Fear the Wolf

by S. J. Sparrows

  In the dark of night, I struggled to see what he was doing. I rushed over to find out what had slowed him. Aldan was bending down, trying to untangle himself from the strap of his satchel, which must have fallen around his legs while he was running.

  As I drew closer, so did the shadows.

  I couldn’t see what color the night-apes were; in the gloom, they were just fast-moving silhouettes with two white lights for eyes. The bright dots in the dark reminded me of glowflies, except glowflies shone warm orange and bobbed about gracefully, doing no harm.

  These murderous white eyes came at us in jagged lines.

  The sounds of the hunt intensified. The night-apes’ screeches grew shorter—aaahhh-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah! Branches snapped and cracked under their weight. When they began drumming their chests, the mix of cries and claps sounded like laughter and mocking applause.

  Aldan had readjusted his satchel by now. I reached him just in time to yank him away from a descending shadow, then yelled at him to run and not look back.

  With terrifying speed, a night-ape dropped into the place Aldan had stood only moments ago. As it fell, I slashed horizontally with Reni’s sword, swinging with all my might. The shadow screamed and thudded to the ground.

  Silence and stillness took over the forest.

  I imagined the creatures watching me from the safety of their branches, reassessing their chance of killing me after seeing one of their own slain. I held my breath. Not moving a muscle, I mentally begged for the night-apes to scatter into the trees and never come back.

  That didn’t happen. Their cries returned with a mournful sound. One night-ape started ululating, and then others joined in until the chorus filled the forest. The cries became laced with aggression before transforming into shrieks of pure rage.

  I turned and ran.

  Following Aldan now, I sprinted for my life. Every one of my senses burst into awareness. I needed them on full alert to get me through the pitch-black forest without smacking into every tree. Still, I tripped and stumbled my way through the dark, gasping to catch my breath.

  The forest showed no mercy. Rocks bashed my toes, thorns sliced my ankles, and sharp branches tore at my tunic as I rushed past. It seemed the forest was conspiring with the night-apes to bring me down.

  When I caught up with Aldan, I took his hand to help him run alongside me—or to drag him, if needed. I tried to drown out the sounds of pursuit coming from behind. Terror swelled in me the more I focused on the noises, the more I imagined the night-apes gaining on us.

  I was lucky to have killed one night-ape. We stood no chance against a tribe of them pouncing on us from above. Old Fendra had once said that when night-apes caught their prey, they pummeled it to death, turning their victim into an unrecognizable mush of flesh and blood and broken bones. Then they feasted.

  That awful image compelled me to keep running.

  Aldan and I burst into a small clearing. The visibility was much better here. Moonlight fell through a large gap in the canopy, gently illuminating the ground and glinting off the treetops that encircled the area. A tall leafless tree stood alone in the middle. Its branches were unlike any I’d seen before. Thick, straight spikes stuck out of the trunk, covering it from bottom to the top. They were like giant thorns.

  We entered the clearing so fast I nearly impaled myself on the spiky tree. With a gasp, I froze but a hair’s breadth from the tip of one of the massive barbs. Aldan didn’t stop in time. He ran into my back, accidentally shoving me into the spike.

  My stomach screamed. I managed to pull away before the spike went too deep. The tip was coated in my blood. I released Aldan’s hand and applied pressure to my stinging stomach.

  Distracted by the dangerous tree, I hadn’t noticed the quiet. The shrieking had stopped. The other sounds had fallen away too—the creaking, snapping branches, and the rustling of leaves.

  I turned around to peer into the treetops. The night-apes perched on the branches. Their bright eyes were motionless, watching from a distance. When they began making sounds again, their cries were long, low, and fearful. It tugged at my heart until I reminded myself that they wanted to eat me. Sometimes I hated having compassion.

  After a while, I realized the night-apes weren’t going to come any closer.

  Confusion blanked my mind. Why had they stopped chasing us? I looked around cautiously, afraid a larger predator was about to leap from the bushes. Instead, the answer leapt forward.

