Wolfskin

by W. R. Gingell

  I threaded my fingers through Bastian’s ruff. “Hold on!”

  “To what?” Bastian’s forelegs were braced wide, claws scrabbling for grip, and around us the house drew in magic greedily as his glow faltered once more and then grew in strength.

  I gave a breathless giggle. “I don’t know. Here it comes!”

  An explosion of molten gold magic burst stone and buckled the ceiling above us in a great crashing cacophony, showering us with shards of stone. The witch hut split around us in a shattering of stone, flooding my mind with memory upon memory while the released magic flowed into me relentlessly. I saw them all – an old woman, dark and evil; a beautiful young girl, her brown eyes wide with fright; even a child of barely three years old, her mouth opened in a prolonged, uncomprehending scream of pain; and so, so many more – all the witches who had finished their days here.

  I saw them all, felt their pain; and as their magic flowed into me I screamed, dying death after death. Dimly, I felt Bastian’s arms around me, but the pain swept everything else aside, as ruthless as the unstoppable tide of magic that poured into me until I felt that I couldn’t possibly hold any more.

  The rush stopped eventually, and I seemed to float toward the surface of a pool of raw, uncontained magic. I found that I was no longer in pain, but my head felt as though it contained a plethora of butterflies, flitting here and flitting there. It was hard to tell which thought to follow. One solid constant was the pressure of arms around me, and slowly it came to me that someone was holding me. Bastian, I thought; and opened my eyes with a sigh of contentment, to see him, dishevelled and wild-eyed, but very human. He cupped one shaking hand around my face and then pulled me close, shuddering. It was some time before I recognised his huge, gulping breaths for the sobs that they were, and realised blankly that Bastian was crying. The world shifted, and suddenly I was the comforter, murmuring quiet nonsense into his ear and stroking his hair steadily with my free hand. A light trickle of magic flowed instinctively from my fingers, soothing; and with it I caught the sense of a young girl with caramel eyes that were very familiar. They were not wide and frightened anymore, but without a doubt she was the second witch I had seen. This was her magic; something she had known. Now it was mine.

  For once I felt sure of myself. My own magic had been chancy and accidental at best, but this magic was assured and certain: it knew what it had to do, and how to do it. I surrounded Bastian with comfort and peace.

  At last he disengaged himself, but it was only to gather me closer in his arms, wrapping them tightly about me as if he thought I was about to slip away.

  He said: “Oh, little witch, I thought I’d lost you!”

  “Oh no!” I said, hugging him back fiercely. “You’re stuck with me now.”

  Around us, the witchhut was a blasted field of sharp, rocky edges, some of them still faintly smoking. I knew with certainty that it would never kill another witch.

  When Bastian raised his head at last, he gazed on it in blank wonder. “What did you do? What happened?”

  “It wasn’t me, bufflehead! It was you! You broke the last part of the curse!”

  There was a nasty type of magic mixed with the others in me, and it told me, with the sharpness of an old woman who had cursed many times in her life, that the last part of the curse had never been mine to break. “Something to find, something to do, and something to give: you know. It wasn’t me that had to give!”

  “I see,” Bastian said quietly. I think he was still shaking.

  He flopped back in the scattered dirt and debris, and for a moment I thought he was sobbing again; but this time he was convulsing with laughter.

  I left him to laugh himself sane and climbed to my feet to inspect the damage. One of the witches in my head was suggesting distantly that there was something I needed to find, and though their personalities had faded quickly since I woke, it was still a strong enough sensation to cause me to wander through the ruins, shifting small piles of rubble somewhat absently with one foot. In my peripheral I saw Bastian sit up again, slowly and quietly, but it wasn’t until I sifted my way through the rubbish toward him again that I saw that he was frowning down at a thick, furry skin that was bunched between his hands.

  “Oh, there it is,” I said, in quiet recognition. I saw a glint of gold amidst the layers of glossy pelt as Bastian turned it over. The residue of the curse had taken a solid shape.

  “It’s your wolf-skin,” I told him. “Put it on, you might need it.”

