The hall was cool and dim, lit by tallow candles set in iron brackets along the stone walls, their flames guttering in the draft that crept through the cracks of the ancient masonry woven through the Alpha’s longhouse. Fenris walked slowly, matching his stride to the short, heavy steps of his son beside him.
Hattie had braided his dark hair up into a small bun at the top of his rounded head; he smiled, seeing the wolf-bone bead she’d placed in one of the smaller plaits at the side. It made him seem smaller and yet more solemn as he walked beside his father. The mud was gone. He smelled of Hattie’s lye-soap and pine oil and the faintest trace of the combined smell of Hattie's hut.
Fenris noticed the necklace then. A thin leather cord hung around the boy's neck. From it dangled a small carved fox head, no bigger than a walnut, whittled from pale birchwood with surprising care–Jorik’s hands. The ears were pricked, the snout tapered, the eyes two tiny gouges that caught the candlelight and seemed, for a moment, almost alive.
Fenris stopped. He knelt, the stone cold beneath his knee, and took the little fox between his fingers, turning it over.
"What is this, son?" he asked.
Isangrim looked down at the fox in his father's hand, then up at Fenris's face. His amber eyes were serious.
"Ethel gave me it," he said. "She says...I won’t play loots with her anymore."
He ran his thumb over the fox's carved ears, and smiled at the hint of Hattie’s accent in Isangrim’s words now, and then frowned at them, too.
Fenris laid the fox back against the hollow of his son’s throat and touched Isangrim’s cheek, cupping the small, round warmth of it in his palm.
"It is time you start to spend your days here," he said gently. "In Black Rock. Among the other wolf-children. You cannot learn how to be a wolf amongst humans, Isangrim. And they will be your pack one day, these will be your people."
Isangrim's lower lip pushed out. "Ethel can come here? Play here, wif me here?"
"She is a little girl who should stay with her mother, Isangrim. And her people."
The boy's face crumpled, the way a sky crumples before rain, his brow drawing to the center and his eyes brightening with a shine that threatened to spill over. He clutched the wooden fox in his small fist.
"You will still play with Ethel," Fenris promised him quickly, squeezing his son's shoulder. "Just not every day. Do you understand?"
Isangrim considered this with a grave deliberation. He sniffed once, hard, and wiped his nose on his sleeve. The tears did not fall. He nodded—a small, reluctant dip of his chin—and Fenris rose, taking the boy's hand in his, and walked on together.
The corridor turned, passing beneath a stone archway where the ceiling rose into the high rafters. It was here that the first tapestry hung.
It was enormous—wider than Fenris's arm-span and nearly his height, suspended from a blackened oak beam by iron hooks that had been driven into the wood generations ago. The fabric was old, its colors dimmed by centuries of hearth-smoke and dust. It had been in the chest amongst the saved tapestries. His old warrior had enlisted a younger, stronger wolf to haul it back up to its rightful place, and there it hung now, restored to the hall it had adorned for longer than any living wolf could remember.
Isangrim stopped. His hand tightened in Fenris's grip, and his small head tilted far back, his amber eyes traveling upward over the vast woven scene.
Water. That was what the tapestry was, above all else—water. A great, dark, churning expanse of it, rendered in thread of deep blue and black and grey-green, filling the world from edge to edge. The water was so high that nothing remained of the land below—no trees, no valleys, no huts. Only the peak of a single mountain broke the surface, its grey-brown-black stone rising from the flood like the spine of some drowned leviathan. Cut into the cliff face near the summit a dark mouth of a cave threaded with veins of orange that was a fire kindled deep within
Upon the water sat a small band of long-boats, and in them sat wolves in their human forms, their faces drawn, their furs threaded with darker colors to appear wet, their eyes turned toward the mountain and the glow of that distant fire. Some clutched infants to their chests. Others rowed with grim, mechanical strokes, their jaws set, their backs bent. Behind them, in the furthest reaches of the tapestry, the rain fell in silver threads so dense they blurred their horizon into nothing.
"A lot of water," Isangrim whispered.
