Yana backed away. “But we can’t,” she said. She was looking around, but the main street looked deserted. “We would starve! There are little kids here.”
“That is a commonplace excuse.” The second man’s voice was sharp. He was chewing on tobacco, and he spat it down into the snow, where it lay steaming. “We’ve heard it before. They will not starve. You will find a way.”
The first rider sniffed. “What’s that smell?”
Feo held her breath. She held the pup to her damp front.
Yana was icy white now. “What . . . smell?”
“Borscht!” said the rider, slapping his hand on his horse, who whinnied, easily alarmed.
“Ah,” said the second. His nostrils stretched. “Good.” The men dismounted and pushed past Yana into her house. “Bring us soup. All of it. We’ll find out if you hold any back. And vodka.”
Yana’s voice was shaking. “Or what?”
“You know the law—or we take your eldest boys, my sweet. Get us some soup and get the men, in that order.”
Feo’s heart was straining against her rib cage in fury. “I’ve got an idea,” she whispered to Ilya. “I need your help.”
“Anything,” he said. “What?”
She told him.
“It’s too risky,” he said.
“I can’t think of anything else. Can you?”
“No. But I’m not sure—”
“Wait here.” Feo handed the pup to Ilya and ran to the nearest of the houses. She beckoned through the window. Two heads poked out of the door.
“Who here has good aim?” she whispered.
“I do,” said Sergei. “And Bogdan.” He indicated a boy of about ten breathing through a half-blocked nose. He didn’t look promising. “And Yana.” Sergei looked around, as if expecting to see her pop out from the snow. “She’s not here. They haven’t taken her, have they?”
“No, Sergei, nothing like that. But I need help. Will you?”
Sergei looked from Feo to Ilya to the pup. “Yes, definitely! Are we murdering someone?”
“Close enough. Come with me.” She led them, crouching low, back to the tree. “We need snowballs. And we need to be quick,” said Feo. “They’re drinking vodka. I don’t really know how long that takes.” She started packing together snowballs, making them as big as melons.
“Quicker,” said Ilya. His hands were fumbling in the snow. “We need to be quicker.”
The smaller boys worked fast, but not fast enough. Feo doubled her pace. “They need to hurt,” she said. “Pack them tight. Good! That’s enough.” She gathered the snowballs in her cloak. “Come on.” She led the way to the house nearest the horses—a small one with graying bricks—and ducked behind it. Ilya was still making snowballs as he ran. He was whispering instructions to himself under his breath, but when he saw she was looking at him, he attempted a grin. It was lopsided and far more toothy than usual, but it gave her a burst of courage.
“When I shout,” she said, “aim for those men’s eyes. It’s important: eyes and mouth, but especially eyes.”
“What’s going—” began Sergei, but Ilya put a finger to his lips.
Feo turned to the woods, cupped her hands to her mouth, and howled.
There was a beat of silence. Children’s faces appeared at the windows all along the street.
Feo howled again, and from the woods came a reply: Gray’s guttural cry, and then Black’s. Feo nudged Ilya, and he joined in. His howl was surprisingly excellent.
The requisitioners stumbled out of the house, a jug of spirits slopping in the hand of the tallest. They ran, staggering, toward their horses, struggling to cock their rifles. “Wolves!” one of them roared, and then tripped over his toes and performed a painful-looking split on the ice.
Feo picked up a snowball in each hand. She howled again. The men heaved themselves onto their horses, their feet slipping drunkenly in and out of their stirrups.
And from the woods came the pack of wolves, running low, the fur on their backs rippling as they approached. Her wolves, Feo thought, definitely had a sense of theater.
“Now!” cried Feo. As the men lifted their rifles, the children attacked. Sergei and Bogdan came charging out from behind the house, hurling snowballs at the men’s eyes, hands, ears, gun barrels. Sergei’s aim was erratic, but Bogdan’s was brisk and true.
“Devil take—” roared a requisitioner. “Wol—!” Just as he raised his gun to his eye, Feo’s snowball caught him in his open mouth.