  The barbed tree.

  Except for Aldan and I entering the clearing, nothing else had changed. Night-apes weren’t afraid to venture a short distance out of the woods; on late winter afternoons, when gloom came early, they used to attack our laborers working in the fields close to the village border.

  Something about this spiky tree frightened them. I couldn’t be certain, but it didn’t appear to have the white sickness. Even if it did, the night-apes were already infected. So why would they fear it? Did the tree’s appearance scare them? Or perhaps the danger of getting impaled while trying to climb it?

  An ache spread through my stomach. The dull sensation flooded outward from where the spike had pricked me. I tried to gently rub the area to soothe the strange burning, but my stomach went numb. My hands shook. My legs trembled.

  “Aldan,” I began, before losing control of my tongue.

  I stumbled toward him. I tried to grab his shoulder for balance, but the numbness had reached my fingers. My hand slipped straight from him. I fell and felt nothing as I hit the ground. I screamed inside my head for help, but no words reached my mouth.

  I lay on my side, paralyzed from head to toe, unable to even close my eyes.

  Aldan laughed nervously, standing over me. “Silly Senla. Clumsy like me, you are.” He watched me expectantly. When I remained silent, he began moaning in distress. He asked me questions I literally could not answer. “What’s a night-ape? Don’t they like us? One nearly jumped on me, didn’t it? But you hit it dead with your sword and told me to run and not look back. Are we sleeping here now?” At last, he gave up and lay down beside me. “Bedtime,” he said, and closed his eyes.

  How he could fall asleep so soon, I didn’t know. I could only assume he had never been told about night-apes. He didn’t understand the danger we were in. I half wished I could do the same, but terror consumed me. Unable to move or speak, I watched the haunting white eyes scattered across the treetops, willing them to stay away.

  At least now I knew why they dared not come near the spiky tree: just one prick, and this.

  The utter numbness of my body trapped my awareness solely in my thoughts. Repeatedly, I panicked that I would never move again. Each time, I had to reason the panic away. The paralysis would wear off, I told myself; it was like a spoiled food sickness or a winter cough. It would pass. My body was fighting it off. I would be okay. I would.

  Although the barbed tree kept the night-apes at bay, it held no sway over the insects and animals of the ground. I was helpless to do anything as bugs and mice crawled over my body, and equally helpless when a hissing snake slithered over my face and then disappeared into the grass. Inside, my fear set alight—I screamed and kicked and shook wildly to throw the crawlers off of me—but nothing reached the surface.

  My entire body lay still as a rock.

  It was around the time of first light when the numbness began to pass. I wiggled my fingers first. Later, my feet kicked. Then my arms and legs convulsed. My head and chest were dead weights for longer than everything else, but eventually I gained enough control to sit up. Each movement drowned me with nausea. I waited for the sickness to pass before finally standing. My surroundings spun and tilted, nearly throwing me back down, but that also passed in time.

  I inhaled deeply. “Can I speak?” I said aloud and smiled when the words croaked out. I shook the insects out of my clothes and blinked furiously to relieve my dry eyes.

  I shuddered out a breath. A tear tickled my cheek and lips as it slid down my face and over my smile. I h
ugged myself. Rubbing my arms and shoulders and elbows, I delighted in the sensations.

  I was alive.

  With complete devotion, I focused on my senses, waiting until I felt solid and in control of my body again. Soft grass blanketed the clearing. I took off my wooden sandals to feel it on my soles. Squeezing clumps of it between my toes, I grinned.

  The gentle green ground contrasted brilliantly with the spiky tree, which, in the morning light, I discovered was black. As I turned and jumped and stretched and breathed, the colors and sounds of the forest reassured me that I now fully inhabited my body again. I really was feeling this.

  Finally settled, I peered at the treetops to confirm we were alone. Earlier, the night-apes had given up on their hunt, fleeing from the rising sun. For a moment, I wondered where they hid during the day and why they only hunted at night, but there was no point in thinking about it now.

