The snow came screaming down the mountain two days after the caravan disappeared down its serpentine road; as if the Great Mother herself had drawn a white curtain across to forbid any pursuit after them.

  For twelve days it fell. Black Rock was entombed, the wind a ceaseless wail that drove drifts against the palisade gates until they were barred by white walls twice the height of a man. It pushed against the door of Fenris’s hut, too, imprisoning him inside with the turmoil of his thoughts and Isangrim’s restless cries. He’d pace the hut, waiting tiredly for his son to cry himself to sleep, his body aching with the sickening tearing caused by Albi’s distance.

  I shouldn’t have let you leave. He thought pitifully, with only himself to listen.

  Fenris had begun to worry the storm would last his lifetime; but then the wind shifted, carrying forward the scents of wet pine and thawing earth. The long icicles that hung from the eaves of his hut like dragon’s teeth began to weep with dribbling tears, and the sun emerged in the blueing sky, turning the snowpack to a slush that sucked at his boots and rotted the hem of his cloak.

  It was then that the Free-Folk were sent, by Hroth’s command, into the Clearing. Fenris stood in the center of the great field beside Jorik, the old man leaning on his wolf-headed cane as they surveyed the sorry gathering that staggered down the rise. Fenris counted fifty families, though the word ‘family’ seemed too kind for the clusters of haunted, hollow-eyed souls who picked their way through the mire. They carried their worldly goods in sacks or clutched in their arms. Some had nothing at all. They stopped at the edge of the treeline, a huddle of damp wool and weary confusion, not yet daring to step fully into the open muck that was to be their home; or approach the two wolves that waited in the middle of it.

  “They look strong.” Fenris said to Jorik, a desperate, hollow attempt at finding hope. He sifted through their ranks with his gaze, finding differences among the individuals that had been lost at first glance by the whole. He found weariness, simmering anger, fear, boredom, and even excitement–the latter only on the lower, smaller faces of the children. He saw, too, a grim set to a few jaws, and a calculative assessment in the eyes that were watching him back.

  Jorik spat a wad of phlegm into the mud.

  “It is indeed a fine gift Hroth has given you. All these empty bellies and no walls to place them in. A devilish thing he has done, not waiting to let us build first. And so soon after that storm we had–”

  “It is what it is, Jorik.” Fenris sighed.

  He stepped forward, the mud sucking at his boots. The murmuring among the Free-Folk died to a watchful silence as he reached their numbers. He saw himself through their eyes then: a large wolf-man in worn leathers, the ghost of an Alpha’s authority clinging to him, standing in a field of cold slop. Not quite the inspiring persona he would have liked to emulate.

  “You know who I am,” he said, his voice carrying flatly over the light drizzle that had begun, “This land, from the treeline to the creek-mark yonder, is yours to build on, to farm, to live on as free men and women.” The word ‘free’ hung strange and weightless around them, “The pack will not trouble you here. I live in that hut there–” he turned and pointed to it now, “--I will make sure you are all safe.” A few exchanged glances. One man coughed, so Fenris pushed on, “You’ll need to govern yourselves. The Elder among you will choose your Laws. And right now, there is much work to be done, and you’ll need to choose from among you someone to speak for you. We will not get anywhere if you all talk at once.”

  Though it would be better than this wretched silence they are stubbornly holding on to.

  He scanned the faces, seeing only blankness or suspicion. “Is there nobody who wishes to step forward?”

  More silence. Fenris rubbed his eyes tiredly, though he understood; to step forward was to make yourself a target. Leadership was a defiant trait that their wolf-masters had quickly beaten out of them. The drizzle of a cold rain dripped from his hair into his eyes as he waited. He saw a big man with forearms like knotted rope shuffle his feet, then look away. A woman with a sharp, intelligent face opened her mouth as if to speak, then thought better of it, her eyes darting to the others, then back to Fenris who was watching.

  As he opened his mouth to speak again a ripple moved through the center of the crowd. Parting with a slow, reluctant yield as though hesitant to give up whoever was inside. From its heart emerged a woman with a face that was both handsome and feminine in equal measures. She was not large, but she moved with a focused purpose that carved space around her. In one arm, balanced on her hip, she held a babe swaddled against the damp; a little girl with a thatch of dark-hair and solemn eyes the color of river clay; the same as the woman who carried her. The child was only a season older than Isangrim at the most.

  The woman stopped before Fenris. Her face was not soft, but it was clear, with lines at the corners of her upturned eyes that spoke of squinting into sun and wind. Her clothes, though coarse and patched, were clean. She looked him in the eye, her gaze frank and assessing, holding no hint of cringe or false deference.

  “Hattie,” she said, though he hadn’t asked. She did not bow her head, as was the slave’s custom, and Fenris liked her already for it. Instead, she shifted the babe to her other hip and offered her hand, calloused palm up, in the manner of equals meeting on the side of a road.

  Fenris took it. Her grip was firm and dry despite this wet weather. The babe on her hip, stared at him with an unnerving, unblinking focus.

  “I’ll be the voice,” Hattie said, a statement of fact, “unless someone else wants the grief of it later.” A faint, dry chuckle came from somewhere in the crowd at her small quip.

  “Good,” Fenris said, releasing her hand. She seemed practical. That was what they needed. “We start with a solid count. Not just your heads. I need to know what we have to work with. How many hands can swing an axe? How many know how to thatch a roof, mend a net, deliver a babe? How many mouths are there to feed, and how many of those mouths can help with the feeding?”

  Hattie nodded once, a sharp dip of her chin.

  “Give me ‘til dusk, I’ll get it done fer you.”

  She turned back to the crowd, and with a few quiet, terse words and pointed gestures, she had them moving out into shelter of the pines at the edge of the clearing to get out of the rain.

  True to her word, as the grey light of day began to fail, her knock came on the door of his hut; three firm, solid thuds. Fenris exchanged a glance with Jorik across the table where he sat. The old warrior was hunched over a bowl of rabbit stew, his spoon halfway to his mouth.

  “Enter,” Fenris called.

  The door swung inward, letting in a gust of evening air that made the fire in the hearth gutter. Hattie stood on the threshold, a silhouette against the deepening twilight, her babe on her hip wrapped in a woolen shawl that had seen better days; not nearly warm enough to stop the girl’s shivering. Hattie’s face was calm, but her eyes held the weariness of a long day and the wariness of a creature in a den that did not belong to it.

  “Well, come in out of the chill, woman, you’re lettin’ all the warmth out,” Jorik grumbled, not unkindly, gesturing with his spoon.

  Hattie stepped inside, closing the door softly behind her. She took in the room with a swift, assessing glance. Her gaze lingered on Isangrim, who was crouched by the hearth, pensively stacking smooth river stones into a precarious tower before placing his wooden animals on the very top.

  “We’re settled under the pines, for now,” she said, her voice carrying the thick accent of the southern kingdom, “The open field is a bother to most of them. Too many years of watchin’ the sky fer trouble, I suppose.”

  “You don’t have to explain yourselves. Do what you wish.” Fenris said, pushing a stool toward her with his foot. “Sit and dine with us. There’s plenty.” He gestured to the pot still steaming over the fire.

  “I’ve eaten, thank you,” she replied, though her eyes flicked to the pot; a refusal of pride, then. She remained standing, shifting the babe on her hip.

  “Does this one have a name?” Jorik asked, pausing mid-chew to point at the little girl.

  “Ethel.” Hattie said fiercely.

  The babe, hearing her name, began to squirm, her little face crumpling. Her chubby hand reached down, not for her mother, but for a small, carved wooden fox that lay on the packed-earth floor near Hattie’s boot.

  “Why not let the little girl down, Mother, she’s wanting to explore,” Jorik said around a mouthful of stew. “Floor’s clean enough. Can’t learn the world from your hip.”

  Hattie hesitated for a breath, then, with a practiced motion, lowered Ethel to the ground. The little girl immediately crawled the short distance and seized the wooden fox in a determined grip.

  Isangrim, noticing the visitor in his ground-level domain, looked up from his stones. He observed Ethel with saddened amber eyes. Then, with the grave deliberation of a diplomat, he selected a second carved animal from his small pile—a bear, its features worn smooth by his constant handling. He waddled over to where Ethel sat and held it out to her, an offering of glances and no words.