"Aye," Fenris said. He knelt again, settling himself beside the boy so they could look upon the tapestry together. "It is from our Old Stories, son. It is the Great Flood. It rained, for forty suns and forty moons. The rivers swelled, and the big lakes burst their banks, and the water rose and rose until it swallowed the whole world. Every valley. Every forest. Every village and every den." Isangrim's eyes were round. His hand found the fox at his throat and held it. "And did you know the Alpha who led this pack–” Fenris continued, "His name was Isangrim." The boy looked up sharply at that, his brow furrowing. "Aye," Fenris smiled. "Like you. You were named for him. When the rains began, the Great Mother guided Isangrim on how to save his people. He told them to leave the valley and climb the mountain and take shelter in the cave at the very top; it is still there today, it is called the Mother’s Cave. He told them the water would not stop, that the Great Mother had spoken to him of this in a dream."
"I dream of fat worms. And Ethel takin’ them from me." Isangrim said, still just as serious.
"Most our dreams are like that, Isangrim, they are wolf-dreams, they are small comforts or small agitations. That is why some of the wolves in Alpha Isangrim’s pack did not believe in his dreams. Most dreams do not come true. So some stayed behind. They did not know of any rain that could flood the world." Fenris paused, letting the silence fill the space between them. "Those who stayed behind were lost beneath the waves. We know naught of them or their history. But those who submitted to their Alpha’s command survived and became our Ancestors. They built Black Rock high upon this mountain, only half a days walk from Mother’s Cave, incase the water ever rose again."
The boy stared at the tapestry, at the vast blue-black water, at the tiny, desperate figures in the long-boats rowing toward the cave's glow. He was quiet for a long time. The candles flickered. The draft moaned through the stones.
"Papa," he said at last, his voice grave. "I-I can’t swim."
Fenris laughed, startled out of him by the earnest terror in the boy's golden eyes. He pulled Isangrim against his side and pressed his lips to the crown of his head.
"Neither can I," he admitted, still grinning. "Albi will teach you. She knows how. She'll have you paddling down the creek like an otter before the summer is through."
Isangrim did not look entirely convinced, but the immediate threat of drowning seemed to recede, and he allowed his father to take his hand again as they continued down the corridor.
Isangrim stopped suddenly and pointed again to a tapestry that hung upon a heavy oak door. It was fixed with brass tacks along the upper edge of the wood, the fabric stiff and unmoving. Behind the door, Fenris knew, lay the armory—the long, narrow room where the weapons of Black Rock were kept, the swords and axes and spears that had defended this mountain since the first stones of the Cathedral were laid. The tapestry served as both decoration and ward, a sigil of protection draped across the threshold. The image was rendered in bold, flat colors—red and black and the deep, tarnished gold of old thread. It was a four-headed grey wolf, massive, its body hunched in a posture of eternal vigilance. Four necks branched from the thick trunk of its shoulders, each one bearing a snarling, sharp-eared head that faced a different direction. The eyes of each head were sewn in thread of pale yellow, unblinking. Nothing could approach this wolf unseen. Nothing could creep upon it from any quarter.
"What is it?" Isangrim asked, pulling at Fenris's hand.
"The Sentinel of Black Rock," Fenris said. "The wolf who watches for danger. See how each head faces a different way? North and south, east and west. It is a reminder, Isangrim, that threats can come from any direction. Not just the one you expect."
Isangrim studied the four-headed wolf with a critical amber eye. His nose wrinkled. "I don’t like it, Papa." he declared. "A wolf shouldn't have four heads."
"No," Fenris agreed, biting back a smile. "A real wolf should not. You will not, my son, don’t worry. The Sentinel does not truly have four heads. He is the patron of the sentries—the wolves who guard the palisade. They wear his mark on their cloaks."
"Still don't like it," Isangrim muttered, but he leaned closer nonetheless, his small fingers reaching up to touch the coarse thread of the nearest wolf-head's bared teeth before Fenris gently guided his hand away.
"Come," Fenris said, straightening. "We are almost there."
The bedchamber was only a few paces further, and Isangrim said nothing about the tapestry that hung over its door.
Fenris pushed it aside with the back of his hand, ushering Isangrim through. The fabric fell closed behind them with a soft, whispering weight, sealing them into the warmth and quiet within.
