Chapter 2: Where It Hurts

A wolf who was found by a girl in a red cloak knew exactly what he was supposed to do. Every version of the story agreed on it, down to the teeth, and not one of them had ever asked the wolf whether he wanted the job.

The valley had its own rule for what a person does when she meets ears like his, and it was a short one: she screams, and then she runs for the wardens. People had been doing it for as long as he had been alive, and he had grown so used to it that he planned his minutes around it.

He was slumped in the mud under a beech tree with a hole in his side, listening to a girl in red walk back toward him through the rain, and he had the next minute arranged down to the last detail. He was wrong about nearly all of it.

I heard her coming a long time before I heard her stop. I’m telling you that because what happened next makes it sound like I never heard her coming, and I did. They are the one part of me I would call dependable, which is a strange thing to say about two pieces of me I spend most of my days trying to keep pinned to my skull.

She was loud, for one thing. Boots crunched on leaf mold, and once, a long way back, a girl told a plant it was not supposed to exist. Don’t laugh. I had been bleeding against that beech for most of an hour, and a stranger being delighted at a fern was so far from anything I expected to hear that I decided I was making it up. The light under the trees was getting green, which I know from experience is not a good color for light to get.

I’ll skip how I got the cut. It took a goblin raider with a knife shorter than my hand and some very poor decisions on my part about where to stand. It looked worse than it was, and it was bad enough.

When she took the left fork, I was relieved. A girl with a basket goes left, toward the proper path and the proper end of her day, and I stay a rumor in a ditch, which is the arrangement I have always preferred. I listened to her take eleven steps away from me, and I let my breath out, or tried to. The cut pulled, and a small, wet noise got out before I could stop it. I would have taken it back with both hands.

Her boots stopped.

I held perfectly still, which is a skill I have, and it did me no good. The silence lasted about as long as it takes to decide something. After it, the boots came back, slowly, one careful step at a time, and from there it would go the way it had gone my entire life.

Someone sees the ears. There is a small sharp breath in, and then either a scream or a run, and the run is usually toward the nearest warden’s post. I have never let the wardens get close enough to write my name in their book or dose me from their little brown bottles, the ones that are supposed to make the moon matter less, and I have kept to the deep woods my whole life so they never would. I have never hurt anyone. I want to say that plainly. I have not hurt anyone in twenty years, and I have arranged every month of those years around not hurting anyone, and it has never once mattered, because the screaming is for what I am, and I was born that.

So I kept my eyes shut. I’d like to say it was the pain. Honestly, it was cowardice. If I didn’t see her face change, it hadn’t changed yet, and I could hold on to the last second of somebody not having decided about me.

I had a sentence ready, naturally. I always do. It was “Sorry, I’ll go,” and I had been polishing it for years, and I could not stand up, so it was also a lie. That never stopped me from having it ready.

Her boots stopped again, at the lip of the hollow. Rain dripped off the edge of her hood and the basket handle creaked, and I breathed in through my nose and braced, because fear has a smell. It’s sour and sharp, and it has been coming off people ever since I was old enough to be looked at. I waited for it.

I smelled wet wool and crushed fern, with yarrow and honey from the basket.

There was nothing sharp in it at all. Her heart was going at a walk, slow and level, and I lay there with my ears pinned and my tail lying still in the dirt and could not make that fit anywhere.

Wicker creaked against wet leaves as she set the basket down. Wool shifted. The rain quit hitting me, and for a second I honestly thought it had stopped, until she knelt beside me and a weight settled over my shoulders and my legs, warm, warmer than a cloak had any business being. She had opened the whole thing out and pulled it across both of us.

It smelled faintly of woodsmoke and lavender.

She did not gasp, and she did not say “oh.” She said, in the voice of someone asking whether I wanted the window open, “Okay. Hi. Where does it hurt?”

I opened one eye, which was a mistake.

She was right there under the edge of the hood, close enough that the rain on the wool made a little roof over our heads. Her dark hair was half out of its tie and she had a crease between her brows. She was looking at my ears the way people look at a bird they can’t name, with her whole attention, and not one bit of what I had been braced for.

It was the first time in my life that had happened, and I was a ridiculous thing to have it happen to, slumped in a ditch with my tail in a puddle.

I noticed the rest of her a moment later, and I am not going to pretend I didn’t. She had big eyes and wet hair coming down around her face, and there was a great deal of leg, which I mention because she had walked into the forbidden forest, past a goblin camp, in denim shorts cut so high and so ragged at the hem that calling them jeans would have been generous. She was getting mud all over her bare knees, and when she had leaned over to set the basket down, a thin string had ridden up over the waistband at her hip. My ears were getting hot, and my tail would have done something about it if I had let it. I looked at her face for a good while after that, and it did not help as much as I had hoped.

“I’d like the worst of it first,” she said. “I know it’s all of it. Pick the worst.”

I had a whole speech ready for her screaming. I had nothing at all ready for that.

She cut my shirt open with a small knife she took off her belt, and I flinched so hard my head knocked against the root.

I did not mean to. It happened before I could stop it, my chin dropping and my face turning away with my eyes squeezed shut, and I stayed there with my whole body waiting for whatever came next. That is what my body does when a hand moves fast near me. It has had practice.

She stopped. Her hand stayed in the air, and I could hear that it did. She didn’t say “I’m not going to hurt you,” which I would have hated. She said, “Cold hands. I’ll warm them,” and I heard her rub her palms together once, briskly.

When she touched me again, it was slow, and it was flat against the skin below the wound, and her hands were warm. My tail, rigid in the dirt since the flinch, let go a little.

“There we go,” she said. “That’s better. Do you want to tell me your name, or would you rather I just keep calling you ‘you’? Either is fine. Mine’s Noëlle. I should have led with that.”