  Aldan softly snored, undisturbed by my early rising and strange behavior. I lay back down beside Aldan. My eyelids instantly slid shut, but I was determined not to sleep. I needed rest, but the last thing I wanted to do was accidentally drift off and then wake up to find the day was gone.

  We had to make the most of the light. Wherever we ended up sleeping this evening, we couldn’t afford to make the same mistake as we did last night. If we didn’t find a village before nightfall, we had only two options. One: risk setting up a fire and torches, which might scare off night-apes but potentially attract other threats. Or two: find another barbed tree to sleep nearby, before settling down for the night. I doubted the likelihood of us stumbling across another one of these trees, and—

  I jerked awake.

  Had I fallen asleep? Sitting up with a gasp, I looked around to make sure it was still day. Overhead, a pale blue sky filled the gap in the treetops. The sun was out of sight, and a cool breeze sneaked through the forest. Still morning. I sighed and smiled.

  Aldan sat a few strides away, eating. He mumbled things to himself, too quietly for me to understand. He even nodded and replied to his own words. I suspected his quiet ramblings had woken me. I scoffed. There had been no reason to worry about sleeping the day away, not with my personal timekeeper Aldan by my side.

  I joined him in eating breakfast. Because we were near the spiky tree, I warned Aldan not to get any closer to it. I explained what had happened to me and why I’d ignored him last night, but he struggled to understand the concept of paralysis. I only knew the word from books I had read in the village hall with Cerik. Healers sometimes used potions to temporarily paralyze their patients before removing an infected limb, or extracting things like a snapped-off arrowhead from their body. The potions guarded against pain.

  Aldan became frustrated the more I tried to describe paralysis. In the end, I told him the spiky tree sends people to sleep, but not a pleasant sleep. He accepted that and childishly glared at the tree. “Bad tree.”

  I laughed. “Yes, bad tree.”

  An idea formed in my mind. I got up and carefully approached the tree.

  “Not allowed to go near that,” Aldan warned me.

  “It’s fine. I’m allowed to this once, but you should never go near it. You understand?”

  He shook his head, but he repeated, “Allowed to this once …”

  My hands trembled. I remembered the all-consuming fear I’d endured last night while unable to move. It nearly persuaded me to stop and turn back.

  I stepped closer.

  I gripped my wrist to steady my hand. One spiked branch stuck out further than the others surrounding it. I grabbed the stem, about a hand’s-breadth down from the tip, and then thrust my hand upward, hard and fast. The tip snapped off, coming away in my hand.

  Stepping back, I unfurled my tense fingers to inspect the object. It looked like a long, thick needle. At the snapped end, a clear viscous fluid oozed from a channel that ran through the middle. Turning the object over, I found the other end of the vein at the sharp tip. A droplet of the fluid hung from a small black eye.

  Paralyzer. I imagined the fluid traveling through my body after it had stabbed into my stomach last night.

  Careful to avoid the fluid touching my skin, I hurried over to where I’d left my breadcloth on the ground after eating. Crumbs showered from the cloth as I picked it up and shook it out. I gently wrapped the paralyzing needle inside the fabric and tucked it into my satchel. I wedged the wrapped needle between other things to reduce the chance of it piercing the bag and pricking me.

  I hoped the paralyzing fluid would not dry out or leak from the needle. A weapon that could benumb my enemies might mean the difference between life and death. From the way the night-apes had reacted, I suspected this poison was strong enough to stop the heart of a smaller animal.

  All I would need to do is reach into my satchel, and then jam the needle into my foe.

  Would it work on a beast as big as the Wolf?

  When Aldan finished his food, we gathered our things and gritted our teeth to face the forest again. I lifted my tunic to check the stomach wound. The small cut had scabbed over and appeared to be healing without infection. My bandaged arm hurt much less this morning too.

  Today, I focused on pacing myself better. Trudging through the forest, weak and exhausted, was beginning to feel too familiar.

  22

  We found a path: an actual path. Around midmorning, we came across a faint dirt trail. The track of trodden grass and plants wended through the trees.