Albi was waiting for them. She sat upon the bed, propped against a mound of furs, her legs drawn beneath her. She wore a soft gown of undyed wool, loose and simple, its front laced with ties that could be pulled free with one hand—a nursing gown, one of the many gifts Ninny had given her. Her white hair was unbound, falling in pale rivers over her shoulders. The color had returned to her cheeks, though the shadows beneath her eyes remained bruised and deep. Before her on the bed, nestled in a small woven basket lined with rabbit furs so soft and white it seemed like still milk, lay his daughter.
The basket was another gift from Ninny and the midwives, woven from river willow, which could bend with soft curves, the furs stitched in by hand so that no rough edge might touch the infant's skin. Within it she lay swaddled tight in a cloth of cream linen, sleeping peacefully with her small belly full.
She was impossibly small. Fenris felt the ache to lift and hold her to him for the vulnerability of such smallness in this world. A cap of fine white hair, downy as thistledown, covered her head, catching the low firelight and turning it to silver.
Isangrim broke from Fenris's hand the moment he saw his mother. He jogged across the chamber with his lurching, determined gait, his boots thudding on the stone, and reached the side of the bed in four strides, his hands slapping the mattress as he tried to haul himself up.
"Slowly, little wolf," Albi said, and the warmth in her voice filled the room like hearth-light. She reached down, hooked her hands beneath his arms, and lifted him onto the bed. She settled him in her lap and wrapped her arms around him.
"I missed you, sweet, sweet, sweet one" she murmured into his hair, pressing her nose to the crook of his neck, then the crown of his head. "I have someone really important I would like you to meet."
She breathed him in.
Through the bond, Fenris felt what she found there. The scent of lye-soap and woodsmoke, the faint ghost of Hattie's hands in his freshly washed hair, the deeper, older smell of Bodolf's hut—the timber and the packed earth, the iron tang of the hearth-plate, all of it an aching memory in her chest of those brief months in the Clearing when she had had the peace of a similar simplicity; a she-wolf who was no Seer, a hut with a babe, a pen of animals, and nothing to do but love and care for the man who protected it.
The longing hit her chest like a fist, sharp and sudden—into the deep place where she kept the things she told herself she could not afford to feel, the place where wanting lived alongside a duty that was heavier even than the duty upon Fenris’s own shoulder, though he could not understand it.
Fenris crossed the chamber. He stood over her, looking down at the pale crown of her head and pressed his lips to the top of Albi's head, lingering there, breathing her in as she had breathed in their son.
It will get better. He promised her, I will make it so. We will have that peace for ourselves, too.
You know it cannot be so, Fenris. She shook her head. I do not ask for it.
She shifted Isangrim on her lap then, adjusting him slightly as he stared at his sister. His brow furrowed, that deep, serious crease that made him look decades beyond his sixteen moons. Slowly, carefully, as though approaching a bird he feared might startle, he extended one small hand and touched the top of Willa's head. His fingers found the downy white hair, stroking it once, gently, feeling the impossible softness of it against his fingertips. Then he stopped. His hand moved from Willa's head to his own, touching the dark hair there—black as a raven's wing, coarse and thick and curly where hers was fine and pale.
He looked up at Albi, his face troubled.
"Mama. Why I don't me have white hair?"
Albi smiled sweetly, "You have your father's hair, little Alpha. Dark as your wolf. And Willa has mine."
Isangrim considered this, his hand still resting atop his own head, as though confirming its color by touch. His gaze moved from Albi's white mane to the baby's silver cap and back again. Then his eyes narrowed with a suspicion that only a child could muster.
"Are you old?" he asked. "You and Willa? The old biggin’s have white hair.
Fenris pressed his knuckle to his lips to keep from laughing. Albi's eyes widened, and for a moment the exhaustion cracked and something bright and fierce and amused shone through.
Biggins? Old biggins? She glanced at Fenris quickly.
“It is a Folkstead word.” he explained out loud around his laugh.
"I am not old, little wolf" she said, with a dignity that bordered on the offended. "I was born with it. As Willa was born with it. It has nothing to do with age."
Isangrim did not look entirely persuaded, but he let the matter rest, his attention drifting back to the sleeping infant. He touched her cheek with one fingertip, marveling at the warmth of it.
