Requiem for the Wolf

by Tara Saunders

  A stain in her favourite green tunic. Laoighre had torn the knee out of his trousers again. Time to start thinking about woollens to warm the winter months.

  Time to start thinking.

  A change in Breag's breathing told her he lay awake, listening to her move around the room. The scent of him thickened in her nostrils; bramble and sun-warmed granite. Sionna opened her mouth and drew him deep into her lungs.

  No. She found the door too easily, Cú a darker patch of blackness at her heels. In the inn's night-hushed corridor she paused. Nowhere to go. Anú would welcome her--and more--but Sionna would chew her own leg off before asking the healer for as much as a bent pin.

  The inn's common room stood empty, her nose told her, but Sionna shrank from the thought of the innkeeper's flat face, so like the other. The greying darkness outside wasn't safe for a young girl.

  Not safe. Sionna laughed with a whine of pain. Not safe because a Lupe stalked the streets? Did mothers warn their little ones to stay close and watch sharp?

  Tarbhal would help, maybe, if she explained properly. The guard had known her from the cradle; surely he would put his disgust aside if she could just find the right words.

  It didn't matter that she had no idea where he slept. She would find him, or walk until she found an answer. At her feet, Cú whined and poked a blunt nose under her hand. Not alone, at least. She scratched the sensitive place behind his ears and he rumbled with pleasure.

  Was his the voice she had heard on the mountain?

  Awareness of what she had done festered and bubbled at the bottom of every thought, too rancid to touch, too heavy to ignore. And, even before that, to the soldiers outside Macha. She should search the memories, pick through them for answers. But not now. Later.

  The common room was empty as her nose had told her it would be. Sionna's breath came quick as she tip-toed from stairs to door. Don’t let him come. The main entrance stood triple-bolted, but regardless it wasn't for her. Sionna's way was dark and secret and silent. A narrow door from the kitchen yielded to the screech of its iron key and freed her into an alley under the fading stars.

  Sionna breathed deep, forcing herself not to gag on the reek of rotten food and waste. Macha had been worse than this. Proinsis was worse than this.

  Anú's place lay northwards. She walked south.

  Anú, who offered the teaching that Sionna's mother would have shared, and tangled them through barbs that drew blood with every snippet shared. No mother, this; the learning felt twice-stolen from her.

  What would Sionna’s mother think of her daughter now?

  Tarbhal would surely help once she explained properly. She had nobody else.

  The sky lightened to mid-blue over streets silent except for the soft scrape of her feet on hard-packed dirt, and the occasional click as Cú’s claws met stone. The town’s claustrophobic atmosphere eased in these early hours of dawn. Sionna passed many a sheebeen, sour with the bowel-scent of spoiled ale, but no other inn.

  Caislean didn’t see enough visitors to need a second one. What Ullach had it held tight, like a child with its favourite toy.

  Stupidity. Caislean was no child playing at dollies but a man, greedy and strong. Even its women took instead of giving, demanded instead of offered. If she stayed, Sionna would become just as hard and just as greedy and just as unforgiving.

  It had started already. She had turned her back on Laoighre, and for what? For pulling away from what she herself would force into the deepest, darkest pit of herself if she could. She hoarded the secrets she knew would grieve him most. She shuttered him from the truth, which was the only thing he had asked of her. She owed him more than that.

  He. Him. Be honest, girl, if only with yourself. You’re the one who’s most in need of your own honesty.

  So. She would go back, bare to him the ugliness and the filth of the thing that was Sionna. She would tell him all of it, and hold his eyes until he chose to look away. It would be her one great act.

  Solid earth gave way to dew-slicked cobbles as Sionna stepped quickly from the alley and into Caislean’s main street. Shuttered windows on either side leered sightless as Slaidh beggars as she moved north again, back towards The Dusty Dam. In this breaking dawn the streets belonged only to her.

  The rasp of hard leather on cobblestone gave a lie to the thought, and her nose warned of men approaching. Sionna allowed only a half-heartbeat of indecision before she slipped into the enfolding shadows to her left, where a chandler’s gable wall turned a rounded shoulder to the draper’s. At her knee Cú growled, a rumbling low in his belly. Sionna wrapped her hand around his muzzle in warning.

