The Silent Strength of Stones

by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  “What?” she said, startled.

  “I feel like you are.”

  “But I can’t marry you. I can’t marry anyone unless the Presences sanction it.”

  “I’m not talking about marriage,” I said, alarmed. I knew even less about her than I had thought.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I like you, you like me. We date. We don’t go out with other people as long as you’re my girlfriend and I’m your boyfriend.”

  “How long does it last?”

  “Until we break up. You can do that whenever you want. How much longer will your family be staying?” Suddenly I wondered: if Evan owned me, and he left with Willow and her folks, would I have to go too? Could he make me? Or was it all just a joke? Ridiculous. Absurd! It had to be a joke. People didn’t own each other, not anymore, and how could a wolf prove ownership of a person? It would never hold up in any court I’d seen on television.

  Then again, it wasn’t a legal matter. Something had happened to me. I had heard and understood a wolf speaking, and the words he had said had done involuntary things to me.

  What if it wasn’t a joke? Pop would stop it. I didn’t know how I was going to get away even when I was eighteen, a moment I’d been planning for years (pack what I needed, what little money I had saved, slip away and catch a ride with Hank, the Laceys’ produce driver, whose acquaintance I’d been cultivating. Pop might check with all our regular vendors to see if one of them had given me a ride, but he probably wouldn’t think of Hank. At least not right away…Get down to the valley and disappear). Pop’s expectation that I would stay and work at the store was so strong it was smothery. Pop would just expect me to stay; how could Evan fight that?

  What if he could fight it, though?

  “As long as we must,” said Willow. “The skilliau are strong here and listen to us, but they are stubborn and want courting. You can’t just take one by force.”

  “Skilly-what?”

  She laughed and said, “We’ll be here a while.”

  “So while you’re here…”

  “All right.”

  I gave her a kiss. “And then if Jeremy still bothers you, you tell him you’re my girlfriend, and I can rescue you.”

  She glanced toward the bench, studying Jeremy, who was talking to Megan now. “Voice will work on him, Nick. It’s very strange. I do things to you that Aunt Elissa and Uncle Bennet told me over and over never to do to anyone in public, but I haven’t been thinking of doing them to other Domishti, not since Mama and Papa sent me south; just to you. Maybe because you’re not Domishti.” She put her hand over her mouth. “Not Domishti,” she whispered behind her fingers.

  The music had started again, and people were dancing around us. Willow gripped my hand. “Come outside,” she said, and led me toward the door again.

  We walked past Junie, dancing with George. Junie winked at me. It suddenly occurred to me that Willow and I had kissed right there in public, more than once, and I hadn’t been paying attention to the fact that everyone in the hall except a few summer transients knew me. Pretty flagrant stuff for Parsley’s. Just part of the newspaper report now.

  Willow led me under the trees, then gripped my fingers, pushing my hand down until my palm faced up. With her free hand she made a series of gestures above my hand. A little ring of gas-blue flame glowed above my hand, giving off no heat at all.

  “Sirella,” she muttered.

  With my free hand, I passed my index finger through the flames. Couldn’t feel a thing. Not bright enough to read by, but still pretty as a firework. “Can you make lights like this anywhere?” I said.

  “No,” she said. The blue ring faded. “Just special places.” She released my hand, then held her left hand flat and gestured above it with her right. A spire of clear lemon-yellow flame rose above her hand, almost too bright to look at. Heat came from it. She snapped her fingers and it disappeared.

  “I knew you were safe,” she said. My eyes, burned from staring at the flame, showed me a tall dark streak everywhere I looked. “Somehow I knew it.”

  “Define ‘safe,’” I said.

  “Kin,” she said.

  I lost breath and for a moment couldn’t find it again.

  “Maybe not close kin,” she said. “I haven’t seen a sign like yours before, though the color is air. But somehow kin.”