“So small.” he whispered, his breath a sweet puff in the air.
Albi's hand came up then, cupping Isangrim's face, her fingers pressing into his round cheeks, squishing them together until his lips puckered like a fish. She turned his face toward hers, bringing him close, so close their noses nearly touched. Her eyes were no longer amused. They were fierce, burning.
"Listen to me, Isangrim the Devourer" she said, her voice low and steady and edged with iron. "You are older than Willa. You are her brother. One day you will be Alpha of Black Rock, and you will need to be brave. You will protect all the people of your pack from whatever might try to hurt them—living or unliving, wolf or man or famine or sickness or things with no name."
Her grip tightened on his cheeks, not enough to hurt, but enough to anchor him, to make certain he felt the weight of every word and did not look away. "But Willa is your sister. She is your blood. And you must protect her first. Always. Before the pack. Before yourself." Her eyes bored into his, honey-smoke blazing. "Do you promise me?"
Isangrim's amber eyes were wide within the frame of her fingers, his small face solemn as an Elder. He nodded—a single, deliberate dip of his chin, his puckered lips pressing together.
"Promise," he said, the word muffled and misshapen by his mother's grip.
Albi leaned forward and kissed him—pressed her lips to his small, squished mouth and held there, fierce and tender, a seal upon the oath she had extracted from a boy too young to understand its weight and likely too young to remember it in its entirety.
The tapestry at the door stirred.
It seemed to part as if by a breeze, so faint that only Fenris noticed it, and only then because he’d happened to set his eyes there; and through the gap stepped Beeba into the bedchamber.
She wore the same shift the healers had dressed her in three days past, wrinkled and pungent with the buildup of her night-sweats, hanging from her frame like a shroud. Her feet were bare, grey with the cold of the stone floors she had crossed to reach them. The braids Albi had woven into her hair were half-undone now, the floral ties loosened and dangling on her shoulders. The thick dark coils springing free in wild, matted clumps around her gaunt face.
Her eyes were open, unblinking, the pupils blown so wide that the lupine gold of her irises had been swallowed by them entirely, leaving only two pits of black that reflected every sharp lick of the flames from the hearth.
She was staring at Willa.
"Beeba?" Albi's voice was careful, the voice one uses for a skittish horse. She shifted Isangrim from her lap, setting him gently on the furs beside her, away from the hovering woman by the door. "Beeba, can you hear me?"
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
Beeba’s gaze was unwavering from the basket where their daughter slept. She did not answer. She stood in the gap of the tapestry like something carved from dark stone, every line of her body rigid, trembling with a fine, almost imperceptible vibration as if she were being chiseled from the inside out. Her lips were parted, her breath coming in shallow, rapid pulls.
She took a step forward. Then another. Her bare feet shuffled over the stone toward the child.
A sharpening on Beeba's skin rushed into his nose; hot-animal and wrong. The scent of a wolf on edge of Changing, the musk of blood when the beast within surges against the skin.
Albi smelled it through the bond. Her nostrils flared, and Fenris saw the change sweep through her body—the muscles of her shoulders coiling, her jaw tightening, her honey-smoke eyes narrowing to slits. She bared her teeth then, a growl rolling up from her chest, low and guttural, a sound that was not human and was not meant to be.
"Beeba. Stop."
Beeba's head jerked up. The movement was too fast, too sharp—as if wrenched by an unseen hand. Her black eyes locked on Albi's face, and for a moment there was something behind them, vast and infinite; a dozen gazes staring out through a single pair of eyes.
Then her mouth opened wide.
A howl like none Fenris had ever heard, not wolf or any creature that walked beneath his sky. It was layered, harmonic, the orchestra of many throats crying out through one throat, each voice pitched at a different register, some so deep they vibrated in the bones of his skull and others so high they seemed to drag and scratch at the glass of the windows. The sound filled the chamber, rattling the iron brackets on the walls, making the candle flames gutter and twist.
Isangrim shrieked.
The boy tumbled from the bed, his small body hitting the stone floor with a thud that was swallowed by the howl. He scrambled on hands and knees, his amber eyes wide and white-rimmed with terror, and threw himself beneath the bed, disappearing into the dark gap between the frame and the floor, his sobs muffled by the furs that fell around him.