  Ethel stared at the bear, then at Isangrim, then back at the bear. She released the fox with one hand and took the bear, holding one animal in each fist, her earlier fussiness forgotten. A slow, gap-toothed smile spread across Isangrim’s face. The sight of it was strange to Fenris, who hadn’t seen it since before Albi’s departure.

  Hattie watched the exchange, and something in her rigid posture softened just a fraction.

  “Sit, Hattie, please” Fenris said again, his voice quieter. “Before you fall over.”

  This time, she did, lowering herself onto the stool Fenris offered with precise, economical movements. He heard a faint sigh escape her as her weight left her feet. She kept her eyes on the children by the hearth, as if drawing a measure of calm from them.

  “So you’ve tallied your people,” Fenris pressed, leaning forward over the table on his elbows.

  She reached into a pouch at her belt and pulled out a piece of scraped birch bark. It was covered in neat, precise markings made with a bit of charred stick—lines, crosses, and small pictograms. She laid it on the table between them. “Fifty-three families. Not all of em’ whole. Most of em’ are joost fragments, survivin’ together.”

  Jorik leaned in, his old eyes sharp.

  “Fifty-three,” he muttered.

  “Seventeen of those families have wee ones under five,” Hattie continued, her finger tracing a column of marks. “Mine included.” She glanced at Ethel, who was now trying to make the fox and bear sleep atop Isangrim’s rock tower. “Twenty-nine men and lads over twelve winters who can lift and carry. Thirty-four women and girls.”

  “Skills?” Fenris prompted.

  “Six of em’ healer’s. Three who were smithees. Strikers, mind, but they know the fire and the hammer as if they were masters. Two know boats and nets, comin’ from the riverfolk. A good dozen can handle a needle and thread.” She took a breath. “Most know the planting and the harvest, the way it’s done. Tomhas is the best of our farmers, he’s been growing the strongest wheat in Black Rook for decades.”

  Fenris studied the bark, “How many are strong enough to swing an axe for timber?”

  Hattie’s mouth tightened. “Most of the men. Most of the women too, if it comes to it. We’re not afraid of hard work. We’re more afraid of workin’ fer nothin’ again.”

  “This work will not be for nothing, dear Hattie.” Jorik said, tapping the table with a bony finger.

  “Aye,” Hattie said, but the word held a world of skepticism. “Noot many of us our confident the wolves will leave us be. Whose to defend us if one of em’ try and take their anger oot?”

  “They know I am here,” Fenris said simply, and folded his hands across his chest, “they will not bother you, you have my word.”

  She held his eyes for a long moment, then gave a single, slow nod. She looked back at the bark. “We’ll need more tools. We’ve a few of our own but noot enough.”

  “Bor is coming on the morning with a cart of them. I’ve already seen to it.” Fenris said.

  “And seed? Fer the spring plantin’? We’ve none and no coin to trade fer.”

  “It’ll be a lean first year. I’ve got seed we’ll use.”

  A faint, grim smile touched her lips. “Lean years are the only ones we know, Alpha Fenris.”

  “I’m no Alpha anymore, Hattie.” He leaned back, running a hand through his hair. “Tomorrow, at first light, you and I and Jorik will walk the ground again. We’ll mark where the first shelters go, where the common hall will be, where to dig the drainage. Your people with skills will lead others who have none. And we’ll get started right away.”

  Hattie watched her daughter, who had now crawled into Isangrim’s lap to better examine his stone tower. The boy put a protective arm around her so that she would not fall near the hearth, his small face intently serious.

  “Aye,” she said again, softer this time. “We can do that.” She looked up, and the firelight caught in her eyes; the river clay softening into a woolen gray. Her face was plain in a way that made her almost beautiful.

  ????

  In the dark before the sun-rise, Fenris walked the ground of the Clearing alone with a slow, deliberate gait, half-lost in thought, and half-counting each of his steps, one-two-three, matching the phantom rhythm that had kept him awake in the night, the distant thud-thud-thud of Albi’s heart pulsing beneath his left rib. The mud sucked at his boots, cold as grave-dirt, and he welcomed the sensation. He welcomed, too, all the work that was before him, craving its physical exhaustion and mental load that might drown out the silence where Albi’s thoughts should have been.

  I’ve spent so much time in your mind and skin I do not remember how to be in mine, Albi.

  He sighed, then thought of Isangrim, and the hard days they had weathered after Albi’s leave. His son did not understand her absence anymore than Fenris. He understood only the sudden, terrible lack of the warm, soft presence that smelled of milk and thyme and rest. Those first few days of Albi’s leaving he would wake, his small face crumpling in the dark, and his cries were raw and panicked shrieks that scraped at Fenris’s soul and jarred him from his own restless day-dreaming. He could not be soothed by rocking, by song, by patting, by play. Jorik, hearing the cries through the stone and wood of their shared wall, had braved the winter wind to come and help, imprisoning himself inside with them. But even Jorik’s old, creaking lullabies could not soothe the babe. His little body would arch, his hands clawing at Fenris’s tunic, seeking what was not there. He wanted the comfort of Albi’s breast, the steady beat of her heart against his ear, the tickle of her white hair across his cheek, and nothing else in the world would do.

  Fenris had known that feeling too well.

  It was this way all through the entirety of that twelve-day winter storm, when Fenris could do nothing but pace the confines of their hut with the boy writhing and fever-hot against his shoulder, waiting for Isangrim to cry himself exhaustingly to sleep. Fenris would murmur nonsense, stories of brave wolves and running deer, but his voice was rough, exhausted, and monotone. It was not Albi’s story-voice the boy loved, and it only seemed to remind him of her absence.

  Sleep was a distant country that Fenris no longer visited as he shared his bed with his ill-content son.

  “Mama….wa?” Isangrim would cry beside him, a plaintive, rising note of confusion, “Mama…wa?”

  How do you explain war to a babe of only twelve moons?

  Fenris had asked the silence place in his mind desperately on one of these evenings when Isangrim continued to ask him where she’d gone. Fenris could feel the weak beat of her heart in his chest from the bond he shared with Albi, but Isangrim could not have even that small comfort. She had been the center of his universe and had vanished from him; constricting his world now to a cold, Mama-shaped void.

  A silent, sullen withdrawal suddenly took root in Fenris’s heart one night. It replaced his cries and angry tantrums of before. He rejected Fenris’s attempts to play, batting away his toys. He’d thrown the newly gifted wooden deer promptly into the flames of the hearth when Jorik presented it to him. He turned his face from Jorik’s offered bits of stew. He would sit for long stretches, as if his careful stillness alone would make her come back to him. His world, once bright and burgeoning, dimmed to a stubborn, miserable gray that made Fenris, for a time, hate Albi for leaving him. He ate little and slept long, solemn hours well into the mid-day despite sleeping early the night before. And his laughter—a sound that had once been as common as birdsong in spring—became only a memory for Fenris’s ears.

  That was before Isangrim met Ethel. After their coming together in the hut that first night of the Free-Folk in the Clearing everything had changed.

  Fenris had seen the slow thaw on his son’s face when Hattie had placed the little girl on the ground to pick up the misplaced fox. Isangrim watched Ethel with the solemn intensity of a scholar, a look, Fenris believed, he'd learned from watching Jorik at his scrolls. When Isangrim had offered her his wooden bear it was the first voluntary gesture he’d made in days; and something tight in Fenris’s chest gave away.

  When Hattie had rose to leave his hut, Ethel drowsing in her arms, Fenris did something he had never done before a human. He dropped to one knee, a posture of raw, urgent need. The action so stark, so out of place, that even Jorik stiffened at the table.

  “Hattie,” Fenris said, his voice low and rough. “A request. Not as your Alpha…” he grunted, not finding the right collection of words, “not as anything but a father.” He glanced at Isangrim, who was listlessly poking at the ashes by the hearth, already retreating back into his shell with Ethel’s departure. “Your girl… she’s good for him. He’s lost without Albi. I’d like to request–beg you–to stay. You and Ethel. You can take the loft, I will clear it, you will have your own space. Isangrim needs her company.”

  Hattie looked down at him, her face unreadable and her dark hair was braided back so tight it pulled at the corners of her squinted eyes. She was a young woman, but her hand, when she placed it then on his shoulder, was as gnarled as an old Elder’s, the knuckles swollen and the palm leathered.