  “But what does—” For about the fifteenth time since I’d met Willow, I didn’t know what questions to ask. How could she gesture and make light? Was she a magician? She was probably a witch. Well, she pretty much had to be, didn’t she? And all her family with her? What she had just done, was it some kind of blood test? Was Pop related to Willow’s family? Was Mom? Mom seemed like a likelier candidate, now that I thought about it…

  Oh, boy, who needed any more relatives?

  Except, of course, my new brother, the wolf; or maybe he was my new pop.

  Suddenly the air carried people noise, a chorus of good nights and good wishes, promises to get together for lunch or swimming or barbecue, and the rev of car and pickup engines. Exhaust flavored the air. Red lights shone as cars backed and reversed, then arrowed off down the road. The dance was over.

  “What time is it?” Willow asked.

  I pressed a button on my watch and the face lit up. “Almost eleven.”

  “Oh, no! I have to go home,” said Willow. “They told me to be back by ten at the latest. Nick…”

  “I’ll walk you back. I know a few short cuts.”

  I didn’t stick around once we got back to Lacey number five. I asked her if she wanted support and she said it would be much better if her aunt and uncle didn’t even see me.

  “Where did you tell them you were going?”

  She smiled. “Out to commune with nature,” she said.

  “Boy, if I said something like that to Pop, he’d tell me to stop smart-mouthing him.”

  “I used different words, but that’s one of my jobs, klishka y varyan. Speaking to wood spirits.”

  “Tell ’em some of the spirits were long-winded.”

  She gave me a brief kiss, then ran across the clearing to the cabin’s front door. I stood in the forest’s fringe and watched the door open, with golden light beyond it turning Willow into a silhouette. A murmur of voices, and then she was inside, shutting the night out again.

  So the magic was over, and now I had to go home and face Pop, who would be waiting up, I was sure, and would have a lot to say. Might as well get it over with, and then maybe I could go to bed and think about everything that had happened. Write down a list of questions so the next time I saw Willow I could get some real information. Like: how did she make that fire ring show up? Did it mean I was a witch too? Was it something I could learn? Lights could come in handy on a night like this, when there was no moon and the forest path was dark and I was hearing things rustling around me.

  I knew this path. I had made this path, and walked it at least once and usually twice every summer day for almost nine years. I could run it. But if I ran, wouldn’t that tell what was following me that I was scared?

  The rustle was loudest to my left. I walked faster, trying not to think about bears. No reason on Earth why a bear should be pacing me. I was pretty sure I didn’t smell like any food I had eaten, and humans weren’t bears’ preferred dinners. Still…I picked up the pace some more. No. I wasn’t running. Just walking very, very fast.

  “Nick.”

  I tripped over nothing and sprawled on the path. The heels of my hands skidded on the ground as I fell, and they started hurting. I groaned. “Evan! Cripes, you scared me!”

  He laughed, more breath than sound, then said, “Sorry.” Then he laughed some more while I was catching my breath, calming my heart, and pushing myself up until I was sitting instead of sprawling. “Sorry!” he said. He laughed. He apologized again.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. “If this is your idea of fun, I’ll be good for lots of laughs, I’m sure.” My hands were throbbing. I tried
to think of all the questions I wanted to ask him. Like, how could he own me, and what did it mean? How could he talk? How could I understand him? What did he want from me?

  “Blood?” he said.

  “What?”

  “I smell blood. What happened?”

  “Oh. Skinned my palms.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and this time he sounded like he meant it. “Heal.”

  My hands tingled, then itched; it felt like bees were swarming across my palms, prickles and wing brushes. Under the skin, heat grew, peaked, faded, leaving a shadowed-stone cool behind.

  The hairs on my neck and forearms prickled. I touched one hand with another and felt only smooth skin.

  4

  Questions of Ownership

  I pressed my hands together, feeling a bone-deep chill because the skin of my palms was smooth and the pain had gone. I had a strong sense that I had done this to myself, the prickling and the heat and the strangeness, that it had come from inside me. How could a wolf order me to do something impossible and have, me accomplish it?

