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Chapter Thirty-Two

Roan

W olves . This was her secret. A pack of wolves .

I couldn’t understand her. I sat there—tense, ready to spring to my feet—and looked back and forth between the pack and her. The one wolf watched, just like she said it would; she slept, like a baby.

Next to a pack of wolves .

She was even wilder than I’d thought. That was scary to come to terms with.

My eyes slipped back to the wolf. He looked on intently, but I had to admit there was nothing threatening in his body language.

The wolves behind him went about their business, even the big alpha who’d nearly scared me shitless.

Some lounged, others preened. The lighter one who’d trotted in first was still hidden under what I now saw was a dilapidated structure, probably built around the same time as the hut Fen had made a home out of.

What was this place?

My heart was settling some, maybe giving in to the ridiculous notion that these wolves would not attack me and rip me to shreds the moment they got hungry, and I looked around, taking in my surroundings more fully .

The forest was thick with the old growth evergreens that were prominent in the region.

They were wide, tall things that made a person stop and peer up into the canopy, wondering what the world was like when these trees were young.

Roots pulled from earth to snake along the forest floor, tangling with each other before they slipped back under the soil and took their secret paths underground.

Hidden among it all, half sunken in and half overgrown with moss and saplings, were the ruins.

The Caed used to live here, and now the wolves did.

They made their den under the old foundation of a Caed dwelling and lingered in the spaces where the Caed used to roam.

As I sat, trying to imagine my ancestors of long ago, pups came tumbling out of the mouth of the den.

They were a jumble of brown fur, too-big feet, and mayhem.

In an instant, they fell upon everything in their camp.

One gnawed on a branch, another on an elder’s ear.

Two approached the dark male, crouched in submission and wagging their tails, and fervently licked his jaw.

The last ran between the others, tripping as it went.

I found I was smiling. I tried to scold myself back to sense but couldn’t make it last. The pups were a whirlwind of antics. Even when I straightened, it was only a matter of time before I settled back into a smile.

The adults took turns regurgitating meat, which the pups descended on enthusiastically.

Once full, I watched them wrestle with each other, wrestle with the adults (who merely lounged and half-heartedly protested), and I watched them get tired.

Finally, they laid in the bits of sunlight that filtered through the trees and slept.

Fenli had found this. She’d stumbled upon wolves and hadn’t fled, hadn’t hurried back to the hunters and told them where she’d seen them. She’d stayed. She’d watched. She’d gained their trust—though how far it went, I couldn’t say—and she’d given hers as well. She’d kept them a secret.

Fenli and her secrets.

So, this was why she’d told me not to hunt the wolves. When she’d disappeared and I couldn’t find her, she was way out here. When I’d worried day and night about her being lost or torn to shreds, she’d been sitting quietly watching a pack of wolves.

I looked back at the wolf who seemed responsible for watching me, and I found myself growing uncomfortable. Not because I was afraid of him. It was worse than that.

When I looked him in his face, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Toke was looking back at me. Not that the wolf was the god—just that there was a piece of him there, in those eyes. Like the wolf was born of Toke just as much as I was.

I didn’t like it, and I looked away.

After some time, I nudged her awake. She led us back through the trees to her shelter, and we sat in silence as she brought the fire back to life.

When the glowing coals had become proper flames, I watched as she cooked up some grains she’d stolen from the storehouse in a pot she’d stolen from the kitchen.

Liar, wild woman, thief . I added it to the mental list of character traits I knew of hers, right next to ‘stubborn, sneaky, rebellious’, and ‘infuriating’.

Right next to ‘resilient’. Right next to ‘bewitching’.

We held up our silence throughout the meal. When we’d finished, I collected the dishes.

“Where can I wash these?”

At the words, she spun towards me. “What did you think? Of the wolves, I mean? ”

“Oh.” What didn’t I think, more like. “I…I thought a lot of things.”

She nodded, a nervous energy drawing her brows in. She licked her lips and gathered her courage.

“What are you… going to do?” This came quieter. Now she was looking me right in my eyes, and it wasn’t difficult to see the fear in hers.

“Fen,” I said quietly. I wanted to drop the dishes and pull her into my arms right there, but I held back.

“I thought you were going to get us killed. Then I thought you were mad. Then I thought—I think you see the world more clearly than the rest of us. You’re braver.

You were able to sit with wolves when I would have been carried away with my fear.

Fear that would have led to bloodshed. I’d have called it self-preservation.

Defending myself and my clan. But I can’t say that anymore.

” I frowned. “I don’t know. They were supposed to be aggressive.

I don’t know what it means that they weren’t.

” I waited until she met my eyes again. “I don’t know what it means that you’re as wild as those wolves out there. ”

She hesitated, her gaze flicking to the side and back.

“You won’t tell?”