  “It’s not that I don’t trust you, little witch,” Bastian said, holding the skin at arms length and cocking an eyebrow at me; “But I really have no desire to be a wolf again.”

  The nasty old crone muttered in my head, useful for once. “You’ll only change if you latch the clasp, and it won’t be permanent. You should be able to come and go as you please now, forest or no forest.”

  Bastian looked unconvinced, but he allowed me to arrange the pelt over his shoulders without demur, and the stiffness in his shoulders gradually subsided as no change took place. I wondered how long it would be before he could bring himself to fasten the catch he was fingering so uneasily.

  Chapter Eighteen

  We didn’t talk about it because we both knew it. Sooner or later we were going to have to make the last jump. Sooner or later we would have to return to the forest.

  And when we did, Cassandra would be waiting for us. I could feel the last stone in my pocket, scraping against my leg as I walked through the debris of the witch hut, and in my mind the old witch muttered old, dangerous spells.

  “Oh, hush, you!” I murmured. Her sourness clung to the back of my mind like a bad taste, and I pulled at a trace of the brown-eyed girl to block her out.

  Bastian, who had been running his fingers through the wolf pelt, cocked his head at me. “Little witch?”

  “Hush. I need to think.”

  His hand snaked out, caught my own, and twirled me irresistibly into himself. I found myself sitting on Bastian’s knee while he said conversationally: “Little witch, you and I will one day have words about your practise of hushing me. For now, I would like to know why your eyes have changed colour three times in as many minutes.”

  “Oh, that.”

  “Yes, that!”

  “Just something tricky the witchhut did when it exploded,” I said evasively. “Some of the witches weren’t quite gone, I think.”

  “What do you mean, they’re not gone?”

  I shrugged. “Little bits were left. Sort of misty bits of magic and personality that stayed behind when they died.”

  “And these bits of magic and personality–”

  “Are in my head now,” I nodded. I sorted curiously through the information that bobbed to the surface of my mind and added: “I don’t know how long it’ll last. A long time, I think. One of them knows about time and trickery like that: I think he was the one who made sure something of them stayed behind.”

  Bastian still looked distinctly worried, and I found myself patting his head from sheer habit, as if he were still wolf-Bastian.

  “It’s all right; they’re not properly real anymore. It’s just magic and old memories. Are you ready to jump again?”

  “Is she waiting?”

  “Oh yes,” I said. I didn’t have to check, but I did anyway: there was a purple haze to the horizon beyond the sea of black nothingness.

  “Not just yet, then.”

  “All right,” I said. I slipped one arm around Bastian’s neck and nestled into his chest. It was strange: I hadn’t noticed myself falling in love with him, but I was quite sure that I was. When had that happened? I tilted my head up at Bastian, wondering if he knew, and he smiled down at me with a quiet warmth that made me certain he did know.

  We sat so for a little while longer before I regretfully withdrew my arm from about Bastian’s neck and stood.

  “It’s time?”

  “Yes.”

  “The stone?”

  “I have it.”
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br />   I gazed out at the sparkle of green amidst the black, weighing the stone in my hand.

  “Ready?”

  “Yes.”

  Bastian’s hand was around mine, cold and rough; the stone flew, fast and true. The earth was firm this time, when we landed. And there, far away but still in the wardship, was Cassandra’s presence.

  Her presence didn’t spur up magic from the old witch or the brown-eyed one, as I had half hoped it would; instead, the infant witch blossomed in my mind, reaching out to the forest in utter trust. The child had no defensive spells and no notion of attack: she radiated a complete and unshaken conviction in the forest that hadn’t diminished despite a swift and excruciating death. It occurred to me, with a shiver, that Cassandra’s time had come, one way or the other. The forest was stirring into powerful life ahead of us: the time for equivocations was over.

  “Can you reach Akiva?” Bastian’s voice was non-committal, but I could feel the quivering essence of fear that exuded from him in waves. No, not fear: expectancy. He was preparing himself.