  “Do not kneel for anyone.” she told him sternly, and her eyes flicked to the safe fire, to Jorik at the table, and then back to Fenris’s desperate gaze upon her, “joost ‘til the first shelter’s up. Ethel does noot like the cold, anyways. And if you kneel fer me again, I will stick my knee into your chin.”

  He’d built her a small cot from wood and straw, padding it with two spare pelts, and set it up in the loft directly where the hearth-fire’s heat would rise and warm the floor beneath it. Hattie had set Ethel in Isangrim’s cot beside the hearth, where she would sleep every night after, and the boy, once tired, said nothing of her intrusion in his space and simply curled himself around her upon the cot. They slept peacefully, a tangled pile of small limbs and soft breaths. And for the first time since Albi left, Isangrim did not wake once, all night, to ask for her.

  ????

  The work began with the first, solid thwock of an axe biting into a chosen pine. It was followed by another, and another, until the Clearing rang with a staccato rhythm of labored creation. The shush-shush of two-handled saws, the grunt of men and women hauling felled logs, the calls of instruction “Heave!” “Brace it there!” “Watch your footing!”

  Fenris worked alongside them, his shoulders burning as he hauled a trimmed trunk, his hands growing raw and blistered from stripping branches. The immense physical toil was, Fenris felt, a blessing from the Great Mother. It drowned out the silence in his head and the constant, low-grade ache of Albi’s absence that lived beneath his breastbone. He lost himself in the strain of muscle, the scent of shattered pine sap, the gritty feel of dirt under his nails. An absorption of his mind that was intoxicatingly numbing.

  Hattie moved through the organized chaos like the field commander of an army. She pulled over, all on her own, the sled where Bor had delivered their tools; axes and adzes, handfuls of saws, all of it glittering weakly in the sun when she dumped it over onto the earth before the smithees. Jorik sat with Ethel and Isangrim in the animal pen, quietly milking the piss-goat or spreading out dried corn for the chickens, and every once in a while Hattie would go over to see how things were getting along there, as well.

  Fenris, wrist-deep in mud helping a brute of a man named Peter dig a drainage ditch, looked up to see them: his son and the little girl sitting in the dirt, babbling nonsense at each other, and chasing the chickens about. It was the only sight that could lift his weight, even for a moment.

  At the end of that first full day of work, the outlines of the four communal shelters were marked with stakes and string and their corners squared. A great pile of trimmed timber lay ready for raising. The first ditch snaked toward the lower tree-line, already filling with meltwater. The air smelled of sweat, turned earth, and split pine.

  Days later, knee-deep in the cold earth of a foundation trench, Fenris heard the echo of women’s shouts across the Clearing. Two women, only one of them he knew by name, a young seamstress they called Mara, were squared off, faces flushed with rage. Between them, held in a death-grip by each, was a single, battered iron cooking pot.

  “It was in my bundle, you witch!” Mara snarled, her voice raw. “I carried it from the damned storehouse myself! Your thieving hands—”

  “Thieving?” the other woman, her gold hair coming out of a careful bun strand by strand with each jerk of the pot between them, shrieked with a thicker accent than Hattie, “You left it by the fire-pit, you daft cow! Finder’s keepers! That’s the law of the rood!”

  “There is no road here you dense twat! This is our home!”

  “A fine hoome it is where a woman cannoot trust her neighboor!”

  A crowd was gathering with a weary tension. Slaves did not fight this way. Fenris could see the anxious anticipation in many faces, as if the ghost of their masters were going to come any moment to give them all a lashing. Fenris felt the bubbling of his resolve gathering, ready to step in and impose….offer….some kind of will to fix the situation. But before he could move, Hattie came stomping up from up the creek.

  She dodged around the cluster of bodies, as fluid as water down a shoot, and stood with her arms crossed over her chest before the women, her face an impassive mask. She said nothing at first, which deeply amused Fenris from where he watched. Her eyes moving to and from Mara and the other girl, listening to their continued hurl of senseless accusations. Spittle flew. Tears of frustration welled in Mara’s eyes. The other woman shook the pot violently as if possessed.

  She let them exhaust themselves until they’d stopped their passionate jerkings. Hattie spoke so softly Fenris had to lean from where he sat to hear, “We are building a home here,” she said “Noot scavenging a fookin’ midden.” The women stared, chests heaving. Hattie’s eyes flicked to the pot, then back to their faces. “You will share it. Mara has it dawn till noon. Selia, noon till dusk. You will keep it clean for the next. You will noot hide it. You will noot dent it in your spite.” She paused, letting the absolute finality of it sink in. “It’s fookin’ pot, laddies. Is it worth all this trouble?” The grand, righteous fury of the women deflated under the weight of Hattie’s stark, pragmatic logic.

  Mara’s grip loosened first. Then Selia’s. The pot hung between them for a moment, a symbol of their pettiness. Selia, with a sound like a deflating bladder, thrust it at Mara. “Take it fer yourself.”

  They didn’t look at each other again. They turned and melted back into the crowd of quiet onlookers who were themselves scattering back to their tasks. Hattie watched them go, her expression a strange mixture of happiness and exhaustion. Then she turned, her eyes meeting Fenris’s across the clearing.

  Dumb twats. She mouthed to him, making Fenris laugh out loud.

  At night, in the hut, Isangrim, who had spent his days shadowing Ethel like her solemn guardian wolf, would eat his supper—actually eat it, without prompting—and then, yawning, would stagger tiredly on his own to his cot. Some nights, as Hattie tucked him and Ethel together beneath the furs, Isangrim would ask Hattie softly, “Mama…wa?” but it had become a mournful habit, and not the panicked grasping of before.

  Fenris, however, was unraveling as the weeks went by. The work that exhausted his body in the days did not touch the cold knot of worry in his gut that found him on his furs in the quiet nights. Sleep, when it came, was thin and haunted. He picked at his food, his appetite gone. Hattie was not the cook that Albi was. He would find himself staring into the fire or at Hattie’s rough fingers in stitching, often for long, unblinking stretches, unaware of the time passing. He was a man waiting for an axe to fall upon his head, feeling its shadow in his every moment.

  More often than not he’d lay upon his furs until dawn and wake not having slept at all. On one of these nights, Fenris lay still in his furs, the coarse wool scratching against his beard, trying to trick his mind into sleeping by forcing his breathing to deepen and slow the way it is for a man at rest. It was stupid, futile, but he did it anyway.

  On the other side of the hearth, Jorik and Hattie sat by the hearth-fire. The old man had lost time in the leather binds of his book, which turned with crisp shuffles of parchment. Hattie mended a tear in one of Ethel’s small shifts; Fenris could hear the soft clinking of her needles and snick of her thread behind his closed eyes.

  “Jorik. I fear fer Fenris. He’s witherin’ away. Workin’ himself too hard. He doesn’t listen to me. Perhaps you could convince him to sloow down.” Hattie said finally, her voice low for the old man’s ear only, “He’s a candle gutterin’ in a draft he is. He pushes his body past its limits, then forgets to feed it. He looks through you, noot at you. It’s fookin’ pity-fool.”

  Jorik sighed, “Aye.”

  “Aye? Is that all you have to say? Well, is it a sickness then?” she asked, the sound of her needle pausing. “Somethin’ in the air? Somethin’ he coot from us?”

  Jorik was silent for a long moment, so long Fenris almost faded into sleep waiting for his voice, “It’s a sickness of the soul, Hattie. And the body follows where the soul leads. You know of the Imprint? The wolf-bond?”

  Hattie’s needle resumed its motion, slower now. “I’ve heard the word aboot the village. Some magic tether.”

  “It’s not magic, dear one.” Jorik said, his voice grave. “It’s as real as the fire before us. It’s a joining of souls that is deeper than blood or oath. Their hearts learn to beat as one. Their bodies heal as one. It is a strength unlike any other. But it’s a chain. A two-ended chain that can stretch mighty far and pull.”

  Fenris, in the darkness of his furs, felt the truth of the old warrior’s words like a cold stone in his throat.

  “So he’s stretched,” Hattie stated, her voice tinged with disbelief.

  “To the point of snapping,” Jorik confirmed. “His body withers because his spirit is trying to follow where she’s gone. An Imprinted wolf apart from their mate can grow weak. It is to be expected. I would not worry yourself, Hattie. He will be fine.”

