The Boy, the Wolf, and the Stars

by Shivaun Plozza

  Bo retied the pouch and hurried back to Nix.

  It was close to the half-Light, the dull gray hour between Light and Dark. The Shadow Creatures would begin to awaken soon. “We’d better get back,” said Bo.

  He glanced over his shoulder one more time; the tree whispered and swooshed, the dead leaves falling. He couldn’t help but think he had done something terribly, terribly wrong.

  He ground his teeth together to stop his chin from trembling. Mads kept a roof over his head and food in his belly and all Bo had to do to earn his place was complete his chores; he had nothing else to offer, no other skill or use to prevent Mads from tossing him aside like curdled milk. What would happen now? Where would he go?

  It would be okay. It had to be okay.

  “Let’s get back,” he said to Nix.

  But as he turned to leave, an unexpected noise stopped him in his tracks: Ah-wooooo! Ah-wooooo!

  A wolf’s howl. A real wolf’s howl.

  He gasped and spun around, fear pulsing through his veins. Where was it? Was it close? Mads always said, “Run if ever you hear a wolf. Hurry home and don’t look back.” But wolves never wandered into the forest. Not this forest. It was just Peter and his blanket and the game and—

  Ah-wooooo!

  The bottom fell out of Bo’s stomach: It was real. And it was close.

  He broke into a sprint, Nix right behind him.

  “Hurry!” he shouted. “Hurry, Nix!”

  They hurtled through the dense forest, tree branches clawing at them, Light fading fast, the wolf’s howl echoing again and again. Bo ran until he tripped, landing face-first in the mulch.

  He sat up with a groan, feeling Nix’s cold nose sniffing his face.

  “I’m all right,” said Bo. He felt his head for bumps and looked up.

  He froze.

  He was on the edge of the small clearing that surrounded their hut, and in the center of the clearing was a giant wolf.

  The blood drained from Bo’s face: the creature was two times—no, three times—as tall as Bo, scraggy and lean, his white fur burnt in patches, the skin etched with scars.

  Bo dared not move. He dared not breathe.

  Had the wolf seen him? Heard him?

  “Long time sleeping,” rumbled the wolf, creeping toward what looked like a felled tree, a lump of knotted wood on the opposite side of the clearing. “Long time. In Dark. But. Suddenly I wake. And find you. At last.” The wolf’s voice was rough, as if the words had been dashed against rocks.

  The fallen tree let out a loud, croaking groan as it began to . . . to rise? Bo gasped: it wasn’t a tree—it was Mads! And oh . . . Bo’s throat constricted as his guardian struggled to his knees, blood dripping from a gash in his shoulder, trickling down his arm to his fingertips. Drip, drip, drip onto the fallen leaves.

  “It’s impossible, Ranik,” wheezed Mads. “You were gone. Burned by the Light. You fell.”

  The wolf crept closer. “I woke. In Darkness. Now. I come back. To find. Brother. Whispers across land. You have answers. I need. Tell me.”

  Next to the giant wolf, Mads looked like the smallest piquee bird. He winced as he tried to stand. “You’re too late. The Shadow Witch killed your brother. She wanted to destroy the Stars and all good magic with them.”

  Mads always said there were no such things as witches. Even when Ma Yulg had been strung up by her ankles for a week after Lucky Karl said she’d cast a spell on his best pig, Mads had said it was all nonsense—there was no such thing as magic. He’d been the one to cut her down and threaten anyone who tried to tie her up again. So why was he talking about a Shadow Witch? And Stars?

  “Liar,” growled Ranik. “You know. Where to find. Keys. To cage. Brother still alive. Locked away. But alive. The owls talk. And I listen. Because they know. Everything.”

  Mads laughed. “You’re wrong. He’s long dead.”

  The wolf snapped his jaws: a cold, metallic clink! “Let me. Remind you. With my teeth.” The giant wolf bore down on Mads, lips twisted and quivering in a snarl.

  In a rush of reckless courage, Bo sprang from his haunches to his feet and shouted, “Leave Mads alone!” He blindly grabbed a fallen branch and thrust it forward like a weapon.

  The wolf snapped his head toward Bo, jaws curling into a wide grin, his milky white eyes shining. “Who. Is this?”

