Chapter 3: The Den

Angeau had a great deal to say about what a wolf kept in his house. There were bones in it, according to the town, and a heap of something nobody would specify, and a smell. All of this had been settled over many suppers, and not a word of it had come from anyone who had been inside.

The healer of Angeau was about to be the first, and she had no idea. She believed she was getting a hurt boy somewhere dry, and after that she would be on her way to her grandmother’s, and she was very sure about the second part.

I told him he was going to be fine. I was wrong.

The cut was clean, I swear it was: a long, shallow cut with a straight edge on both sides and nothing torn. What I hadn’t thought about was the knife, with goblin smell all over that hollow. A goblin’s knife has been in everything, and I have known that since I was twelve, and I let a tidy line in a boy’s side talk me out of knowing it.

By the time I had finished the bandage it was nearly dusk under the beech, the rain had settled into a steady drum and his skin was hot against my palm. The heat that had started at the end of the patching was a fever now. His breathing came quick and shallow, his ears kept jumping against his skull, and when I lifted the edge of the bandage the skin around it was tight and shiny, warmer than the rest of him.

I had no willow bark. I had put every last curl of it into Tobias that afternoon, and I would have given a lot to have it back.

Here is what the choice looked like from where I knelt, and it doesn’t make me look good. Left went to Nana’s. It was most of the way across the forest still, and I had spent my afternoon on a fern and some flowers, so it would be dark before I got there. A sensible girl would have tucked the cloak around him, left him the elderflower with directions for brewing it, and gone. A sensible girl would have been at Nana’s door with a story about the rain.

I didn’t think about it. My hands were already pulling the cloak tighter around his shoulders.

“We’re moving,” I said.

His eyes opened a crack, glassy. “Mm?”

“Is there anywhere close? Somewhere dry. You know this part of the wood and I don’t, so I need you to be useful.”

He swallowed. “The den,” he said. “It’s... not far. Past the stone with the... moss. Down.”

“Down is great. I love down.”

He said den with no trouble at all, which I think was the fever. I found out later what that word usually cost him.

Getting him up was the hard part. He was a head taller than me, all of it lean weight, and when I got my shoulder under his arm and stood, the mud pulled at my boots and he swayed so far that I thought we were both going back down. He made a sound I had heard at a thousand doors and said sorry.

“That’s three,” I said. “Keep walking.”

I pulled the cloak around us both as far as it would stretch and hooked the basket over my free arm. His hand hung over my shoulder, hot and loose. I would like to say I noticed only his weight. I also noticed that there was a great deal of arm across my shoulders, and that his ribs moved against my side with every breath, and that I was going to be embarrassed about the order of those things later, and not only about the order.

“Left,” he said into my hood. “No. Left. That’s... that’s it. Mind the root, it... bites.”

“It bites?”

“Figure of... speech.”

His tail dragged along beside us through the ferns, and every few steps it gave a small twitch against my calf, and I decided it was checking I was still there. The goblin smell fell behind us and the rain kept coming. I thought about Nana at every step. This rain would be getting into her hip, and the salve for it was on my arm, going the wrong way. That should have turned me around, and I kept my shoulder under his arm and walked on. He steered me with murmurs, past a boulder and along a ridge, and the less sense he made, the better his directions got. Twice I would have gone the wrong way, and twice his hand tightened on my shoulder before I did.

“Almost,” he mumbled. “It’s... you won’t see it. Nobody... sees it.”

I didn’t see it. We had stopped at the foot of a bank of rock so thick with bramble that I would have walked a wide circle around it. The thorns were as long as my thumb.

“There,” he said.

“Where?”

“The long one. Lift it. It isn’t... rooted.”

He was entirely serious, swaying, with rain running off the tips of his ears. I reached out and took the longest cane in two fingers, and it swung away from the stone in my hand with a whole section of the thicket tied to it. The canes had been cut at the bottom so that they only looked rooted. I had a year of university botany and a cut stick had fooled me, and I took that personally. Behind it was a gap between the bank and a boulder, low and dark, wide enough for a person turned sideways.

“Duck,” I said, and we went through sideways, me in front with his hand on my shoulder and the thorns dragging at my hood.

Past the gap the ground sloped down in steps worn smooth by feet, and the rain sounds fell away behind us, and warm air came up against my face. He took the steps by memory, with his hand dragging along the wall and me taking most of his weight, and he did not once feel for a step. I felt for every one in the dark. I counted them under my breath out of habit, lost track at the bottom, and called it a good number.

It was a chamber of dark stone, rounded and smooth, low at the edges and high enough in the middle for me to stand. The air was dry and smelled of woodsmoke and clean fur. Against one wall there was a ring of stones with ash heaped in it, and under the ash a dull glow, banked down by someone who had meant to come back. A crack in the ceiling drew off the smoke. Along the far side, heaped against the curve of the wall, was a nest of furs and dark cushions big enough for two.

I looked at all of it for one breath, and then it was a job.

I got him across the floor and down onto the furs, and he lay there with his eyes shut and his ears flattened and said, “Sorry. The mud... your boots.”

“That’s four, and don’t be silly. Stay put.”