  Both joy and fear came with the discovery. For the path to exist, people must have regularly traveled this way.

  “Nomads,” I whispered.

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t worry, Aldan.”

  He pointed at the path. “Is that the way to the village that’s got good people?”

  I considered for a moment. The route probably led from one village to another, where nomads would stop off to trade. Or perhaps it led to their own camps or other places they frequented, such as springs of clean water. Generally, nomads avoided staying in one place for too long; they believed that those who settled became soft and fearful. Settling down gives people certain comforts, comforts that trick them into dropping their guard. But at the same time, people can never fully convince themselves that their comforts will last forever, so they fear the day their comforts will be taken from them. Better instead to keep moving, to never grow attached to the illusion of security.

  I shook my head. How sad it must be to live that way.

  Aldan huffed, and complained, “When are we going to get there?”

  “What?” I frowned. He’d taken my head shake as an answer to his previous question. “Sorry. I wasn’t shaking my head at that. Yes, I think this might lead to a village.”

  He grinned. “I don’t want to walk for always. My feet hurt.”

  “Me neither. We’ll reach a village soon, I promise. But we have to be careful. There might be bad people who use this path. If it takes us toward them, we’ll have to turn around or go a different way completely. You understand?”

  His grin turned into a scowl as he crossed his arms. “I hate you.”

  Sighing, I shook my head again and looked away. “You don’t.”

  “I do.”

  I ignored him and began walking down the path. He followed, and his vicious words followed, too.

  “I do hate you.”

  “All right,” I said. “Be quiet, please. I told you bad people might use this path.”

  He groaned, muttering something under his breath.

  My heart sank at his behavior. Yesterday, when we’d bonded over his rock collection, I’d felt a growing fondness for him. Today, he seemed more frustrated than usual. Since we’d set off from the clearing, he had repeatedly worried aloud about how he wasn’t doing what he would normally be doing at certain times of the day. Whenever I tried to calm him, he either glared at me, called me harsh names, or said he hated me.

  At first, I’d taken no slight from his behavior—he didn’t know any better; he
didn’t mean everything he said—but as the insults piled up, it became harder to disbelieve his cruel words. For now, I decided the best course was to give him clear answers and instructions until his mood improved.

  After stopping for lunch, I thought of a safer way to travel the nomads’ route. I explained to Aldan, in simpler words, that we should walk parallel to the path, under cover of the trees and bushes, and tread carefully and say nothing, so as not to attract attention. That way, if nomads happened to be using the route, we stood a chance of staying hidden, rather than walking straight into them.

  My plan had been a fine one. But stealth did me no good when the ground fell out beneath me. I had crept through the trees, before slowing down for some reason. My intuition told me something was off, that the undergrowth looked different somehow, but I failed to stop in time.

  With a loud snap, I dropped. Leaves and branches flew in front of my eyes. I twisted as I fell, reaching back to grab on to anything. My fingers blazed with pain as they clawed into the earth. My hands latched on to a root. I stopped falling and slammed into a wall of dirt. A strong earthy smell swept up my nostrils as dust and stones ran down my face.

  Hanging from an edge, I craned my neck to look over my shoulder. Below me was a pit filled with sharpened wooden poles. They were wedged into the ground, evenly spaced, so the spikes faced upward. Old, dry blood darkened their sharp ends.

  Desperately, I pulled myself up and out of the pit, before kicking and scrambling backward on my hands and feet, panting. It was the second time in under a day that I’d nearly been impaled by giant spikes. But this time, I had almost fallen on them, rather than running into them.

  “What a monstrous, wicked trap!” I raged before my good sense returned and urged me to be quiet.

  Only nomads would create such a cruel trap. It would have been easy for me to wallow here in self-pity—what if I had fallen the whole way in?—but my thoughts went instantly to the countless animals that had fallen in. I imagined them impaled on the spikes, fixed in place and fixed in agony, perhaps taking hours to die. All that pain. All that suffering. And all so that nomads could eat something other than plants.