Page 76 of Habibi: Always and Forever

CRYING WOLF FROM INSIDE THE CASTLE

R obin says there are two kinds of gates: the ones meant to keep wolves out, and the ones meant to keep the land in.

The one we’re walking toward opens both ways.

The hill rose like the back of a great, sleeping beast. Stones flattened the grass, but sprigs snuck between them, leaning into the wind like the land already knew which way it was meant to breathe.

Beneath the thin skin of white paint, the foundation stones were ancient.

Darker. Heavy blocks marked with spirals, leaf-shapes, and river-lines.

All sigils carved by people who knew this hill as a living thing, not a holding pen.

The House calls them “decorations” when they notice them at all.

I’ve seen those marks on my own skin, etched into me by magic older than the House’s language.

Robin’s voice is low, but it carries in my bones. “Still want to go in through the front?”

I bare my teeth in a smile that’s not meant to be polite. “It’s the only way they’ll know it’s me.”

Wolves don’t knock. With the wind along my skin and shadows burning in my blood, we’ll do more than rattle the guards. We’ll make the stones remember what they were called before the House learned to lie.

Robin’s bow is steady, but his glance is for me.

It lingers like he’s mapping the shape of my breath in the air between us.

I’ve seen him loose an arrow blindfolded and still strike true, but the look he gives me now feels surer than any shot.

It’s the kind that says he’s already chosen where we’ll land, and he is coming with me.

I smile, knowing the wind’s already carrying us there, bound to the same breath. Even as I turn back to the bricked-in horizon of the high walls. Banners hang heavy, stolen silk stitched with a crest that didn’t belong to this soil.

I could smell the wrongness like an animal.

It’s not the warm, sun-cooked scent of quarried rock, but the dry rot of foundations that had been forced, gouged into a bedrock that hadn’t wanted them.

The House stood because it had been willed to stand, not because the land beneath agreed to bear its weight.

As I stare, something stares back before I catch the flicker of their movement. Too awkward to be the upright posture of a guard.

Then there’s a soft scared voice.

“Wolf at the gate!”

Their voice is pitched perfectly, aimed not at warning the people on the walls but to reach deep into the belly of the castle. This isn’t earnest fear; it’s performance. They might not even know exactly what they’ll call down on our heads, but more importantly, they don’t even pause to care.

The cry travels fast. I can hear it repeating, passed mouth to mouth down long halls and across balconies. A heartbeat later, an answering rhythm begins: boots striking stone, doors banging open, armor rattling in its racks. The sound builds until it’s a tide rolling toward us.

The pigs pour into view on the wall, and spill down the stone steps to take their places before the gate.

Not animals, but men polished to a shine, their armor bright enough to flash the sun into your eyes.

Shields lift and lock. The discipline is so clean it feels like a single body breathing in front of me.

“They’ve already decided what you are.” Robin’s voice is quiet, meant for me alone. There’s a loving pride in it as he speaks. “So, show them.”

My shadow stretches ahead of me, uncoiling across the grass into a creature utterly free of this world’s rules as it forms into a wolf’s muzzle.

The ground gives a low, rolling shiver, not enough to throw them down, but plenty to break their perfect little pattern. The quake started in the soles of their boots, humming up into bone, a warning whispered by the land itself.

One pig stepped back to steady himself, shoulder clipping the next. A ripple of irritation passed through the line: muttered curses, shoves to regain rank, heads snapping toward one another in blame.

The shadow’s wolf ears flicked back to me, and I grinned, waiting to pounce. Robin’s lips crooked, suppressing a smile.

The wind slid over the hill, folding the grass until it lay flat like fur smoothed by a careful hand. The weather waited for me to speak, but my heart belonged to Robin.

He took a step toward them, speaking on our behalf. “If you let go of your fear first, you won’t have to let go of your lives.”

What was surely the captain peered over at us. He was older than his voice, beardless and unnaturally tanned. He looked at Robin as if trying to place a name. Then his gaze shifted to me. Finally, it dropped to my shadow at his feet.

He held a bundle of rods bound tight with wooden rods, an axe-head jutted between them, clean and sharp. The bundle rose nearly to his shoulder, carried like both scepter and cudgel. His knuckles whitened on the fasces’ haft, a grip that said he trusted its weight more than the wall behind him.

