Wolfskin

by W. R. Gingell

  “No change,” Mother said, and I thought Akiva looked relieved rather than otherwise. “Gwen’s watching him.”

  “I’ll bring Rose’s things around later,” Akiva said. Mother nodded, and I realised a little indignantly that I was expected to remain with David. “Come, Rose; I need your help.”

  David was in Father’s study, laid on the bed from our guest room and wedged snugly between the big old writing desk and grandma’s sewing cabinet. Father’s room was a good choice: the guest room faced the road, whereas Father’s study backed onto the open hills, with windows that were shielded by three large evergreens. It would be difficult for anyone to catch sight of David there.

  Close to, I could see that David wasn’t as young as my dream had led me to believe. In sleep or coma his face was relaxed and untroubled, but there were creases about his eyes and a deepness to the line of his cheeks that suggested he was perhaps only a few years younger than Mother. The serenity of his face puzzled me: somehow I’d expected terror or pain to be etched into his features. The attack, while bloody, must have been very sudden and short. I wondered if he’d seen it coming, and the first doubts as to the attacker being Cassandra filtered slowly into my subconscious. I felt uneasily that Cassandra would have played with her victims before finishing them, and it left me with the frightening knowledge that the choice was now between the remaining six wardens, all of whom had appeared perfectly sane and reasonable. Somehow I’d been more comfortable thinking that of course it must be Cassandra.

  “Poor boy,” Mother said compassionately. She stood in the doorway drying her hands on her apron and adding to the bloodstains on it.

  “Margot, take his head if you please,” said Akiva. “Rose, his hands. Hold them fast.”

  Mother sat on the bed at David’s head, smoothing back the long strands of hair that were beginning to curl, her hands competent and gentle. I took a firm hold on his wrists and leaned my weight a little forward, ready to apply pressure if need be.

  Akiva uncorked her small vial of potion and said: “Steady now,” as she tilted the bottle over David’s mouth. Black liquid flowed smoothly out, a little more quickly than honey but by no means as quickly as hot tea, and David spasmed as it hit his tongue. Mother’s hands, which had been gently stroking his brow, fastened with vice-like strength around his head, and I had to lean all my weight on David’s wrists to prevent his thrashing from knocking the bottle out of Akiva’s hands. He struggled, but we held him tight until every last drop of the black liquid was swallowed and Akiva nodded at us to step back. David’s eyes had opened during the struggle, and now he stared at the ceiling with huge black irises that were horrible in their sightlessness, insensible to the world.

  Akiva straightened with a groan and restored the empty bottle to her satchel.

  “That’s all I can do for now. Rose, you’ll remain here until he wakes: I have some forest business that can’t be delayed. You will need to draw wards every night while he sleeps.”

  Mother’s eyes flew to me, startled, but I only nodded.

  Akiva said: “Well, Margot; what could I do when she was stumbling over every mythic in the forest? Not to mention Cassandra. She’s safer knowing these things.”

  Mother looked rather grim. “Very well, but I wish to know more of Cassandra. And of Bastian. Rose is young and heedless, and the young man doesn’t sound like the kind of person I would wish her to know.”

  “We will talk downstairs,” said Akiva, nodding.

  The stairs were wood, and through the faint lines running in them, I heard snatches of conversation.

  Akiva said: “I’ve scared him off for the time being, but I can’t protect Rose from him forever. He has some claim on her.”

  “Because she helped him? I think not.”

  “He has one chance,” Akiva said softly; and despite the sternness with which she treated him, she sounded as if she felt sorry for Bastian. “And he has waited a very long time: Cassandra’s vendetta has spanned some decades.”

  Their voices faded away as they moved into the stone-paved kitchen, and I wrinkled my nose in annoyance. Bastian, I had always been certain, was hiding several things from me: it was annoying to find that both Mother and Akiva were doing so also.