  Fenris could picture the furrow in her brow, the practical mind working through a mystical problem. Hattie made a soft, dismissive sound, and Fenris fell asleep to the continued clicking of her needles.

  One month. The thought was accusing as he stared up at the full moon in the sky.

  Two months.

  Three months.

  Hattie found him an hour past dusk, when the full moon of the fourth month was a cold, bright coin in the sky above the Clearing.

  He knelt in the dirt before the stubborn new hearth he’d been building for Rose, a woman with a tongue like a skinning knife, and her deaf son named Samwell. The fire within sputtered and coughed, belching more grey smoke into the single room than up through the hole in the roof, like it should have been doing.

  Fucking blessing that Rose and Samwell are sleeping in Tomhas’s hut or I’d of given them black lungs. Can’t fucking do anything right today, can I?

  A cold draft licked at the back of his neck. With the quietness of a mountain cat, Hattie was suddenly kneeling beside him. He hadn’t heard her enter. Her calloused fingers, rough as bark, traced the line of mortar between the stones before him. They stopped at a dark seam, a finger’s width of nothing.

  “Here,” she said, her voice soft in the quiet, “The cold’s sookin’ in right through this crack. You need to chink it with moss. Not just stoofed in—” she reached across him, her arm brushing his chest, and took a wad of damp moss from the pile by his foot, “—pack it like this. Pack it in tight, for lord’s sake.” She drove her thumb into the crevice, working the moss deep with a firm, practiced pressure until it sat flush and solid. “Don’t be lettin’ it off easy,” she said, her eyes still on her work. “If you’re too tired to do it right, leave it fer another time.”

  “I wasn’t letting it off easy before,” Fenris frowned, a flicker of defensive pride stirring in his gut. “And I’m not tired.”

  “If you weren’t,” she replied, not unkindly, “then it wood be holdin’.” She finally glanced at him, and in the firelight, her eyes were the color of wet slate.

  Chastened, Fenris knelt closer. Their shoulders brushed. He felt the solid, grounded warmth of her, the tensile strength in the arm. She smelled of woodsmoke and lye soap, with the faint, metallic tang of game-blood lingering beneath her nails—a woman who cooked, cleaned, felled trees, and butchered, all in one day.

  “You shood eat,” she said. Her breathing had gone quick and cool, a faint mist on the night air. She kept her eyes low, not looking at him as she pressed another wad of moss into his dirty palm. “You’ve loost the roundness in your face. I can feel the bones of your shoulders through your tunic. And this new jawline of yours could cut bread.”

  He had no good answer, so he stayed silent, mimicking her motion and packing the moss into the gaps until the hearth was sealed tight. She was right, and eventually the smoke ceased its wavering dance and began to rise in a straight, confident column towards the bright, cold eye of the moon.

  “I’ve saved you an extra stew,” she said softly, standing and brushing the dirt from her knees. “Let’s go so you can eat.” She offered a hand to help him up.

  The motion, as he took it, sent the world tilting. The hut spun in a violent, twisting circle around him. His vision swam, the solid ground turning to water beneath his boots.

  She caught his shoulders as he staggered, her grip unsurprisingly strong, and guided him back down to the cool, packed earth before he could fall, kneeling down with a rough hand to his chest to keep him from trying to get up again.

  “Easy,” she murmured.

  “I’m not hungry,” he mumbled, the words thick in his dry throat, “might I’ll stay here and finish up with the door clasps.”

  “You’re never hungry, and you’re never tired, and you’re never thirsty, and you’re never not okay,” she murmured, the frustration clear in her voice.

  She met his gaze then, by accident or intent, he could not tell, but he saw it in her eyes—the heat banked in those grey depths. It was a quiet, shameful warmth, and he knew then why she’d hidden them before. She looked quickly away, back at the flames of the hearth they’d fixed, her voice dropping lower. “A stone man, you are, then. And yet you stand there swayin’ on your feet like a sapling in a high wind. One of these days you’ll collapse, and I’ll be the one diggin’ your grave-mound in this hard-earth. And you are, Lord help me, a terribly big man who’d need a big fookin’ hole. I’ve not the time nor the inclination fer such a chore.”

  A laugh startled out of him—a raw, genuine sound of lightness that felt strange and painful in his throat, like a muscle long unused. It surprised them both. She looked back at him, and she smiled. It was a rare, swift thing, gone in a heartbeat, but it lit her face and pulled a stubborn dimple into her cheek.

  With not a thought in his mind, he leaned in and pressed his lips to that dimple, feeling the cool smoothness of her skin. He heard the sharp, sudden intake of her breath, felt the warm puff of it against his temple.

  She turned her head only slightly and his mouth found hers. There was no hesitation in her response. Her lips were chapped and tasted faintly of the stew she’d eaten. She kissed him back with a desperate, hungry certainty, her hands coming up to frame his face, her fingers tangling in the grimy strands of his hair.

  She pushed forward, shifting her weight until she was straddling his lap in the dirt, her knees on either side of his thighs. Her weight was a solid, welcome pressure. He kissed her harder, one hand clutching the rough wool at her back, the other cupping the nape of her neck. For a dizzying moment the world narrowed to the heat of her mouth, the strength of her body against his and the frantic beating of his own heart.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  His hand slid from her back, down the strong, taut curve of her side, and in the feverish dark of his mind, the shape was familiar. Her lean strength, the supple curve of her back. He tilted her head and filled his nostrils with the scent at her neck, woodsmoke and wild thyme. In the dim, dancing firelight, the loose strands of hair that escaped her braid shimmered white before him.

  Hattie’s hand moved with a fierce, lustful urgency, slipping between their pressed bodies, seeking the hard proof of his desire through the leather of his breeches.

  She found only softness.

  The shock of it—his body’s blunt, undeniable refusal to participate in the fantasy his soul was conjuring—was like a dash of ice water over their heated skin.

  The scent that filled his lungs was Hattie’s alone. The hair against his cheek was dark brown, and not pale like the moon above. The shape of her shoulders, the feel of her back beneath his hands—similar, but wrong. The details rushed in, cruel and specific, erasing the beautiful phantom his loneliness had painted. This was the solid, warm, strong Hattie. Kind, fierce, practical Hattie, who smelled of their day’s labor and her own clean sweat, not of sun-drenched thyme and sweet milk.

  He tore his mouth from hers, a ragged, wounded sound escaping his throat. The hut, the cold dirt floor, the smell of their newly-sealed hearth—it all rushed back in, sharp and unforgiving. The warmth of her body against his suddenly felt like a trespass.

  A wave of shame, so profound it was nauseating, crashed over him. He didn’t pull away from her embrace, was too weak then in that moment, but slumped forward, his forehead coming to rest heavily against Hattie’s shoulder; which rose and fell rapidly with her wild breathing. The hot, silent press of his tears followed, soaking into the rough wool of her tunic below.

  Her hands, which had been fierce moments before, softened now. One came up to cradle the back of his head, her fingers stroking through his hair. The other rubbed slow, gentle circles on his back. She held him as he wept silently. She knew. Of course she knew. Hattie was no simple woman.

  “Hush now,” she whispered into the quiet, her voice thick but steady. “It’s alright. It’s alright, you great fookin’ fool. You’re just… you’re weak with it all. And I am weak fer ya, lord fergive me.... your weak with missing her, weak with noot eatin’, weak with noot sleepin’. There’s no shame in it, Fenris. It didn’t happen. Ferget it, okay?”

  “Come,” she said after a long while, her voice firming as she lifted his head to look at her. She was a blur in the haze of his vision.

  “Up with you. You’re going back to the hut. You’re going to eat that stew, every last drop, and then you’re going to sleep until the sun is properly up. No fightin’ it with me.”

  She threw herself off his lap and stood, and heaved him up to his feet. This time, the world stayed still. She kept an arm around his waist anyway, and he didn’t stop her.

  She guided him out of Rose’s unfinished hut, back across the moonlit Clearing, towards the warm, waiting fire and the sleeping children. She was his strong keeper of the living, leading him back from the land of soul-spirits.

  Little Foxes of Folkstead

  Another sun rose through the lichen-dyed linen curtains into Fenris’s hut, and with it a low, holler followed by a howl of such raw rage that it seemed to shake the very timber of his walls.

