Sofia was only eight years old. If frequent visits couldn’t be arranged, she would grow up with no better memory of me than I had of our father.
And . . .
“Mama, Elena and I are supposed to be neighbors! We’re supposed to raise our children together.”
“I know that’s what you wanted, Adele, but a guardian has to put her duty before her personal interests. And this is what we agreed to in the negotiation.” Pain flickered behind her eyes, and I realized that despite the arrangements she’d made, she dreaded the thought of my absence. Then her gaze went carefully blank. “All the other benefits of marriage aside, Maxime will provide you with a home, and in return, you will protect Ashborne from the dark wood.”
“But . . . why? Why can’t I stay here?” Assuming I accepted this union. Which I had no intention of doing. I intended to prove to her that Grainger would choose me over his duty to the village, if it came down to that. But how could I prove that without showing him what we were?
“Max’s mother was only blessed with one daughter, and she died in infancy. The villagers of Ashborne need you. Whether they know it or not.”
The field seemed to spin around me as I tried to make sense of what I was hearing. “You’re selling me in service to another village? To people I’ve never met? To a husband I’ve never even seen?”
“Adele, you are not the first couple to be betrothed as children. This is a common arrangement among guardians. Marriage is a contract with benefits to both parties, and your father and I made sure your needs were well-represented. You will be cared for. You will be treasured, which is much more than most new brides can expect. And you will be free to carry out your responsibility—to hunt monsters in the dark wood—in peace. Alongside a husband who will protect you from villagers likely to misunderstand.”
“How will he do that?”
“He will explain away any necessary absences. He will answer any difficult questions. He will be your anchor to the community and your shield from suspicion. And he will be your confidant. As your father was for me.” The longing and weariness in her voice spoke volumes about how much she still missed him.
“And Sofia?” I asked. “Have you sold her hand as well?”
My mother flinched, looking wounded by the accusation. “She will stay here, and in a few years, Max’s younger brother, Alexandre, will come apprentice with Monsieur Girard.” The local carpenter. “And when your sister is old enough, Alex and Sofia will be wed.”
“If she agrees.”
“Yes,” my mother conceded. “And you could be instrumental in helping her see the wisdom of that.”
“Assuming she survives her trial.”
“Don’t say such things,” she snapped. “Sofia will be fine. She is already exceptionally fast and well-coordinated. As are you.”
That was true. I’d beaten Grainger in every race we’d run since we were small children. Even now, when no one was watching, he would sometimes challenge me to a race around the northern village pasture, which inevitably ended with us collapsing into each other’s arms and laughing like loons.
“I can’t marry this Max, Mama. I don’t even know him. And I love Grainger.”
She stared at me for a long moment before answering, studying me as if she were assessing my sincerity. And finally she sighed, her breath a puffy white cloud against the dark night. “You will at least give Max a chance to win your heart. He’ll be in Oakvale soon.”
“He’s coming here? Why?”
“To court you, of course. To get to know you in advance of your marriage. If you agree, you’re to be wed . . . well, as soon as the next full moon.”
Shock washed over me like an icy dip in the river. “That isn’t possible. There’s still the marchet. He’ll have to—”
“That’s all already taken care of. The Bernards are very eager to have you, Adele. He will treasure you. The entire village will love you.”
My chest felt tight. I felt as if I were being carried along in the wake of my mother’s plans for me, like a cart hauled behind a galloping horse.
How could everything have changed so quickly?
“You can’t possibly be sure of any of that. Just because you and Papa were happy—”
“That wasn’t always true for your father and me. It took some time, but though our marriage began as a strategic arrangement, it blossomed into a very special connection. We shared my secret from the beginning, and that became an iron-clad bond between us. We grew to love each other very much. And he loved you and Sofia even more. He wanted this safety and security for you, Adele. He traveled to Ashborne himself to negotiate the betrothal. He would want you to at least give Maxime a chance.”
I groaned. That was the one statement she knew I would not argue with. I’d never gone against my father’s wishes while he was alive, and I wasn’t going to start now. At least, not without a reason that didn’t sound like the whining of a spoiled girl over her own good fortune. Which meant I would have to meet this Max. I’d have to get to know him well enough to find a valid objection to the union.
“Fine.”
“You will give him a chance to court you?”
I crossed my arms over the front of my cloak. “Do I have any choice?”
“Of course you have a choice. As I said, if you don’t like him—if you honestly can’t imagine ever growing to like him—you do not have to marry him.”
“But the people of Ashborne will suffer for my decision.”
“Yes. I won’t lie to you about that. Your betrothal is about more than the union itself. More than the children you will have. It is about protecting an entire village whose guardian will soon be too old to carry the mantle all on her own.”
“That isn’t fair, Mama.”
“Life isn’t fair, Adele. And without us, eventually places like Oakvale and Ashborne will be swallowed by the dark wood.”
So many lives, all dependent upon my decisions. My discretion and my dedication to a mission I’d only just discovered.
The weight of such a responsibility threatened to crush me.
With a sigh, I turned away from my mother and marched quietly toward the edge of the village.
