The Wolf Wood

The moon in the Wolf Wood was red, and it hung so low that she could have thrown a stone at it.

It sat among the treetops like a coal in a grate, swollen and heavy, and it lit the whole forest in the color of a bruise. The trees were beeches and birches, tall and white-barked and bare, and their leaves lay deep underfoot in drifts of rust and scarlet that rustled at every step. The air was cold and thin and smelled of woodsmoke. It was an autumn night in a story. It was the kind of night on which a girl in a red hood might set out for her grandmother's cottage and meet something on the path.

"I don't like it," said Odile.

"No one does," said Brannoc.

"It's pretty."

"Aye. That's what's wrong with it."

They had come through the Crossing's front door in the dark, with Mrs. Dray cursing behind them and a full hundred Strays crowding the common room to stare. Isolde had not looked back. She had not wanted to see the Redhand faces, or the Lantern faces, or the small pale one by the window that was Wick's. The Door had closed behind them with a sound like a held breath being let go, and there had been nothing but trees.

Door Six, the voice had said. Six remain.

Seven, it had added, very softly, to itself.

She had written it in her notebook by the red moonlight, with a cold hand. She had underlined the word. 7? It was not a question any more. It was a tally. Thirteen Doors, six passed. Seven remain. The pleasant voice said twelve; the other said thirteen; and Isolde, for whom arithmetic had never been a matter of opinion, knew which of them was lying.

"Do you hear that?" said Odile.

They stopped.

It was far away. It came from the east, from the black heart of the woods, a long thin trembling note, high at the start and falling. It rose again. It was joined by a second, and a third, until the whole forest rang with a chorus of long, mournful, shivering cries.

"Wolves," said Brannoc, very quietly.

"They're singing."

"Aye. Not for long."

The voices stopped.

In the hush that followed, between one breath and the next, a single clear low voice spoke from among the trees, close by, pleasantly, as one might greet a friend in the street.

"Brannoc Aldhelm Rook?"

The old man went rigid.

…

She saw it happen.

She saw his one eye widen. She saw his scarred face go slack, and his gnarled hands drop the boathook, and his mouth begin to open in the dazed, soft, helpless way of a sleeper who hears his mother call. He turned his head toward the sound. His lips shaped a word.

"No!" Isolde said.

She hit him. It was not a good blow. She struck at his shoulder with the heel of her hand, and then threw her whole weight against his chest, and Valerian was there a half second later with his hand over the old man's mouth. They went down together in the leaves in a tangle. Brannoc's boots drummed. His voice rose behind the black glove in a muffled bellow, and then in a whisper, and then in a long dreadful sob.

"It's me," he gasped. "It's me. It's my name. It's the name my mam— Nobody's said it. Not in forty years. Oh, God. Oh, God, she knew me—"

"It's not your mam," said Valerian, very low.

"It was her voice."

"I know."

"It knows me—"

"Brannoc." The Overseer's voice was low and dry and utterly steady. "Look at me. Do not look at the trees. Listen. It will say your name again. It will say it sweetly, and you will want to answer, and you will not. Because if you do, you will go to it. And it will not be your mother."

The old man stared up at him. There were tears running down into the white scars of his face.

"Aye," he whispered. "Aye. All right."

…

The wolves came out of the dark like a spill of smoke.

She saw them first as eyes. Dozens of pairs, then scores, yellow and green and silver-white, drifting among the trunks at the level of her waist. They made no sound. They walked on the dead leaves without disturbing them. They were great gaunt silver-gray beasts with thick ruffs and narrow heads, and they were the color of the moon on frost, and there was nothing in the least wolfish about the way they moved. They moved like dancers. They moved like something that had been taught.

They hunt by voice, thought Isolde. They don't need to hunt by anything else.

"Odile Mary Pruett," said one, softly.

"Odile—"

The girl clapped both hands over her mouth. Her eyes were enormous. She backed up against a tree, and slid down, and curled into a ball with her arms over her ears. Her shoulders shook.

"Odile. Little Odie. Come home, pet. It's late."

"Be still," said Isolde. "Be still, Odile. Don't."

"Odie."

"Tell me what the rule is," said Brannoc harshly. He had pulled himself up on one elbow. His face was gray. "You've to find it, girl. Find it quick. There'll be a rhyme."

"I'm looking."

"Look faster."