  I could persuade people to do things they didn’t want to do, but he hadn’t bothered with persuasion. He had told me, and I had done it.

  I lay face up on the path, folded my hands on my stomach, and closed my eyes. I had crossed my believing-unbelievable-things threshold. I wasn’t sure when I was going to move again.

  “Nick?” Evan said. His cold nose touched my hand. “What’s the matter now?”

  I lay quiet for a while, trying to sort facts out in my head. They lay like beached fish, a flopping fact here, a shivering fact there, a gasping fact over there, no cohesive net of sense pulling them together. Unconsciousness beckoned. The cradle of drifty sleep thoughts and slowed breathing rocked me a few inches away from myself.

  “Nick?”

  Be comfortable, he had told me some hours earlier. It was odd how comfortable hard ground and twisted roots and pine needles could be. Pine needles, the best smell in the world. Be well, he had said. I wondered how long that would last. The rest of my life? Maybe this was a good thing. What if he decided he didn’t like me, though? What if he said, Be sick? My thoughts warped and stretched taffy thin. What sort of sick? Maybe he’d be specific. He could say spots and I would be leopard-spotted, or hairy, and I would grow my own fur. I saw a courtroom with a wolf in the witness stand, and all the jurors wild animals. The judge was Pop, of course. Pop was always the judge, and I was always on trial.

  “Nick. Wake up.”

  I blinked, wide awake.

  He said, “Talk to me.”

  “About what?”

  “Tell me what’s the matter with you.”

  His voice was nothing like Willow’s when she was persuading me to say something I would rather keep to myself. I could still hear the edge of a growl in it, and thought that if somebody else was around, Evan would sound like a wolf to them. His voice wasn’t beautiful or soothing, but still, words came from my mouth whether I wanted them to or not. “Did anybody ever own you?”

  After a moment, he said, “Yes.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “No.”

  I hesitated, then said, “How can you tell me to do something and I do it, even though I don’t know how?”

  “When did I?”

  “You said, ‘Heal.’”

  “But you know how to do that.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t strike me as particularly cautious. You must have scraped yourself before. Of course your body knows how to heal. Otherwise you’d be all sores.”

  “But it doesn’t happen in a moment.”

  “It could, though.” I felt him sniffing my hands, tiny puffs of warm breath against my skin. “You have the energy for it.” He sounded puzzled. “How odd.”

  It occurred to me that I hadn’t answered his question, anyway, and I said, “What’s the matter with me is there are too many things I don’t understand, things I don’t know how to believe in. All day, one thing after another.”

  He sat. “It’s all right,” he said. “You’re fine. Believe what’s true, what’s actually happening. It won’t hurt you.”

  Something hot and hard caught in my throat. For a little while I couldn’t breathe. I saw darkness inside my eyelids, and then an explosion of fireworks, and then I moved my throat and swallowed the hot hard thing and my body relaxed. I felt much better. It was inside me now, out of my head and into my stomach, all the doubts and resistance, dissolving, changing into different things I could absorb. I took deep night-flavored breaths, tasting starlight and possibilities.

  Evan said, “See? Feel better?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good.”

  “Evan, Willow says you own me, and I’m scared. She says I asked for it, and that scares me too.”

  “You didn’t ask for it. I took you. You consented, but you didn’t ask for it. I took you so Willow wouldn’t. I never meant to do anything with you, Nick, except protect you,” He lay down beside me and rested his muzzle on my chest.

  After a moment, he said, “Willow was getting trained to take people and own them, and our parents didn’t like that, but they couldn’t figure out how to stop it. They couldn’t see where it was coming from. Even now I’m not sure. I didn’t get that training; I mean, I knew how to fetch you, but I don’t crave owning people the way she does. Anyway, they sent us to live with our cousins, hoping that would change Willow’s mind. With the help of our aunt and uncles, she’s fighting the training, but she still has this hunger.”

