She made out the sound of paws on the damp forest soil. They were hard to distinguish; the beast was nimble. But they were there, and they were getting closer.
She could hear its breath. It was panting only a little, barely exerted from killing all those men.
It began to keep pace with her own, until it sounded like one breath being drawn in two bodies. Elspeth tried to remember a prayer, but nothing came to her mind. She only had time, she thought, to hope for a moment that wherever her parents were, there she would be to.
But the blow she expected – the flurry of teeth and blood and claws – never came. The beast just sat there, next to where she sat frozen on the ground.
After a minute, Elspeth forced herself to look up. The beast was there in front of her, sitting like a common dog would sit for its owner, only so much bigger. Elspeth had only seen wolves once dead, carted back into the village. She had not seen many of them, but she knew even from this limited experience that they should be nowhere near this large. The wolf was like a small tower before her, easily the full height of a man standing, when it was only sitting down.
And then it lay down. It was only about a foot from her now. It lay down its ears like she had seen dogs do to their masters, but something in the wolf’s eyes, catching a tiny piece of the limited moonlight, struck Elspeth with the unshakeable feeling that this was a beast that had no master.
No, it was trying to communicate with her. It was showing her something. It was setting her at ease.
Unbidden, her hand reached out as though to touch the head, but her better sense stopped herself. Why would she do something so foolish? The creature may not kill her, but that was no reason to tempt fate.
She stood and began hobbling toward home.
It was slow going, and it hurt. By moving slowly and looking down carefully for roots or rocks, she could avoid another fall, but she knew it would still be a long time before she would be able to get to her home.
The wolf kept pace with her, drawing closer now and then. For a long time, Elspeth drew away when this happened, but as they went on and on together, she stopped drawing away. Eventually, the wolf was right next to her, close as her little sister walked when she was afraid.
Elspeth was distracted by the feel of the creature beside her. She felt as though she could sense its great beating heart through the space of the small expanse of air between them. Now and then some of its fur rubbed up against her side.
The distraction was too great for her, and she fell, suddenly, on her face. She cursed herself for not being better at walking through the dark, and for the pain that shot through her side. She’d landed on a rock. She wasn’t injured, but it would leave a bruise, she could be certain.
The creature wrapped around in front of her. Its nose came close to her neck, its great head nuzzling her. Then it stepped back and lay its front paws down in front of her.
It jerked its head toward its back, as though trying to make a motion. But surely a beast couldn’t communicate this way?
Elspeth hesitated. The beast whined. It felt strange to hear that small sound come from such a great creature. It stood, drew a little closer, and did the same thing again.
In later days, Elspeth would think of how foolish she had been. She couldn’t have known this would not spur the beast to kill her. She couldn’t have known this was anything the beast would want. But in the moment she did know, and she could be certain. She felt it clear through her that this creature would not hurt her, could not hurt her, and she climbed, as surely as she could, onto its back.
It stood and moved cautiously at first. It seemed to be moving deliberately and slowly, keeping her from falling off. She grasped some of its thick, tufted fur in her hands to hold on. She had a fleeting thought that this might hurt the beast, but she dismissed it. This is the creature that had murdered six men with as little thought as swatting a fly. It was great, and huge, and felt ancient. It would not be hurt by her little hands grasping at it.
After a little while, when Elspeth had grown accustomed to the odd motion of sitting on its back, it began to speed up. It was a gradual change, and Elspeth barely noticed it was happening until the ground was flying by quickly, and she had a sense that their speed isolated them from the forest around them. They were flying, as it were, in their own little bubble, as separate from the cool night and the dark forest around them as was the moon from the earth.
A brief worry flickered through her mind that the beast would take her somewhere she didn’t mean to go, but the thought swiftly disappeared. It wouldn’t harm her, she knew. It wouldn’t take her anywhere she didn’t want. It would know, she felt, what she needed.
She was proved right when they reached the edge of the forest. Elspeth shook her head as if waking from a strange but pleasant dream. The wolf was lowering itself to the ground and she slid off, looking towards the roofs of her village and the smoke drifting into the sky from the houses, and the glow of the candles and lamps lighting the windows.
Then as suddenly as it had appeared when she’d been surrounded in the forest, the creature was gone.
Elspeth began the slow limp over the relatively short distance left to the village, suddenly feeling much more alone than she ever had before.
The next morning, Elspeth woke to raised voices out the window. There was a crowd gathered in the open ground in front of the village church. She looked at the bed next to her. Fiona wasn’t there. She must have overslept.
As quickly as she could, she slipped on her dress and her still-muddy shoes from the night before. She passed woven baskets on the way out – all the plants Granaidh had harvested from the garden before they were truly ready. She’d walked into the house the night before as though still in a dream, and all night had in fact dreamed of the wolf. She’d forgotten, somehow, the difficulty and the danger. She’d forgotten that she was about to be forced from her home and away from her parents by a war she had no interest in fighting, for a protector of the realm she had no reason nor inclination to love.