Behind them, out of the corner of her eye, Feo saw the meetinghouse door burst open. The requisitioner’s rifle rang out and a bullet drove into the snow, meters away from the approaching wolves.
“No!” Feo’s heart caught in her chest. “Get them in the eyes! Make sure they can’t shoot!” She kept hurling snowballs, showering the men with ice that cut at their faces and knocked them sideways. Feo howled one last time, and Gray leaped, her jaws bared, at a horse’s side. Feo hadn’t meant her to get so close. She shouted, “Gray, no! Back!”—but even as she did, the horses reared. Screaming in terror, they fled down the main road. The sacks, loosely empty over their saddles, bounced against their sides. The men, hanging blindly on to their horses’ necks, disappeared over the horizon.
ELEVEN
Four hours later Feo sat by a roaring fire in the middle of the square, wrapped in eight blankets, ducking the grateful kisses of strangers and chewing a kebab on a wooden stick. The juice of it ran down her wrist, and the pup kept trying to insert himself into her sleeve. Her head was still in a whirl.
Alexei had taken in what had happened faster than anyone. Pushing through the crowd of staring men, he had dragged her into their center and raised her hand above her head like a prizefighter.
“You see?” he had shouted to the men, who stood, staring and bewildered. “That’s what courage looks like. That’s why Rakov is afraid of her!”
She had wriggled free as soon as she could, but she was unable to avoid the stream of strangers approaching her, clapping heavy hands on her shoulders, embracing her with rough cheeks and calloused palms, the women stroking her hair and pressing hot meat into her hands.
They had stayed back, though, from the wolves. In the flurry of the requisitioners’ departure, a few stones had been thrown at the animals, but Feo had thrown stones at the throwers and her aim had been better, so it had all stopped fairly quickly.
“They’re my friends,” Feo had said. “They’re no more likely to bite than I am.” She did not specify exactly how likely that was.
At last, unable to bear the attention, Feo took the wolves, a lantern, and a haunch of beef behind the tree to hide until her head stopped spinning. The meat, at least, did not try to kiss her.
But the space behind the great tree was already occupied.
“Yana!” said Feo. “Sorry, I was just—”
“Hiding? I know,” said Yana. She edged away from the wolves. “I thought I’d get out of the way before the dancing starts.”
The thought of dancing was so terrible that Feo pushed it away out of sight. She took a bite of meat, and spoke round the edges of it. “What happened with the meeting?” she asked.
Yana shrugged. “Nothing. It was interrupted, wasn’t it? They’ll decide tomorrow. They’ll decide not to fight. They always do. All they do is talk.” There was rage in her voice. It was odd, coming from so soft-looking a person. “This isn’t the first time Alexei’s tried to make them. He’s been wanting to fight since he was thirteen. Rakov’s never been so bad as this, though. They say he’s going mad, did you know?”
“I think he’s just plain evil. Those men—they didn’t hurt you, did they?”
“No! They just wanted a drink. Though if the grown-ups keep going the way they are right now”—she gestured at the men dancing around the fire, their boots kicking out in the snow—“there won’t be any to give them when they come back.”
“Come back?”
Yana nodded. Her face, Feo thought, was horr
ibly matter of fact. “What you did was wonderful, Feo, but they’ll come back. You don’t know what it’s like here. Rakov’s men—the tsar’s army—they always come back for something. Or someone.”
The look on Yana’s face made Feo’s throat burn. She shook it away and turned to stare at the snow, poking at it with a stick. As she poked, the first twitchings of an idea began to flicker.
“But, look—look! See here.” She pointed to the prints Black’s paws had left in the snow. “Look.”
“They’re big,” said Yana. “Big enough to kill you.”
“Exactly! Those men—they won’t come back if they see the prints, will they?”
“But the next time it snows they’ll be covered,” said Yana. “It’s not . . . They’re lovely prints, but it’s not a long-term solution, Feo.”
“You could make them again, I think!”
“What?” Sergei peeked from around the tree trunk. “Are you planning to leave the black wolf here? That would be amazing! I’d take good care of it!”