  Fenris was on his feet before his eyes were fully open, the taste of Hattie’s sleeping tonic—a bitter, cloying draught that had mercifully given him back dream-less sleep these past weeks—was thick on his dry tongue. He’d managed to put some weight back on his bones, his frame filling back out from gaunt to thickened muscle again, which rolled as he stretched his bare chest in the warm hut.

  The ladder from the loft creaked. Hattie descended, her face pale in the grey light, her braid a single dark rope over her shoulder. By the hearth, Isangrim and Ethel slept on from their low cot, a tangled mound of innocence untouched by the noise of terror outside.

  “You awake, Fenris?” she whispered, though her own wide eyes answered the question.

  “Did you hear that?” he grunted, pulling a tunic over his head to cover his bareness. “That was no hunting cry.”

  “Nay,” she breathed, already wrapping her cloak around her shoulders. “That was a battle cry fer sure.”

  They spilled out into the chill morning mist just as Jorik was hobbling past, his wolf-head cane thumping the damp ground with urgent purpose. The old man’s face was a grim mask.

  “I will see what the howl was for,” Jorik said, not breaking his stiff-legged stride. His eyes met Fenris’s, holding a complex mix of dread and a strange, wary hope. “You two go ahead. Break your fast. Suppose this might be my excuse to go and carry with Hilda for a chat.”

  He vanished then into the shifting fog toward the village, leaving Fenris and Hattie standing in the damp silence.

  They ate without tasting. Fenris had little appetite, his stomach knotted tight from the morning’s disquiet, but Hattie placed before him a heaping wooden trencher that demanded attention. Upon it lay a thick slice of yesterday’s mutton, reheated until the fat had rendered into a savory, glistening pool that soaked into the slab of coarse, dark bread beneath. The meat was tender enough to pull apart with his fingers, the fibers yielding, smelling of rosemary and woodsmoke. Next to it, a wedge of hard, white cheese. It was a simple meal, but a generous one, and he knew she would watch him hawk-like until the last crumb was gone, her silence a more potent harassment than any scolding.

  Jorik returned as Fenris was licking the last of the mutton from his fingers. The man who entered was not the one who had left. His steps, though still leaning on the cane, were buoyant, almost graceful. A wide, disbelieving smile split his weathered face.

  “Praise the Great Mother,” he said, shrugging off his cloak, his voice hushed with awe. He sank onto a stool by the fire, his eyes bright. “It is another Imprint. You’ll never guess who, Fenris.”

  “Who?” he asked, hating the suspense.

  “Elitha,” Jorik said gleefully, “she’d only just lost Gerulf to that dreadful shaking disease two summers past I believe.”

  “And the other? Who did she Imprint with?” Hattie asked.

  Jorik’s smile turned wry, a spark of ancient, subversive delight in his old eyes. “Tomhas.”

  For a moment, the name meant nothing to Fenris. Then it clicked into place with a jarring, impossible finality. Tomhas. Their Tomhas. The Free-folk man with freckled cheeks and hair the color of his wheat. Their head-farmer.

  “Hilda says Tomhas had been a slave in Bor’s house.”

  Hattie’s spoon clattered into her bowl. Her jaw slackened in disbelief. Tomhas was her good friend, Fenris knew. She could not have seen it coming or braced for the impact of it. Moving almost without thought he reached across the table and gently pushed her chin upward, closing her mouth.

  “It could happen to anyone,” Fenris shrugged, “do not be so surprised, Hattie. It could very well happen to you one day.” He wished for it secretly in his heart. Wished it had been Hattie, in some selfish depth of him, and not Elitha. He did not like causing Hattie pain; he knew how she felt for him, but there was naught else to be done for it.

  “It seems,” Jorik continued, oblivious to Fenris’s thoughts as he poured himself a cup of water with a hand that trembled slightly, “that in the quiet hours of the night these last few months, Tomhas had stole away to be Elitha’s secret lover. A relationship they had already built over the last few years, if the rumors be true. It is…quiet the scandal now in Black Rock.”

  “Do not disgrace Elitha without proof. Who did you hear this from?” Fenris growled.

  “The Tanners wives, and I know of no other she-wolves with howls as loud as theirs.”

  “Aye, but Lupa and Siv do not always howl true.” Fenris reminded him, not liking the taste of it on his tongue, mixed with the mutton’s seasonings.

  “That you have the right of it, Fenris, but Alfric himself testified to me that he saw Tomhas sneaking through a secret passage through the palisade that led into the Cathedral the other night. I had made no thought of it. Perhaps Tomhas would like to avoid Hroth’s brutes at the palisade front-gate. That is what I believed. But now, it is falling into a different picture. There seems to be some truth, I’m afraid, to Lupa and Siv’s whisperings.”

  “Oh, Elitha,” Fenris sighed heavily, “you say this has been going on for years?”

  “Aye, and Siv has even claimed there is suspicion that Elitha’s daughter might even be his, too. And not Gerulf’s.”

  “They go too far with their wicked tongues.” Fenris was back to growling again.

  Hattie finally found her voice, a bare whisper. “Bor will skin him alive.”

  Jorik’s smile faded into something tight-lipped and small, “He cannot. The Imprint is sacred. It is against the Old Law. It would mean death for Bor. And to harm Tomhas is to harm his own daughter. To deny it is to spit in the face of the Great Mother herself.”

  Fenris nodded slowly, but his thoughts had already turned down the same darker paths that Hattie’s had. It would have been a normal response for a wolf-man like Bor to resort to violence against Tomhas, sacred law or no. The Old Laws prevented killing, but they did not prevent bruises, broken ribs, or the teaching of hard lessons. Bor was a man who understood very little about the subtle arts of feeling or the discipline of controlling them. He wouldn't kill Tomhas—might be Bor had the habit of being simple but he was not dishonorable. And the Mother knows that Bor was not beyond delivering a good beating, especially if Tomhas had slighted him by coupling with his daughter in secret and putting Elitha's honor at risk through infidelity. That was not a violation of the Old Laws. That was a father's prerogative.

  Fenris watched Hattie rise and take the ladder four-rungs at once. Watched her dress with swift, trembling movements, pulling her woolen skirt over her hips, fastening her bodice. She spared no words for explanation, nor did she meet Fenris’s eyes, and she always seemed to know when he was watching. Her face had gone pale beneath its weathered tan, the color draining from her lips until they appeared bloodless.

  “Tomhas is a big man, Hattie, the Mother will protect him now. Give your heart a rest!” Fenris called up to her. She gave him no mind; he knew she wouldn’t, and when she pushed past him and opened the door, the morning light caught the fear and determination warring in her expression.

  Fenris rose and caught the door before it could settle into its clasp, and studied her from the open doorway. He needed no confession to know her purpose; the frantic rhythm of her footsteps told the simple tale. She marched across the Clearing with a heavy, deliberate stride, her boots churning up clods of the drying mud. Her gaze never wavered from the western ridge, where the dark line of newly-turned earth scarred the land, and where Tomhas’s small hut stood suddenly very vulnerable beneath the high sun—as if it were a rabbit’s den awaiting the wolf’s tread.

  He smelled the unmistakable scent of the wolf on a passing wind. Fenris, shielding his eyes from the sun in his face, squinted out to the rise leading to Black Rock.

  A figure was descending it. Broad of shoulders, bared to the heat. The bones of his beard shuddered with a damming noise upon each heavy impact in the soft earth.

  Bor was coming. And he was not alone. He carried with him the full weight of honor—and the weight of every Bor who had ever walked that path before him. He moved like some colossus out of the Old Stories, an ancient giant descended from the realm of their Ancestors to walk among their descendants; the shadow he cast felt long enough to swallow the whole Clearing.

  Fenris grabbed his boots and followed Hattie’s path where he knew its end would intersect with this mountain of Black Rock coming to crush the man below.

  The farmer was bent over his line of herbs in the front garden of his newly finished hut. Hattie stood beside him, speaking in a voice too low for Fenris to hear. He went to her first, and pulled her protectively out of the way with a firm grip to her arm as Bor, a quickening sound behind him, approached.

  “Fenris what–” and then she, too, saw the wolf-man, and from a safer distance they watched the massive warrior stand over the still-kneeling farmer.

  But before Bor could draw breath to speak the first grumbled syllable of judgment, a cry split the air.