  Man or woman, fish or flesh, Sionna was heartsick of the people of Caislean. Would Tearmann really be worse than this place of stink and death?

  A man slid from the shadows of an alley to Sionna's right and crossed the main street silent as a shadow. A second followed. And two more, dark and hunched as wildwraiths in the pre-dawn gloom.

  Sionna pressed herself backwards into the space between buildings, blessing the enhanced hearing that gave her early warning. The streets were busier than they should have been. There was nothing honest in these men's business, to skulk through the streets before daylight.

  Like you do?

  She allowed ten long breaths for the strangers to pass, then continued northwards towards the inn, hugging the shadows. It would be dawn soon. Better for her to be safe in her room by then, cheering Breag with her change of heart. Laoighre might even choose to stay in their company. By evening Caislean could be a bitter memory.

  The pretty pictures Sionna painted of Breag's gratitude left no headspace for her safety. The fifth man stepped from the same cramped entryway as the others had, so close that Sionna could smell the linseed on his fresh-oiled bata. He shot out a quick hand to avoid knocking her into the filth.

  No hiding from this.

  I know you!

  A face that begged to be forgotten. Sculpted features ruined by a scar that twisted across the left side of his face, pulling mouth and eye upwards in a parody of a smile. Beech-red hair braided near as tight as Breag's.

  "Is it Ushna?" Of course it was.

  "Well met, Sionna." As though they shared a bench at Midsummer Fair instead of a filthy alley in a place so far from home.

  "Have you left the guard for the army?" Even to Sionna’s own ears this was more than a stupid question, but how else to explain him here, and skulking with the others?

  Ushna turned his head and spat, hatred pulling his scars tight over fine cheekbones like false-grass on a sinkhole. Cú's low rumble came again.

  "I came to find Tarbhal. There's need of him at home."

  Ushna drew back into the alley's narrow opening, and against the uproar of her common sense Sionna followed.

  "I’m looking for Tarbhal too."

  Ushna shook his head. "He's gone, girl, left with the last of yesterday's light. I have one final errand and then I’m off after him."

  Gone. Without a word or a thought for her.

  "Easy, youngling." Ushna steadied her with a rock solid arm, quickly withdrawn. "Tarbhal’s carrying a heavy weight on his shoulders. He did what he could for you and now he has work to do elsewhere."

  "I was last of a long line, then?" The tears burned the harder because Sionna wouldn't allow them to fall.

  "You don't understand."

  "Then tell me!" Sionna burned with sudden anger, hot and frightening but welcome as the swallow's first swoop on a summer morning.

  "How can you not understand?" The blaze of Ushna's temper met her own. "You know what’s at stake. You had to leave everything you knew because of what Glór-Hunters would do if they caught you, and now you’re walking the streets of a strange place."

  "Alone." The word closed her throat.

  "Alive!"

  "And for how long, walking the streets of a strange place?" Ushna had no need to know about Anú. Or Breag.

  "Every breath you take is more than Tarbhal's
wife was given. The Glór-hunters that peeled her skin because they could, that left her baby son naked in the winter snow, allowed her no new start before they moved to the next poor sod to catch their eye."

  Sionna clamped her jaw shut on an unsympathetic answer. The demons she wrestled left no sympathy in her for the loss of a woman forty years below ground. Filth and hope and rescue and betrayal, and none of it her choosing.

  "Have a thought past yourself, you selfish cutty." Ushna growled into the silence left by her failure to respond. "There's more than you that’s been robbed and left with nothing. I had a wife once, and a little one, and I lost them just like Tarbhal did. I'll do what needs doing to strike the Glór-Hunters where it hurts them. If that means leaving you here to manage on your own then so be it."

  The guard turned with set shoulders and no other word, and immersed himself in what remained of the night. Too careful an exit to be unstudied. Sionna's lip curled. No Tarbhal, this.