  David didn’t recover consciousness that week. He lay silent and barely breathing, his eyes still black-irised and staring uselessly at the ceiling until Mother closed them. I walked a boundary around the house and gardens each night, feeling an odd sort of power drawing in around the house, and was charmed to realise that here at least, I would always be warden. It was like my own, small version of the forest.

  Akiva returned in due course with my trunk, and I found that she had packed a great many books in with my clothes, all of which I was adjured to read. I went through them eagerly that night, picking out the interesting ones and putting aside the more ordinary ones for later. Gwendolen tripped in blithely as I was sorting through them by David’s bedside, looking unusually studious with a fat little book in her own hand. She looked over my books and wrinkled her nose fastidiously.

  “Oh, how boring, Rose! What a dull life you must have with Akiva!”

  I gave her a scornful look, and snatched at her own volume. “What’s this, Gwen? Going in for a course of serious study?”

  Gwendolen tried to snatch it back, flushing, but I held it out of reach.

  “Rose! Give it back!”

  “Shush!” I adjured her, looking pointedly at David. Gwendolen shushed, but looked pleadingly at me, so I took pity on her and tossed it back.

  “Does Mother know you’re reading The Black Knight?”

  Gwen put her nose in the air. “There is nothing remotely improper in it,” she informed me coldly. “It is only a romance.”

  And in spite of my teasing, she read it aloud to David during the day. Fortunately, David’s haggard good looks had appealed to her sense of the romantic, and she was happy to take her turn watching him when Mother and I didn’t have the time to spare.

  Akiva came by every few days, hobbling in to poke David’s shoulder and then grunt in annoyance when he didn’t wake. She twice forced more of the blueroot potion down his throat and returned at last, at the beginning of the new week, with two huge black crow feathers.

  “This has gone on quite long enough,” she told the unresponsive David. “Your stubbornness will be your undoing, young man.”

  She set the feathers alight with a click of her fingers, and held the grossly smoking things beneath David’s nose.

  He coughed and weakly protested with meaningless mumbles, but his irises shrank almost immediately until the grey of his eyes could be seen once more.

  “That’s better,” Akiva said approvingly. “Wake up, man!”

  David groaned and coughed again, wrackingly. “Go away, you evil old woman. Stop haunting my sleep.”

  Gwendolen and I snickered into our hands, and even Mother fought a smile as Akiva glared at David.

  “Show some gratitude, David McAvee! Sit up and tell me what happened to you.”

  The grey eyes studied her warily. “I don’t know who you are. Have you kidnapped me?”

  Akiva’s eyebrows snapped together, and she sat back on her heels. “Hm, I didn’t expect this. Do you remember who you are?”

  “I was looking for someone,” David said jerkily. “I don’t– remember.”

  I watched in horrified fascination as a tear slid down his cheek, following the deep line in his cheek.

  Mother said sharply: “That’s enough. Out, all of you!”

  Even Akiva did as she was told, and we left Mother alone with David. Gwendolen looked distinctly tearful on David’s behalf, but Akiva’s back was stiff with annoyance as she marched down the stairs ahead of us. I left Gwendolen hovering uselessly in the kitchen and followed Akiva out into the garden, where she was glaring with ferocity into the bright winter morning.

  “Do you think he was looking for Kendra?” I asked her warily, quite prepared to be told to go awa
y.

  But Akiva only sighed. “I very much suspect so: I found him outside the forest entirely. He may have confronted someone.”

  “And so the kidnapper had to kill him,” I finished darkly, forgetting for a moment that this wasn’t an adventure story.

  “Whoever it was didn’t try to kill him; the forest would have intervened even that far out.”

  “If it was a warden,” I added helpfully.

  She looked at me sharply then nodded. “If it was a warden. There was a curse crawling all over David when I found him, a nasty slippery thing that was very well put together. If it’s not a warden, it’s a very strong, logical magic user.”

  “What was the curse supposed to do?”

  “I don’t know.” Akiva looked as if she were annoyed with herself. “I had to dismantle it before I could find out what it was meant to do. However, whoever cursed David doesn’t know that we have him safe, and I would like to keep it that way until we know a little more; or at least until his memory comes back.”