  Elitha came running down the rutted track from the village, her dark curls bouncing wild and unbound against her shoulders, her face flushed with exertion and fury. She moved with the desperate speed of a mother protecting her young, and as she drew closer, Fenris saw the strapped bundle on her back—a girl of two summers, sandy-haired and silent, her solemn eyes wide as she clung to her mother’s neck.

  “Papa!” The word cracked like a whip. Bor turned, his face a thunderhead of rage and confusion.

  Elitha skidded to a halt in the mud, gasping, and stepped between her father and Tomhas, who was kneeling no longer, but was small enough beneath Bor’s frame that he might as well have been for all his cowering height was worth him in that moment. Elitha, with her father’s own stubborn expression, pointed her chin up to the sky.

  “He is my mate now, Papa,” she said, her voice carrying clear and sharp across the Clearing. She reached back instinctively to steady the child on her back. “If you do this, Papa, I will never forgive you. The Mother has chosen. Will you gainsay Her?”

  Bor’s jaw worked, a thick muscle jumping beneath the weathered skin of his cheek. He looked from his daughter to the trembling man behind her, and then, as if seeking some anchor for the tumult of his emotions, his eyes drifted and found Fenris where he watched.

  He held his Alpha’s gaze for a long moment, and Fenris saw the struggle there, the battle between ancient pride and the undeniable, sacred truth of the Imprint. He gave Bor a small, slight smile of understanding.

  Bor’s shoulders slumped, taking some of his massive height. When he spoke, his voice was like gravel sliding down stone, scraped raw by the effort of swallowing the pride he’d carried down with him from the village. “No.” He dragged a heavy breath through his nose, his gaze sweeping the Clearing, taking in the half-built shelters, the Free-folk watching from a distance, “But if my daughter lives here… amongst these…” The word hung, heavy with meaning. “…then I will build her a village fit for a daughter of Skoltha and daughter of Bor. She will not live in this mud-hole like a field-hand.”

  Fenris could feel Hattie’s sharp exhale of relief where he still held a soft grip on her arm.

  “We are not all without honor, Hattie.” He’d leaned in to whisper in her ear; a wave of pride flooding through his chest. And it was by this honor that the wolves of Black Rock were thrust into the daily living world of the free-folk of the Clearing.

  The first morning they came down the path from the village, they moved as though they’d seen an Elk on the wind, hiding none of their brute strength. The freed men froze with their hoes mid-swing, and Fenris watched as the women who’d been lounging easily in their camp shades near the tree-line snatched up their children from the open ground, clutching them to their breasts as if the wolves might pluck them from the earth like mushrooms for a stew. Hattie had tried to prepare them, she’d told Fenris exhaustingly, but there was none who were happy about the wolves' presence among them. None who showed any enthusiasm for whatever kind of camaraderie Bor, and those he’d recruited to help, offered. For three days, the two peoples orbited one another in a rigid, fragile dance.

  On the fourth, with the heat of the high sun on his shoulders, Hattie found Fenris; Elitha and Tomhas flanked at her side. On her face was the clear sign of exhaustive fatigue, startling on the woman who rarely showed any expression but determination. Behind her, the Clearing was becoming a cauldron of raised, angry voices.

  "Fenris," she said, and the steadiness she usually wore like armor had cracked. Her voice was thin and fraying. "It be Mara's boy, Mathio. He's gone. Been gone since the first light, and she's sayin’ noot but that the wolves took him. She wood noot hear reason. I am meetin’ my wits end, I am."

  Fenris wiped sawdust from his hands, processing it all. Beyond Hattie's shoulder he could see it unravelling—a knot of Free-folk women gathered around Mara, whose shrill, keening accusations pierced the morning air like a blade. Opposite them, three of Bor's building party stood in a tight, bristling cluster, their faces darkening into anger. Bormund, Alfric’s father and Bor’s youngest brother, had his hand on the haft of his axe, the gesture alone enough to sharpen Mara’s accusations and make the nearest freed men take a step backward.

  "She's tellin' everyone who'll listen that one of them snatched her boy up," Hattie continued, jerking her chin toward the wolves. "And the more she says it, the more the folk believe it. And the more they—" she meant the wolves now, "—hear it, the angrier they get. I've goot two fires burning tow-ward each other and noot enough water for either to put oot."

  Tomhas, his weathered face drawn tight, spoke quietly. "It's turning ugly. Some of the men are talking about taking up tools. Not for building."

  Elitha, stood with her arms crossed, her dark curls wild about her face. She said nothing, but her eyes moved between the two groups with the calculating wariness of a woman who belonged to both worlds and trusted neither in this moment.

  Fenris rose, wishing for them all to leave him be to finish his work, but pushed through the crowd. The Free-folk parted for him and he found Mara at the center of this storm, her hands clawed into fists at her sides. When she saw Fenris, she lunged at him. Fenris had expected nothing less from the woman who proved herself to be extravagant in her displays of emotion.

  "Where is my boy, wolf?" she screamed, her nails raking the air near his chest. "Where is he? Your wolves, they've taken him! They've taken my Matty!"

  Fenris caught her wrists, gently but firmly, and held them. "Mara. Look at me." His voice was low, calm,"When did you last see him?"

  "This morning!" she sobbed, the fury collapsing into raw terror. "Before the sun was up. I sent him to the well for water. He took the bucket. He took—" Her breath hitched. "He never came back. The bucket is gone. My boy is gone. And they are here, in our home, where they should never have been—"

  "How long ago, Mara? How many hours?"

  "Three. Maybe four. I don't—I searched the huts. I searched the tree line. Hattie helped me search. He's nowhere."

  Fenris released her wrists and turned. Erland, had been listening from the edge of the crowd, his face troubled. He stepped forward now, unbidden.

  "The well she speaks of," Erland said, his voice careful, measured, aware that every freed ear was trained on him. "The one on the eastern side. It is not right yet, Alpha. The shaft is deep but the stones at the rim are mighty loose—the cap hadn’t been properly mortared. Getting water from it is a chore for a grown man with great height, impossible then for a small boy. You have to lean far over the lip to lower the bucket. I myself almost took a dive the other day." He paused, rubbing the scar on his left hand. "If the lad found it too difficult… he may have gone to the creek instead. It's not far. The path runs downhill through the birches."

  Every head turned to Mara. The color drained from her face until it was the grey of old ash.

  "Matty cannot swim," she whispered. The words fell into the silence like stones into deep water. "He has never learned. He is afraid of it. He—" Her legs buckled. Hattie caught her, one arm around her waist, holding her upright.

  "Give me something of his," Fenris commanded. "A shirt. Something he wore close to his skin."

  Mara, trembling, pulled a crumpled linen shift from the bundle she carried—small, stained with the honest dirt of a child's day. Fenris brought it to his face and breathed deep. The scent filled his wolf's nose: the sour sweetness of a young boy's sweat, the faint chalk-dust of limestone, a trace of the porridge he'd eaten the night before. Beneath it all, the particular, irreducible signature that was Mathio alone.

  "Erland. With me," Fenris said, already moving. The twin wolf fell into step beside him without hesitation.

  Hattie, Tomhas, and Elitha followed close behind, Hattie's arm still steadying Mara, who stumbled forward on legs that barely held her. As they crossed the Clearing and climbed the gentle eastern slope toward the well, Hattie and Elitha began to call, their voices carrying high and clear through the morning air.

  "Matty! Matty!" The name echoed off the birch trunks and died in the wet grass. No answer came from it.

  The well stood at the crest of the rise, a rough cylinder of stacked fieldstone, waist-high to a man, with a crude wooden frame above it from which a fraying rope hung limp. Hattie shook her head as they approached.

  "We've searched it already," she said, her breathing labored. "Looked down. Called his name. There's noot but dark water at the bottom."

  But Fenris did not go to the opening. He circled the well slowly, his eyes low, reading the ground. The mud around the base was churned with many footprints—the searchers who had come before. But on the far side, half-hidden by a clump of dead nettles, something caught his eye.

  A gap in the stonework. One of the large capstones that formed the rim—a broad, flat piece of grey granite, heavy enough to require two hands—was missing from its seat. The mortar around its vacant space was fresh and crumbling, the exposed edge raw and pale where the stone had recently sat.

