Page 31

He went back to sleep in the river he had made, and hoped it would drown him.

Long years passed.

Cub woke up, and slept, and woke up again. He grew while he slept, and was no longer as small a cub as he had once been.

But his heart remained small inside him, and he kept it hidden. He pretended the hurt in his chest was a bad dream.

As he slept, the thin shreds of Old Wild left in Cub’s blood told him a story.

From his first day in the world, Cub’s mothers had taught him to listen for the Old Wild in his blood.

The Old Wild was even older and wilder than beasts like Cub. It was what had made the world, and everything came from it—beasts and humans, and witches too. If you knew howto listen to it, you could learn much. Cub had never been good at listening, except when it came to his mothers’ stories about the Old Wild.

Some creatures—like Cub—were full of the Old Wild, they had told him.

Some creatures—like humans—had none. Their eyes were so simple and small that most of them couldn’t even see Cub and the other beasts like him, only hints and shadows, like tricks of light. They would swim in a river and not see the beast that had made it lying on its banks.

“Sweet, plain little foals,” Cub’s mothers had often said fondly, of humans. “Dull, confused little kittens.”

“Kittens,” Cub had once pointed out, “taste good.”

His mothers had thumped him over the head for that one.

“Neither kittens,” they’d told him, “norhumans, are to be eaten. What do we eat instead?”

“We eat sunlight,” Cub had grumbled. “We eat the wind that whispers through the trees. We eat the nighttime shadows and the silver dew at dawn and the snow on the highest mountains.”

“We never eat more than we need. And?”

“And when we eat,” Cub would conclude, still grumbling, “we eat only with love and thanks in our hearts.”

But some creatures—not beasts, and not humans—had just enough star-flavored Old Wild in them to cause trouble.

These creatures, Cub’s mothers had told him, were witches.

Lonely and lonesome, shivering and angry, Cub listened to the story the Old Wild in his blood was telling him.

There was a place beyond the eastern mountains called the Star Lands. This land of seven kingdoms had air thin and clear, and stars so close they shone day and night.

In this place, the first witches had been born, long ago.

Seven of them had fallen from the stars. The First Ones, they came to be known. And as the years went by, and more and more witches were born and left the Star Lands to travel the world, the First Ones stayed in their homeland. They grew powerful, angry, and jealous. They fought often.

And then, the Old Wild in Cub’s blood whispered to him at last,they went to war, and destroyed each other.

“What is war?” Cub whispered into the deep dark.

War will end us all.

“Even you?” Cub asked.

Even me. It has already begun. Can you feel the Wild, as you once did? Can you smell it?

Cub shivered. No, he could not. He listened and he smelled and he breathed, seeking. But the Old Wild was not what it once was. Even the powerful pieces in his blood felt lost to him—fuzzy, distant, and scattered.

I cannot live,the Old Wild whispered,in a land of war.

“You cannot?” Cub dared to ask. “Or you will not?”