Wolfskin

by W. R. Gingell

  “What are you doing?” Her voice retained a vestige of calm, but her fingers were white around the chair back where the bracelet beads clicked against wood. “You can’t see the lines here, and your little touch of magic is hardly strong enough to fight me.”

  I curled my hand a little more tightly around the comb. Mara still hadn’t realised that I had come into the wardship instead of Akiva. Now that I had, Akiva’s cloak was no longer merely a protection: it performed for me the same function that it had for her, providing part of my wardship for me to draw on.

  And I suddenly knew what to do: because I had another advantage . . .

  I slipped my hand into Bastian’s, lacing my fingers through his, and he looked down at me swiftly, enquiringly. I smiled up at him, then found a single, stright thread running through the house and leapt for it. I tore all the other threads as I leapt, and the house fell down around our ears as we ran, the only whole thread glowing ahead of us, true and strong. Bastian was laughing, a gleeful, wolfish sound; and with my heart pounding in my ears and Bastian’s fingers strongly clasping mine, I laughed too. Mara was close behind, but she was old, notwithstanding her great magic, and her wardship thoroughly hated her now. As she ran the trees reached out and caught at her, and the energy lines twisted around her until she was gasping in rage and fatigue. Bastian and I ran and dodged, feeling the hiss of deathly magic that flew around us more and more wildly as Mara lost focus. The other threads twisted around us in a sickening vortex of power, but I ignored them all to follow the one, true thread that led us to the very thing I wanted to find.

  I burst back into my wardship with Bastian by my side, gasping for breath. The strangler fig was still there, ancient and gnarled, and so Akiva-like that I wondered why I hadn’t known her at once. Mara must have caught her off guard or such a thing could never have happened. Still, she’d fought impressively to get home, and she had almost made it.

  Bastian, bright-eyed and hardly panting at all, caught himself up beside me. “What’s in the wind, little witch?”

  “Deeper forest,” I said, without waiting to explain.

  I plunged desperately in, leaving him far behind, and layers of forest swept past me in a moment. I experienced again the cold, falling sensation I had felt when the dryads invited me into deeper forest for their wedding dance.

  My heart jumped, because I was right, it was Akiva. Hadn’t she said one didn’t get into deeper forest without an invitation? That one, straight, glowing thread had been her doing: the invitation had come from her.

  The strangler fig before me didn’t seem to grow more human, nor could I see the branches melding into limbs and skin; but quietly, suddenly, Akiva was there.

  “You took your time,” she said, but it was said with a grim smile. Pulsing threads announced Mara’s imminent arrival as she began to take shape beside me, faint and nebulous, and somehow slower than I had been. My fingers shook as I untied the strings of my hood to give to Akiva, my haste making me clumsy.

  “It’s too late for that, child,” Akiva said, forestalling me with a gnarled, twiggy hand. “It’s yours now. I will not be escaping this place in a hurry. Deeper forest tends to cling to its own, and I’ve not the strength to break free.”

  “But I’ll give it to you!” I said, a little desperately. “The wardship is yours, I’ll give it back!”

  “You can’t,” she said. “Once a new warden is chosen, the old is no longer recognised. The forest chose you, and will remain yours until your death.”

  I saw my plans crumbling in a horrifying heap around me as Mara grew more solid beside me, and desperately gulped back a sob.

  Akiva saw it, and her grimness softened into something very like a grin.

  “I can’t escape, but I can help,” she said. “I’m very well content to remain as I am– it has been peaceful and quiet.”

  “And no feckless apprentice to make your life a misery,” I said gruffly, sniffling in an attempt to keep the tears at bay a little longer.

  She really did grin then, but didn’t answer. I had the idea that she was too busy to do so. Her arms (or perhaps they were branches, now; it was hard to tell) had snaked out to encircle Mara, who though nebulous and weak, was fighting back. She had tried to enter deeper forest without an invitation shortly before crossing into my wardship, but without her comb she was as helpless as she would have been in my wardship. The fig branches curled and tightened about her, and I watched as her mouth opened and closed in dead silence. I couldn’t tell whether she was yelling or cursing or pleading, for her voice, along with the colours in her clothes, hadn’t yet penetrated to deeper forest. She was a silent, black-and-white figure squirming against the backdrop of living green. Akiva, without mercy and without pity, tightened her branches until Mara was still and tree-like herself, and then turned toward me.