Nine
I held my tongue as we snuck through the dark, swallowing a series of objections to my arranged betrothal that I couldn’t bring myself to voice, because they all boiled down to a single thought: This isn’t fair.
That was the complaint of a child, and airing it would not earn my mother’s respect or any further consideration of Grainger’s proposal. So I decided to let everything I’d just learned truly sink in before I tried to argue further. I had no interest in meeting Maxime Bernard, but I could not contend with any of my mother’s points, save one.
Grainger would never lead a mob against me. He loved me. We’d spent the past two years counting down the days until I would be old enough to wed, and we’d expected my mother to say yes immediately. Her hesitance had hit me like a tree crashing into the forest floor.
She wanted me to marry a shield. An anchor. A man beloved enough by his own community and dedicated enough to my calling to protect me. And those were all things I wanted, too.
But I wanted them from Grainger.
As we stepped between two of the torches and into the forest, however, fear and excitement began to buzz within me, centering my thoughts on the challenge ahead. I’d been in the dark wood several times, but I’d never gone in looking for monsters.
I followed in my mother’s silent footsteps, and light from the torches faded within a few feet as an unnatural chill washed over me. Then, a few minutes after we started walking, a violent screeching speared my brain like meat on a skewer. My hands flew to my ears, trying to block out the sharp, painful sound.
“You will get used to it, in time,” my mother assured me as she flipped back one side of her cloak to expose her hatchet.
“What kind of creature makes such a horrible sound?”
“Most of the beasts of the d
ark wood have no proper name,” she said. “That particular creature is a monstrous woman-like beast from the waist up, and a serpent from the waist down. And like most of the monsters we hunt, she feeds upon human flesh.”
“A man-eating snake woman. Is she our target?”
“No, tonight, we’re after goblins. There is a nest of them near here.”
“Why are we after goblins, exactly?”
“Because they’re plentiful and relatively easy to kill. That makes them good for skill-building early in a guardian’s training.” My mother suddenly swung her arm, and her hatchet thunked through a woody coil reaching for her foot. “Watch out for the vines.”
I pulled my hatchet from my belt, on alert for anything slithering toward me from the darkness. “So, how do we find these goblins?”
“They’ll find us.”
“That’s unsettling. What do they look like?”
She frowned at me from the shadows. “They look exactly like I described them in every bedtime story you heard as a child. So, you tell me. What does a goblin look like, Adele?”
Sudden understanding hit me like a frigid winter gust. Of course those weren’t just stories.
“Um . . .” I fought the urge to close my eyes as I thought back over the tales she used to tell me. The tales she still told Sofia. “They’re large, and their skin has a greenish cast. They have pointed ears, near the tops of their skulls, which gives them extraordinary hearing. And their eyes bulge a bit from their faces, though their sense of sight is not as well-developed as their hearing.”
“Very good.” She looked truly pleased with me for the first time since I’d returned alive from my trial.
“So it’s their ears that will lead them to us?”
“It certainly will be, if you don’t start whispering.” But she smiled as she handed me her hatchet—virtually identical to my own—and when I took it, she untied the cord around her neck and shrugged out of her cloak.
“What are you doing?”
“Demonstrating.” My mother’s head turned sharply to the left, as a grunt echoed toward us from deeper in the forest, followed by a heavy thump and a chorus of twigs breaking. “They usually hunt alone, but I hear two heading for us right now. From the east.”
I squinted into the dark, listening, but though I could hear the heavy footsteps, I couldn’t distinguish two sets. Maybe that ability would come with experience?
She stepped out of her shoes as she reached back to untie the laces at the back of her bodice, then she tugged on the material to loosen it quite a bit. “One hatchet in each hand. It might take you a bit to get the hang of using one left-handed, but the skill will come with time.”
“I— Mama, what are you doing?” I demanded in a fierce whisper as she knelt on the forest floor.
“Changing. I’ll take the first one that appears. You take the second.” And with that, she dropped onto her hands and knees, and before I could ask another question, her body began to . . . transform.
Her face elongated into the familiar shape of a muzzle, accompanied by a chorus of rapidly popping joints. Her arms thinned into muscular wolf legs, her palms plumping and fingers shortening as her hands became paws. Odd shapes rose and fell beneath the material of her bodice as her torso underwent an unseen transition, and finally, fur sprouted across her bare front legs in a reddish wave.
I could only stare as my mother crawled out of the confines of her dress and looked up at me from the forest floor. The entire process had taken only seconds. Would my own transition ever come so quickly?
Though she was only two-thirds the size of the whitewulf I’d killed the day before, she was still more than waist high on me, with a compact musculature that made me wonder what I’d looked like in my own redwulf form.
But before I could come to terms with the sight of my mother transforming into a wolf, another set of grunts echoed from the forest, and this time they sounded much closer.
My mother turned toward the sound, her entire frame tense. She began to growl.
My grip tightened on both hatchets, and as heavy footsteps thumped toward us, my pulse began to race with a potent combination of adrenaline and fear. Which was when I realized that I could feel the goblins coming. My heart seemed to beat in time with their steps. Energy buzzed across my skin, pulsing harder the closer they came. Yet when the first goblin finally lurched into sight from the distant shadows, I gasped with surprise.
