Chapter 12: The First Kiss

Angeau’s story gave its children a great many things to be afraid of in the woods, and a kiss was not one of them. Nobody had thought it necessary.

The story had advice for a girl who met a wolf and advice for a wolf who met a girl, and none at all for a boy who had been counting nights for a week and had told no one. Crispin had a bowl of porridge in front of him that morning, and he did not yet know it had a leaf in it.

Three days after the fence, Noëlle put one leaf of yarrow in my porridge and sat across the fire with her chin on her fists to watch me find it.

I found it on the second mouthful. It was bitter enough to fold my ears down. “Thank you,” I said, through my teeth, because I had promised to say it for a week of suppers and nobody had told me the week was over.

“The bet’s finished,” said Noëlle. “I just missed it.” She had her boots off and her feet tucked under her on the fur, in the cropped top and the torn shorts, and I was being careful about where I looked. The cloak with its cut hem hung on its peg. “Now be scary.”

“It’s... breakfast.”

“Villains eat breakfast. I heard you with the goblins, Crispin, and I’ve been thinking about it for days. One growl. A good one. Then I’ll leave you alone.”

“You won’t.”

“I won’t,” she agreed.

I put the spoon down and looked at the fire. I tried the hinge noise first, out of habit, and she shook her head at it. So I dropped my voice and let it come up from my chest, from the place it had come from in the ferns, and it came out low and even, and it kept going longer than I had planned.

Her grin stopped. She sat up straight on the fur with both hands flat on her knees, and the hair on her arms stood up.

“Okay,” she said. “That one’s real. Put it away.”

I put it away. My tail was thumping the floor. I was pleased, and I was also not, because it had come up easily from the same place as the hunger in the moss. I decided not to mention that.

“Fenris never washed a bowl in his life,” she announced, taking mine, “so that’s the one thing I’m changing today. I wash. You dry. And you have to look menacing while you do it.”

“I can’t... dry menacingly.”

“You can try.”

She pulled her boots on, and we took the bowls down to the stream along a track I could walk in my sleep. Halfway there, with no warning, she put the bowls in my arms and ran.

I set them on a stump, carefully, and I counted her a proper head start before I went after her. I still caught her before the alders. Catching her got easier every time, and I noticed that and did it anyway. I got an arm around her waist from behind and her boots left the ground, and she shrieked with laughter loud enough to empty every jay out of the trees. She turned around inside my arm, flushed and wheezing.

“You weren’t even trying.”

“I was... a bit.”

“Do the growl.”

I did it into her hair, quietly, because she was pressed up against me and there was nowhere else to put it. She made a small noise of her own that I am going to keep to myself, and then she hit me on the chest with both fists and said that was not fair. My tail was wound around her calf. I did not remember doing that.

I went back for the bowls. At the stream she washed and I dried, and I looked menacing at a bowl for her benefit. She flicked water at me and I flicked the cloth back at her. She stepped back onto a stone that wasn’t there. I grabbed for her, we both went over, and she came down on top of me in the shallows, both of us in the cold water, with her sitting across my lap.

Her top was soaked through and stuck to her. Her breasts showed through it. I looked at the alders with great interest.

“You’re looking at the trees,” said Noëlle. “It’s fine if you look at me.”

“I’m... looking at the trees.”

“Your tail is splashing everybody,” she said, delighted, and she was right. It was beating the water behind me. She put her wet forehead against my collarbone and laughed until she shook.

My tail stopped in the water before I knew why. My teeth had started to ache. It was a dull ache deep at the roots, at the back of my jaw, and it was always the first sign. My knees would start by tomorrow. I had not needed the sky to know what day of the month it was, but I had looked at the sky anyway, and the evening before, the moon had come up over the ridge while it was still light, fat and lopsided. There were only a few days left.

I had been meaning to tell her since the springs. I had also been meaning to tell her what I heard from the town on the walk home from the fence, which was not much. From people at the field’s edge, carried up through the trees, I had caught Béatrice’s name, the word wolf several times, a man laughing, and someone saying “with her own two eyes.” I had not heard the word warden, and I had listened for it every morning since, with my ears turned toward the town while she talked. I told myself that none of it meant anyone was coming.

I also told myself I would tell her about the moon once she had had one more good day. She kept having them. Nobody had ever seen me on those nights, and I could not stand the idea of watching her learn to be afraid of me. I know that was cowardice, and so do you.

She got up out of the water and wrung out the hem of her top, which did nothing. “Bramble leaves,” she said. “For Josette’s cough. I’ll leave them on the post. Come with—”

“Yes,” I said, before she had finished asking.

We left the bowls at the den, and she came out with her knife and her cloak. The brambles grew in a hollow where the beeches gave out and the ferns took over. Light came down through the leaves in patches, and it lay green on her arms. She had her cloak tied around her waist, and her boots were wet and squeaked. I walked behind her with my hands in my pockets, listening all around us, and I could not hear the town from there, so my ears came back around to her.

