Frost Wolf

by Kathryn Lasky

  “So …” For once, Mhairie’s tongue seemed to stumble in her mouth. “So you got her bones and … and —”

  “Morag’s bones were not ready to be carved yet. I first found other bones to tell her story on, and since then I’ve made two trips back. Our mother’s bones are beautiful.”

  He read the slight confusion in his sisters’ eyes. For them, bones were carved to inscribe laws, to honor the Great Chain that ordered the wolf world, or to chronicle events. That was all. The notion of memorializing a wolf through bone inscription, especially one that was not a clan chieftain but just an ordinary wolf, was difficult for them to grasp. Furthermore, for Faolan to call the bones “beautiful” was eccentric to say the least.

  But to Faolan, the bones of his mother were beautiful — they were lustrous with a pale gray patina. The knurled ends of her femurs rose and fell like waves in a stormy sea. Her skull seemed to shine with a blinding white — all of her bones were lovely. Faolan stepped closer to his sisters. Their fur was stained with blood from gorging on the musk ox, but he caught the golden flecks in their eyes. “You want to know about your first Milk Giver, don’t you?” he said softly.

  “Oh, yes,” they answered, although it seemed more like a sigh in the air than actual words.

  “I’ll take you to her drumlyn and show you the story of her life. But first we must go to the Namara.”

  They were standing on the edge of the Broken Talon bight. Normally they would have had to swim across it and follow the coast to get to the Carreg Gaer of the MacNamara clan. But while the waters of the Bittersea churned with gales, the bight was protected from harsh winds and had frozen solid. They could run straight across it, saving a great deal of time.

  They were across the bight before high noon, and a short time later, two MacNamara scouts came racing toward them.

  “We thought you were musk oxen!” exclaimed the first, a large brown male wolf, skidding to a halt. The other scout blinked at them, for their fur was stiff with blood and they reeked with the scent of the musk cow.

  “Faolan, is that you?” the second scout asked.

  Faolan dropped the curved horn of the musk ox he had been carrying for his mother’s drumlyn.

  “Yes.” He quickly explained about the creature caught in the avalanche. And with their pelts spangled with frozen blood and hoarfrost, the three wolves trotted after the scouts into the encampment of the Carreg Gaer of the MacNamara clan.

  Idiot! Idiot wolf! The words kept up a din in Gwynneth’s brain that she thought could almost be heard by the Sark and Liam on the ground below her. They were following the cowardly wolf on the trail to Gwyndor’s hero mark, to the place where he had died and his bones were resting.

  “We’re getting near!” The Sark tipped her head up to call to Gwynneth, who was skillfully navigating through the thick trees of the Shadow Forest.

  “Yes, we are. How can you tell?” Liam asked.

  “I can smell the rabbit-ear moss,” the Sark replied.

  “Oh, yes, I forgot about your keen sense of smell,” Liam mumbled.

  “You forgot more than that, you idiot!” Gwynneth called down. She was wearing her father’s helmet and visor now.

  A quarter of an hour later they arrived at Gwyndor’s grave and Gwynneth lighted down. “So this is the place?” she asked.

  Liam nodded. There was an immense blue spruce tree and even Gwynneth could smell the spicy rabbit-ear moss that crawled partway up its trunk. The moonlight filtering through the boughs of the spruce was tinged a silvery blue and cast a pool of lovely light. This is a nice place to die, Gwynneth thought as her dark eyes filled with tears. “And his bones —” Her voice broke.

  “In the hollow,” the Sark replied, nodding toward a cavity in the tree trunk not far from the ground. “I can smell them.”

  “My father wanted them as high as possible off the ground. That was as far as he could reach,” Liam said in a small voice. “He didn’t want any animals to disturb the bones.”

  Gwynneth and the Sark whipped around to glare at him.

  “Rather ironic, isn’t it, that his own son was the one he had to guard against,” snarled the Sark.