It—no he; it was definitely a he—was huge!
Despite the weight of its footfalls and my mother’s descriptions of a large greenish monster, I’d drastically underestimated the goblin’s size in my imagination. This beast was easily one and a half times my height and at least three times my width. It was barrel-chested, its legs the size of small tree trunks, with arms like battering rams and fists nearly as big as my head.
Yet for all its obvious strength, the goblin was slow, and we redwulfs were fast.
Before I’d truly processed the monster’s size, my mother leapt at it, snarling with her lips pulled back to reveal a muzzle full of sharp teeth. As her front paws slammed into the beast’s chest, the goblin opened its mouth, and I got my first look at its most terrifying feature.
Saliva dripping from a triple-row of sharply pointed teeth, the goblin snapped powerful jaws at my mother’s head. If he’d hit his mark, she would have lost an ear, but her momentum drove the beast backward. It stumbled a few steps, and as it fell to the forest floor, my mother clamped her muzzle around the monster’s throat and ripped the flesh to shreds.
An instant later, the second goblin broke through the underbrush.
Stunned by what I’d just seen, I lost precious seconds while the goblin barreled toward me, breaking branches from trees with every lumbering swing of its arms. My mother yipped, startling me into awareness, and my hands tightened around the handles of both hatchets. And finally, I lurched into motion, my pulse pounding so hard that my head began to spin.
I swung with my right hand, aiming for the beast’s head, but at the last second, I realized he was too tall. I’d never be able to reach. So I adjusted my aim. My blade thunked into the monster’s thick left forearm, sinking in so deeply that I couldn’t pull it out.
The goblin hissed at me, spittle flying from that triple-row of bared teeth, and when he jerked his arm up, I lost my grip on the hatchet, which remained lodged in his flesh.
The beast roared at me as he lunged, and I dove to miss a blow from his massive right fist. I landed in the underbrush and rolled over, dodging meaty feet as the monster tried to stomp on me like a bug. As I shoved myself upright, I transferred my remaining hatchet into my right hand, then I swung it as I spun, avoiding a blow that whooshed through the air where my head had been a second earlier.
This time my hatchet glanced off the goblin’s other arm, so I swung again as I ducked another blow. My blade bit into the meat of his thigh, and he howled as I wrenched the weapon free. Blood poured from the wound, and I struck again and again, leaving gaping gashes in his pale green flesh. Dodging blows—until one landed on my shoulder.
The hit threw me sideways, the forest zooming past in a dark blur as I flailed in the air. My arm hit the trunk of a tree, and I crumpled to the ground. Air burst from my lungs, and I gasped, trying to refill them.
The earth shook as the goblin ran at me. He was slow, and I should have had plenty of time to get out of the way, but I couldn’t . . . breathe . . .
The beast bellowed as he grabbed me by my left arm, drool hanging from his pointy chin, and lifted me two feet off the ground. He roared in my face, spraying me with more foul spittle as his rotten breath blew back my hood.
My mother yipped, but I didn’t have time to process more than the simple imperative in that wordless command.
Do something, Adele!
I had no idea what to do. So I closed my eyes and swung my hatchet.
My blade thunked into thick flesh. The beast made a choking sound and lost his grip on my arm. I fell
to the ground again, absorbing the impact on my right hip, and when I looked up, I was surprised to find my hatchet buried in the goblin’s neck.
He blinked at me, giant hands hovering near the offending weapon for a second. Then he roared again as he pulled it loose and dropped it at my feet.
Blood sprayed the tree trunk at my back, over my head. The goblin gurgled for a moment, choking on his own blood. His hand slapped at the wound, trying to hold it closed, but to no avail.
A second later, he fell, his impact shaking the ground.
I picked up the bloody hatchet, and while I stood, breathing heavily from my effort to take down the beast, my mother threw her head back and howled.
The dark wood replied with a chorus of shrieks and howls from all directions, some obviously echoing from quite far away. They didn’t seem to be celebrating with my mother—the vocalizations felt more aggressive than anything—but the sound sent a euphoric tingle sweeping through me.
My mother crouched near her dress, and while she changed with a series of soft pops and creaks echoing from her joints, I rotated my left arm, trying to work the ache out of my shoulder. I could already feel a huge bruise forming on my other arm, from my impact with the tree.
“You did very well, Adele,” my mother said as she sat up, in human form once again.
“I lost one of the hatchets.”
She pulled her dress over her head, then brushed dirt from it and turned so I could help tighten the laces of her bodice. “You will soon be strong enough to wrench it free even if it hits bone. Why didn’t you throw one at his head? You might have felled him without even having to get close.”
“That felt like a big risk to take, considering that I’ve never done this before. I had no idea whether I could hit what I was aiming for.”
When I’d secured her laces, she shook out her red cloak, then she bent to wrench the aforementioned hatchet from the dead goblin’s arm. “I taught you to throw a hatchet when you were ten years old, and I don’t think you’ve missed your target since.”
“Yes, but that was for sport! For fun!” She’d challenged me to best her, using a target nailed to the side of our cowshed. “This was an entirely different situation!”
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