  “I’ve drawn wards every night,” I said quietly, feeling sobered.

  “Good, good,” Akiva murmured distractedly. She was not looking at me: she was looking to her left, where the forest stretched out, bleak and barren with the winter. “Continue to do so. Run along now.”

  I did as I was told and went back into the house. By late morning Akiva had vanished into the forest and I found myself still at home with Mother and Gwendolen, almost as if nothing had ever changed.

  We told people that David was Father’s brother, addled from the northern wars. Everyone was kind and understanding, and he was drawn into our circle easily. Thankfully there were no dancing parties at that time of year, and I could spend most nights sitting before the fire with Mother and David while Gwen sewed frocks for the coming spring and dreamed of conquests with a bewitching smile on her cherry lips.

  David continued all winter without recovering his memory. I played chess with him of an evening, and sometimes with Gilbert, who turned up with startling regularity along with Gwendolen’s hangers-on. I found myself glad of his company, and when David was disinclined to talk to anyone but Mother, Gilbert and I would quite often walk along the borders of the forest. I missed the sound and the feel of the forest, but more especially of deep forest. As we walked I could always feel the pull of it, yearning and somehow frightened. There was an uneasiness to the air that made me more worried for Akiva and the remaining wardens than ever before.

  Mostly we talked of Gilbert’s farm, the harvest and his plans for the spring planting. Gilbert was eager and knowledgeable on the subject, and I could tell that he loved the farm very much. I didn’t know why exactly he chose me to confide in, but I found the subject interesting enough to ask questions, and Gilbert seemed to enjoy answering them. Sometimes we talked playfully about the supposed monster in the forest and how we would free him from his enchantment. This subject I found more interesting but of no practical value, since Gilbert had no better idea than I of how to break Bastian’s curse. I kept niggling at the idea, however, and it became something of a joke between the two of us, something to laugh at when we didn’t feel like talking seriously.

  When spring came with youthful spurts of green in even the most deadened tree branches, Akiva came to fetch me once more. David was doing well by then, though he was still without his memory, and another warden had disappeared. The thought in both of our minds was that Akiva could also disappear at any moment, and it seemed to me that she had come to fetch me because she wanted to have the wardship taken care of if she weren’t there to look after it.

  “Has the council found out anything yet?” I asked, as we walked through a sweet smelling patch of pines on our way home.

  “The council is rather thin on the ground at the moment,” said Akiva, rather grimly. “Gwydion and Mara are still searching, but the other wardens are keeping to their wardships as much as possible. The forest is suffering.”

  I nodded silently, because I had felt as much. “Did you find anything?”

  “Perhaps.” Akiva was short. “I have no doubt that it’s one of the wardens. What I don’t know is who, why, or how.”

  “That’s a lot we don’t know,” I said dissatisfiedly. I had been so busy looking after David and trying to find out how to break Bastian’s curse that I hadn’t had a spare thought for finding the rogue warden. I think that in some subconscious way, I had assumed that Akiva would make it all right: that no one could stay hidden from her shrewd grey eyes for long. It hadn’t occurred to me that there might be something that was too big for even Akiva to fix. But today I felt the truth of it keenly, just as I had felt keenly Akiva’s danger for the first time those few months ago. The forest didn’t seem so welcoming as it once had.

  Chapter Eleven

  I was shuttled back and forth between home and the forest all the spring of my fifteenth year. Each night I walked home to set the wards around the house, protecting David from notice; then I walked back again. I came to enjoy the quiet of my nightly walks despite the new, uneasy stillness I felt in the forest.