  “You’d best be off now,” she said, her voice strained. No matter what she said, I knew that she had a fierce desire to be human once more, to stomp out her days in the free air of the forest. “Remember me to your mother. And to the wolf, I suppose.”

  “I won’t!” I said, with glittering eyes. “You’ll see them yourself!”

  There was a kaleidoscopic swirl of colour radiating toward us, whether a natural effect of deeper forest or from the tears in my eyes I couldn’t tell: but I knew at once that Kendra had appeared again.

  Akiva didn’t turn, but a shiver of relief seemed to pass through her old body.

  “Kendra, child; we’ve missed you.”

  “I am here now,” Kendra said obliquely. She wasn’t at all like the quiet, almost painfully shy young woman I had met once. She was tall and willowy and utterly confident; at home in deeper forest as neither Akiva nor I could be. Memory mounted upon memory, and when I realised the truth it wasn’t a surprise to me.

  “You’ve turned dryad,” I said, guilty relief flowing through me. She would never leave the forest again: Mother was safe. David could– well, David could at least choose now. “It was me you came to see at the dance.”

  She nodded and smiled down at me, her eyes at once bright and distant. “Tell David it’s well with me. I don’t want to leave. He is free.”

  I nodded respectfully, but I didn’t dare look her in the eyes again for fear that she would see the joy blazing in my own.

  She turned from me to Akiva, and said with quiet command: “Let go now.”

  Akiva did so without question. I think she knew as I did that there was little of humanity left in Kendra, no pity and no hesitation. As she let go, Mara flashed into colour and sound, her hair now utterly free from its comb. I gripped the other tightly in my hand, afraid that she would somehow seize it and escape after all.

  “You can’t do this to me!” she snapped, but there was a cold watchfulness in her eyes, and I think that not even she believed it. She had broken too many of the forest’s laws, and it wouldn’t help her now.

  Kendra considered her quietly as if weighing options, and then said: “If I let you go it will cause mischief in the forest. That cannot be allowed.”

  “I’ll leave the forest!” There was dawning horror in Mara’s eyes, and I found I could still pity her even though it was the fate she herself had foisted upon Akiva. “I’ll take a house well away from the forest and the village!”

  Again Kendra gave her that considering look. It occurred to me that she was communicating with someone, somewhere, in a way that I couldn’t understand.

  “You have been judged and sentenced,” she said. “You will remain in deeper forest confined to the form of this tree. Your wardships will be kept in trust by Akiva until such time as the other wardens are found and returned to their wardships.”

  Kendra’s eyes turned to me, and I realised that she was waiting for me to give Mara’s comb to Akiva. I did so, skirting widely around Mara, who looked as if she would try any desperate attempt to escape. At once Akiva became clearer and less treelike.

  “Ah, that’s better!” she said, stretching as if he
r bones had been cramped. Beside me, Mara was slowly and horribly being swallowed up in strangler fig boughs that wound about her far more tightly than Akiva’s had. Akiva’s face was flint-like, without compassion, and I wondered what exactly had passed between her and Mara.

  When there was nothing left of Mara but the vague, lasting impression of a face, Akiva let out a sigh and hugged me roughly.

  “There’s nothing else we can do here, Rose. Come along.”

  I turned back once to ask Kendra: “What about the others? Can we do the same for them?”

  “Some are dead, some are not,” she said quietly. “Find the ones that are not and free them.”

  Deeper forest passed by in a rush under Akiva’s hand. Before I could blink I was snatched up and hugged roughly to Bastian’s chest more tightly than my already breathless body appreciated. He let me go at last, and swept Akiva into a crushing hug that made her first groan in protest and then box his ears.

  “None of that, wolf! Save your hugs for those who want ‘em!”

