Chapter 13: The Window

By the time the moon was up, the teller of every wolf story in Angeau had gone home and bolted the door, which is why the stories are so short on what happens after dark.

The forest had never minded an audience, and neither, it turned out, did the girl. Noëlle had been told since she could walk never to be among the trees at night, and she packed a water skin, a clean cloth and Nana’s jar of salve to go and be there. She believed she had brought everything the evening could need.

I worked it out before he told me, and I will confess that I worked it out slowly.

The kiss was two days behind us. On the first morning after it, Crispin came down the steps of the den one at a time with a hand on the wall, and when I asked, he said the steps were steep. He went up and down those steps twenty times a day. He ate three spoonfuls of porridge and said he was full. At the stream he rubbed his jaw with the heel of his hand every time he thought I wasn’t looking, and then he looked at the sky, which was empty and blue, and his ears went down. I decided he had a toothache and spent most of a morning planning how to pull a tooth.

On the second morning my hands got there before I did. I took his wrist to give him the bowl, and his forearm was hot as a hearth stone, with the muscle jumping under the skin. I know fever heat. I have put my palm on it in a hundred children, and this was not it.

The rain came back to me, and him saying I will into the dark when I asked him to tell me more tomorrow. That was more than a week ago.

“Crispin,” I said. “When is the moon?”

He put the bowl on the floor and took his hand off it slowly, in case it tipped over without him. His tail lay flat. “Tonight,” he said. “It comes up at dusk. I was going to tell you today.”

“Today is tonight.”

“Yes.”

I was angry. I would like to be honest about how long it lasted, which was one breath, in through my nose and out. Lying in his arms in the rain, I had asked him about the moon, and he had told me everything except how soon. I had also not counted a single night toward the moon, on purpose, and I knew it. The breath went out and the anger went with it, and the practical part of me was already making a list.

“Okay,” I said. “Water. Willow bark for the joints, I have some. Something you can keep down. Where do you go?”

“I have a place.” He looked at me, and then at the wall. “You stay here. The den’s the safest place in the forest. Pull the canes shut and stay in. I go out alone. I always go out alone.”

“No.”

“Please.”

“You can say no to me coming,” I said. “You get a vote. If it’s a real no, I’ll stay at the den, and I’ll hate it. But first tell me something.”

His ears pressed closer to his head. “What?”

“Are you scared I’ll get hurt, or are you ashamed?”

He rubbed his jaw. A long time passed. “Both,” he said. “Mostly the second. Nobody has seen it. Not once, not ever.”

“I don’t need a good view. You pick where. As far as you want. And if you tell me to leave, I leave.”

His tail moved on the floor, the barest curl of it, and stopped again. “There’s a shelf of rock,” he said, “over the clearing I use. One way up, a crack in the stone. It’s too narrow for me. For how I’ll be.” He swallowed. “Would that be... far enough?”

“It’s perfect.”

“Okay,” said Crispin, so low that I read it off his mouth. It was the smallest yes anyone has ever given me, and I took it in both hands.

We left in the afternoon. He walked stiffly, with his shoulders up, and I carried everything and talked most of the way, because talking was better than looking at his shoulders. I told him Nana would say to drink the willow and then eat, and his ears jumped, and I was too busy counting what was in my pockets to wonder about it. The clearing was deep in the forest, in a ring of big beeches, with the gray shelf of rock along one side. I went up the crack sideways with the water skin on my hip and the cloak on, and sat with my back against the stone and my boots over the edge.

The moon came up over the ridge as the sun went, huge and nearly round. Crispin took off his boots, stood them side by side at the edge of the grass, and walked out to the middle and looked at it with his whole face. His hands were already shaking.

“Noëlle.”

“I’m here.”

“Whatever you see, don’t come down.”

“I won’t.”

“Say it again.”

“I won’t come down,” I said, and I meant it, as I said it.

It started with his hands. He held them out in the moonlight and looked at them, and the bones got longer. The knuckles lifted, and the nails thickened and darkened and curved. I watched it joint by joint, like any injury, because that was the only way I could stand to watch at all. The wrist went first, and the elbow followed. A shoulder came out of its socket and went back in somewhere farther out, and the crack of it crossed the clearing. His spine did the same, again and again. I have set a shoulder. I know what it costs. He did not make a sound, and that was how I knew how bad it was.

His shirt split down the back. His jeans gave at the seams from thigh to knee. Black fur came up the backs of his arms and thickened across his shoulders and neck, and his ears, which I had held in my hands, grew and swung around to listen in every direction. I had thought the ears and the tail were him. They had been the edge of him showing, and the rest was arriving.

He was a head taller than me, and then two heads. He kept going. His back widened until it blocked the beeches behind him. When he turned his head his jaw had pushed out, and the teeth that had ached for days had come down long and white over his lip. His hands hung almost to his knees. His breathing carried to the shelf. Under the breathing was a lower sound that came up through the rock into my spine.

Every animal in earshot either bolted or went still. A deer I hadn’t known was there crashed off through the beeches, and after that the crickets quit, and so did the owl. That left me, and I had come here on purpose.

He went at the nearest beech and wrapped both arms around the trunk and held on. Bark peeled under his claws. He put his forehead against the wood and shook from head to heel, with his back to me. His tail hung straight down, as thick as my arm. After a while his arms came off the trunk. He dropped to his knees and drove both hands into the dirt to the wrists, and he held that too while the muscles of his back worked against nothing. My fingers were digging at the edge of the shelf, and I made them stop. A sound came out of his throat, low and shaking, the sound a person makes holding a door shut from the inside with his whole weight.

