Chapter 15: Insatiable

In the story, the girl never stayed in the forest long enough for the weather to change. She was caught, or she was eaten, or she was home by supper, and in every telling the leaves stayed as green as they had been when she went in.

Noëlle had been in the woods a good deal longer than supper. She had stopped counting somewhere in the high heat and was rather proud of it, and she had not looked up lately at the maple on the ridge above the den, where one branch was red at the tips. Nobody had pointed it out to her. The almanac in her mother’s kitchen could have, but it hung on a nail a long walk away.

I’ll say it first so it doesn’t sound like an accident: I lost count of the days, and I did it on purpose. Until the lair I could have told you the day of the week. After it I couldn’t have told you the week of the month, and I didn’t want anyone asking.

The bite is how I can say it was a good while at all. It scabbed as I told Crispin it would, and the scab lifted at the edges and came away in the stream, and under it the skin had grown back in a ring of small pink dents. I touched it over breakfast and whenever he said something sweet. It had stopped hurting. It itched when it was healing and got warm when he walked into the room, and I am a healer, so I know those are two different complaints.

The rest of what it did to me was louder than the mark. From the nest I could hear the water under the hill running downhill in the dark toward the stream, and I fell asleep to it. One evening I told Crispin it would rain at suppertime tomorrow, with the sky clear to the last star, because I could smell it coming from a long way off. He looked at me and went out and smelled the air and came back shaking his head. The next day it rained at suppertime. He was proud of me, which I had no defense against.

I could find my way in the dark. I woke up wanting water one night and walked to the stream with no light, and every root was where I knew it would be. When I came back he was sitting up in the nest with his ears forward, because he had heard me go and known which step I was on.

Plants told me things through my hands. I put my palm on the birch by the stream and found that it was hollow low on the north side and hurt there, the way a belly is tender before the patient says anything. I cleared the rot out of the hollow with my knife and felt silly and did it again the next evening. I can’t explain it better than that. It was mine, and I stopped asking it for reasons.

I always knew where he was. With my eyes shut at the foot of the steps I could tell he was at the stream, one hand up behind his ear, scratching it. I had no use for knowing that, and I checked on it all day.

The moon came around once in all that. I sat on the shelf for three nights and he held on to the tree, and in the mornings I did his hands. We were getting good at it. I am not going to tell you it was nothing.

And we couldn’t stop. I would like to say we tried.

Three mornings running I woke him with my hand on his cock, and the fourth morning he was up on one elbow before I got there. “Good morning,” he said, in the voice of a man bracing himself, and his ears were already pink at the rims, and he was the one who pulled me down. He blushes first, every time, and then he’s on me so eagerly that I have never once had to wait.

We did it twice at the stream and once against a beech with my shorts hanging off one ankle, and that time a jay began shouting at us and I laughed so hard that Crispin had to hold me up by the thighs.

The stream was a game. He caught me on the bank, which I let him do, and pinned me to an alder by the waist and said, in his Fenris voice, with his ears folded down, “I have you.”

“You do,” I said. “What’s the toll?”

“There’s no toll.”

“There is now. Fenris would just take it, so you have to bargain with me. I’m very good at it.” I offered a kiss for my freedom and two for his shirt, and he said yes to everything before I finished, and I had to explain that a bargain was supposed to be hard. We did it again the next day, so he could practice.

He had lived on porridge and whatever went in the pot. In the legend Fenris fed Scarlet raw kills, so the first night after the lair I told him the new version had the wolf cooking something for me on purpose. He caught a fish with his bare hands, which he said was not a talent, and burned it black on a flat stone, and served it with both ears down. I ate all of it. By the end of the week he had stopped burning them.

The best night was the one where I changed the whole legend.

We had eaten. The fire was low and the furs were warm, and I sat across from him with my knees pulled up, looking at him until his ears got pink.

“Tell me what Fenris did,” I said. “With her. In the lair.”

He looked at the fire. “He... took what he wanted. When he wanted it. She didn’t get a say.”

“Right. So tonight you’re Fenris, and I’m changing it. The wolf sits against the wall and doesn’t touch me.”

“That isn’t what he did.”

“That’s the change. Go on.” I pointed at the cushions. “Hands flat on the fur.”

He went and sat. He put his hands flat on the furs on either side of him, and he was already pink to the collar. “Okay,” he said. “Can I... how long?”

“Until I say.” I pulled my top over my head and dropped it on him. It landed on his face, and he took it off very slowly, with great dignity, and put his hand back on the fur. I took the shorts and the thong off standing up, one leg and then the other, and I was in no hurry, because I could hear his breathing change. “Are you looking?”

“I’m looking.”

I knelt over his legs and kissed his neck, below the jaw, where I knew it made his ears go back. His hands pushed into the furs up to the wrist. His tail was another matter. It had been lying on the floor behind him, and it came up and wrapped itself around my calf and held on.

“That’s touching,” I said.

“It does what it wants!” He sounded wounded. Without lifting either hand he shifted his weight, got the tail under himself and sat on it. It was out again before I had finished laughing, and wrapped around my ankle this time, and he shut his eyes.

“Fine, the tail can stay,” I said. “Hands still count.”