She looked. She did it with her heart pounding against her ribs, and a hundred shining eyes at her back, and the voices rising round her one by one in the dark. She saw the beeches. She saw the leaves. She saw, a little way off through the trunks, a low squat shape in the red moon's light: a hut, or a gate, or the ruins of one, built of old black iron. A hunter's lodge. A wolf-trap.

"There," she said. "Come on."

…

The iron gate was rusted shut. It stood at the head of a clearing, and beyond it, through the bars, she could see the wreck of a stone cabin with the roof fallen in. But it was not the gate that held her. It was the lintel. Someone had cut verses into the iron with a chisel, in a great crude hand, row on row, so deep that the red light pooled in the grooves.

She read it standing. She did not need to sit down. The words went into her as water goes into dry ground.

Hush, little one, the wolves are near;

They know your name, they'll make you hear.

Each of us has one that's true,

Whispered once, and known by few.

Every wolf will call it sweet,

In a voice you long to meet.

Answer not, though it be kind,

Or leave your voice and self behind.

All the night they'll call and wait,

Patient as the grave, and straight.

Answer none and walk away;

Wolves go hungry, then, till day.

Lock your lips and shut your eyes,

Hide until the red moon dies.

Dawn will come, and with it, grace;

Wolves forget your name and face.

"H. E. A. L."

She said it aloud. She could not help it. The letters clanged in her head like a bell. She turned to the others, shaking, and said it again, in a whisper: "Heal. It's heal. What is locked away cannot heal."

Valerian had gone white. He stood at the edge of the clearing with his hand on the nearest tree. It was a ghost of a white, the pale bloodless color of a man who has taken a knife in the ribs and has not yet looked down. He did not speak. His lips moved, faintly, in the red light. She thought he was repeating it.

What is locked away cannot heal.

It was a statement now. It was a sentence, a true one, with a subject and a verb. It lay in her mind like a stone dropped in a still pool, and the rings spread. She thought of a bed in a long vaulted hall. She thought of black flowers opening on a white wrist, one by one, petal by petal. She thought: Locked away. Locked away. What is locked away?

And something stirred at the back of her mind, a shape she did not want to look at, a face half-seen in a dark window. She turned from it. She did not have time. A silver shape slid out of the trees behind her, and another, and another, and the wolves were all around them in a ring, with their yellow eyes and their patient mouths, and the pleasant voice rose from a dozen throats.

"Hide," said Brannoc. "Hide!"

…

There were two hollows under the old windfall.

It was a vast dead beech, which had come down in some long-ago storm and lay across the clearing like a sleeping giant, its root-plate standing up in the air in a wall of tangled earth. Beneath the trunk the soil had washed away, leaving a hollow, and beneath the roots another, narrower. Brannoc and Odile went into the first. She heard the old man's gruff curse, and the girl's sob, and the soft thump of earth being pulled down over their heads.

That left the narrow one.

It was a slit, a gap of black earth between two roots as thick as thighs, perhaps four feet long and two high. It smelled of mold and worms. She went in first, on her hands and knees, because there was no time to argue, and wriggled to the back, and turned. A moment later a long shape folded in after her. It took him two tries. His coat caught on a root. He swore, softly, in a language she did not know.

The silence closed.

They lay face to face in the dark. There was no other way to lie. The slit was so narrow that she could feel the warmth of his breath on her forehead, and the length of him along her side, hip to shoulder, and the hard cold weight of the buckle on his coat against her ribs. His knee was between hers. His arm was bent over her head, to keep the earth from falling. She could see nothing but a dim gray line where the roots met the ground, and in that line, once in a while, the red gleam of an eye.

Isolde.

It was a whisper from the clearing, so close that it might have come from inside the hollow. It was a young girl's voice, light and clear and dry. It was a little hoarse. It had a tiny rising lilt on the zz.

Isolde Marguerite Hale.

She stopped breathing.

It was her name. It was the name that was hers, the one that was not for the world. It was the name her mother had breathed into her ear in a narrow bed on a winter night, nine days before she died, in a hoarse sweet whisper, so that you'll always know who you are, my darling, no matter where they take you. She had never told it to a living soul. She had never written it. She had not, in fact, thought it in her own head for ten years.

Isolde Marguerite Hale. It's me. I'm so cold.

"No," she breathed.

Izzy.

