was never easy sleep; each hour was a battle, and her battles too often ended in nightmares of Leila screaming and thrashing and begging for her arm back. She woke up with tears on her face once and thought that was as bad as it could ever get until the night she woke up with her arms around Nakaroth instead of Heather. He released her without a word when she scrambled back, but she knew he was awake and watching her.
Someone was always watching her.
They gave her nothing else to do. There were no fields to tend, no crops to harvest and preserve. There was no need for a fire unless there was something to cook over it, so no reason to gather firewood. The water didn’t need fetching or purifying. She couldn’t wash dishes or vacuum carpets or clean windows. She couldn’t be useful, she could only exhaust her restlessness on long walks that took her nowhere and accomplished nothing.
Long walks, but not lonely ones. Most of the time it was Nakaroth lurking in the shadows, content to follow unseen and allow her the fantasy of solitude. Once in a while, it was Kruin himself, who walked boldly and in disapproving silence at her side. Burgash came only if she succeeded in dragging Heather with her, and those walks never lasted long or went far. She felt trapped by their company, leashed by it, even as she knew why they did it. There were always wolf-tracks pressed into the snow around her own on her way back, weren’t there? There was always movement in the shadows, even if she went no further than the pond for a drink. Twice, she’d straightened up after slipping away into the bushes for a private piss only to lock eyes with Vru, so no, she never went further than a scream could carry if she was alone and she always kept her knife in her hand.