  Mads groaned but didn’t have the strength to stand or reach out. “No one. It’s no one.”

  Ranik laughed. “It’s someone.” The wolf turned from Mads, creeping slowly toward Bo. “If old man,” he said. “Won’t give keys. I take boy. Fair trade. Boy for keys.”

  Beside Bo, Nix growled.

  “I didn’t think this far ahead,” whispered Bo.

  The branch trembled in his grip as the wolf inched closer. “Stay back!” said Bo, but it was he who stumbled backwards.

  The wolf snarled. “Dinnertime.”

  With a loud cry, Mads lunged for his fallen axe and swung it toward the wolf. The blade cut deep into Ranik’s hind leg. The wolf howled in pain.

  “Run!” Mads shouted to Bo.

  Ranik turned and pounced on Mads with a roar, and the pair struggled—twisting, heaving, gritting their teeth, thundering with pain and effort. “Tell me. The truth!” cried Ranik. “Tell me. Or I eat out. Your heart. And find. The answer there.”

  Bo could feel the night settling in, the Darkness approaching fast. Soon, the shadows would grow claws and teeth and become Shadow Creatures. No one survived the Shadow Creatures.

  Bo looked at the branch in his hand, so thin and easily broken. He needed to get Mads into the hut. He needed to chase away the wolf before Dark. He had failed Mads with the ancient tree but he could save him now. He could earn his place. But how?

  All at once there was a flash of blinding Light. The shadows cringed and Bo flung an arm across his eyes, gritting his teeth. When the Light faded, Bo lowered his arm and blinked rapidly until his vision returned. Mads was in the center of the clearing with a ball of pure white Light anchored to the palm of his hand. The ball was spinning, spitting colorful sparks in all directions.

  A sudden coldness seized Bo’s core. He turned to where the wolf lay on the ground, unmoving. A swarm of questions buzzed inside him, threatening to burst from his open mouth.

  It was . . . impossible.

  Mads crumbled to his knees with a cry of pain.

  Bo ran to him and skidded to the ground. He grabbed Mads by his shirt, soaked with blood. “Are you okay?”

  “Go. To the hut,” wheezed Mads. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.

  Bo looked to the wolf. The beast’s chest heaved, legs twitching—he was waking up. Around the wolf, shadows lengthened, their edges growing sharp and clawlike. Bo’s heart hammered in his chest.

  He was tall for an Irin his age but he was thin and gangly. Still, Bo gripped Mads under his armpits and dragged the old man toward the hut with every ounce of strength he had.

  So close. Almost there.

  Leaves rustled—was it the wolf climbing to his feet? The Shadow Creatures waking? Bo dared not look.

  “Hurry, Nix,” he said. Nix was by his feet, scampering and whimpering—the scar on his snout wept. “To the hut.”

  Bo crashed back-first into the front door as the sound of the wolf running toward them drummed in his ears: thump-ta-thump, thump-ta-thump.

  He rattled the doorknob, heaving against the heavy wooden door that wouldn’t budge.

  Thump-ta-thump.

  He pushed harder, twisting the knob left and right. “Come on! Come on!”

  Thump-ta-thump. THUMP-TA-THUMP!

  “Open! Please open!”

  Finally, the door swung open and all three—Bo, Mads, and Nix—tumbled inside.

  Bo slammed the door shut, bracing his shoulder against the thick wood as he turned the lock. His whole body shook as—thump!—the wolf crashed into the other side.

  There was silence.

  Bo breathed heavily.

 
Nix whimpered.

  And then . . .

  A howl.

  Long and mournful. Ah-woooo!

  A howl of bitter disappointment.

  Bo quickly lit a candle to chase away the growing Dark and then crawled to Mads’s side and gripped the old man’s hands.

  “Mads? What do I do?” he whispered. “Tell me. How do I fix you?”

  Mads lifted a hand to Bo’s cheek—two fingers brushed away Bo’s tears. The rough drag of the old man’s callused skin across his cheek was unfamiliar to Bo, and a tiny, locked corner of Bo’s heart ached at the unexpected intimacy. “So many wrongs. No time to fix them all,” said Mads. His sigh was long: the sound of the wind through bare trees in the Sorrow Season. He looked down at his palm—the orb of Light was gone but his pale, grayish skin was still glowing. “Shouldn’t have been able to do that,” he said. A troubled crease lined his brow. “Unless . . .”