Her mouth was open. She felt the word rise in her throat: Yes. It was a small, sweet, helpless thing. It was a girl's voice calling her from a bed she'd left, from a hall, from a dream, and every drop of blood in her body knew it. She felt her chin lift. She felt her lips part.

A hand covered her mouth.

It was cold. It was gloved. It was pressed hard across her lips, hard enough to hurt, and a body moved against hers, and a voice that was almost no voice at all breathed in her ear:

"No."

She stiffened. She fought. She heard herself make a low animal sound against his palm, and felt him shift to pin her, one arm round her shoulders, the other still across her face. She was shaking. She was crying. She could feel the tears running over his fingers. He held her through it, without a word, rigid as stone, with his heart going against her ribs.

Heart, she thought, distantly. He's got one.

It was a strange thing to notice. It beat against her breastbone hard and slow, a deep dull knock, like a door being struck in an empty house. She had thought, she realized, that there'd be nothing there.

"Izzy," said the wolf. "Please."

"Not her," whispered Valerian. His lips were against her temple. "It is not her. I swear to you. Not her."

"How do you—"

"I do not."

"Then—"

"Isolde." He drew a breath. "I do not know who it is. I do not know how it has your name. But I know that your sister is not in this forest, and that if you answer it, I shall lose you. And I will not."

She went still.

It was not the words. It was the way he said them, low and unadorned, with something in it that she had not heard before. It was the voice of a man giving a plain fact.

I will not.

She closed her eyes. She leaned, very slightly, into his hand, and felt the taut line of his body ease by a fraction. He took his palm from her mouth. He did not take his arm away. They lay there in the dark, breathing together, with the red eyes passing and re-passing in the gap, and the voices calling in the leaves.

It went on for hours.

…

She remembered afterward only fragments.

The cold, first. It crept up out of the earth and into her bones. The wolves called all the names in the wood: Odile's, a dozen times; Brannoc's, once, in a woman's voice, and then no more. A child's laugh, a husband's cough, a mother's hum. Once, near dawn, a deep slow man's voice, quite close, said clearly: Valerian Draycott.

She felt him go stiff as a board.

Valerian. It is time to come home.

He did not answer. His whole body was shaking. His chin was on the top of her head, and she felt his breath catch, and hitch, and steady, and she put her arm round him without thinking and held on. She did not know what she was holding. She only knew that he was there, and that his name was Draycott, and that she had never before heard a voice say it without the faintest note of triumph.

I am here, thought Isolde. I am here. Don't go.

She did not say it.

She said nothing at all. But some time in the long gray hour before the red moon set, she turned her face into his coat, and he drew his hand slowly up her back to the nape of her neck, and left it there, and they lay quite still until the dawn came and the wolves forgot.

…

"Heal," said Brannoc.

They stood in the clearing in the thin gold morning, battered and filthy and ringed with dead leaves, looking at the iron gate. The wolves were gone. The red moon was gone. The trees were only trees. A bird was singing, somewhere, with an air of bewildered optimism.

"What is locked away cannot heal," the old man said slowly. "Is that how it goes?"

"I think so."

"It means summat."

"Yes." Isolde had not stopped shaking. She sat on a stump with her notebook shut on her knee and Valerian's coat round her shoulders. She had not remembered taking it. "I think it means a great deal."

"Aye. Well." Brannoc spat. "What I want to know is how that bloody wolf knew your name."

She had been waiting for it. She had been waiting since the first whisper in the hollow. She looked up.

Valerian stood a little distance off, with his back to the sun, tall and black and unreadable. He had turned his face to the gate. He had not spoken since dawn.

"Valerian."

"Yes."

"The wolf called me by my true name. A name I've never said. Never written down. Not in the Hollow, not in the covenant, not in my notebook. No one knew it but my mother." Her voice broke. "I'd like you to tell me how that's possible."

The Overseer did not turn.

"The fourth clause," said Isolde. "You must not lie to me in any matter that touches my life."

A long silence. A bird sang.

"I know," said Valerian.

"Then?"

"I do not know." He turned, at last, and she saw his face, white and haggard and absolutely honest. "That is the truth. I do not know how it knew. I have never in my existence heard a Door use a name like that. Not for me. Not for anyone." He drew a breath. "But I will tell you what I think."

"Go on."

"I think," said Valerian, "that something in this place has been waiting for you."