The crowd was centered around a man, tall and lanky, but well-built with a kind of wiry strength. He was being jeered at and questioned by the crowd around him. He looked as though he wanted to speak, but couldn’t have been heard over the crowd around him, so rather than try, he waited.
There were many people, all the people in the town, it almost felt to Elspeth, but he didn’t seem afraid. He seemed steady and sure, and unbowed. He seemed…patient?
Elspeth found the baker’s daughter, and asked her what was going on.
“He’s English,” she said. “He stayed last night at the inn, and only spoke very little, and the innkeeper didn’t notice. But this morning he was speaking more, and now we know what he is.”
“And what is he?” Elspeth asked, bristling.
The baker’s daughter was taken aback, not expecting this reaction.
“He’s…he’s English. He might be a spy?”
Elspeth looked at the man, drinking him in with her eyes. A spy? He didn’t seem shifty-eyed or disingenuous. She would imagine spies were creatures who hid in the darkness and slithered away to betray. This man, whatever he might do, would never slither.
“Wait!” Elspeth yelled out, with a firmness to her voice that surprised her. “Everyone, please, be quiet!”
The general clamor of the crowd decreased, but wasn’t gone. She called again.
“Please, everyone, close your yapping mouths! I want to hear what he has to say!”
He was looking at her now. Everyone was looking at her, yes, but he was looking at her.
“Well?” she said, quietly. Too quietly to be heard, almost. But he heard her.
“I’m English, it is true,” he said. His voice was measured, and his accent was English, but a much softer, much less angular English than the soldiers in the woods last night.
“But I’m not a spy. I owe no loyalty to the English, and I don’t intend to help them. I intend to help you.”
The hubb
ub from the crowd began again. Wild speculation. Expressions of mistrust. Elspeth was about to yell again, but she found she didn’t need to. A few men from the crowd were interested in the taking over that particular duty. They quieted everyone back down, and the man continued.
“The English will return. I think you know this. I think you know this and you intend to leave, and I don’t think that is fair. You’ve harbored the army, yes. You’ve helped your Scottish army as was asked of you by the protector of Scotland. You’ve helped their wounded. The English will see this as a crime. They will see this as treason.”
There was no clamor of the crowd at this. They were all silent, waiting for his next words.
“I don’t agree,” he said. “I don’t see it as treason to help the men of your land as they fight for your land. I see it as your duty. And when the English send men to destroy what’s left of your village, after the battle and the army have taken so many of your young fighting men from you, I mean to help you stop them.”
A gentle murmur went through the crowd. Their fears had been given voice. The monster pacing in the back of their hearts, waiting to overwhelm them, had been called from the darkness and brought into the light.
“You’re just one man,” someone said. Elspeth wasn’t sure who. She only knew that the man was looking at her again, and there was something in his eyes that felt familiar. “What can you do against the full army of the English?”
“I am just a man, it’s true.” He spoke with a smile playing at this lips, as if there were some private joke no one was privy to but himself. “But the English will not send their entire army. They need as many of their men as they can to go west, to meet the Scottish army. They will send only as many of the men as they deem necessary to overpower the village and send a message. We do not need to defeat an army – we only need to be stronger than they think we are.”
We, Elspeth thought, he said “we.”
“And how do we do that?” the same man as before asked. Elspeth could focus now that the man’s eyes weren’t on her. She saw that it was the blacksmith who had spoken, his hands grasped around a hammer Elspeth guessed he’d brought with him to inflict harm on the Englishman.
“We ask for help,” the man said.
Help from whom, exactly? The man played coy. He said at first that they wouldn’t believe him. That they didn’t really want to know. The crowd, or rather, various people in the crowd who stayed as those who had only come for violence wandered away, kept asking. He said they would doubt him. He said they wouldn’t believe.
The thinning crowd let Elspeth get closer to the man. She felt drawn, and she felt curious. She wanted to hear his words, for she felt she knew what he would say.
“The wolf,” he finally said. “We ask for help from the wolf.”
The talk with the crowd did not convince the village. They did not believe in the wolf, and most of them believed he was a charlatan who must want something from them. He insisted over and over that he didn’t want anything from them. He said that he knew the way to ask the wolf for help, and that he would do it for them, if they would only agree to stay and fight, and that it would cost nothing of the village.
There were some who agreed, and there were some who were determined to fight anyway, wolf or no wolf, so had no issue with whether or not it would be true to begin with, but there were many who thought him a madman or a liar.
But there were none, in any case, who thought him a spy.
None but the innkeeper.
“You can stay at my house,” Elspeth heard herself offer, after the innkeeper walked away, telling the man he was not welcome at the inn.
“It is only three women in a house meant for a family. We can make space.”
They were nearly alone now. Only a few stragglers from the crowd were left. And those stragglers were wandering off, one by one, as though they knew they were interrupting something.
Elspeth sensed this, though she knew clearly in her own mind that of course she had never met this man, and there was nothing that they were interrupting.
The man agreed. Elspeth asked him to go get his things, but he said he had none. He had nothing but the clothes on his back, and the few coins in his pockets to pay for a room.
“Isn’t it dangerous,” Elspeth asked, “travelling with so little?”