Willa woke. Her thin, newborn cry pierced the cacophony like a needle through cloth.
Beeba lunged at the sound.
Her hands came up, the fingers lengthening–thickening nails curving into claws as the Change ripped from beneath the surface without fully breaking through. She reached for the basket, for the swaddled infant within, her black eyes fixed on Willa with a hunger that was not her own.
In the same movement, Albi threw herself from the bed; a violence that sent the bolsters scattering, her body colliding with Beeba's midsection, driving the woman sideways and down away from her daughter. They hit the stone floor together, the impact shuddering through the chamber.
Albi’s pale hands locked around Beeba's wrists, slamming them against the flagstones. The nursing gown tearing down her shoulder. A streak of blood appeared on Albi's forearm where one of Beeba's half-formed claws had raked the skin.
"FENRIS" Albi shouted, her voice raw, “WE CAN’T LET HER CHANGE SHE’LL KILL THE BABES.”
He was already rounding the bed to her, but the howl had done its work; heavy footsteps were thundering, too, down the corridor—boots on stone, the sharp barking of voices raised in alarm.
The tapestry was torn aside and Ninny barreled through, her stout body filling the doorway. Behind her came Luta, and Helga both.
Ninny assessed the scene with a stark calmness—Albi pinning Beeba to the floor, the infant screaming in her basket, the overturned furs—her face was set like granite.
"LUTA—the baby. Take her. NOW."
Luta darted to the bed and scooped Willa from the basket, retreating quickly out the room, his daughter's cries ringing down the hall and disappearing, as she did, out the longhouse.
"HELGA—the boy. Where is the boy?" Helga's head swiveled, her rheumy eyes scanning the chamber.
"Isangrim?" she called, her old voice creaking. "Little one?"
"HE’S UNDER THE BED!" Fenris barked, crouched beside Albi now, his hands reaching for Beeba's thrashing legs, trying to pin them. The woman was convulsing, her body arching off the stone, the Change fighting to break through—fur rippling beneath her skin in dark patches and coming now roughly beneath his palm, her jaw distending, her teeth lengthening to points before receding, caught in the grotesque half-state between woman and wolf.
She would have Changed fully, Fenris realized, had she possessed the control to. Whatever had gripped her mind had not been able to harness the beast completely. The months of wasting, of a body nourished only by the scantest bits of food and water had left her too weak to complete the transformation. The Change surged and retreated, surged and retreated; but Albi knew, he could feel through their bond, she knew the Change was coming.
Helga dropped to her knees with a grunt, her old bones cracking on the stone, and peered beneath the bed. "Here," she said, reaching into the dark. "Come, little heart. Come to Helga. There we are. There we are." She pulled Isangrim out by the arms, the boy's face streaked with tears and dust, his fists clenched white around the wooden fox at his throat. He buried his face in the old woman's neck and would not look up, trembling like a leaf in a storm-wind as Helga carried him with small quick steps out the way his sister had gone.
Heavy booted footsteps overtook Helga's soft small ones. The corridor roared with them now—Luta had gone and got the sentries, got the warriors, got anyone who would listen. The tapestry was torn from its nails in their haste to enter the chamber, trampled beneath boots of the young wolves with sleep still in their eyes, some born of Black Rock and some of Deep Water. Where was Bor among them? Where was Magnes? Where was Erland and Erlend? Rusk?
They’ve gone South with Rusk, Fenris. Albi’s thoughts slammed into him, this is all the strength we’ve got. It won’t be enough.
They crowded the doorway, swords half-drawn, their faces slack with fear.
Albi’s own hands unfurled into claws that dug into the skin of Beeba’s arms, pinning her down to the flagstones. Her arms were locked at the elbows, her knees driving into Beeba's hips, her white hair hanging in a curtain around both their faces. Albi bared her teeth, something feral and absolute in her eyes that made gooseflesh rise over Fenris’s body.
Beeba's right hand balled, pinned as it was to her side; turning into a fist no longer human.
The stone below broke as she slammed her fist down in a growl of rage.
The crack split the chamber like a thunderclap. A fracture raced through the flagstone from the point of the impact, jagged and forking, the chips of grey rock exploding outward, skittering across the floor like teeth knocked from a jaw.