  And no hope or help from his direction. The guard had bigger fish to fry than a she-Lupe who had already killed more than once. He owed her nothing. She was lucky he hadn't taken time to gift-wrap her for the military before he left.

  Night had all but leeched from a sky lightened with a new day's hope. Sionna left the main street and stepped again into the alley’s shadows, Cú a warmth of reassurance against her leg. She would do this thing. She would brave the North.

  Tearmann. The word tasted strange on her tongue; alien. She would make it hers. She had nothing else left.

  * * *

  Sionna had thought the kitchen would still be empty. Stupid. As though an inn's breakfast made itself. The cook's squawk of surprise disguised her own, at least.

  With word of apology Sionna was through, her lungs full of the scent of bacon, and of porridge with honey. There would be time to eat, she was sure, before they left. The common room was lit now but still empty, and Sionna scuttled for the stairway before she could catch sight of the innkeeper.

  In the room Laoighre still slept. He lay curled under a huddle of blankets, his face hidden in their folds.

  Breag was dressed for travel. He wore a sleeveless woollen tunic over his shirt, and his braid was plaited so tight that not one black hair dared escape its stranglehold. Standing over his pack, he filled the room.

  "I'm coming with you." Spoken, the words lost their triumphant glitter and became ordinary.

  "Yes." Breag showed no hint of surprise or gladness.

  Sionna looked at him, at a loss what to say next. Her imagination had painted a scene very different to this one.

  “Get yourself packed up, we leave in an hour.” Plainly, Breag felt no such loss.

  No. Sionna drew long, slow breaths, each one fanning the banked coal of her temper. This was not how it would be. On her terms or not at all.

  “There are some things I need you to hear before I agree to go anywhere.” She ignored her own contradiction.

  Breag stood taller; bright and black against the grey nothing of the wall. He didn’t speak.

  “I’m not who I was before.” Anger forced the words through a tightened throat. “You know that. You started it.”

  Breag bent over his pack. He transferred woollen trousers from one pile to another, both hands clenched in their softness. Sionna could see the careful stitching of a rip she had repaired coming frayed again at the edge. Never whole again. Always damaged.

  “All my life I’ve hated Lupes, and with good reason. Proinsis showed me how they were, what they could do and none to stop them. Animals. Filth.”

  A flutter of dark outside the window behind Breag’s hunched shoulder. Heliod? The slim possibility of it strengthened her jaw to speak bitter words.

  “I found the good in it for myself. Best you remember that, you and Anú. I won’t sit under her skirts, tethered like a babe. And I won’t travel to Tearmann thrown over the back of your horse like a runaway. This choice is mine alone, and I choose to go.”

  “Choice.” Breag laughed, tight and hard. He turned to face her, finally, eyes hooded under a puckered brow. “There’s no such thing as choice, girl. It’s all a game, and the prize goes to the strongest or the trickiest.”

  Laoighre stirred with a whimper. Sionna's ears told her that he had long since abandoned sleep. He curled again, childlike, buried under blankets. Sionna ached for what he heard.

  “I won’t play that game. I choose Tearmann for my reasons, not yours. There’s so much of this that I don’t know. What I found inside myself is too great for hiding. I want to be with people who understand. Who can teach me what it means for me. Even if I have to go North to find them.”

  Breag's laughter was harsher now. "Have you heard none of what I said, or Anú? Tearmann doesn't promise pretty lessons in the sunshine, girl. No more Changing, I'm taking you back so they can break you of that. You're abomination. You fell. The Eolaí will know what to do with you."

  Ashes and dung. All of her hopes shown to be the silly dreams of a mooning girl. It hurt, this. More than Tarbhal; more than it should have. Back to having nothing.

  An age passed before she could meet the hardness in Breag's eyes. "Then I don't go."

  His head was shaking before she had finished speaking. "No more of this. I am Marbh. I've found my Lost One. Now I’m taking you back." His knuckles showed white around the ugly yellow hilt of his knife, and he refused to meet her eyes.

  No. She would not go back to that. Remember the mountain. At her back Cú whined, a whistle of plaintive support.

  "No."

