Chapter 22: Roses Out of Season
Chapter 22: Roses Out of Season
In all that time her cloak never tore. The thorns slid from it, and the dark did not keep to it, and the Wolf's own claws turned aside from the red.
— the Old Wolves' telling
There is a cottage in the deep wood that the wood has agreed not to mention, and roses climb its thatch in every month the roses have been told to stay in bed. Angeau has a song about the place that gets the chimney wrong. Nobody who sings it has walked far enough in to be corrected.
A wolf had come to that door more times than he could count and had never once knocked. He knew the step by heart and the path by smell, and over a great many winters he had made himself a promise that he would not be seen there by the girl who spent her summers inside. The promise was about to meet the girl.
Crispin smelled the house a long time before he saw it: cinnamon and beeswax and old leather, and under them the green sweetness of roses that had no business blooming this late in the year. His ears were pinned by then. Noëlle walked ahead of him with the basket on her arm and her cloak swinging, talking about Nana’s hip, Nana’s winters, and how much trouble she was in over the honey. He let her talk, because as long as she did he did not have to.
She was, it should be said, telling him a great many things about her grandmother that he already knew. He had been letting her do it all summer. It was the longest lie he had ever told, and he had told it entirely by nodding.
The trees opened, and there it was, low and crooked under a thatch heavy with roses. Smoke rose from the chimney from a fire that looked to have been lit a moment before they arrived. He stopped at the edge of the clearing. He had stopped at exactly that spot more times than he would ever admit, and every one of those times he had turned around.
“Come on,” said Noëlle, holding out her free hand without looking. “She doesn’t bite. She feeds.”
That was the whole trouble. His tail dropped straight down against his heels.
The door opened before they reached the step.
Nobody in Angeau had ever seen that door open before a visitor knocked, because nobody in Angeau visited. The roses could have told them it happened often.
Nana was smaller than he remembered and straighter than she had any right to be, in a gray shawl with her sleeves pushed to the elbow and flour on one wrist. She looked at Noëlle for the length of a breath, and her mouth tightened and let go. “You’re late,” she said. Her eyes moved to him. “Crispin. You’ve grown again. Come here and let me look at you.”
He had rehearsed a great many greetings for that door over the years. Not one of them had allowed for her going first.
Noëlle had her mouth open to introduce him. She shut it, and then she opened it again. “Nana, this is Crispin, he’s... You said his name.”
“I did.”
“I hadn’t said it yet.”
“You were about to, and I’m too old to stand in my own door while somebody works up to it.”
He had rehearsed this for the whole summer, in order, with reasons. What came out was “Hello,” and his tail hit the doorpost with one thump, loud enough to settle the matter of whether he had been too nervous to knock.
Noëlle looked at the tail. She looked at his ears, and at Nana, and at him again, while he watched it arrive in her face one piece at a time.
“The salve,” she said.
“Noëlle...”
“The first day. You smelled it on my hands in the ditch and your ears shot up and you went red, and I thought you had a fever.” She pointed at him. “Every time I said Nana your ears jumped. I thought it was a nervous condition. You told me shade canes have less bitter leaves. That’s what she says. You know her.”
“I know her.” It came out firm, which surprised him. “I knew whose granddaughter you were before you got your boots out of the mud. I smelled the salve and I knew, and I let you tell me about her all summer, and I said nothing. I hid it, and I’m sorry. She fed me.”
Noëlle’s hand dropped. “She what?”
“When I was small. Nobody in the valley would feed me, and she left a bowl on the back step in the winters, when you were down in Angeau. For years I took it, and the bowl always smelled of her salve, and she never said a word to me. In the summers I stayed away, so you wouldn’t see me.” His ears were as flat as they had ever been. “I should have told you in the den. I should have told you in the ditch.”
He braced for her to be hurt. She hit his arm with the back of her hand instead, laughing hard enough to shake the basket. “You let me explain Nana to you,” she said. “Twice! You nodded!”
“I did.”
All summer she had kept refusing to be the thing he braced for. He was beginning to think he ought to stop bracing, and he had no idea how.
“I’m still deciding whether to be furious.” She turned on Nana. “And you. You knew. All summer, you knew.”
