PRINCE OF WOLVES

by Susan Krinard

  "Tell me about your mother, Luke."

  He stiffened instinctively, drawing up all his defenses, muscles trembling with the urge to fight or flee. One by one he brought the reactions under control again, before Joey could catch more than a glimpse of them—though he knew it had not entirely escaped her. Just as he knew he had little choice but to answer.

  "My mother," he said heavily, feeling the weight of the word in his heart. He'd never spoken of her, not to anyone like Joey, but there had never been a woman like Joey before.

  "You told me—that she'd died when you were a boy." Joey licked her lips, as if realizing at last the significance of her question. "I—I could tell she meant a lot to you."

  "Yes." Luke dropped his gaze and stared into the fire, which seemed safer than Joey's sympathetic eyes. "If that's what you want to know, I'll tell you." He closed his eyes, casting back into memory, into a time when things had been simple, when he had been happy as only a child can be when his world is a known, safe place—and before, to a time he knew through stones and the soft, nostalgic words of others. And considered where to begin.

  "There is a valley," he began slowly, "hidden in the mountains not far from here, where a small village exists much as it has for a hundred years. Few people know of it, and those who do seldom speak of it to strangers." He looked up to find Joey's attention riveted on him like a child hearing a fairy tale, and he almost smiled.

  "In this village there are families, many related, all living in harmony with each other and with their world. They seldom need to go beyond its borders, but sometimes the villagers will send the restless young men out to the nearest towns to buy those few necessities the village can't provide for itself. Many years ago one of these young men grew to have a family of his own, and his only child was a beautiful girl that he named Marie-Rose."

  "That's a pretty name," Joey murmured, her face warmed by firelight that turned her pale hair to molten gold.

  "Yes." Luke gathered his thoughts again and continued, "Marie-Rose, like her father, was a restless girl. She wandered the forest from the time she was very small, and never listened to warnings that she should take care not to stray too far. She was as fearless as she was beautiful; when she grew to be a young woman, she was not content to settle down with one of the village boys. There came a time when she followed them on their expeditions into town, and so she found Lovell, and learned about the world outside the village.

  "When her parents knew they could not prevent her from visiting Lovell, they did their best to prepare her for the things she might see. She made many trips there, often alone, to watch the peculiar life of the people who lived in a place so unlike her own. One day a stranger came to town."

  He fell silent for a long moment, remembering. He remembered his mother, even from the time when he had been little more than a small child. And they'd told him what she had been like in those days; carefree, full of life and laughter, running barefoot through the forest as fleet as a deer and as fearless as a wolverine.

  "The stranger," he said at last, "was from a country Marie-Rose had never seen, and barely knew of—a place far from the mountains. He had come as the leader and representative of men who wished to buy land, locate virgin timber to fill the needs of people in that other country. Marie-Rose didn't know of this at first, but she was drawn to the stranger and his smell of other places. She began to follow him, to make more and more frequent visits to the town, until one day he saw her. On that day he was captivated by her utterly, and she in turn gave her heart to him."

  Again the memories overwhelmed words; Luke felt his muscles tighten, remembering the man who had changed his mother's life forever. He looked up at Joey, who sat absolutely still, her chest rising and falling with deep breaths of wonder. The newer ache of her presence pushed the old pain of the past aside, so that he was able to continue with detachment once again.

  "The stranger courted Marie-Rose, and after a short time, unable to leave her, he decided to settle in Lovell and give up the things he had come to do there. Marie-Rose told her parents and the people of her village that she loved this stranger, and that she would stay with him. But they berated her, telling her this man had no place in her life and could only bring her pain and sorrow. Marie-Rose refused to listen to their warnings; at last they had told her that if she took this man as her mate, she would no longer be welcome in the village.

  "With great sadness, Marie-Rose accepted the condition. She left the village forever and went to the man she had chosen, who built her a cabin in the forest and used his wealth to buy as much of the surrounding land as he could. Marie-Rose didn't know that he was rich with money had had earned by despoiling the wilderness she loved, but when he settled down with her, he put all that behind him.

  "Their life together was happy for the first years, Marie-Rose continued to wander the forests, and her mate delighted in her love of life and freedom. He went away at times, to conduct business, but always came back with some gift for her, and all was well between them.

  "On the day Marie-Rose discovered she was to have a child, the man could not do enough for her, he brought her special delicacies imported into town and watched over her devotedly. When their son was born, he had her dark hair and her eyes, he grew up to match the size of his father, and became a part of both worlds."

  "You," Joey breathed. He felt her eyes move over him searchingly, he almost shuddered under the inspection, though it was not annoyance that he felt but something far more troubling.

  "Yes," he admitted with a sigh. "For the first years the boy had everything he could possibly want or need, his mother taught him the ways of the forest, and his father took him to town and showed him the ways of civilization.