The man wore that same playful smile he had had earlier. He looked up into the sky as though the birds shared his secret with him, and would get a good chuckle out of it.
“Oh,” he said, “I have more than you think.”
The man’s name was Henry. Elspeth’s grandmother eyed him suspiciously, but after they had talked for a bit, she began to warm to him.
He ate very little for such a large man. When Elspeth pressed him, he said simply that he had already eaten, though Elspeth much doubted that the innkeeper would have fed him or allowed him to eat at the inn after discovering he was English, and she much doubted as well that he could have made it through an entire breakfast without giving away this simple fact.
The rest of that day Elspeth spent with him. People of the village had heard that he was there, and they came to visit. They came to speak with him, and to ask him if what he said was true.
Most were unbelieving. Many were unsure. Only a few clung to his story as their last shred of hope. These were mainly those who could not leave anyway. They were those who could not make a journey to a new village, or who had so much to lose here that the journey would ruin them, and take from them all that they valued. They were those who most wanted to believe.
But most wouldn’t stay, Elspeth became more and more sure. She saw them packing their things. She saw them readying what animals they had. She saw them preparing to leave with a certainty that they must that broke Elspeth’s heart a little more every time she saw it.
Around dinnertime, the blacksmith came to ask her if her guest was doing all right. He spoke to her, although Henry was sitting there with them. Elspeth said that he was, although she didn’t know why the man didn’t ask him directly.
The blacksmith didn’t answer right away. He seemed hesitant to look at the man, but finally he forced himself.
“I lost two sons in the battle, sir,” he said, speaking with more respect that he clearly felt Henry deserved. “And it was your countrymen that did it. But you say you’re not with them, and I think I believe you. And I would want to lay them to rest here, with their mother, where they belong.”
Elspeth was now the one who felt she was intruding. The blacksmith’s hope was so thin, and he was entrusting it – cautiously, timidly – to Henry.
“I can help you do this,” said Henry. He said it with a gentleness that made Elspeth almost forget the strength of his arms, or the power of the hard muscles that she felt as if through the air as she sat beside him.
“Yes,” the blacksmith said, standing and distancing himself, as if made uneasy by his own growing trust in the man. “I hope you can. I hope you’re a man of your word. This is why we’d like to see you, in the village church, at sundown.”
Henry stood as well and said that he would be there, and the blacksmith left.
It was clear after this conversation that no one would be bothering them. They were alone for the first time, with no one coming to intrude. And they would be for some time. It was probably several hours until sundown.
Elspeth was suddenly embarrassed. She’d been with Henry all day, but this was a new intimacy. She could have left, she supposed. But everything in her body screamed that she would not be dragged from his side, not with all the horses of the English army, not by all the cries of Granaidh and Fiona.
She felt him close to her. They’d been drawing together closer and closer throughout the day, without her really meaning to. Every adjustment in the way she was sitting, every time he rose to greet a villager and sat back down, each move inched them both closer to the heart of the other.
His hand lay on his leg, and he rubbed it absentmindedly, as though he were
caressing hers. She watched it, and felt it on her leg as though he had been touching her. A thrill ran through her body.
Then he spoke, and the words felt incidental, unimportant.
“Can I ask you – you’ve never asked me if it was true?”
Elspeth’s laughter rang out in the little room. Not believe him? How could she not believe him? Surely he knew she would believe him. Surely he remembered…
Her mind stopped at that thought, and she wouldn’t let herself go further. She wouldn’t let herself follow that idea where it would lead.
Instead she looked up at him, her eyes saying what her mouth could not speak and her mind would not let herself fully think.
He looked down at her and his hand moved from his leg where it had been constrained by propriety to where it belonged around her waist. He pulled her closer, across the small gap that had been left by the last shred of formality they’d kept between him.
As that last sliver of physical distance disappeared, so too did the illusion of their unfamiliarity. His head, his great head and the gentle strength of his jawline moved quickly towards her neck, as though he’d been holding it back from there for hours. There his lips hovered, hesitant, for the longest moment of Elspeth’s young life.
She listened to his breathing. It was heavy, as was hers, but they were merging into pace with each other.
One breath, two bodies.
Finally, she felt just the softest tips of his lips on the exposed skin of her neck. He kissed her, gently at first, then more forcefully.
She breathed in sharply, breaking the rhythm of their shared breath. He drew back and looked at her, questioningly, offense in his eyes that she wouldn’t welcome his advances.
Then Elspeth knew fear, more intense than she’d felt the night before in the forest. She was desperately afraid he thought his advances unwelcome – desperately afraid she would not again feel the gentle firmness of his lips. Her hands shot out, unbidden, across his stomach, feeling the tightness of the muscles beneath. They found their way, seeking, under his shirt, to where she could feel his skin. She felt his pulse quicken and then he had turned back to her, his lips meeting hers.
AFRICAN AMERICAN URBAN FICTION: BWWM ROMANCE: Billionaire Baby Daddy (Billionaire Secret Baby Pregnancy Romance) (Multicultural & Interracial Romance Short Stories) Page 41