“No!” Feo shook her head so hard that her hair got caught up in her meat. “Black and I go together. That would be like leaving behind my fingers. And, anyway,” she added, as Sergei pouted, “he wouldn’t stay for long if I left: I can’t make him do anything.”
“So you can’t help us.”
“Maybe I can. I’ve got an idea. We’ll need wood, thick wood. And knives. Can you get those? And some people to help. And Black, as the model.”
The whittling took less time than Feo had expected. Ilya was meticulously careful; Yana was unexpectedly fast with her hands. They hacked the wood into squares with an ax, and then chipped away with kitchen knives until paw shapes began to emerge, very slowly, from the grain.
Every now and then Sergei would yelp, and the snow around him would be flecked with red, but he tried to bite Yana when she suggested he give up on his, so they left him to it.
When they had four lumps of wood carved roughly into something like the shape of wolf paws, Feo took them into her lap and rubbed the edges with the rough sacking of her bag. “To blunt the edges,” she explained. “Wolves are smooth.”
Sergei watched with his tongue poked out in concentration.
“There. Now we need string. Do you have any?”
“String’s valuable round here,” said Yana. “But I’ll try.”
She returned in ten minutes, her expression guilty. “I . . . borrowed it, from Papa’s spare boots.”
“Thank you. Now—look!” Feo looped the string around her feet, then lashed the wolf paws to the soles of her boots so that the print faced downward. She took the other two in her hands. On all fours she ran a few steps, turned, galloped the other way. She tried to keep her feet close together: Wolves run in a compact line. Behind her, the prints of a wolf cut into the snow.
“You could do it every day! And we’ll get Black to mark the territory. He’s an alpha,” said Feo. “That way you’ll be safe from other wolves.”
“How? Mark how?”
“Well . . . ,” Feo said. “You know. They pee.”
“I don’t want them peeing in my room!”
“No, just on trees! And the outside of houses. It has a scent in it. It warns other wolves to keep away.”
“Like writing a ‘Keep Out’ sign?”
“Yes. Peeing is wolf writing.”
“Ugh.”
“It’s an old trick. It’s the only trick I taught them. It’s what keeps us safe, at home, from the wolves we wild coming back.”
Sergei asked, “Does it work for humans too? I mean, if I peed on my sister’s bed, would she have to leave?”
Ilya let out a snort of laugher.
“No,” said Feo. “I tried, when I was much smaller. I was angry with Mama about something. It definitely didn’t work.” The thought of her mother—who, in response to that incident, had sighed, and then laughed, and swung her bodily into the tin bath—sent up such a spurt of longing that Feo felt the snow sway under her. She forced the longing down.
Grigory’s head peered around the tree. “Ah! There you are. I heard laughing. You’re wanted by the fire. Dancing!”
There was music playing outside the meetinghouse.
“It’s all for you!” said Clara. She gestured at the fire, at the circle of waiting adults, and the man with a fiddle poised under his chin. “To say thank you! You and the boy are going to do a dance!”
Fresh horror drenched over Feo, far worse than when faced with guns and requisitioners.
“Thank you!” she said. “But I don’t dance.”
“Oh, come on! I dance,” said Sergei. He swiveled his hips and windmilled his arms. “See?”
“Wolf wilders don’t dance,” said Feo. She wrinkled her nose at Clara and smiled. She hoped the fear didn’t show in her face. Feo hated dancing. Dancing was unambiguously to do with being watched.
“You’ll have to,” said Yana. She smiled apologetically. “It’s easier just to do it.”
“I don’t know it.”
“Yes, you do! Dance, wolf girl!” said Sergei.
In fact, Feo did know the steps to this music: Everyone did. Mama had taught her as soon as she was old enough to walk—just in case, Marina had said. Everyone should be able to dance one dance.
The woman’s part wasn’t difficult. You made little doll gestures with your hands, kept your head and neck still. For men, lots of stamping and head tossing. If you had a skirt, you swished it. Feo sighed and stuck out her elbows, and swished her cloak. Yana clapped politely. The adults murmured contentedly.
Ilya stepped forward and bowed. He was grinning nervously, but there was a spark in his eyes.