  "The happiness was not to last." Luke closed his eyes again. "Marie-Rose had never lost her wildness, and once her babe was weaned, she would occasionally disappear into the woods, sometimes for entire days, leaving the boy in the care of her mate. At first this seemed no trouble, because the father's business allowed him to stay home to look after the boy, or to take him into town on those days his mother was gone.

  "The boy was too young to understand when things changed. He didn't understand that the two disparate worlds of his parents were less compatible than even they had realized. He only learned later what had happened.

  Luke heard his voice as it carried the story to its inevitable conclusion, recalling it with crystal clarity. He remembered waking that first time they had argued, hearing the sharp crack of angry voices in the kitchen, his mother's lapse into French—which she seldom did unless she was very angry or very happy—and his father's booming voice shouting back. He had crouched in bed, listening, fearful without knowing why, longing to rush in and stop them.

  That had only been the first of many fights, conflicts that came one after another with greater and greater frequency. They were always careful to do it away from him, so he never heard much of what they said to each other, he only knew it hurt.

  He began to catch his usually cheerful mother in tears, crying quietly where she thought no one could see, his attempts to comfort her made her smile but never took the sadness from her eyes. She began to disappear for longer and longer times into the forest, always returning with endearments and apologies, holding him tightly so that he could not be angry that she'd left him. But his father began to interrupt their quiet moments, to tell his mother she was not to go out, that she was to stay and look after their son and the house and forget her wild ways.

  Luke had still not understood the anger between them, so potent that he felt it like a black cloud summoning a hard spring rain. But he saw his mother's sorrow, and it was her he turned to, her he grew closer to, protecting her instinctively from the threat he saw in his father.

  A day came when his father grew so angry that he came at Luke's mother with a lifted hand prepared to strike; that was the day when Luke stood between them, holding his body as a barrier, defying his father with every ounce of a child's strengt
h. The blow had fallen on him. And his mother had gone at his father with a rage Luke had never seen before, so savagely that his father had fled the cabin.

  That was the first of his father's absences. He, too, always returned, often with soft apologies for Luke, and even for his mate. But things were never right again. The arguments became cold silences, the disappearances by his mother or father longer and longer. One or the other always looked after him, but he learned what it was to rely on himself, to be prepared for new shocks in a life that had opened up an unknowable abyss under his feet.

  One day his father left and did not come back. He waited, and his mother did, in weary silence. A year passed, and he did not return. He left no explanation, no warning.

  Luke remembered when his mother accepted that her mate would never return. She never spoke to him of it, never explained—but he remembered her wild eyes that day, her tears as she held Luke and rocked him, even though he had grown too old—her black hair tangled and her voice ragged as she sang a lullaby in broken French. That day, it was as if the light died in her. The wildness faded. Luke never understood until much later why his mother had been so terribly broken.

  Even after his father had abandoned them, life fell back into a rhythm almost normal, almost peaceful, a brief tranquillity after the storm. Marie-Rose continued to teach Luke the things he needed to know of her world, if anything, the urgency of her desire to make him truly a part of both worlds in which he lived grew even stronger. She saw to it that he attended the small school in Lovell, refusing to accept his youthfully fierce determination to stay by her side, protect her as his father had failed to do. Because she wished it, he had learned—focused all of his intensity on amassing the knowledge she insisted was vital to his future. It didn't matter that she herself knew little of the outside world.

  Her son—he would know and understand the things that had so fatally eluded her.

  So much of this he had come to grasp when it was too late.

  He remembered the long days when he had struggled with his own alienation from the other children, doggedly working his way through years of schooling. He grew up with few friends and with no knowledge of the hidden village in which his mother had been raised.

  Something—some subtle shift in Joey's posture, some night sound that broke the inward focus of his thoughts—made Luke suddenly aware of his own voice, reciting the memories as if they were no more than a tale of hypothetical characters in another existence, incapable of giving pain. He broke off, looking away from the hypnotic spell of the flames, away from Joey's rapt face.

  "It was only because of my mother that I did well in school," he said at last. "Because she wanted it, I learned about my father's world." He heard his own voice catching on the word "father", a word he had never voiced to anyone but her, and one other, in all the time since his mother's mate had left them. "He had left us money to live on, in his vast generosity—a tidy sum in the local bank, plus all the land he had bought for my mother. Sometimes new deposits would appear in the bank. She never touched it, except what she needed for me."

  The mournful hooting of a great horned owl punctuated his words, he paused to listen, to a language far simpler and more honest than the one he'd found. Outside It seemed a melancholy and appropriate comment on his mother's fate.

  "When I turned fourteen, my mother changed. She'd lived the past many years changed already, though I didn't know it then; I was old enough to see it on the day she began to talk to me about my future. I didn't care about any of that, but because it was important to her, I listened." Luke closed his eyes. "She told me there would be changes in me as well, things I wouldn't always understand. She explained that there would be things I would have to deal with, and she wouldn't always be there to help me. Even then I didn't realize what she meant."

  Luke caught himself then, remembering the limits on what Joey could comprehend. There were things he had no intention of telling her—could not tell her, even now. Her lovely dark eyes never left his face, she could have no conception of what he left unsaid, the thoughts that went through his mind as he spoke so dispassionately.