“I know most things,” said Nana. “Come in. The tea is stewing, and I won’t have it spoiled for a quarrel.”
This was true, and it was also the most irritating thing a grandmother can say, and she was well aware of both.
Inside it was exactly as it smelled: candlelight on fur-lined chairs, a hearth that looked newly lit, rugs worn to the weave. Nana took the basket from Noëlle and lifted the cloth. She picked out the yarrow and turned it over. “Cut at the knee. Good girl.” She took out the honey jar, held it to the window, and found nothing in it but a gold ring.
“I ate it,” said Noëlle at once. “Well, we did. It was a long week, and the basket got left, and it’s weeks late, and I’m—”
“It was honey. It was for eating. I would have worried if it came back full.” Nana set the jar on the sill. “I said before the weather turned, and the weather has not turned. You are exactly on time.”
She sat them at the table and poured three cups. She gave his first. He took it in both hands, because he did not trust one hand with how he felt.
Nobody had ever served him first. Nobody had served him at a table at all. He held the cup and looked at the steam and was afraid that if he looked at anything else he would do something about it.
“Nana,” said Noëlle. “What happened? A real answer.”
“You told me in the spring you would bring the salve. Your mother had a supper planned for a Sunday, with a boy you didn’t care for.” Nana blew across her tea. “I knew you wouldn’t hurry home to that supper. You’d take the long way, and the long way goes by a certain den. I let you promise me that basket for that week.”
“You sent me on purpose.”
“I sent the herbs. You walked.”
In the stories Angeau tells, the grandmother is eaten, or bedridden, or both, and she waits at the end of the path for things to happen to her. It had not occurred to anybody in Angeau to put one in a story who did the arranging.
Noëlle’s hand went to the edge of the cloak. “And this?”
“I stitched it for the deep woods, and it did what I stitched it for.” Nana did not smile at that. She did something in the corner of her mouth. “That is all I will say about wool.”
He put the cup down, because it had started to ring against the saucer. “Why?” he said. “Why did you feed me? You knew what I was. You knew whose I was.”
“I knew whose boy you were. So did everyone in this wood.” She looked at him with her head tilted, which was how she used to look at him over the edge of the step, deciding whether he would eat. “Fenris’s blood. You have carried that name twenty years like a stone in your boot, and I let you, because it wasn’t the day to take it out.”
“It’s a curse.”
“It is the old wolves’ line, love. It kept this forest long before anyone made a story about it. The lair and the tree and the springs and the ring of standing stones answer to that blood, and you’ve noticed they answer to you.” She set her cup down. “And the line that stood beside it, to keep the other half, was mine. It is Noëlle’s. The two were one thing once. They were meant to be joined by asking, and Fenris took what was meant to be given. He took it with chains and called it a bride.”
Noëlle was holding perfectly still, which for her was a loud thing to do.
“So the brambles,” she said. “Nothing catches me. The cloak. The forest moving.”
“That is us,” said Nana. “It is rather a lot, and you may be cross about it after supper.” She turned to him. “These two asked each other. In a lair, in a hollow, in front of a field of torches. That is the only way it ever worked. The blood you were ashamed of is the reason somebody could ask you properly.”
He could not keep his face still. It tried an expression and gave it up and tried another. His ears went up, flat, and up, and his tail had wound around the leg of his chair and was dragging it across the floor. “It made me the one who could do it right,” he said. It came out hoarse. “That’s what you’re saying.”
“I am saying you stopped at a fence for a week. Drink your tea.”
He drank it. His hands shook so that some went down his chin, and Noëlle reached over without a word and wiped it off with her thumb.
For twenty years the name had been the worst thing about him. It had taken a grandmother something under a quarter of an hour, between pours, to turn it over and show him the other side. He did not know yet what to do with the other side. He held on to the cup.
“You arranged all of it,” Noëlle said to Nana, and her voice cracked in the middle, outraged and delighted at once. “You put us in the same ditch.”
“I put a girl on a path. The ditch was nobody’s idea.” Nana lifted the teapot and filled all three cups again. “Well, I won’t say it twice. May the pair of you be happy and well fed and left alone, and may the roses keep for you. There.”