Fenris staggered, loosening his grip for only a breath.
He had seen wolves break wood, break bone, break iron locks and chains in the full fury of the Change; and then, only wolves as strong as Bor or Asger. Beeba was a she-wolf half-starved and half-dead, wasted to sinew and shadow, an eighth the size of Bor.
This was not Beeba's strength. Whatever had crawled inside her, whatever legion howled behind those black and depthless eyes, had brought their bodies with them—every muscle, every sinew, the accumulated force of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of feral wolves condensed into the single wasted frame of her body.
One of the young sentries—a Deep Water boy, broad-shouldered and no more than seventeen—rushed forward and grabbed the leg that Fenris had lost in his shock.
Beeba's hand shot out as the sentry passed, and seized his shin just above the boot. With a sickening twist, a movement inescapable for its quickness, the bone there snapped with a sound like a green branch breaking.
The boy screamed—a high, animal shriek that bounced off the stone walls—and collapsed, his leg folding at an angle no leg was meant to fold, the white shard of bone tenting the skin beneath his trousers without quite breaking through. He writhed on the flagstones, clutching his ruined limb, his screams dissolving into wet, choking sobs.
The other warriors were as still and unmoving as the icons on the walls of his bedchambers.
Beeba surged upward.
The force of it was volcanic—her body erupting from the floor with a power that sent Albi flying sideways, her slight frame thrown like a trout out the water, her back striking the edge of the bed with a crack that drove the breath from her lungs.
Fenris, who had been reaching for Beeba's shoulder, was caught by Beeba’s swinging arm; the blow lifting him off his feet and hurling him, spinning, violent, into some wall far away.
He hit the stone shoulder-first, his vision whiting out, the taste of copper flooding his mouth.
From his tilted, dizzying place on the ground he watched Beeba rise.
She stood in the center of the chamber, barefoot on the cracked flagstones, her shift torn away, her naked body trembling with the effort of containing what inhabited her. The Change was rippling through her in waves, the dark fur blooming across her arms then retreating again, her spine lengthening and then compressing, her jaw distending with a wet crack before snapping back. She was caught in the threshold, halfway between woman and wolf, it was as if Beeba herself were fighting the wolves within for sovereignty over her own body.
Another sentry, the stone of him brought to life again by the urgency pressed upon him, lunged at the beast in the center of the room. Beeba caught him by the throat as he lifted his sword. She lifted him—a boy who weighed fourteen stone–as if he weighed one, lifting him high into the air before lunging him back down through the stone at her feet. The ground split and cracked by the impact, his skull opening against it with a sickening, hollow pop.
Fenris pushed himself up from the ground, grinding his teeth, growling, trembling with his own Change.
Albi was charging already, blood on her lip where she’d bitten through it, her nursing gown ripped nearly to the waist. Fenris felt a shooting, electric vibration in his arm, her arm, which had been broken somewhere in the impact of her body hitting the hard stone and wood of the bed.
She seized Beeba’s throat, and with a trembling strength drove her down into the stone floor the same as she had done to the sentry, down through the already-fractured flagstone beneath, with a concussion that shook dust from the rafters and sent a tremor through the floor that the warriors in the doorway felt in their boots–that Fenris could feel in his own.
Her hands moved and locked around Beeba's wrists and forced them down into the broken stone. Beeba thrashed, the strength of the many surging through her limbs. Albi's grip did not break this time.
Fenris could feel the power of his mate flow with raging certainty in his veins; a power that his own impotent, weak body could not, was not, meant to hold. His knees buckled, forcing him down into a reverent kneel he could not get up from.
Albi was no longer. She was the Great Mother Wolf in human form, right there in his bedchamber.
The muscles in her arms stood out like iron cables, trembling, and a light seemed to ripple beneath her skin—faint, pale, the color of moonlight trapped in glass—visible for only a moment before it vanished.
Fenris heard her thought repeating through their bond—a cold, crystalline certainty that cut through the chaos like a blade.
If she Changes, Fenris, we will all die. Every wolf in this room. Every wolf in this village.