  Bastian planted a smacking kiss on her cheek, and I chuckled through a yawn, as exhausted as if I had been running wild in the forest all day.

  Akiva said briskly: “Off home with you, Rose! No, I’m not coming with you; there are far too many things to do around here. Wolf, make sure she gets home safely.”

  “I can look after myself,” I interposed with some asperity, stifling another yawn. I was annoyed to find myself so sleepy. Horned hedgepigs, at this rate I wouldn’t ever be more than a two-copper warden!

  “I’ll look after her,” Bastian said, ignoring me.

  “And be careful where you walk,” added Akiva. She slid the comb that had been Mara’s into her hair, and I felt a little hum buzzing on the air as the wardship took to her. “The forest is coming apart at the seams with flyaway threads: some of them are loose and dangerous. Try to keep to the paths.”

  She left us there and melted away into her new wardship, leaving me with the rather dazed realisation that I was no longer a temporary warden. I was full warden of a vast and magical piece of forest that needed more attention to bring it to rights than I could give it in one day, one week, or even perhaps one year.

  I took a deep breath to quell a moment of panic.

  “At least,” I said tightly: “At least Mara is gone. There might be a chance of straightening out the forest threads now, if only we can get rid of Cassandra as well. How long were we gone, Bastian?”

  “A few moments,” he said, slipping his arm around my waist to dance me a few steps forward. He seemed light-headed and merry, and I thought in a flash of knowing that he had been very much worried for those few moments. So I allowed him to twirl me about, grateful in truth for his arms around me, since I felt that there was nothing I would like better than to be in my bed. Setting the wardship – my wardship! – to rights could wait a little longer.

  “It was much longer than that,” I told him, looking up from a merry promenade through two birches. Bastian spun me elegantly, and this time instead of dancing he was hugging me again, close and fierce as though he didn’t want to let go.

  “I know,” he said. “Oh, little witch, I know!”

  Chapter Seventeen

  I found a hard dirt path for us, prosaic and staid, and Bastian and I strolled along it slowly, his arm comfortably around my waist. I vainly tried to stifle my yawns for a while and then allowed myself to succumb, grateful to Bastian for holding me up. The ground felt as though it were dancing beneath my feet in a slow, shallow, dizzying swing.

  It wasn’t until Bastian, his voice startled, demanded: “Is the ground moving, little witch?” that I was brought to the fuzzy realisation that it was not simply my tired mind playing tricks on me.

  “Yes– no. Perhaps.” I cast my forest sight around, but exhaustion made it hard to focus, and the threads blended together in a confused, golden tangle. I swiped a hand over my eyes and then sat down suddenly, slipping away from Bastian’s arm with determined abandon. “Can’t see. I’m going to sleep now.”

  I think I remember being carried, and dappled afternoon sunlight slipping across my face in golden warmth, then there was silence and cool shadow as I slipped into dreamless sleep.

  I woke to a gentle rocking sensation that made me think for a sleep-heavy moment that I was still being carried. As I blinked my eyes open I saw the furry form of wolf-Bastian, dropped forward on his belly, head erect and watchful. I lurched up into a sitting position to try and account for the sensation, feeling a little peculiar. Pre-dawn light was stealing through the trees, chasing a wispy early morning mist, and my feeling of disorientation increased.

  “Did I sleep all day?”

  Bastian, who had been watching me, gave a wolfish nod and sat up. “Most of the night, too. My change will come again shortly.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, hugging him. “Thank you for staying.”

  One of Bastian’s ears quirked humorously. “I would love to accept your thanks with a gratified smirk, little witch, but the plain truth of the matter is that I couldn’t leave if I wanted to.”

  I sat back and regarded him with a narrowed look to see if I were being laughed at. Odd. He was laughing and serious at the same time. “What do you mean?”

  “Look around, Rose.” The laughing lilt was suddenly gone from Bastian’s voice. I sensed a still, tense note to his voice that I hadn’t heard before, and it struck me with a chill that Bastian was frightened.

  “Look with your forest sight.”