  He was at the rim in two strides, leaning over the lip into the shaft's darkness. The smell hit him first—damp stone, mineral water, and beneath it, faint but unmistakable, the copper-bright tang of blood. He waited for his wolf-eyes to adjust. The shaft was deep, perhaps three times the height of a man, and at the bottom, where a shallow pool of black water gathered, he saw him.

  Mathio lay crumpled against the curved wall of the shaft, half-submerged, his small body folded at an angle that made Fenris's stomach clench. His head lolled to one side, and even in the dim light, Fenris’s wolf-eyes could see the dark, matted patch above his left ear where the capstone had struck him as it fell. The boy's chest rose and fell—barely, but it rose.

  "He's here," Fenris said, his voice tight and controlled. "He's alive. He's at the bottom. The capstone gave way when he leaned over. It struck his head."

  Mara's scream was a raw, animal sound. Hattie held her back, murmuring fiercely in her ear.

  Fenris was already pulling at the rope. It was thin, fraying, made for buckets, not men. He looked at Erland. The twin met his gaze and understood instantly. Without a word, Erland uncoiled a length of the wolf-gut rope from his own pack—the good rope, the rope that would not rot or snap—and began knotting it around the well's frame.

  "I'll lower you," Erland said, bracing his boots against the base stones, wrapping the rope twice around his forearms. His scarred hands gripped the cord with white-knuckled surety. "Go."

  Fenris swung his legs over the rim and descended into the dark. The shaft was tight, the stones slick with moisture and a green film of moss. His shoulders scraped the walls as he went down, hand over hand, the rope burning against his palms. The air grew colder, wetter, tasting of earth and iron. Below him, the boy did not stir.

  His boots touched water. It was numbingly cold, rising to his shins. He crouched beside Mathio, fingers finding the boy's throat. A pulse—thin, thready, beat against the hot pads of his fingers. The wound on his head was ugly, a split in the scalp that had bled freely down the side of his face, but the bone beneath felt whole. The boy's lips were blue, his skin like ice.

  "He's alive," Fenris called up, his voice echoing off the wet stone. "Throw down the second line."

  It came snaking down, and with gentle, painstaking care, Fenris secured the boy against his chest, binding them together with the rope. He felt the child's shallow breath against his neck, the faint flutter of a heart.

  "Pull us up. Slowly."

  The ascent was agonizing. Erland hauled them with a steady, grinding strength, his boots gouging furrows in the mud, his teeth bared with the effort. Tomhas appeared beside him, adding his hands to the rope, and together they drew the weight upward, inch by inch, until Fenris's head cleared the rim and hands reached to take the boy from his arms.

  They laid Mathio on a cloak in the grass. His face was a mask of dried blood and well-water, his lips still carrying that terrible blue tinge. Erland knelt beside him. Gently, with a tenderness that seemed impossible from hands so large and scarred, the wolf-man cupped water from a skin and brought it to the boy's cracked lips. A trickle ran into his mouth. Then Erland wet a strip of clean linen and began to wash the blood from his face—carefully, methodically, wiping away the grime with slow, circular strokes, the way a father might clean a newborn.

  For a long, terrible moment, nothing happened. Mara was on her knees beside them, her hands hovering, afraid to touch, afraid not to. Hattie gripped her shoulder.

  Then Mathio coughed. Water sputtered from his lips. His eyelids fluttered—once, twice—and opened. His eyes, dazed and unfocused, found Erland's face first. The boy flinched, a reflexive terror at the wolf-man looming above him. But Erland did not move. He stayed very still, the wet cloth in his hand, and waited.

  "You're safe, boy," he said quietly. "Your mother's here."

  Mathio’s gaze shifted. He found Mara, and a small, broken sound escaped him. Mara surged forward, gathering him into her arms, rocking him against her chest, her sobs shaking them both.

  Erland stood. He looked at Fenris, then at the gathered Free-folk, and then back at Mara, who was pressing her face into her son's hair.

  "I know you," Erland said gruffly. Mara looked up, her eyes swollen and streaming. "You worked in my father's house. You kept his hearth. You mended his clothes." He paused. Something shifted behind his eyes—the seeing, for the first time, a person where before there had only been a function. "I am sorry," he said, “my father was not a kind man.”

  Mara stared at him. Her mouth opened, then closed, her jaw tensed. She did not forgive him. She was not ready for that, and he did not ask for it. But she gave him a single, trembling nod, and clutched her son tighter, and that was enough.

  Erland bent and lifted the boy from her arms with her silent permission. The child's bloodied head rested in the crook of his wide neck. He walked Mathio back to Mara's hut, and the crowd parted for him in silence. The Free-folk watched the wolf-man carry their wounded child home, and though they did not lose their suspicion from their faces, Fenris smelled less of it in the air.

  The Clearing, which had been a morass of sucking clay and half-frozen muck, became a crucible of fervent industry in the week that followed. The wolves worked with a ferocity the free-men could not match, and had turned what would have been a month’s labor into a week’s grim sprint. They showed the smaller, softer-handed folk how to lift, how to brace, how to notch the logs so they locked like fingers without a single nail.

  With their aid, the grid of huts rose as proper steads, built to endure the mountain’s wrath. Stone foundations were sunk deep below the frost line, mortared with a grey, gritty slurry of lime and sand hauled up from the creekbed in sloshing buckets. Walls of notched pine rose, the resinous tang of fresh-cut wood sharp in the air, chinked with moss and clay that Hattie patiently showed Fenris to mix—wet enough to seal properly but dry enough to hold. Roofs were shingled with bark rather than thatch, layered like the scales of a great fish to shed the meltwater in silver streams that ran in channels Fenris had dug with a mattock, keeping their footpaths dry and passable.

  In the very heart of the village, where the ground was blachest and richest, Tomhas walked with his head high, made bold by Elitha’s fierce, protective presence at his side. He worried fiercely at the large farm plot there, sowing their winter rye and sharp onions into the earth; eventually green shoots rose defiant against the lingering cold.

  On the eve of the first thaw, when the work had ceased and the smoke rose from a dozen sound chimneys, Hattie came upon Fenris where he’d been quietly collecting the brown and blue eggs of his hen’s nest. From behind, her hands, rough and cool and smelling of cedar, covered his eyes in the dusk.

  “Walk with me, Alpha, and do noot struggle fer me,” she whispered, her lilt close to his ear, guiding him forward with no wait for choice through mud that was no longer a mire but a road packed firm by many feet. He heard the contented living sounds of the folk around them as they waddled through the center of their village.

  She stopped him, turned him, and withdrew her hands.

  Before him stood a tall post of planed oak, sunk deep at the entrance to the village. Upon it hung a sign of the same wood, the letters carved deep and blackened with ash and oil by Erlend’s careful hand; Erlend, he knew, because of the unique lettering that was his alone, and common on signs in shops and taverns in Black Rock. They spelled a single word.

  FOLKSTEAD

  Fenris stood before it, the wind stirring his hair. It was not a grand name. It was blazingly simplistic. It had been Hattie who chose it, no doubting.

  Hattie came before him then, searching his face with a large grin on hers.

  “Aye? You like it?”

  “It is…good.” He shrugged, then smiled down at her.

  “Piss-off,” she rolled her eyes,“we needed a name,” she said fiercely, “A place needs a name to be real, somethin’ to ground it down.”

  "Are you happy, Hattie?" He asked her then.

  Her grin faltered. Had she heard what he really wanted to say? She leaned her shoulder against the post, crossing her arms, and looked out over Folkstead—the rows of proper huts with their bark-shingled roofs, the smoke curling from a dozen chimneys, the green shoots of Tomhas's rye pushing through the dark earth in the central plot. Children were running between the dwellings, their laughter carrying on the wind. Somewhere, a hammer rang against an anvil. The sound of building. The sound of life.

  "Look at it, Alpha," she said softly, the lilt in her voice warm with something close to wonder. "Four moons ago this was moock and pine needles and your sorry little hut. Now there's fifty hearths burnin'. Tomhas has goot wheat comin' in he says’ll feed us through the next winter."

  Fenris watched her profile against the late afternoon light. The pride in her face that of a mother surveying her child.

  "You did good, Hattie." He said.

  "We did good," she corrected, though the color rose in her cheeks. "Don't go handin' me croons. I’ve goot no head to wear it."