The wolf that Beeba would become was not Beeba's wolf. It was the Beast of Rage. It would tear through them like a scythe through wheat, and by the time the first of them had found their wolf-form, the chamber would be painted red with their blood.
The Beast’s mouth opened to speak, the breath of the voices of many pouring from the impossibly small tunnel of its singular throat.
"YOU DID THIS TO US."
The remaining candles on the walls and along the hearth guttered and died, plunging the chamber into darkness that only wolf-eyes could see through. The warriors in the doorway pressed back against the corridor walls, their faces drained of color.
"YOU KILLED US. YOUR CHILDREN."
Beeba's black eyes were fixed on Albi's face, but they were not seeing her. They were seeing through her, past her, past the stone and the mountain and the sky, into something beyond the living world entirely.
"WE KNOW WHO YOU ARE. WE KNOW WHAT YOU ARE. WE KNOW WHO YOU ARE. WE KNOW WHAT YOU ARE. WE KNOW…."
Over and over and over, the words grinding from her throat like stones from a mill, each repetition more ragged, more desperate than the last, the voices within the voices fraying at their edges and unraveling like old rope.
"WE KNOW WHO YOU ARE. WE KNOW WHAT YOU ARE. WE KNOW WHO YOU ARE. WE KNOW WHAT YOU ARE."
"FOR FUCK SAKE HOLD THAT BITCH!" Ninny was there–had she always been there?—solid and heavy across the chamber stone. She dropped to her knees beside the wreckage of the floor, her thick hands steady.
From the pocket of her apron she drew a small glass vial, dark amber, stopped with wax—poppy milk, the concentrated essence, the midwife's last and heaviest mercy. She cracked the seal with her thumbnail, and in the abyss of the Beast’s open jaw the possessed chanting words still roaring from deep within. She poured in the entire contents of the vial.
The Beast choked, the voices gurgled and gagged, tried to spit it out but failed as one of Albi’s hands wrapped around its throat.
The chanting faltered, the layered voice dissolving into a wet, guttural cough. The Change receded beneath Beeba’s skin like shadows fleeing the light of dawn.
She became Beeba again, gaunt, wrecked, barely breathing beneath Albi’s grip on her throat.
Albi loosened it, the Mother’s strength leaving her, and with a trembling hand rose to touch the fire-hot cheek of her dying friend.
Beeba's hand shot up, her fingers closing around Albi's throat with a speed and precision that did not belong to the poppy-drunk woman beneath her.
The grip was crushing, final, a dead bolt sliding home, and the instant skin met skin the warm air in the chamber plummeted into the cold of the highest skies.
Through Albi, Fenris experienced the blast of sensation so vast it threw him back against the stone flat.
Albi's eyes went white, the honey-smoke irises swallowed entirely by a blazing, depthless pale that had no edge; were windows flung open onto an endless, howling storm.
The vision came upon her all at once.
The Prophecy
She stood on the edge of the world, and the world was drowning.
The cliff fell away beneath her feet—a rounded drop of black rock, slick with rain, vanishing into a darkness beyond that was so complete it seemed like a waiting mouth opened wide to swallow whatever dared get too close. She could not tell from which direction the rain came; it was from the heavens and from hell, it whipped her cheek from the east, and as if circling the world came back to whip the other from the west. It hammered into her skin with a force that was maleficent and merciless, each drop a hard cold fist beating against her face, her arms, her bare shoulders, until the pain of it became a second skin she wore over her own.
It was what she deserved. It was a small penance to pay for what would happen now.
Below, the water raged.
It stretched in every direction, horizon to horizon, a churning black expanse that had no end and no beginning. The world she had known was gone and swallowed into the belly of this Deep. The only thing the water could not swallow, had never been able to swallow, was the cliff beneath her feet.
How long must this continue? Have I lived enough? Have they died enough?
She screamed. It could not be helped. It would bring him, as it always did, but she did it anyway because it could not be helped.
Far below, scattered across the surface of the black ocean like red stars fallen from a drowned sky, the torches burned. Thousands of them, more than that, she knew, more than that, but her heart could not bear to know the true account of it. They were impossibly small and trembling against the vastness, each one a single point of defiant light-life clinging to the dark-death. They were mounted on the prows of long-boats—she could not see the boats themselves, not from this height, not through the curtain of rain, but she knew them by the way the lights moved, drifting, clustering, separating, the slow and desperate choreography of vessels that had nowhere left to go except beg for the mercy of refuge at her feet.