  I opened my forest sight and a small, stifled sound escaped me. Bastian and I were curled on a tiny piece of forest that trailed torn forest lines out into a vast, inky blackness, the path we had been travelling on now simply a fragment that ended as abruptly as it began, in a jagged line of dirt.

  I rose to my knees in wide-eyed horror, understanding all at once the stiffness with which Bastian sat. “Oh! Oh, oh, oh. Bastian, what happened?”

  “Don’t move too quickly,” he warned, carefully rising on all four legs. “It tilts if you unbalance it. I was carrying you home along the path, not too far from the cottage, and suddenly the path wasn’t there.”

  His voice was tense, and I wondered just how close we had both come to tumbling into the hungry blackness. “There are other bits of forest further on; I can see them sometimes.”

  I stood, shaking a little, with the steadying help of a sturdy young birch. My fingers curled around it, white at the knuckles, as I gazed out into the terrifying expanse of blackness.

  Bastian was right: there were other islands of forest adrift in the dark. Some of them were small, barely bigger than the one we were on; others were quite large. One was even large enough for a tiny stone hut. Once I knew they were there, they were easier to see, threads trailing out around them like tentacles on a creeping underwater creature. It sent a nasty shiver through me, the kind of shiver that a particularly large and hairy spider brings on.

  “They’re pieces of my wardship,” I said, feeling sick. There was a violet kind of flickering around the edge of my forest sight, too far away to see clearly. I found I knew what it was.

  “Cassandra’s out there, isn’t she?”

  “Yes.” Bastian’s voice was so quiet I almost didn’t hear it. “The tears in the wardship aren’t Mara’s doing.”

  “Does she know where we are?”

  “No.” Bastian hesitated, then swung his muzzle at the darkness around us. “I think it’s all this. I don’t think she can sense us through it, or she would have found us hours ago.”

  “You should have woken me,” I said angrily. He must have stayed awake for hours, waiting each moment with nerves straining for Cassandra to pounce. I was surprised to find how furious that made me. I wasn’t sure who it was I was angriest at: Cassandra, Bastian, or myself.

  “No need, little witch,” Bastian said lightly, nosing my hand comfortingly. “Cassandra hasn’t seen us, and we remain in the same place without drifting. I left you sleeping with the purely s
elfish motivation that you would need all the strength you could get to bring us out of this scrape safely.”

  He said it to make me laugh, and I gave a mechanical smile.

  “I can’t do it, Bastian,” I said baldly. “I don’t know how– I don’t even know where we are.”

  “We’re on your wardship,” he said, with a quiet confidence that warmed me. “This is your home: you make the rules. Make it do what you want it to do.”

  I gazed out on the torn pieces of wardship, hoping for inspiration. There were thirteen of them, green shards against a black velvet backdrop. I found that if I narrowed my eyes and concentrated hard enough, my vision scoped outward until the closest chunk of green wardship seemed to hang in the air just before me, perfect in detail.

  Broken forest. Thirteen pieces of broken forest. Thirteen pieces.

  I stooped to the ground, absently feeling for pebbles between the roots of the slim birch tree. Thirteen pieces. Thirteen milestones. A grim smile grew on my face, maturing until it became a tough, humourless grin. Perhaps I could get us home after all.

  I narrowed my vision on the torn piece of wardship furthest away, a fuzzy greenness far away. It wouldn’t clear entirely, but I could see enough to know that it was the rest of the wardship. Thirteen milestones to mark the way.

  “Rose?” Bastian’s voice was strained.

  I looked across at him, and saw a pale glow of gold emanating from his fur that took on a vaguely human form as I watched.

  “I can’t hold it off much longer,” he said, hackles up in spiky discomfort. “When it happens, she’ll hone onto us like a moth to flame.”

  I nodded, my grin so fierce now that it was almost a grimace. It was going to be chancy at best. A quick glance down showed that I had gathered exactly thirteen assorted unlovely and unpolished stones: just enough. The game allowed for fifteen, a kind of two-life bonus, but I didn’t think that would work here: the forest seemed to play for keeps. I would need to make each throw count.