  Outside, the wolf howled.

  “In the morning,” said Bo, “I’ll go to the village. I’ll get help. Just hold on. Please?”

  “No!” Mads grabbed hold of Bo’s hands so tightly it hurt. “Not the village. You must leave. Find the Stars so she can’t get hold of them.”

  “I don’t—”

  “The Stars!” urged Mads, wheezing. “Don’t let the Shadow Witch find them. She will wake too—there is nothing to hold her back now.”

  “But Stars aren’t real! You said so.”

  Mads’s grip slipped, his hands landing on the pouch half-filled with gold-red dust. Bo watched Mads’s face crumble with the realization that if Bo had the pouch now, then that meant yesterday, when he was supposed to sprinkle the dust on the tree’s roots . . . Bo looked away, ashamed. “Oh, Bo,” said Mads, and laughed, but it was a sad, rueful kind of laugh. “What have you done?”

  “Hold on, Mads,” said Bo. “I’ll get help in the morning. Please just wait.”

  Mads shook his head, loosening the top few buttons of his shirt, slipping the crystal pendant that always hung around his neck over his head. He held it out for Bo. “You must release the Stars. Set them free. Three keys. Riddles lead you to each one. The Scribe can help . . .” He forced the pendant into Bo’s hands. “The first riddle is . . .”

  “Mads?” Bo squeezed his guardian’s hand and called his name again and again.

  But it was too late.

  The old man was gone.

  The True Histories of Ulv, Vol. II

  Why You Should Never Wish to Meet a Wolf

  There are more things to fear in this world than there are boils on a troll’s bum. But few are more deserving of your blubbering, jelly-legged terror than wolves.

  Wolves are carnivorous, cold-blooded beasts powerful enough to fight off Shadow Creatures—their one weakness is that they can walk only in the half-Light, that eerie hour or two before the Dark descends. Light burns their skin, you see: a horrible curse bestowed upon them many years ago as punishment (for more, see The True Histories of Ulv, Vol. I, “Why You Should Never Attempt to Eat the Sun”). For this reason, wolves rarely leave the northern ice forests of Rakoo, where days are a constant half-Light.

  Aha! you might think. Why fear them? They live so far from me!

  Oh, but listen: a most interesting fact about wolves (and by “interesting” I mean “bloodcurdling”) is that once they get a whiff of your scent they can track you for days and will, in fact, never give up chasing you. One wolf was known to have spent seventeen years tracking its prey!

  Again, you might think, But this changes nothing! I will never meet a wolf!

  Well.

  The most astute of my readers will have noticed my use of a very important word in an earlier paragraph: “rarely.” (Go on, go back and reread if you must. I’ll wait.)

  For rarely does not mean never. Because on occasion, wolves do indeed leave the northern ice forests. If they have reason to . . .

  Chapter Four

  The next day, Bo buried Mads under the boughs of a flowering blossom tree. It felt as though his heart had been clawed by Ranik, shredded to pieces he would never be able to fit back together. He was scared and confused and alone.

  When he had woken at first Light, Bo had thought it all a cruel dream. But when he’d spied Mads, cold and still on the floor, he had remembered. With tears, he had remembered.

  Mads was dead.

  Bo was alone.

  Mads had not always been the kindest father figure—mostly he was a mean old drunk with a sharp tongue—but he was all Bo knew. He was the only one who’d taken Bo in when no one else had wanted him.

  Eventually, Bo had summoned the courage to check outside the hut, but the wolf had long gone, forced to hide from full Light like all wolves. But Bo knew Ranik would be back in the half-Light. He knew this because the night before, the wolf had pressed close to the door and whispered, “You cannot. Escape me.”

  Bo had clutched his stomach and gulped down the sour taste in his mouth when he’d heard it. He would have to leave. But where would he go? Where could he go?

  “Goodbye,” Bo said to Mads’s grave, the mound of earth already lightly scattered with fallen blossoms from the tree above it. Nix pressed against Bo’s calves, whimpering quietly. In his hand, Bo held Mads’s leather necklace with the small crystal pendant. It was an odd shape—all points and jagged angles—and the thick leather strap was carved with peculiar little squiggles and marks, but Mads had worn it every day of his life, so Bo wanted to keep it.