I undid his jeans, since he wasn’t allowed to, and took his cock in my hand, and he made a noise I wanted to hear again immediately. He was hot and hard against my palm. I rubbed my pussy along him, wet, without letting him inside, and he said my name through his teeth, and the hide creaked under his fists. “Okay?” he said, with his hands still nailed down.

“Yes. God, yes. Stay still.” I sank down on him all at once, and we both swore. He was so deep inside me that I stopped, to breathe, with my forehead against his. His ears had pinned back and his tail was cinched around my leg, so the only part of him allowed to move was his chest. I rocked up and down, slowly, with my hands on his shoulders, and then faster. His mouth came open. I told him what a good wolf he was, and he tried to laugh, and it came out as a growl.

“Please,” he said. “Noëlle... please, can I...”

“Hands.”

They were on my hips before the word was finished, and he lifted me and pulled me down on him, hard, and I yelled. I rode him until my thighs shook. The mark throbbed warm in my shoulder, and I could hear the water under the hill running faster. I came with my fingers dug into his hair, and he came right after me with his teeth set on my collarbone, carefully, and not on the mark. He held me while I came down, and his tail still hadn’t let go of my ankle.

“Best Fenris ever,” I said into his neck.

“That’s... a low bar,” he said, and I laughed against him until the furs shook.

Later, with my feet in his lap and the fire down to coals, I saw the basket.

It was in the corner by the steps, where I had left it the last time I took anything out of it, with the cloth tied over the top. I had walked past it so many times that I had stopped seeing it. That night I let myself smell it. I untied the cloth. The elderflower was limp and musty, and the honey was down to a sticky ring in its jar. The jar of salve for Nana’s hip wasn’t there, because it was in my pocket, half gone, and I had used it on Crispin’s ribs and Béatrice’s hand. I got up, naked, and carried the basket across the floor to the shelf, where I put it behind the pinecones so I couldn’t see it from the nest.

I stood there for a moment with my hand on the stone.

I had not thought about her hip in I don’t know how long, and that shamed me more than being late. Nana had patched me up at every age I had been, and I had gone weeks without once asking myself if she could get out of a chair. I should have gone. I had been meaning to go every single day, and every day I hadn’t, partly because of him and partly because of Gaspard, who had said he would see to Crispin himself, and the wardens, who were still out there to the south. Mother’s Sunday was so far behind me that I couldn’t have said how many more had followed it.

“You went quiet,” said Crispin, behind me. He had sat up.

“I’m fine. It’s only Nana’s basket.” It came out too fast, and I heard it. His ears jumped and came down, and he looked at the floor.

“We can go. Any time you say. I’ll take you as far as you want.”

“Tomorrow,” I said. I had been saying tomorrow for a long time.

I got back into the nest, and he pulled the fur over my feet. Nobody in that den needed anything from me. He did not need his ribs bandaged or a fever broken. He wanted me to lie there and say silly things, and his ears came forward when I did, and that was all it was. I had spent twenty years trying to be useful enough to be kept, and here I was being kept for doing nothing. I took it and did not give it back.

The light changed first.

We had walked up the ridge in the afternoon for no reason except that I wanted to walk with him. By the top, the shadows of the trunks lay across the path much longer than they should have been at that hour. The sun came in low between the trees and lit the ferns from the side, at a slant I hadn’t seen since spring.

I hadn’t thought of myself as the town’s cupboard in weeks. I thought it now to try it, and it was only a word. I wanted to tell him that much. What I kept to myself was that I did not want the summer to end. I was supposed to be back at the university by autumn, and I hadn’t thought about that in weeks either. I wanted this summer. I wanted exactly this path, with him a stride behind and a little to the left, and I couldn’t have said that out loud to anyone alive.

The ground answered me as we went, if that’s the word. I knew a root would hold before I stepped on it, and I went around a stretch of moss because it was over wet ground, and when I pressed the edge of it with my boot, water came up. A low branch crossed the path, and I had ducked before I saw it. The brambles along the ridge had taken a good deal of skin off my shins in the past. This time I put my feet where the canes weren’t, a half-step early, the way I know where a patient is going to flinch, and my cloak slid through the whole thicket without one of them catching it.

“Nothing’s caught you all afternoon,” said Crispin. His tail was up.

“I know.”

“I’m... only saying.”

“You’re proud of me.”

“Yes.” He said it straight out, without a pause, and then his ears went back anyway.

On the shady side of the ridge the air was cold enough that I tied the cloak at my throat. The evenings had been starting a little sooner for days, and I had decided not to notice.

There was a maple leaf on the path, lying face up in the dirt, with the edges red and the middle still green. It had come down from the maple over our heads, with no wind to knock it loose.

He bent and picked it up before I could. He held it out on his flat palm, and his ears had come forward to look at it too.

“It’s early,” he said.

“It’s one leaf.”

“I know.”

I took it. I turned it over, and the underside was paler than the top, and I put it in my pocket with the string, the knife and Nana’s jar, where I keep the things I mean to deal with later. He took my hand, and I let him, and we went on along the ridge together with the light coming in lower through the trees. I told myself it was one leaf, and I walked a little faster.