The howls rose from among them.
Each one finding her where she stood, wrapping around her chest and pulling tight. The howls of the dying—mournful, long, ragged with never-ending exhaustion—rising one after another in an endless, overlapping chorus. When one voice faltered and fell silent, another took its place, and another after that, and another…. an unbroken chain of grief that stretched across the water like a bridge made of sound; trying to reach her. Cries for mercy. Cries for deliverance. Cries for imagined sins and desperate forgiveness of them.
They were all innocent.
The sorrow hit her chest as if it were a boulder dropped from the heavens. It crushed the breath from her lungs and sat there, vast and immovable, pressing down upon her heart until she thought it might simply stop beating from the weight. A sob gathered in her throat and she clamped her jaw shut against it, her teeth grinding, the muscles of her neck cording. She would not weep. She would not. She did not, anyway. It was a relief to know she wouldn’t.
Was that her choice or Theirs? Maybe if she had wept, the water below would rise from her tears and overtake them all. It would be the end. The real one.
She took a step forward. Toward the edge. Toward the lights. Toward the howling and the black water. She wished she would hurl herself into this waiting mouth. To go to them. She wished she could. But he was here now.
A hand seized her shoulder.
It was strong—broad-palmed and heavy. A grip only belonging to a man of hardened strength and size. It held her fast, pulling her back from the edge, anchoring her to the stone.
"The wave is coming," she told him, and her voice was not her own, "They will all be washed away."
"They will understand their sacrifice." The voice behind her assured. She did not turn to look at him. She could not take her eyes from the torches.
"They have never understood it," she whispered. "Though you always say they do."
The hand on her shoulder tightened, the fingers pressing into her flesh—a farewell for now.
"We wait for you on the other side."
Then the hand was gone, and she was alone on the cliff with the rain.
She watched the torches and held her breath in anticipation for the sound that roared from the sky the moment her chest filled up with air. It came from the edge of the horizon, felt first in the soles of her feet and then in the rumbling of the stone beneath her.
The surface of the water shifted–a great pulling back, as large an inhalation as the one she’d just taken into her lungs.
The Wave came from the darkness beyond the torches. She could not see it at first—for it was too large, was the horizon itself moving as a wall of black towards her. The rain seemed to lean away from it.
A sudden silence fell over the sea below as every voice and howling cry upon the surface of the water stopped at once.
They see it too now.
The torches began to rise, tilting upward as the water beneath the long-boats swelled with the approaching mass. The red lights climbed, one by one, riding the slope of the wave's leading edge, rising higher and higher against the blackness until they were at level with the cliff itself—a constellation of desperate fires lifted toward the sky on a mountain of water.
They began to cut out, one by one, some falling long, sad streaks down the cliff of the mountain wall.
Then the wave broke over them, pulling them under with a great Swallowing; a wet, final exhalation that matched the rough gust of air that came ragged from her chest.
The wave surged forth, hurtling toward the mountain with a speed that no natural storm could produce, carrying within it the dead of its belly.
It struck the cliff.
It shook the mountain down to its pegs in the earth. The spray erupted upward in a column of jetting white and found her where she knelt—for she was kneeling now—had fallen with all those who’d fallen to the depths of the water and knelt as those who’d knelt before in asking forgiveness. Her hands pressed flat against the rock, her mouth open in a sob that had finally broken through. The water hit her face, warm as blood, salt as tears, and it tasted of everything and nothing.
The surface of the water and all its smaller waves below smoothed out as if rubbed over by a calm hand. A resetting. The cleansing of a tablet’s face.
The long-boats and the wolves and the humans who had sailed them and the small, desperate fires they had kept burning against the end of all things—were gone, all of it, pulled down into a darkness that would not give them back.
She rose with a shaking, weak body. She turned from the edge and looked behind her.
The cave mouth gaped in the cliff face, ten paces from where she stood. Within it, barely visible, a fire burned; a trembling in the draft that crept through the stone.
It was the only light left in this world.