What a question. I was supposed to be a wolf hunter in Toke’s clan. Yet I heard myself saying, “Your secret is safe with me.”

At that, her shoulders seemed to lighten. She nodded, then gestured north.

“I’ll t-take you to the river,” she said.

I followed her down the path I could see she’d laid from her shelter to the water’s edge, watching the way she moved over the terrain. She would have slugged me in the arm if she had seen me openly staring, but she was focused ahead and I was shameless.

When we reached the side of an impressive stretch of rushing water, we paused to look out over it .

“I erased it from the maps.”

I looked over at her. “What?”

She didn’t answer right away. She kept her eyes trained on the current, and I watched her profile, her hair blowing in the wind, chin up.

“I took it off all the maps.” She turned towards me. “In Gaert’s hut. I took this island off each one.”

“You…tampered with the maps?”

She nodded and looked back out at the current. Defiant. Not a shred of guilt. And it was everything I’d told myself she’d be likely to do, right before I’d laughed the thought off as ridiculous.

“ Damn .”

“I wanted to make it invisible. At least for a little while.”

I turned back as well.

“Makes sense,” I said. “It would take the clan a long time to make it all the way out here again. Our attentions have been mostly inland, only a few of the southern islands.”

She nodded once more. “Especially if they think it’s all water.”

And she wasn’t wrong. In truth, it could take decades.

I chuckled, a smile spreading wide across my face.

“What?” When I didn’t answer right away, she bumped her shoulder with mine. “What?”

“Everyone underestimates you, Fenli Wyn Faasval. And they pay for it in the end.”

She didn’t try to deny it.

After we washed our dishes in the river, we meandered back.

Everything felt different. We were separated from the clan and relieved of the expectations of others that had weighed us both down.

Now—alone in the wilderness, just us and the wolves—things came easier.

There was a lightness that hadn’t been there before, an ease of being, and the very comfort of her presence surprised me.

I thought I could have gone on living like that forever.

I wasn’t sure what had come over me, but that evening, eating fish and grains around the fire in the hearth, I started telling stories.

I told her about the forest all around us. The rainfall. How the salt water met the fresh water, and the oddities I’d seen in those stretches of waterway.

There were rumors of a humpback whale as white as a cloud. A moose in the mist who was one hundred years old and could only grow one antler. She found my tales ridiculous and wholly captivating, and I enjoyed her attention.

Then I saw her marriage ribbons. I was going on about the witch who lived in the cliffs north of here when I stopped mid-sentence, my mouth fallen open in shock. She followed my eyes to where she’d strewn them up to hang laundry over. At that particular moment, her underwear was plain to see.

I closed my mouth, pointed, and asked her, “Your ribbons are now a clothesline?”

“For what it’s worth,” she said carefully, “the under things are clean.”

We laughed together. When I’d settled into a smile, I looked down at my own forearms, still wrapped as they had been for the last ten years.

“I’ve had them on for so long,” I said. “Was it strange taking them off?”

She hesitated just a moment, but she was telling her secrets now, so what was one more?

“I put them back on three times.”

My smile deepened at that. “Really? ”

“Yes,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I was falling apart as it was. Unwinding them felt like it was letting even more of me spill out, all over this floor.”

I nodded. I almost started unwinding mine right there, but something stopped me.

It felt like a big gesture, and I wasn’t sure I was ready.

The moment ended, and we finished eating.

Sometimes we were quiet; sometimes we talked.

She told me a few stories of her own. We spoke of Ess and everything that had happened since I’d betrayed her secret, of what could be, if only the clan would be willing to change.

And the time slipped by.

She had been remade out here. Or maybe it was that she could finally be herself. Whatever the case was, the Fen I watched now felt true.

She moved with comfortable ease. I’d seen her smile more in the past day than I’d seen in all our weeks before.

Most confusing of all, she wasn’t pushing me away.

She held my gaze, brushed up against me without flinching, and spoke to me without suspicion in her eyes.

I loved seeing the sword I’d made her at her hip.

She reached for it often, her hand resting on the pommel, and I pretended not to notice, but of course I did.

When it started raining, she started humming Toke’s song.

She’d left his clan but not him, I thought to myself.

Turning away, I stoked the small fire she had made in the old stone hearth and fed it into an almighty blaze.

She wrapped up in her blanket and sat beside it, just like in our hut.

When the wolf song started, she left her place behind and padded to the open door.

I watched her lean against the frame as she listened.

Then she tipped her head back and howled, and I felt the sound of it in my core.

She turned back to look at me then, the smile across her face unhindered, her cheeks flush with heat, and I felt my eyes prick painfully, felt the lightning that tore through my chest. She turned her focus back to the night when the wolves answered her, and I watched, dumbstruck.

She was a wild thing. I’d known it all along, but now I knew it to my bones. She belonged to herself. The clan could never take that from her.

More than ever, I wanted to belong to her as well.