I had come up the rock with a speech. It started you’re not going to hurt anyone. I watched him fight, and the only thing he was fighting was himself, and it was nowhere near over.

It went on for hours. The moon crossed the gap in the beeches. Around the middle of the night I shut my eyes against the cold and still knew where he was, by the beech and then low to the ground, until he stopped moving for a long while and I opened them to check. He was still there. His breath had turned to a rasp. I have sat up with people who were burning through water faster than they could drink it, and I knew that sound. When he shifted, I could see that his hands were bleeding.

I have to admit what I did next. I told him I wouldn’t come down, and I went down the crack sideways, step by step, and I kept my word except for one water skin. I walked slowly out from the foot of the rock, as far as the nearest beech root, and set the skin on it with the stopper out. That was all. I started to back away.

His head came up. The sound stopped.

He turned around. I had been looking at his back for hours, and this was the front. He stood all the way up and his head came past the middle of the rock, with black fur silver at the edges where the moon hit it. The face was his. That was what I looked for first, and it was there under the heavy jaw, in the set of the mouth. He looked at me.

I didn’t run, and it wasn’t courage, because my legs were not taking suggestions. The smell of him reached me, hot and strong, and my heart was going so hard it hurt. He took one step toward me, and it came up through the ground into my boots. He stopped with his weight on the front foot, and all of him shook, and he took the step back. He crossed his arms over his chest and dug his own claws into his ribs. With his back to me, he walked to the beech and put his arms around it again.

I went back up the crack with my hands shaking, and I said his name from the shelf. The voice was the one I use on frightened people, and I used it each time his arms tightened on the tree. I can’t tell you it helped, but each time the ear nearest me turned, and the end of his tail moved.

Somewhere in there my hands stopped shaking. I looked at them in the moonlight, and I couldn’t have said when it had happened.

What I worked out then, I worked out with my back against cold stone and my hands tucked under my arms. Almost everyone I have ever known needed something from me. The town needed my hands. Mother needed me settled. Gaspard needed me on a shelf in his house. Even Crispin had needed me, to bandage him and bring his supper. He didn’t need me for this. He could have walked through the whole valley that night and nobody could have stopped him, not Gaspard, not a hundred wardens, and he had spent hours with his face against a tree so he wouldn’t cross a clearing to me. There was nothing I could carry for him and nothing I could fix. The strongest thing I had ever seen needed nothing from me. It wanted to keep its hands to itself, and I could stand beside it.

I’d love to say I stayed on that rock in spite of what he was. The plain true thing is that the size of him was the reason. I thought: oh. It’s you. You’re the biggest thing in this forest and you’re holding on to a tree so you won’t hurt me. And I love you.

I said it only in my head, to the stone, and then I said his name again.

The moon went down behind the trees. The sky over the beeches got light, and the first sound to come back was one bird a long way off, and then the crickets. I counted his breaths from the shelf, as I would at any bedside, and they slowed. He got smaller, which went faster than the growing had. He dropped onto his side in the flattened grass in the shreds of his jeans, and he lay there with his arms over his head.

I waited until the birds were all going. I said his name, and from the grass came a croak I could barely hear. “Still... here.”

I took off the cloak and went down. The water skin was on its root with the stopper out, and he hadn’t touched it. I picked it up on the way. The grass was wet, and he was lying where he had dropped, with a boy’s shoulders and his ribs going in and out under the marks his own claws had left. He had a long red line down each arm from holding the beech. His eyes were shut.

“You can go,” he said. “If you’re going, go now. It’s light enough to walk.” His ears were pinned against his skull and his whole body was braced, flat in the grass, for me to be gone.

“Your hands are disgusting,” I said, and sat down next to him.

I looked at the hands before I looked at his face. I always do, and I’m not sorry. Three nails were split to the quick, and the heel of the left was laid open and packed with black dirt. I laid the cloak over his shoulders, and it was warm when it touched him, warmer than wool has any right to be after a night in the cold. I told myself that was me.

I poured water over his left hand and he flinched. “Hold still,” I said.

He held still. I worked the dirt out of the cut with the corner of the cloth and spread Nana’s salve over it, and then I took the other hand. His tail lay in the grass behind him, and halfway through the second hand it moved, once, along the ground toward my knee.

“You came down,” said Crispin, to the sky.

“Once. For a water skin.”

“I saw you.” He opened his eyes at last, and they went to my face and stayed there. “I turned around, and I saw you, and I wanted... Noëlle, in the moss. When I wanted to bite you. It wasn’t a game.”

“I know now.”

“Tonight. Every minute of it.”

“I know. I watched you hold the tree.”

His ears came up an inch and stopped. I kept my hands moving, wrapping the cloth around his palm, and my voice was perfectly ordinary. “You stepped back. You had your claws in your own ribs. I’m right here.”

“It isn’t over.” He said it carefully. “Two more nights. It’s less, after the first. But it comes back at moonrise.”

“Then I’ll bring more water.”

“Why?” It was barely a sound. “How can you...”

“Because I watched you all night,” I said. “And I’d do it again.”

His tail, which had gone as far as my knee, curled around it and held on.

“Will you be on the shelf?” he said.

“Tomorrow night, and the one after. Same shelf.”

I didn’t say the other thing. He had enough to carry for one morning, and I had a bandage to tie. I sat there in the first light with his torn hand in my lap and his eyes on my face, as scared and wrecked as a person can be, and I looked at him and thought, there you are. I had walked into those woods looking for a lot of things, and I had called them herbs. I was in love with him, and I was not going anywhere.