“Can we try to do it as quickly as possible?” said Feo. The heat in her face had nothing at all to do with the fire. “I’m not very good at dancing.”
“Dance!” cried someone in the crowd. Feo suspected it was Alexei. She glared.
The music rose, quickened, peaked. Ilya leaped upward. Boys do not have skirts to swish—but as Ilya jumped and spun, scissoring his heels in the air, snow flew up around them, and the air seemed to swish for him. He leaped again, higher, and as the wolves paced into the circle to investigate, Ilya crouched and split-leaped high over White’s back.
Feo let out a gulping laugh of surprise. White snuffed primly. There was laughter from the adults, but Ilya’s face was shining with a white, bright seriousness.
Feo stepped through her part, keeping her head down: two skips, twist the wrists. Ilya was ignoring the steps: He found a spot of ice and began to pirouette, one leg straight out from his waist and snow flying from the sole of his shoe. Clara started counting his turns, but at eleven she got confused and cheered instead. The crowd around them was growing. Ilya jumped like a cat and landed in front of Feo, and crouched, kicking his legs out like a Cossack.
He didn’t dance like a soldier, or like a sharp-wristed child who could not light a fire. He danced, Feo thought, like a lost boy found: like a victory parade.
Feo danced herself to a stop. Nobody, she thought, was watching her: So she knelt down by the wolves, one arm round Black’s shoulders, staring. Even the wolves seemed more than usually fascinated. The snow had begun to fall again, and the villagers widened their circle to give Ilya space as he threw himself backward—hands landing wrist-deep in snow—and flipped upright to land on the tips of his toes. He did not wobble. The top of his head had gathered a snow cap. The fiddle player quickened his pace again, and Ilya flew in a circle of leaps and spins, snow and sweat flying off his face. Feo hugged Black tighter, and scrunched up her face so nobody would see the pride in her eyes. She whistled through her fingers.
He came to a stop as the music softened, and let his arms fall to his sides.
There was silence. Ilya’s shoulders fell a little, and his ears began to glow pink. He looked down at his shoes.
The roar of applause hit them like a solid wave. It was architectural.
Ilya let out a choking, strangled snort of hap
piness. “I did tell you,” he said to Feo, “that I never wanted to be a soldier.”
Feo tried many times in the next hours to get Ilya away by himself, so they could be gone. Alexei had stuffed their packs full of cheese, dried sausage, and nuts, but every time they crept away from him, he seized her and towed her to meet another bearded man or cloaked woman.
“The wolf girl! Look at her!” he kept saying. He grinned at her. “Look—see, this is the one who attacked Rakov with a ski! You have cheese older than her, Grigory! You’re willing to let her be braver than you?”
So it was pitch-black by the time Feo found Ilya by himself, and the panic in her chest was rising.
“We need to sleep, Feo,” he said. He was stretched out on a straw-sack mattress on Sergei’s floor, looking ostentatiously comfortable. “And it’s dark out there. Tomorrow will be soon enough.”
“It won’t, Ilya! We need to go now. It’s Sunday! The city’s still more than a day away! And then we need to find a way to get in, and get her out.”
“Six or seven hours won’t make any difference.”
“It will, Ilya!” Her voice, she could hear, was growing shrill.
Ilya closed his eyes and snored loudly.
Feo shook him. The snoring grew louder, and the eyes scrunched more tightly closed.
Outside the window the fire was still burning, and the laughter was getting louder and wilder. Men were thumping their fists against their chests; women were dancing in the snow. As she watched, Feo felt her chest contract. She had never been around so many strangers in her life.
Alexei dashed past outside, Clara on his shoulders. He slipped and skidded in the snow. Sergei chased him, trying to touch his cloak, sliding in the ice and shrieking with past-bedtime glee.
Feo thought for one second about joining them, and then pressed herself back against the wall. It wasn’t time for playing. They were strangers: Everyone, really, was a stranger, even Ilya. Feo tried to fight back the rising panic. It prickled in her stomach, an unfamiliar fear. Even the snow in this place was thinner and trodden flat. It didn’t talk, she thought: It was mute snow. Sitting still became too much to bear.
The Wolf Wilder Page 10