“You’re the Big Bad Wolf,” he said, like a man checking a legend off a ledger. “And this archer?—”

“Robin Hood,” he supplied, generously. “If you prefer titles, I’ve misplaced mine.”

The captain sighed, and when he spoke again, he tried to sneer and landed on exhaustion instead. “You lurk at my gate like a shopper without coin, and expect us to…what? Invite you in for supper?”

“I expect you to listen to your land,” I said, not raising my voice as the wind carried it to him. “It is tired and doesn’t like the crest you nailed into the ground.”

“You’ve made your noise,” the captain snorted, “Now leave.”

I could, but I wouldn’t.

Robin smiled like the captain told a joke. “Did you know ancient societies used seed oil in door hinges?”

One of the pigs squinted at him. “Is your business buying oil, then?”

“Idiot. Keep your mouth shut,” the captain chastised, his grip tightening. “I don’t pay you to ask questions.”

The pig grumbled, helmet dipping back into place. I glanced up from them to the gate.

It wasn’t grand so much as self-important. A slab of carved arrogance set into the wall, etched with the House’s seal and words they thought would outlast the truth.

“Open Sesame,” I told the gate, and as freely as thought magic flowed. “I remember who you are. A hinge, not part of a prison.”

The pin gave another soft, traitorous slide.

Robin shifted beside me, the bow coming off his back in one fluid motion. He didn’t raise it all the way, just enough that the fletching caught the wind. But my gaze wasn’t for the captain or the pigs.

The crier was still there on the wall. Pale hair knotted up like a crown they hadn’t earned, hands clasped at their pearl necklace as though they’d barely escaped me.

Except this time, they’d gotten their wish. I was finally, fully, here.

“You’ve called for me before,” I said, my voice carrying over the ramparts, woven into the wind until it was as much weather as sound. “But now you’ve earned the truth of your warning.”

I drew the first real breath.

The wind trembled.

It came up through the ground as much as it poured from the sky.

The air threaded through the walls, down into the stone’s grain.

It curled into the mortar’s cracks, whispering to the bones of the hill beneath.

The wolf shadow inhaled with me, its ribs expanding into the shape of the hill this House had buried.

The first huff wasn’t an attack. It was a remembering.

The dust shifted before the pigs even realized the wind had touched them. Pebbles rattled at their boots. The gate’s lock jerked in its housing, a low, metallic growl, as if a jaw opened just enough to taste the air.

Robin’s bow rose, his draw smooth, and when he loosed it into the air above me, the wind caught the arrow.

It curved along the current I’d made, marking its path like a scribe’s ink.

My magic curled around it, shadow and gale braiding together, carrying the arrow high over the wall where it split into streamers of wind that lashed along the battlements.

The pigs glanced at each other, uneasy now. One took a step back. The shields that had been unified a moment ago wavered, their edges no longer perfectly locked.

Beneath my boots, the land inhaled, the first stretch after a long sleep. The hill’s spine pressed against the foundation stones, just enough to make the fortress creak.

A murmur moved along the wall. The performance faltered. The crier’s shadow jumped in the shifting light. For a heartbeat it wasn’t theirs at all, and now the blunt snout of a pig, plain as the truth I knew.

I could have let the moment end there. The pigs might have told themselves it was a bluff, that the wolf at the gate was still just a story they could tell over their cups tonight. But I wasn’t here to be a cautionary story.

I was here to make them remember the truth of the land beneath their boots.

The first huff settled into the wall like a seed in a crack. The second breath came even easier.

Not like the old days, when the magic in me ripped at the edges of my ribs until it burned as madness and blood.

Not like when I feared the cost of drawing too deep.

Now, Robin at my side, the land under my boots, the wolf was not something I summoned, it was part of my lungs, part of my spine. I breathed, and it breathed with me.

The air swelled in my chest until my shoulders ached. Shadows rippled out from my boots, curling over the grass, sliding up the iron bars of the gate. The wolf’s shadowy jaw opened wider than mine ever could, black tongue curling in anticipation.

Then I exhaled.

The sound wasn’t mine alone. It was the howl of every voice the House had silenced. The gust carried the weight of centuries. The sigh of the hill before it was trampled, the groan of roots torn from the earth, the breath stolen from lungs that had sung here long before walls.