  There was something very odd about what he was saying, but it took me a moment to figure out what. “Your parents are Willow’s parents?”

  “She’s my sister, what did you think?”

  “I thought you were a wolf,” I whispered.

  “Oh.” He lifted his head and looked down at me. In the darkness all I saw was a moving shadow. After a moment, he lowered his head to my chest again and muttered, “I forgot.”

  “You’re not a wolf?”

  “I am now.”

  I thought about that for a while, about all the assumptions I had made because I had thought he was an animal; that I had held out my hand for him to smell, touched him, scratched his ears, hugged him, that even now I was lying here with his head on my chest, which was a magical connection to an animal one had made friends with, but very strange if I considered Evan a human male.

  I tried to imagine him as a man or a boy, but I could only picture him as a wolf. I lifted the arm he wasn’t lying against and stroked his head. It felt natural and right. And he had licked my nose, and that had felt okay, too. I decided not to think about it too hard.

  After a little while, I said, “How long have you been a wolf?”

  “Six months.” He moaned the way a dog would. “Ever since they sent us to live with Aunt Elissa and Uncle Bennet. I hate the way they live.”

  “That’s what Willow said,” I murmured.

  “I didn’t want to leave our home. I mean, I didn’t have Willow’s problem. But Ma and Pa were worried that something else was happening to me. Maybe because I…well, anyway, Pa put a pusher on me to go, even though he and Ma cried when Willow and I left. So as I left, I turned myself into a wolf, and I’m sticking with it.”

  “Mmm,” I said. “Would you really stay here with me, like you said?”

  “Sure,” he said. He laughed, this tune a deep chuckle that sounded almost like a growl. “I’ll be your dog. And then sometimes…”

  “What?”

  “You’ll be my wolf.” He urfed.

  I tensed. Images of late night horror movies dashed through my mind, men turning into beasts and committing horrible crimes, then living to me the night.

  “What’s the matter now?”

  “I—” How could I explain that to him? “You ever watch TV?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Never mind, then.” He was probably joking, anyway. He certainly laughed a lot. I felt sleepy again. Suddenly I remembe
red that Pop was probably sitting up, waiting for me, and the longer I stayed out, the madder he would get. I was pretty sure I could already kiss my half-day Saturday good-bye just for insolence, let alone staying out too late, and the regret I felt—I had an eagle to track down and finally a wolf who would go out with me and look—struck so deep it felt like a wound. “Evan? I have to go home.”

  He lifted his head and I sat up, then got to my feet. The path was familiar to me again, even in the dark, and my fear had gone. Evan followed at my heels. Was this what it was like? To have a dog and not be scared of anything in the night. Even better, to have a wolf. A fierce joy flowed through me, in spite of everything. For a little while I imagined we were leaving, me with a pack full of supplies and a sleeping bag, heading into the wild together. We would find the perfect campsite, and in the morning I would catch rainbow trout—add fishing gear and a frying pan to what I was carrying—and fry them over a tiny fire, and…

  Light from the store woke me out of this dream. “I don’t think you should come in,” I said to Evan. I could see Pop sitting behind the cash register in the old swivel chair he had found at a yard sale, his boots propped on the counter. He was reading Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.

  “He’s got to know sometime, doesn’t he?” Evan said.

  “I’m just about to get in a lot of trouble. This wouldn’t be the best time for me to tell him I have a, a, well, a pet.”

  Evan laughed. “See you tomorrow,” he said, and trotted off into the woods.

  I opened the door, and the bells rang. Pop looked up, his face still ruddy as normal, not bright red like when he was about to shout. “Nick,” he said, putting down his magazine, lowering his boots to the floor.

  “Hi, Pop.”

  “I ever tell you how much I need you here?”

  I felt staggered. He’d never said anything like that to me before.

  “Place couldn’t run without you.”

  I stuffed my hands in my pockets, feeling a weird combination of hope and fear. Was this actual, honest-to-god appreciation? Or was he setting me up for something?