  As the days grew warmer and longer I stayed more often with Mother and Gwendolen for dinner. Gilbert was often with us, playing chess with David and sharing a supper plate with me: we squabbled over treats and quarrelled amicably about the Wolf of the Forest. Gwendolen was rarely without one or two dinner guests, either. Sometimes it was the Gantry girls, whose company I really enjoyed, but more often it was one or two of her beaux, whose company I could have done without. Gwendolen seemed to like them all impartially, but from conversations with Mother and Liz Gantry, I discovered that Gwendolen had also attracted the notice of a certain, older man who had lost his young wife just over a year ago. Liz as well as Mother seemed to think his chances were good, and both of them seemed to be relieved at the idea: Mother because she liked the man, and Liz, I had begun to suspect, because she was a little bit sweet on her friend Harry. I had a feeling that she would be glad to see him free from Gwendolen’s coils.

  Gwendolen didn’t mention the man at all, and looked away when his name was mentioned. This, I discovered to my surprise, seemed to mean that she liked him very much. When I asked her about him, eyeing her narrowly, she would only tell me that his name was Thomas and that he was a blacksmith, and wasn’t very forthcoming with any other information.

  When I had a spare moment I took myself off to the place where Akiva had found David. The field where she had found him was just outside the forest and still in disorder, even after a few months’ respite. Leaves had been dashed from the surrounding trees, and the bareness of the boughs made it easy to see where branches were missing. Others, cracked almost to breaking point, hung forlornly from their trunks, and smaller branches lay here and there on the grass below, as if a storm had passed through. I took it in with silent rage and asked myself what sort of curse could have caused this much damage. There were still streaks of blood in the grass where David had lain, though they should have washed away when the snow melted, and the deep gouges in the earth looked more ruddy than earthy. The blood was mingled with an oily residue of curse, and I rubbed two fingers over a patch resentfully, disgusted at the way it soiled the forest air around it. I wiped my hand gingerly on my apron and threw another thoughtful look around the clearing. I remembered the gashes on David’s arms, and it occurred to me to wonder for the first time if the attacker might have been an animal. The gouges on the ground were large and widely spread, as if the animal had been very, very big. More importantly, they were familiar.

  Horned hedgepigs, where had I seen those before? Another circle of ruined trees sprang to my mind, these ones snow-encrusted; and the sound of a gryphon screaming in pain seemed to echo in my ears again. They were gryphon claw marks! I was sure of it.

  If someone really had set a gryphon to attack David, they had probably set it to attack me as well. I puffed out my cheeks in quick surprise. I’d been lucky that time. I was pretty sure that it was Mara who saved me from the g
ryphon: I had recognised her black-and-white hair when I saw her on the warden council.

  No one had been there for David when he was cursed and attacked. My jaw became mulish but this time I didn’t try to stop it. Somebody was going to pay for David.

  I crouched by the greasy scarf of curse again and pinched it between my forefinger and thumb, grimacing. Patchy but clear, it trailed back into the forest. I followed it, unspinning it as I went. It gave me great pleasure to take the twisted nastiness and repurpose it to shore up the fraying edges of the forest, which had been starting to show for quite some time now. I followed the trail over Kendra’s boundary, stopping briefly to snatch a leafy sprig and tuck it into my buttonhole before I stepped over the invisible line. The forest around me went in an instant from new spring green to early, russet autumn. I could still see a trace of the curse corrupting the gold of the forest lines, but the trace vanished after I crossed into Kendra’s old wardship. I couldn’t tell if it was gone because I didn’t have Akiva’s hood, or if it really had disappeared.

  I scowled, hands on hips, but the forest wasn’t to be intimidated into giving up anything else. In the end I had to be content with dissipating the remaining threads that I could still see.

  I was scattering those few threads to the breeze when I felt a twinge in the forest lines that meant someone else had entered Kendra’s wardship. It was a gentle twinge, but it was enough to startle me: I couldn’t help remembering that two wardens had disappeared from this wardship. My inability to see the forest lines here made me feel uncomfortably blind, and I hurried for the border with a chill crawling uncomfortably down my neck.

  I had almost reached it when I saw Mara striding through the trees toward me. Relief flooded through me at the sight of her sensible, no-nonsense face, and I waved, forgetting that though I knew her face, we had never actually met.