  A silence settled between them–the silence of things unsaid, growing thorns the longer they were left unattended. Fenris felt it pressing against his ribs. He had carried it for weeks now and he knew she had too. He could smell it on her. The wolf's nose did not lie. Beneath the woodsmoke and the lye soap and the clean sweat, there was a yearning warm current of want. It rose from her skin whenever they stood too close, as they were now.

  "Hattie," he said. The word came out heavier than he intended. She stiffened. Her arms tightened across her chest, and she didn't look at him. She knew. That damn woman always did. She had been waiting for this, dreading it, the way one dreads the lancing of an infected wound.

  "Don’t," she said quietly.

  "We haven't spoken of it."

  "There's noot' to speak of."

  "In Rose's hut—"

  "I know what happened in Rose's hut." Her voice was low, clipped, the lilt hardening into something brittle. She still would not look at him. "I had no business doin' what I did. It was foolish. It was weak. And it is done."

  "Is it?"

  The question hung between them like a blade. Hattie's jaw tightened. She uncrossed her arms, then crossed them again, as if she couldn't decide what to do with her hands. When she finally turned to face him, her river clay eyes were fierce and bright with the effort of holding something back.

  "What wood you have of me, Fenris?" Her voice was barely above a whisper, rough at its edges. "That I think of it? That I lie in that coot you built me, listenin' to you breathe on the other side of the hearth, and I—" She stopped herself. Drew a sharp breath through her nose. "I may be a stoopid woman, but I am noot a simple one."

  "You are neither stupid nor simple, Hattie."

  "Then let me be wise aboot this." She held his gaze, and the pain in it was a living thing, a creature caged behind her iron will. "Your mate is comin' back. She is comin' back, Fenris. And when she doos, she'll know. You told me yourself—the Imprint lays everything bare in your soddened mind. She will walk into that hut and she will smell me on your skin. She will hear it in your thoughts. Every moment of that kiss. Every—" Her voice cracked, just a fraction, before she hauled it back under control. "Every thought you've had or hadn’t had of me since then, the White Wolf will rip me to pieces fer it, and she'll have every right. I wood do the same, had I teeth and fangs to." The words landed like stones. Fenris opened his mouth, but Hattie raised a hand, palm out, stopping him. "What I feel," she said, each word chosen with the careful precision of a woman stepping through a field of snares, "is noot what you think it is. It's shared space and shared labor. It's sleepin' under the same roof, raisin' our bairns side by side, sharin' meals in the dark. It’s human weakness. You put two people through that and somethin' groows between em'. It's natural. It's the way of things." She swallowed hard, her throat working visibly. "And perhaps my own heart has gone soft because you needed tendin' to, and I am... I am made fer tendin’ I am noot made fer you, though, Alpha. That is all it is. It is noot real." She said it with such firm, deliberate conviction that it might have been believable, had her voice not thickened on the last three words, and had the scent rolling off her skin not told him the exact, aching opposite. The wolf's nose was merciless. It read him the lie in her blood, in the quickening of her pulse, in the heat that gathered at her throat. She was trying to convince herself as much as him, building a wall of reason between what she felt and what she would allow herself to feel. Fenris wanted to believe her. He needed to believe her. It would be cleaner, simpler, kinder to them both. But the sadness in her voice was thick as fog, and doubt clung to every carefully constructed syllable.

  Fenris knew not a damn thing to say. It was foul of him. Almost cruel.

  A long, aching silence passed. The wind stirred the grass. In the distance, Ethel's high, bright laugh rang out, chasing Isangrim's deeper giggle through the huts. Then Hattie turned to the post beside her. She placed her hand flat against the oak.

  "This," she said, and her voice had found its ground again, rough and sure. "This is my one troo love. This village. These people. It is more than I ever thought I'd have. More than any of us dared to hope fer." She looked at him then, and the smile she gave was smaller, sadder, and infinitely more honest.

  "Aye, Fenris," she said softly. "I am happy."

  He held her gaze for a long moment, reading the truth and the sacrifice woven together in those river-clay eyes. Then he nodded, slowly, and said nothing more. There was nothing more to say. She had said everything.

  “Let us go and see what those little foxes of Folkstead have gootten into.” She took his arm then, and let him lead her down the rise back to their huts; their steps moving through the shadow of the village sign-post that loomed above.

  ????

  Isangrim turned fifteen months old in this village of Folkstead. He walked with the bow-legged determination of the assuredly upright, his small hand often entwined with Ethel’s as they waddled from hut to hut, a pair of cunning foxes, as Hattie had called them, let loose upon the village. They had developed a trap—Isangrim would stand before a doorway, amber eyes wide and solemn, while Ethel, being slightly older and in possession of a stronger speech, would announce with feigning urgency; “Little lordy hunger for sweets pweas,” and point to Isangrim with such gravity that none at all could get away from the demand without yielding.

  “They be terrors.” Hattie had shaken her head while they watched, “up-ta no good.”

  When they returned to Fenris and Hattie each evening they were properly covered in sticky honey or berry-paste or whatever other sweet desert they’d managed to con the free-folks out of; their faces smeared with the unabashed evidence. Hattie would scrub them with feigned exasperation in the rain-barrel outside while they shrieked with laughter, the sound cutting through his chest like a blade softened by silk.

  That Fenris loved his son was true, but he had begun to love him with a ferocity that frightened even his own wolf-heart—a rooting, primal and possessive, as though the boy were an anchor of living bone driven deep into the frozen earth, holding him fast when the winds of Albi’s distant bond threatened to tear him away and scatter him across the snow like chaff.

  Fenris would carry him out in the evenings alone, shielding against the biting air by wolf-pelt wrap, to teach him the names of the world. He showed him the black pines that stood sentinel at the wood’s edge, their bark scaled like dragon-hide, and the silver birches that shivered white and naked in the wind. He knelt with him in the slush, guiding Isangrim’s pudgy fingers to trace the tracks of the red fox in the mud—the delicate print of the toe, the pad, the claw mark—and taught him the scent of it on the air, musky and sharp, that is your wolf-nose, Fenris was sure to teach him, and how the smell of fox was distinct from the bear and the deer and the hare. He held his son’s face close to the bark of the oak until the boy could smell the sweet rot of the moss that clung there. He taught him the language of weather—the metallic tang in the nostrils that meant snow was coming, the heaviness of the air before a thaw, the particular silence of the wood when a storm gathered in the east.

  Fenris carved a practice blade from soft pine—not sharp enough to cut, but weighted like steel—and placed it in Isangrim’s strengthening grip, curling his small fingers around the hilt. He showed him the pinch-grip, the way to hold it so the blade became an extension of the hand, and he let the boy stab at mounds of soft mud, teaching him the downward strike, the forward thrust, the respect of edge even in play. Isangrim would grunt with effort, his tongue between his teeth, and Fenris could sense the shape of this tempered man-to-be in these small, fierce movements. He could almost see Ygrid alive again in him.

  When his dreams began to return to him, he’d dream of Isangrim; soft, domestic dreams that were extended moments of their simple days.

  Until Albi started to find him there, too; and the dreams were no longer soft, but strange dreams that were not the dreams of wolf-sleep, exactly, but lucid visitations that rode the edge of waking, carried on the bond’s thin thread. In them, Folkstead was always covered in snow, though in waking life the thaw had turned it to early spring mud. Albi stood beneath the great pines of the tree-line, her white hair unbound and whipping in a wind he could not feel, her belly rounded large with the child she carried and exposed fiercely for him to see. She did not speak with her mouth, but her voice filled his skull like warm water.

  I am coming home, she told him. Over and over, until he would wake up still hearing it in his skull, wondering how his mind had remembered the exact lilt of her rounded accent.

  In the last dream—the one that woke him gasping, his hand reaching for her emptiness beside him—she had been close enough to touch. He had felt the press of her body against his, the weight and heat of her, solid and real. She had kissed him, her lips tasting of honey, and her hands had cradled his face with a tenderness that made him weep in his sleep.

  He woke to find Hattie sitting by the hearth-fire, the only one awake, quietly knitting in her lap. She did not ask about the tears on his face, only rose and handed him a cup of warmed milk, her calloused palm pressing his hot forehead in the dark.

  “It’ll be any day now.” Hattie promised him softly. Because she knew. That damn woman always knew.