  "Your decision is made. You Fell. I can't change what happens next." The set of Breag's jaw named that a lie.

  But there was something she could change. Sionna seized on the word with the single-mindedness of a scavenger. Why not this? What more could it take from her?

  She would let somebody else carry the consequences this once.

  Long practice took her deep, to the place she could watch from and not care. Where her true self burned, liquid and scalding. It was easier this time. The brightness leaped to welcome her, and she met it half-way. A part of her registered Breag’s face, anger and elation mixed there in equal measure.

  Here, the control was so purely, so joyfully hers. Sionna stretched into the golden heart of herself and grabbed it with both hands. This was worth the loss. This was right. This made her powerful. The knowing fizzed through her body with tiny bubbles and Sionna laughed, accepting.

  The wolf-shape came into focus and she reached for it, grateful. Legs curved for speed and distance. A body long and sleek and sinuous. Nose to taste the promise of the new day. Muzzle pointed to offer her people's true voice on the altar of the Lady’s moon.

  She stood, proud, shaped gloriously with this other part of herself.

  Cú stood to welcome her, tail high, ripe earth and rain on still water.

  And another. Thick ruffed, white-bearded, the red-black of the fire's dying heart. Bramble and sun-warmed granite.

  Breag.

  19

  Bliss.

  Everything was made again for Breag. A prayer-trill of the morning tickled his ear, offering thanks for late bounty and harvest-hidden nests. Rough hessian stroked the pads of his feet. A shaft of pure sunlight arrowed through the grimy window pane and quivered on the floor in front of him.

  He gloried in the newness of it. Rivulets of sensation shivered along his skin, heating and chilling him in turn until his nipples hardened in pleasure. His nose lapped the air for tattletales of cooking food and the movement of strange men.

  And Sionna. Her scent intoxicated him, enfolded him in warm soda, tantalised him with its muskiness. He lost himself in the grey-dapple of her back and the curve of her neck as she turned to greet Cú.

  “Welcome, cousins. Long I've waited for you, long.” The gadhar’s rump wriggled with excitement, his joy in their change broadcast in scent and posture.

  Cousin? Animal. Sudden as a summer thunderstorm, colour washed from the moment, leaving it a monochr
ome grey. Not miracle but curse. Animal.

  Breag reached inside himself and found nothing. He had lost the light. Panicked, he stretched into all of the corners of himself, places pocked with rough crevices and sharp edges. Places he was always careful not to allow curious thought-fingers to explore.

  Nothing. He searched for the true shape of himself and found no trace of it. He was lost. He would remain a wolf. He whirled, keening, tail plastered tight to his body and ears pulled flat. Animal.

  Abomination.

  "Easy, cousin. You are not alone." Cú's voice rumbled low, his scent spring rain and reassurance. “Your female will lead you back."

  "I don't understand." Sionna tilted her head, ears cocked.

  "Thorn has lost his way. He followed you to find his voice, and only you can lead him back to silence."

  Breag drew his tail tighter, his shoulders hunched. The sleep-room's short, ugly walls loomed over him. Smothered him. He whimpered, needing the sky.

  The sensitive nerves at the base of his ears were first to squall a warning. Breag sat up straight, his eyes fixed on Sionna. On her other side Cú mirrored him, expectant.

  The prickling spread across his body, stroking him gently with fingers of fire. He could feel the change in Sionna, although there was nothing yet for him to see except closed eyes and a hitch in her breathing.

  Just like moments before, he stood in the barrenness of that room and watched her change his life.

  Sionna seemed to swell inside her body, becoming something more, something huge. The shape of her was at once indistinct and so much more herself, the essence of person unbounded by shape. Her beauty parched Breag's throat.

  How could he doubt the Lady's intention now? It was the certainty of it that had drawn him after Sionna into the place where the wolf lived. Anú had the right of it. Odharna's secret face was hidden deep inside, his for the knowing. All he had to do was to deny himself and everything he had been taught to value.

  Breag reached for Bliss and felt it stretch for him in return. Awareness flowered to pain, a shiver of cold sweetness enfolding him.