“Crispin,” I said. It came out as half a croak. I tried again. “Crispin. I’m... sorry about this. About the mud. And...” My ears went flatter, which I hadn’t known they could. “The ears. And the tail, and the... I have teeth, as well. I’ll keep them to myself.”

I said that out loud. A girl had knelt in the mud to save me from bleeding to death, and I apologized to her for my teeth.

“Oh, don’t be silly,” Noëlle said, and she said it so absently that I didn’t at first understand it was an answer. She was already peeling the shirt back from the cut. “You’re going to have to move your hand, though. I need to see.”

I moved my hand. She went quiet for exactly as long as it took to look, and I waited for it, the sharp breath, the flinch of her own. She leaned in closer instead and said, “Mm. Okay. Long, but it’s clean. It went across and not in, so it missed everything that would have mattered.”

I waited for the next question. There is always a next question, and it always comes in a lower voice, and it always starts with “what.” She asked whether I was warm enough under the cloak instead, and I said yes, and she said good, and neither of us said the word for what I was. I kept waiting for it anyway, with my ears turned toward her, and every time she opened her mouth I got ready, and every time she only told me something about the fern.

She talked the whole time she worked, and I have gone back over this since, because I think she did it on purpose. She told me she’d had a fever on her hands that afternoon, a six-year-old who said the ceiling was moving, and that she had been so glad to get out of the house that she’d forgotten to be careful and walked straight into a fern she had never seen. She told me about the fern. The spore cases were in two neat rows, which they are not supposed to be. She had been unbearable about it, she said, and she planned to go on being unbearable, and I was lying there leaking on a root and in no position to stop her.

She wrung out the cloth the jars had been wrapped in, held it out past the edge of the cloak until the rain had rinsed it, and washed the wound with it, quickly and thoroughly, and I bit down on the inside of my cheek and said nothing. She packed the cut with yarrow, which she chewed first. That was the quickest way, she said, and no, I should not think about it. Honey went over that, the good honey, thick and gold, and she said she knew it was a ridiculous waste of honey and her Nana would say so, and then go straight out and find more.

My ears came up at that word before I could stop them. I covered it by coughing.

If she saw, she kept it to herself. She opened one of the jars, and the hollow filled with the smell of resin and beeswax, and I shut my eyes, because I knew that smell. I knew it from before I could remember being anybody.

“Salve,” she said, smoothing it over the honey with two fingers. “It’s Nana’s. She swears it’s the only thing that works on her hip, and she’s right. If she hears I spent it on a boy, she’ll want to know all about him.”

I did not have a single thing to say to that.

Hands had been on me before, and they had always wanted something. Hands that wanted nothing from me were so long ago I had nearly forgotten them. This was a girl I had only just met, and she was dabbing honey into a hole in my side and humming under her breath, and she touched me carefully, with no hurry in it, and I did not know where to put any of it.

She slid two fingers under my jaw to check my pulse, and I stopped breathing.

“Fast,” she said. “But good and strong. You’re doing great.”

“I’m not. I’m lying in a ditch.”

“You’ve bled on a root in the rain and been polite to me through all of it. That’s doing great.” She tore the cloth into strips and tied one around my ribs, firm and neat, and sat back on her heels. “You’re going to be fine, Crispin. I mean it. It’ll hurt like anything for a few days, and you’ll have a scar to be unbearable about at parties, but you’re going to be fine.”

My tail thumped against the dirt.

It was one beat, loud as a dropped boot, and it came straight out of the middle of me before my mouth got a vote. I lay there blushing from the neck up and stared at the underside of her cloak, because I could think of nothing else to do.

She looked at the tail, and then at me, and one corner of her mouth went up and she tried very hard to put it back.

“That doesn’t mean anything,” I said.

“Okay.”

“It does that. It’s not... I didn’t tell it to.”

“I’m going to take it as a good review,” said Noëlle, “and not ask a single follow-up question, and you can thank me later.” And she went back to wrapping the strips, with her head bent, humming again, blushing to the tips of her ears under the hair she had shoved back.

“Sorry,” I said anyway, to the roof of the cloak.

“That’s two.”

“I wasn’t counting...”

“I was,” she said. “I’m keeping a list. You’re the first patient who ever apologized to me for his teeth, so you’re winning.”

I stayed quiet after that, because my chest was tight and I did not trust it. I have spent my whole life waiting for kindness to turn, and I have gotten good at spotting the exact moment before it does. It’s the small pause, or the hand that comes down a little too fast. I watched her hands and her face, braced for it, and it did not come. She finished the bandage, wiped her palms on her shorts, and settled in beside me under the red wool, in no hurry to leave.

She was not afraid of me. I had gone through the whole list of reasons it could be true, that she was a fool, that she was planning to fetch somebody once I was patched, and none of them had a smell on them. She had been close enough to count my eyelashes, and her scent was honey and plain concentration.

And now that she had stopped, now that the bandage was on and the pain had a floor under it, the other thing started.

It began under the wound, low and slow, a heat that was not hers and not the cloak’s. It crept outward along my ribs and up behind my eyes, and my ears gave a small involuntary twitch against my skull. I knew exactly what it was. Noëlle’s fingers came back to my jaw, light, and her breath changed.

“Okay,” she said, quicker than before. “That’s your body getting on with it. Let’s get you somewhere dry before it gets any worse.”

I opened my mouth to say there was a place, not far, I had a place, and I didn’t know what to call it except a den. I would have to say the word den to a girl in a red cloak.

I closed my mouth again. The heat climbed one more notch, and I let it, and I was almost grateful, because it gave me a perfectly good reason my eyes were stinging.