  He shook his head, dismissing what could never be. "My mother told me about the village she'd grown up in. She'd always kept me from exploring in that direction, only then did I learn that she had left the village and her family behind forever. But she told me that I could find my own people there, if I needed them." It was hard, now, to keep his voice level. "She apologized for all she had been unable to give me, made me promise to complete my education. None of it warned me of what was to come."

  Silence fell, only the crackling and popping of the fire marring the perfect emptiness of it. "After she had talked long into the night of things I had just begun to grasp, she stood over my bed and waited until I'd fallen asleep. I remember her face in the darkness: all serene sadness, a face out of a medieval painting. There were tears, but I had seen those often enough in the past not to be alarmed."

  Her cascade of rich dark hair had fallen over her face, veiling the depth of her emotion before he could know what lay behind it, he remembered squeezing her hand, trying to offer comfort even as he'd drifted off to sleep with the ease and innocence of the very young.

  "When I woke the next morning, she was gone."

  Luke lifted his head. He could feel his face settling into a perfect, indifferent mask of stone. Like stone, his eyes saw nothing. "She had left everything behind, but she never returned—not after that day, or the next or the next. I finally understood for the first time what she had done." Even the memory of the deep sense of betrayal, of adolescent rage at his mother, himself, the world—even that did not reach the calm surface of the face he turned to Joey.

  "I went after her then. I tracked her with all the skill she had taught me. She had hidden her trail well, but I followed it. It led me to the village—the place she had spoken of.

  "It was there I found her. There were many strangers, people I had never seen except for one or two I had glimpsed in town or in the forest. They looked at me without surprise. My mother was there, on the doorstep of one of the cabins, her face was more at peace than I had ever seen it. She seemed to be sleeping, but I knew." The image of her face, the echo of his wild howl of grief at her treachery in leaving him, reverberated to the roots of his soul, trapped there to die in memory. "The villagers tried to help me. They took me away while they put my mother to rest in accordance with their own ancient traditions. I never knew any of that until much later."

  He wondered how he could explain to Joey those days of torment, when he had suffered in the grip of a raging fever born of terrible grief and the changes that were even then coming upon him. Her face now was tense with a reflection of the pain he could not show, as if she expressed it for him. No—even she could not know the source of that pain.

  There was too much intensity, too much emotion. He had to end it now before it went too far to stop. Between them and within himself.

  "Later, when I recovered, they told me more about my mother and how she had grown up there and come, at last, to leave them. They had taken her back, willingly, though too late—regretted having cut her off, grieved for her. Because of that, they accepted me and made me one of them. They never spoke of my father." The word grated, again. "When I went back to the cabin, I gathered up a few belongings and went to live among them for a time I finished what education Lovell could give me, and when the time came I went Outside, as my mother had wished."

  Those long years in the city, away from everything he loved, had been torment, the burden of constantly mimicking what he was not, what he had no desire to be—of fulfilling his mother's wish for him, in honor of what she had been—had brought him back wiser but with no love for his fathers world. He could no more speak of those things, now, to Joey than he dared give in to his own dark yearnings.

  Abruptly he ended it. "There's little more to tell." The sound of his voice came remote and detached to his own ears. "I came back, and never left a
gain." He looked up to meet Joey's eyes across a fire that had grown small and cold, it was a relief to turn his attention to the simple task of building the fire up again.

  He knew she was still watching him, waiting, even before she spoke.

  "Thank you."

  It was hardly more than a breath, though he heard it as clearly as a shout. "Thank you for telling me. I—" He knew when she looked away by the infinitesimal change in the soft lilt of her voice. "I was wrong to pry, and I'm sorry—sorry for everything."

  The last words held a wealth of meaning. Luke met her eyes and was lost in the whirling gold sparks, like stars in a velvet-dark sky. He didn't want her sympathy, but he could not make himself turn away as if her concern did not matter, as if she were only a complication and not an obsession.

  But he did break away at last, as the last branch he had fed into the flames caught and smoldered.

  "I've answered your question, Joey," he said. It didn't come with quite the evenness he would have preferred. With deliberate care, he relaxed every tense muscle and stretched until the bones cracked. "Now it's your turn to answer some of mine."

  She started. Her finely molded nostrils flared, the supple lines of her body hidden under bulky and practical clothing froze into stillness. Composure came back to her slowly, and with it the familiar, defiant tilt of her chin. "What do you want to know?"

  He considered for a long moment. It came to him how little he really knew of her and had never needed to know, even now, where she had come from, what she had been before, seemed almost unimportant. If there had been some hope of a future—but there wasn't. In spite of that knowledge, the question that came to him now rose unbidden from the very compulsion he had tried so hard to deny.

  "You said once," he began with deliberate casualness, "that you were married. Richard, I believe his name was." Watching as she reacted to his question, he felt his own anticipation like an unwanted hunger.