  Bo tied the leather strap around his neck, dropping the pendant beneath his shirt. He patted his chest, feeling the cold lump through the thin material. It was small comfort, however. Bo’s head was filled with strange ideas about wolves and Stars and keys and witches, ideas that danced and darted and refused to come together to make sense. He didn’t have any answers; he felt useless and afraid.

  But there was something he could do. If he bought the wish from the man at the market, then perhaps he could save Mads. Bo wasn’t sure if he believed in wishes but it didn’t matter. If there was a glimmer of hope, the smallest chance that Bo could wish for everything to be the way it was before, he would take it. His life with Mads hadn’t been perfect but what else could he wish for? Sometimes Mads had even been kind to him: swimming in the river, shadow puppets on the walls, little foxes carved out of wood for Bo to play with. Not always, but sometimes.

  Didn’t he owe it to the old man to try? Bo could prove his worth, once and for all.

  Inside the hut, Bo grabbed everything that might be worth trading. How many Raha had the man asked for? Five hundred? Bo didn’t have anywhere near that amount, not even after he found a tin of money hidden beneath the hearth. But perhaps he could sell some belongings. He searched high and low but they didn’t have anything much of value.

  Nix tied himself up in knots around Bo’s legs. “I’m not leaving you behind, you silly thing,” said Bo. “We’re doing this together.”

  When he spied the box of gold-red dust under Mads’s cot, a coldness gripped Bo’s heart. He knew that, before he went to find Galvin, he should walk to the center of the forest and check on the old tree. For Mads.

  Bo heaved his rucksack full of items to barter onto his back, and he and Nix set out, quiet in their grief. But when they arrived at the clearing, Bo’s heart—which was already shattered to a million pieces—found a way to shatter some more.

  The leaves and limbs were blackened and shriveled, and the hole in the center of the trunk was so large Bo could have walked into it without bending over. The mournful howling he thought he’d imagined coming from inside the tree trunk the day before was now so loud it made Bo’s teeth rattle.

  The tree was dead.

  Worse still, whatever had killed the beastly old thing had spread to the trees circling the clearing, their branches bare of leaves, their bark peeling in long, jagged strips, their trunks splitting and toppling over. There was no breeze, no birdsong, no sign of life, save for the same tawny owl as last time. But with a gentle hoot
and a flapping of wings, the owl left too and then there was silence.

  A Dark funk settled over Bo, his insides crawling as though filled with Shadow Creatures.

  How far would this . . . this disease spread?

  Bo didn’t bother throwing the powder on the base of the tree. He tossed the pouch on the ground where he stood, then ran, feeling so much shame that here, again, was another way he had let Mads down. I can’t get anything right, thought Bo. No wonder I was left in the forest to die.

  “What have you done?” Mads had asked when he saw the pouch, right before he’d died. These words whirled through Bo’s head as he ran.

  What have you done? What have you done? What have you done?

  * * *

  As Bo neared the edge of the forest, he heard noises.

  “Steady up!” rasped an old man’s voice, just through the break of trees. Bo crept forward until he could see beyond the forest and to the narrow road.

  A scattering of people marched along the road, headed away from the village. On their backs they carried bulging rucksacks and baskets filled with food and clothing; a young woman pulled a cart overflowing with furniture and bedding. “Mind you don’t tip the thing,” the old man said to her. “You’re going too fast. I’d like to reach the Un-Royal City in one piece, thank you very much.”

  Flyaway strands of brown hair framed the woman’s face; her cheeks were red with effort. “I need to go fast,” she snapped. “The sooner we get away from this cursed place, the better.”

  Bo watched several more families pass, all carrying their worldly possessions, all looking over their shoulders at the village behind them, worry etched in their features. Bo even recognized some of the traders from yesterday’s market, the ones who had come from far-flung corners of Irin and who usually stayed in the village for weeks, peddling their wares.

  “Strange,” said Bo to Nix. “Why do you think they’re leaving?”

  The little fox growled.

  “You’re right. The Shadow Creatures were bad last night. Louder than ever but you don’t think—”

  And then Bo saw him.