Noëlle’s mouth fell open. “We haven’t even—”
“I was speaking to the kettle.”
“Nana.”
“It is an old kettle. It likes to hear things.” She put a heel of bread in front of each of them and sat down, entirely pleased with herself.
It is not recorded what the kettle made of it.
His face was hot to the tips of his ears. Under the table, Noëlle’s boot found his and stayed. It slid up the inside of his ankle while she asked Nana a perfectly sensible question about the hip, and he answered “Yes” to a question nobody had put to him. Nana, without turning her head, moved the bread closer to his hand, which was no help at all.
“Mother sent a hello,” said Noëlle, after a while, in a smaller voice. “She said to tell you she’s well.”
“Did she.” Nana turned her cup on the saucer. “Then she is learning. Tell her I said hello, and that I am well, and that we shall see which of us is lying first.”
“I will not say that.”
“You will say it nicely.” Her gaze came across the table to him, and it was not a joke anymore. “The moon is full in a week, Crispin.”
“I know.”
“I know you know. I have watched you walk off to a beech every month since you were this high, and hold it until the bark came off in your hands.” She tapped the table once. “Don’t, this time. Take her to the standing stones.”
His ears flattened against his head. “The ring is where they...”
“Where they did a terrible thing, yes, and it has been waiting a hundred years for somebody to do a different one.”
A hundred years is a long time for anything to wait, even a stone. Crispin had not known that anything had been waiting for him at all.
“I’ll come,” said Noëlle.
“I know you will,” said Nana. “Eat your bread.”
They stayed two days at the cottage because Nana would not hear otherwise. She fed him at the table like anyone else, and he did not cry in front of her more than twice.
On the second night Noëlle came to him. Nana had put them in the loft room on two narrow cots with a wall between, so he lay awake listening to the floor, which creaked in three places. Nana had known which three since before either of them was born. Noëlle stepped over all of them. The blanket lifted, and she slid in cold from the boards, wearing only her shirt, and put her mouth against his ear. “Not a sound.”
“She has been awake since I was born,” he whispered.
“So be quiet.”
She pulled his shirt over his head before he could argue. He caught it by the hem; she took his wrists and set them on the mattress, one and then the other, and looked at him by the light from the window, all of him, while his face burned to the roots of his hair and his tail curled round the bedpost to cover what it could. “Stop hiding,” she whispered. “I like it.”
He let go. Her hands went down his ribs and over his hips, still cold and warming on him, and she took hold of him under the blanket. He turned his face into the pillow and bit it. She stroked him slowly, root to tip, watching his face the whole time, and every time the cot ticked she stopped dead and they both listened to the dark. Nothing moved below. She started again.
“You’re enjoying this,” he muttered into the pillow.
“Enormously.”
She swung a knee over him and the cot complained, and they froze again, her above him with her shirt rucked to her waist and his cock in her hand, both of them holding their breath until his ears rang. She lowered herself onto him at last, a little at a time, so slowly that he felt every bit of her open around him, hot and slick and tight, and he had to put his own fist against his mouth. She leaned down and replaced it with her palm.
She rode him slowly, because the cot ticked at anything faster. She rocked instead of lifting, grinding down on him with her knees pressed into the thin mattress on either side of his hips, and he could feel how wet she was in the slide of every small movement. He put his palm over her mouth too, because she had started making a sound in her throat that the whole house would hear. She bit the heel of his hand. They shook with the effort of making no sound at all, her palm over his mouth and his over hers, her eyes open above him in the dark, until she dropped her forehead against his and came apart around him in long, slow clenches that she rode out without a single noise. That finished him. He came into her with his teeth set in his own lip and his tail wound so tight around the bedpost that the whole cot creaked once, loudly. They lay there afterward stuck together, shaking with laughter they could not let out.
In the morning Nana remarked that the loft had been very quiet for such an old house. He studied his egg until it went cold.
After that they went back to the den. Josette got her thyme. Penda got his wrist rebound. Crispin got through the week by not looking at the sky.