  I shook my head soundlessly: there hadn’t been a sense or sight of Akiva since yesterday. I pressed Bastian’s hand and he smiled down at me, leaving me oddly comforted.

  With a certainty I didn’t quite feel, I said: “She can’t hurt us anymore. The forest is waking, and she’ll have to answer for what she’s done.”

  “I hope so, little witch,” Bastian said, swinging my hand gently, and we walked through the shadowy tree trunks toward Akiva’s cottage.

  “How. Sweet.”

  The two words were icy and diamond-edged in all of Cassandra’s fury, dropped into the silent shadows of the forest. She approached us swiftly, her feet twinkling through the grass, and her smile was sharp and brilliantly furious.

  “Why,” she asked in a brittle voice, her violet eyes pinioning first me and then Bastian; “Are you not dead? And why are you human?”

  “I told you last time,” Bastian said, through his teeth. “Pure, self-sacrificing altruism. The forest loves that sort of thing.”

  A million threads of blackness pierced him from Cassandra’s accusingly pointed finger, and I felt the first sinking of cold desperation in my stomach, because none of the witches were volunteering magic.

  The infant witch said: Quiet, and wait, unfurling into the forest, which was now crouching around us, poised and intent. I wondered that Cassandra didn’t notice. She must have stopped listening to the forest long ago.

  I said: “Stop it!” and the words seemed to swim in the thick air as the forest drew closer.

  Cassandra circled us with small, angry steps. “No reprisals, she said. No interference. And now she is gone! You’ve been very busy, rabbit.”

  Bastian’s fingers tightened painfully about mine as the torture spell sharpened, but the infant witch still said Wait.

  “The forest took Mara,” I said. “She went against it, and it took her. Be very careful, Cassandra.”

  “The forest loves me, rabbit: it has always loved me. He might have chosen you, but it will choose me!”

  The forest grew darker around us and the air thickened still more until it felt as though I were breathing in the very trees and grass.

  “You pushed the boundaries by trying to break Bastian,” I said grimly. “Don’t make the mistake of trying to kill him.”

  “You think he loves you, but he doesn’t,” said Cassandra contemptuously. “He engineered it all, right from the beginning! Your first meeting, every meeting after that. He needed to make you fall in love with him. Tell her, wolf!”

  “It’s true,” Bastian said quietly; and I saw that it tortured him more than the pain of Cassandra’s spell. “I thought that if I could make you fall in love with me I would be free of the curse. I knew a heart had to be given as the last part to break the curse, and I couldn’t let you go. Ah, Rose, you were so sweet, but I was desperate.”

  I laughed scornfully, provoking a violet flash in Cassandra’s eyes. “I’ve known that since I was a child! Why else would he bother to flirt with me?”

  Her eyes darted between Bastian and I, furious but arrested, and Bastian laughed low and ragged as she yanked the torture threads tight.

  “You attacked us in Mara’s wardship,” he gasped, rocking back and forth in agony but still laughing. “I was so furious with Rose. I was so furious because I knew that I’d be tortured, or die, or stay wolf forever just to save her from a moment’s pain. It was my heart, you old cow! My heart!”

  Cassandra forgot her magic and hit him; actually slapped him with all the power in her slender arm. The torture spell snapped, and as Bastian staggered into me I caught him by the waist.

  “He owes you nothing!” I panted. “The curse is broken and all debts are paid! Leave us be!”

  Cassandra only laughed, low and soft. “Oh, he will pay,” she promised. “Not in death but in blood and pain and disappointment.”

  I saw the curls of black around her wrists just a second too late. By the time the old witch tried to push through my mind with a defence it was too late: the blackness had punctured my heart. Bastian gave a hoarse yell of anger and grief, but that was too late as well.

  Ah! I thought, in the quietness that fell as my heart stopped beating. So I’m her revenge.

  There were moments or ages of nothingness, and then I was somehow alive, my head and shoulders supported by Bastian’s arms and my legs stretched out in the grass. Bastian’s face was frozen in grey lines, his mouth determined, or angry, or perhaps both.