  The Sark felt the softest whisper of a breeze stir across the withers at the base of her neck. She looked up. Gwynneth was hovering up near the spruce’s top branches, gently nestling her father’s helmet into the highest hollow in the tree. In her beak she held a bone — one of the fourteen vertebrae in an owl’s neck. They had nearly twice as many vertebrae as most animals, as she was fond of pointing out. When she had finished safeguarding the helmet and the bone in the new hollow, she alighted on the ground. “I’m going to take every single one of these neck bones and put them way up there.” She spun her head about quickly. “Then Da can keep watch over his hero mark!”

  When Gwynneth had completed this task, she perched on a branch just outside the hollow. She looked up through the interlacing branches silvered by the light of the moon. She would wait patiently, she thought, wait for Auntie’s scroom. As she caught the first glimpse of a vaporous mist float down through the branches, she began to wilf.

  Splendid, whispered a voice that was not quite a voice. Splendid, dear!

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  THE DRUMLYN OF MORAG

  “SO HERE WE ARE,” FAOLAN SAID quietly. “I built it here because there is a good view of the Ring of Sacred Volcanoes, and on a clear night when I am on watch, I can see Broken Talon Point from my cairn and imagine that I can see the drumlyn of our mother.”

  The lashing of the winds off the Bittersea had stripped snow from the drumlyn. The bones were clearly visible, looming pale in the moonlight. They seemed almost transparent, and it crossed Dearlea’s mind that they could have been made from crystal.

  “Dearlea, are you cold?” Faolan asked.

  “No, no. I just … I can’t explain.” Then very softly she said, “Mum?”

  “She died very peacefully, Dearlea. And Brangwen was a good mate.”

  “It’s too bad that we didn’t get to meet him,” Mhairie said.

  On their arrival they had been told that Brangwen had left for the Blood Watch a few days earlier.

  “Can you show us Thunderheart’s bone?” Mhairie asked.

  “Well, if you really look I think you’ll see it.”

  “That one!” Mhairie said, touching her nose to a huge bone at the base of the drumlyn.

  “Yes, her paw bone.” It was one of the largest bones in the drumlyn. “I had buried it on a slope near the salt lagoons in the Slough. I retrieved it about six moons ago to bring here.”

  “I can see the carving you did. It’s so beautiful!” Dearlea said.

  “It’s the story of our time together — the summer we spent fishing on the river, the fall, and then our winter den.” He paused. “Would you like to carve a bone for Morag?”

  The Namara had diligently kept watch over Morag’s bones as her body decomposed. She had even posted a guard to protect Morag’s remains so that Faolan could come back for more bones to add to the drumlyn.

  “But what will we say? We never knew her,” Mhairie said.

  “Tell her about yourself. She was an outflanker, Mhairie, and so are you. And, Dearlea, you had been selected to be a skreeleen, to read the ceilidh fyre. You have much to inscribe. Stories that a mum would be proud of.”

  “Are you going to carve any more?” Dearlea asked.

  “Not tonight. Now it’s your turn.”

  Faolan knew he shouldn’t carve while his sisters were trying to incise their own stories. Watch wolf carving skills were vastly superior to those of ordinary clan wolves. It would only make Mhairie and Dearlea anxious if he were to gnaw beside them. “There’s a shelter in the lee of the point. I think I’ll go there for a rest. But you begin your bones. It will feel good, I promise.”

  “We’re not nearly as skilled as you, Faolan,” Mhairie said.

  “But your story is yours, and yours alone. You are the only one who can tell it t
o our mum.”

  “Our mum,” Mhairie repeated, savoring the words on her tongue.

  And Faolan’s sisters began their stories. At first their incisions were stiff and rigid, blunt marks staccato in their rhythms.