“Take the canes in the shade,” I said, when she reached for the sunny ones. “The leaves are better. They’re less... bitter.”

Noëlle stopped with her knife in her hand. “That’s what Nana says.”

My ears jumped before I could stop them. “Lots of people say it.”

“Do they,” said Noëlle, and went back to cutting.

She worked quickly, holding a cane steady with one hand and putting the knife through the stem with the other. I kept my eyes on the canes and my mouth shut, and I only half heard her say something about the tea and something else about a man at the university who had refused to believe that bramble was a medicine. A word I won’t repeat came next, and she shook her left hand and stood looking at the heel of her palm.

“Thorn,” she said. “It broke off short.”

From where I stood, a dark speck showed in the skin with a bead of red around it. She tried it with her fingernails, and the nails slid off.

“I do everyone’s hands,” she said. “I can’t do mine. I always wobble. Will you?”

I could not recall her ever asking me to do something for her that wasn’t for fun. She held the hand out between us, flat, with the knife hanging from her other hand by two fingers. The creases were stained with herbs and there was a pale nick at the base of the thumb. Her hand was a little dirty, and I would not have traded it for the forest.

I took her wrist and turned it to the light. My fingers were too thick, and I couldn’t get a grip on the end. “I’m going to use my teeth,” I said. “If that’s... can I?”

“Yes,” said Noëlle, so low that I turned an ear to catch it.

I bent over her hand. Her pulse was under my thumb, close to my mouth, and I looked for the hunger with everything I had, the wanting from the moss, the one that came up into my jaw and went for her shoulder. All I found was her hand, salt and resin, and me wanting to be exactly where I was. I was not sure the hunger had gone anywhere, and the moon was days off.

I closed my teeth on the end of the thorn, as gently as I know how, and drew it out. It came cleanly. I turned my head and spat it into the ferns, and pressed my thumb over the place until it stopped bleeding.

Noëlle went quiet. I looked up, because in all the days I had known her she had almost never let a silence go by without filling it. She was watching my mouth. A flush was rising from her collarbones, and she had forgotten about the knife. It dropped into the ferns.

My tail swung behind me and hit a bramble cane, which shook leaves down over both of us.

She laughed, helplessly, with her forehead dropping toward my shoulder. “Your tail is in the brambles.”

“It doesn’t feel it. It’s... fine.”

“Crispin.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I hadn’t asked anything.”

“I know.”

She put her good hand along my jaw and came up on her toes, and I came down to her at the same time, so we met in the middle and bumped noses. We both laughed into it. The second try worked.

Her mouth was warm, and she kissed me the way she did everything else, at once and with no plan, and I kissed her back like someone who had read about it. My ears were pinned back and I did not care who knew. Her hand with the thorn hole in it found my ear, and she held it, running her thumb up the edge, and I made a sound that I could not have stopped for money. She smiled against my mouth. My knees gave out and I sat down on a root, and she came with me, onto my lap in the leaves.

I had my hands at her back, on the bare skin where her top stopped. She pushed her fingers up through my hair and tilted my head to where she wanted it. Nobody had ever wanted my head anywhere in particular before, and my face got hot. My tail was around her boot, and the end of it was going so hard that the canes rattled over us.

She was the one who pulled back, with her breath short and her face pink to the roots of her hair. “Breathing,” she said. “I forgot. Hold on.” She was grinning. “Don’t move.”

“I’m not moving.”

“Your tail is.”

“I can’t help that.”

“I’m not asking you to.” She looked at me, her hand still on my ear, and some of the grin left her face. She meant this, and it frightened me. “Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

She kissed me again, and we stayed on the root for a good while. Her hand left my ear and came back. I kissed her jaw and her mouth, and the corner of it when she laughed. She put her cold nose into my neck and told me I was very good at this. I told her I wasn’t. She said she had a medical opinion. We lost track of the bramble leaves.

Somewhere in there I thought about the word. I had been walking around it for several days. It was in my chest, and I thought it once, all the way through, with her hair in my mouth, and then I refused it. In a few days the careful half of me would be gone, and I was not going to say that word to her while she didn’t know that.

When she finally leaned back, her mouth was red and her hair was wrecked. She laid her forehead against mine.

“I didn’t plan that,” she said.

“Neither did I.”

“I’m not sorry.”

“I’m not either.” I could say it without stopping, which surprised me. “I’d like to do it again.”

“Thank God.” She was laughing. “Your palms are cold.”

“It’s the stream.”

“It’s the stream,” she repeated, with enormous kindness, and bit my lip.

Her hand was bleeding again a little, where I had pressed. I took it and put my thumb over the spot, and I held it there. I had been rehearsing a sentence about the moon for days. It went, “The moon is closer than I said.” I opened my mouth to say it, with the light on her arms, and she kissed me before I could, and I let her.

My teeth ached the whole time. I counted the days again, with her hand back on my ear, and there were still too few.