  I heard him say: “Rose, I will not have you die! You bested a witch hut: what’s a mere enchantress?”

  The air had thinned around us again and the forest was no longer a pulsing, heavy weight. It was delightfully easy to sit up.

  I did so, reaching instinctively for Bastian, and was kissed three times in quick succession, hard and insistent. I wriggled against Bastian’s grip and he let me go, looking rather pale again; but since I had only wriggled free in order to fling my arms around his neck, I was soon able to return his kisses with a fervour that made him chuckle at the back of his throat.

  “Oh, Rose, my little love, I thought I’d lost you!”

  “I told you before,” I said; “You’re stuck with me now. What has happened to Cassandra? I didn’t see: I think I might have been dead for a little while.”

  “I find I don’t care, my little witch,” said Bastian, who was engaged in kissing each of my fingers in turn. “Cassandra holds no interest for me at all.”

  “She’ll hold a bit more interest for you if she turns up unexpectedly again,” I pointed out, and disengaged my hand in an attempt to stand up. Bastian promptly caught me by the waist and sat me down beside him again. I laughed but protested, and was in the process of fending off kisses when, somewhere ridiculously nearby, a baby began to cry.

  I scrambled to my feet, Bastian rising swiftly beside me: and there, where Cassandra had been standing not so long ago, was a squirming pile of clothes. The infant wails, if I was not very much mistaken, were emanating from the clothes.

  I approached the silken pile cautiously and pulled back the cloak to reveal a pink-and-white face, rapidly staining to blotchy red with tears, and two little fists that clenched tight and flailed in the air.

  It was Cassandra, and she was a baby.

  “Rose, is this–”

  I nodded, quite speechless as I looked down into the violet eyes. At last I found my voice and said: “Yes. It’s Cassandra.”

  Bastian picked up the struggling infant with surprising proficiency and patted it briskly on the back. “How? Why?”

  “It was the forest,” I said in wonder, and took the infant Cassandra unhandily from him. A quick survey of the infant’s aura of magic was sufficient to show that she hadn’t lost any of her power in the transformation. “She misused it and so it turned back on her; but instead of killing her it’s given her a new start. She still has all her magic.”

  “But what do we do with her?”

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nbsp; “We raise her as our own, I suppose,” I said, awkwardly patting the tiny rump. “No one else will be able to handle her.”

  Cassandra the infant was wriggling in a way I suspected meant she had wind, but despite burping once she looked distinctly uncomfortable. I believe she was as much afraid as I was that I would drop her.

  “Good heavens, not like that, little witch,” Bastian objected. He took Cassandra and slung her over one shoulder, patting her miraculously cloth-covered backside in a natural way that I envied.

  “What will we do if she remembers? When she’s older? Will we tell her?”

  “She’s not Cassandra anymore; there aren’t any memories for her to remember,” I said. I found that I very much approved of the forest’s way of dealing with people. “She’s whatever Cassandra she makes of herself, now. She must have been different once, or the forest wouldn’t have accepted her. Now she can be again.”

  “The other wardens might not see it in the same light,” Bastian warned, but his smile held more resignation than mockery. He set Cassandra down gently in the grass and piled her previous clothes around her for a cot, where she burbled happily at the tree boughs above her.

  “You will have to excuse me,” he said solemnly to her chuckling face; “But there is a little witch over here whom I really must kiss.”

  We told Mother first. She gave us one of her slow, amused looks, and said: “It was about time you sorted yourselves out.”

  Bastian grinned and kissed her promptly on the cheek, but Gwendolen said petulantly: “It’s not fair, Rose. I was supposed to get married first; you didn’t even care!” by which I understood that she and Thomas were still in their quarrel.

  Bastian grinned his most wolfish grin at her and said with brutal candour: “And unless you stop being such a little princess you won’t be married at all, Gwen. Tell your butcher–”

  “Blacksmith!”

  “Tell your blacksmith you’re sorry, and kiss and make up.”

  Gwendolen regarded him dangerously for a moment, torn between laughter and outrage, but eventually went off into her infectious peal of laughter.