  Mum. They named me Mhairie. Was this the name you chose? I grew up to be an outflanker, like you, only not as good. Mum, you should know that Caila took good care of me — Mhairie stopped. Should she write about Caila’s rejection? Faolan said that one must never lie on a drumlyn bone. So she began scratching lightly with her incisors. Until the famine sickness came upon her, she took very good care of us. And now the marks flowed like small ripples in a river touched by wind. Dearlea and I think something happened to her marrow. She said we were not her daughters. She rejected us. And I suppose she was right. She was not our first Milk Giver, you were. But she raised us as if she were our true mum. We never felt she loved us less than any other litters. She loved us and took care of us until the famine sickness came upon her. She was so proud of me when I became an outflanker and when Dearlea was chosen to train as a skreeleen. She was a proud mum.

  Faolan was more tired than he’d thought, and while his sisters carved, he fell into a deep sleep. In his dream he carved as well. Bone that was slightly familiar. It was a twisted femur, and he couldn’t understand why he felt he’d come across it before. He loved that bone, but it wasn’t his mother’s, nor was it Thunderheart’s. It was a wolf bone, not a bear’s.

  I was a bear, he said in his dream.

  He felt a deep thrill surge within him. Suddenly, it was as if he had been transported back to the Cave Before Time. He could feel those walls that seemed to breathe with life surrounding him, the animals pounding across the rock face of the cave. He could hear their panting and see the spiraling painted marks on the stone, just like the dim tracery on the pads of his splayed paw. I am so close, he thought, I am so close to the answer, so close to the heart of a secret — my secret. What is it?

  Not yet! Not yet! a dream voice whispered. And once more the spirals from the cave walls that matched the marks on his splayed paw emerged from the mists of Faolan’s dreams and reminded him that he was but part of a larger design. I was not born for death and yet I have died a thousand times, he thought. And now I am born again for these hard times.

  His marrow began to boil and his dream split, as if a bolt of lightning had cracked open his skull. There standing beside him was another wolf, a paltry creature so old it looked as if his legs would not support him. A tattered pelt hung over stick-thin bones that seemed rimed in frost.

  I was not born for death and yet I have died a thousand times, the wolf echoed.

  Faolan jolted awake. “Who said that?” he asked. Those were the words from his dream, from the frost wolf. Faolan got up and walked to the mouth of the den to look out. He saw his sisters working diligently on their bones. On the edge of the wind, he could feel a deeper cold coming. It was now almost fall. What would the hunger moons of winter bring?

  Faolan looked up at the sky. The stars blurred, as if the constellations were stumbling toward a precipice, like Beezar the blind wolf. There was but one thought in Faolan’s mind:

  My service is not over. I am in but my first pelt of a new season. Can this be so?

  Author’s Note

  THE AUTHOR WISHES TO ACKNOWLEDGE that the notion of a shadow freezing was first suggested by Mark Twain in his book Following the Equator. She’s also indebted to the poet William Butler Yeats, in particular for his poems “The Second Coming” and “Sailing to Byzantium.”

  About the Author

  KATHRYN LASKY is the author of the bestselling Guardians of Ga’Hoole series, which has sold more than four million copies and has been made into a major motion picture, Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole. Her books have received a Newbery Honor, a Boston Globe—Horn Book Award, and a Washington Post—Children’s Book Guild Award. She lives with her husband in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2011 by Kathryn Lasky

  Cover art by Richard Cowdrey

  Cover art © 2011 by Scholastic Inc.

  Interior illustrations by Richard Cowdrey

  Interior illustrations © 2011 by Scholastic Inc.

  Map illustration by Lillie Howard

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, SCHOLASTIC PRESS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lasky, Kathryn.

  Frost wolf / Kathryn Lasky; [interior illustrations by Richard Cowdrey]. — 1st ed.

  p. cm. — (Wolves of the Beyond ; [4])

  Summary: When a terrible danger threatens the wolves of the Beyond, outsider Faolan must take a leadership role and inspire the pack to stand together.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-545-09316-3

  ISBN-10: 0-545-09316-3

  [1. Wolves — Fiction. 2. Fantasy.] I. Cowdrey, Richard, ill. II. Title.

  PZ7.L3274F r 2011

  [Fic] — dc23

  2011028151

  First edition, December 2011

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.

  eISBN: 978-0-545-38837-5