The signs came on schedule. His teeth ached at the roots on the fifth day and his knees on the sixth, and on the last afternoon he could not finish a bowl of porridge. Noëlle watched him push it around with the spoon. She put the back of her hand on his forearm without asking, held it there, and said “Tonight.”
“Tonight,” he said.
She packed nothing this time, not even a water skin or a cloth. She put on the cloak and tied her boots and stood waiting for him at the bramble gate with her hair already coming loose. When he took her hand, the mark on her shoulder made a small warm patch through the wool.
She looked, he thought, like someone going to a party. He had spent every one of these nights of his life alone with a tree. Nobody had ever looked forward to one.
He led her east instead of to the beeches. He had been to the ring a handful of times in his life, in daylight, and had left each time quickly. It opened out of the trees all at once: a wide glade of short pale grass, ringed by tall stones carved with runes older than the town, black against the last of the light. The silence was so complete that it pressed on his ears. He took his boots off at the edge of the grass and stood them side by side, as he always did. Noëlle crouched and unlaced hers and set them beside his.
“You don’t have to,” he said.
“I know I don’t.”
The moon came up between two stones, much too large, and red as the inside of a mouth. It poured over the grass and turned her hands crimson when she laid one on the nearest stone. She tipped her head. “It’s humming.”
“Don’t...”
“It likes me.” She was grinning, with her eyes half shut. “I can hear the water under the hill, and a hare at the far edge, and your heart. It’s going very fast.”
“It’s the moon.”
“It’s me.”
Both of those were true, and he did not have time to say so. It started in his hands.
The bones lengthened, the knuckles climbed, and the nails thickened and curved. He had done this alone every month of his life with his face turned to a tree, but he had never done it with someone watching who was not afraid. His shoulder went out and came back in farther along. His spine cracked from the neck down in a row. His jeans gave at the seams and his shirt split. Black fur rushed up his arms and across his shoulders while his ears and his tail grew until he could feel them as separate weight. His jaw pushed forward. The teeth that had been hurting for days came down long over his lip. He did not cry out. He never had. The sound he made was lower than a cry and came up through the ground, and the stones answered it.
By the time it ended he was more than two heads taller than she was, with his arms hanging to his knees and his claws curled at the ends of them.
His hand had already moved. It had gone to the nearest stone without asking him, to take hold of something that would not give, as it had taken hold of a beech every month since he was small. The rune under his palm was cold. His claws scored it. He pressed his forehead against the rock next to his hand and shook.
Small hands closed around his wrist. Noëlle lifted his arm away from the stone and held it between both of hers, up against her chest. When she came up on her toes, her mouth landed on the side of his jaw, as high as she could reach, and he felt it through the fur.
“Not that,” she said. “Not this time.”
The hunger had been there since the beginning, down under the breastbone where it always waited. He knew its exact weight. For twenty years he had set his back against it and pushed. It came up now through his jaw and into his teeth and fixed on her, on the line of her throat and the warm patch on her shoulder, and he did not push. He let it stand in him in the open, where she could look at it. It was enormous. It was his. It did not feel like Fenris at all.
“Noëlle,” he said. His voice came out ruined and low.
“I know.” She was breathing hard, and her eyes were wide and shining in the red light. “I hear it. I hear all of it.”
She let go of his wrist. She stepped back onto the pale grass with the cloak swinging off her shoulders and looked at him with her chin up and a broad, wicked smile. Her pupils were huge. Whatever the mark had put into her was opening wider than he had ever seen it, and she turned her head toward things before they moved: the hare, a fox far off, a branch settling.
She unclasped the cloak and dropped it over the stone he had been holding.
“You’ve never once chased me in the open,” she said. “You’ve held a tree instead. I want you to catch me.”
The girl in the old story had run because she had no choice. This one was asking for it, with her hands on her hips, and the ring had never seen anything like it in a hundred years.
“I could...” He stopped. His tail swung out behind him, slow and heavy, and all of him leaned.
Noëlle laughed, a delighted, breathless sound, and she ran.
She went across the glade barefoot and between two stones, and she was under the trees at once. He heard her all the way. He heard her feet on the moss and her breath and her heart, and the mark in her shoulder pulled at the center of his chest.
He did not count to ten. He did not hold a single thing. He went after her.