There was a bucket by the wall with water in it, and an iron pot, and I found a spare shirt folded on a shelf and a few clean rags under it. I took the shirt to dry him with and didn’t ask. His boots came off next, and I stood them at the foot of the steps, under the peg where I hung the cloak. I got his own wet ruin of a T-shirt the rest of the way off him, and I dried his chest and stomach as I would anyone’s, quickly and briskly, and my hands stayed on the job and the rest of me did not. His jeans I left on, as a courtesy to the boy he would be in the morning. After that I rinsed the bandage out, smoothed more salve from the open jar onto the cut, and wrapped it in a clean rag. The unopened one stayed in the basket. I pushed the coals together and fed them kindling from the pile by the ring, and I put a pot of water on to heat.

When it steamed, I crumbled in a good pinch of the dried elderflower, and the room smelled of summer. I left it to steep, soaked a rag in the bucket, and laid the rag across his forehead.

His ears twitched beside my wrist.

They were right there. Black and furred, they swiveled toward my voice every time I spoke, and I wanted very badly to find out how soft they were. I did not touch them, and I hope you’re impressed, since I thought about it for a good part of the night, and I thought about it in detail. He was sick. He couldn’t say yes or no. I kept my hand on the rag and my eyes on the fire, and I told myself I was a professional.

I got the tea into him a little at a time, holding his head up and tipping the cup and telling him about the fern again, since he couldn’t stop me. He swallowed and coughed and swallowed again, and I counted every swallow as it went down. When the cup was empty, I sat back on my heels and finally looked around at where I was.

I didn’t decide to like it. It happened on its own, the way a bruise does.

The floor was swept, and a ladle hung on a nail. And the shelves, cut into the stone beside the nest, were full of small things.

They were plain things, the sort you find if you walk through a forest with your eyes open. Pinecones stood in a line from the smallest to the biggest, and jay feathers had been pushed into a crack in the rock so that they fanned out. There were river stones with holes worn through them, snail shells, a shed antler tip I had questions about, and an empty bird’s nest about the size of my fist.

It was a lot of care to spend on a room nobody visited. He had stood here on some ordinary day and decided which pinecone went next to which, and I wanted to cry about a pinecone, which I had no time for. I liked the fur and the fire. I liked that it was warm and that it was his. I sat on the floor with my hands around a cup of elderflower tea I had made for him and drank it myself, and I thought, honestly, that I would not mind staying here a little while.

That was not the errand, and I put the thought down where I could find it later.

The fever climbed. It took its time about it, as they do. I changed the rag whenever it stopped being cool, wrung it out over the bucket until my knuckles ached, and put it back. I held the back of my hand against his neck, and the heat there kept rising. His face stayed dry and got pinched, which was bad. He muttered once in his sleep, and his tail, which had been lying stiff along the furs, began to twitch in small, fast jerks, and each time my chest got tighter. The poultice of comfrey I laid around the bandage was something to do with my hands.

I am good at fevers. I have sat through dozens, in front rooms and back bedrooms, with a pot of something on the stove and a family hovering in the doorway, and I always know what comes next. Here I knew too. There was no doorway full of people and no line behind it, and I had not wanted to scream at anyone all night, which I did not look at too closely. There was also no one to tell me it would be all right and mean it, so I got the quick bright voice I use on frightened parents and used it on the fire. “You’re doing very well,” I told the coals. “Nobody could ask for more.”

After that I went back to staring at his shoulders. I’m not proud of it. He had a long muscle in his arm that jumped whenever his tail did, and I had my chin on my knee and was studying all of it with a thoroughness I had only ever given Professor Aubert’s plates. The healer in me held up a hand and said that I was checking for swelling. I wasn’t.

I thought about Mother for a minute, which I try not to do in the dark. By now she would be telling people I had reached Nana’s safely. She had no way of knowing that and had announced it anyway, which is how she has always handled me, and for once it was working in my favor. Angeau would leave me alone until Sunday.

I turned the cloak over on its peg so the other side could drip. It was soaked through, and it was still warm in my hands, and I decided I would think about that in the morning.

Somewhere past the middle of the night, he surfaced.

His ears came up off his skull first and turned toward the sound of my wringing the rag. His eyes opened and stared up at the stone ceiling without finding anything there.

“The ceiling’s,” he said, slowly, “moving.”

“The ceiling is a liar,” I said, too fast, with two fingers already under his jaw. “Don’t listen to it. Hi. Welcome back.”

He turned his head on the furs and looked at the den and the fire, and me cross-legged on his floor with his rag in my hand. His ears went back so hard they nearly vanished.

“You’re... in my...”

“Den. Yes. You gave me excellent directions. Your root bites, apparently.”

“I said... that? Out loud?”

“Twice. I was impressed.”

“I’m sorry. About the... it’s a mess. I didn’t...” He closed his eyes. “Nobody was supposed to...”

“That’s five. It’s not a mess, you swept.” I put the cool rag back on his forehead and poured what I had kept warm by the coals. “Drink this.”

He drank, because I tipped the cup at him until he did. And partway down, he sniffed at the steam and said, drowsily, “That’s the good kind. It’s got to be... picked before rain. Or it...” His voice thinned out. “...goes bitter.”

I had picked it before rain. I had been taught to. I sat there with the cup tilted and my mouth a little open, and I wanted to ask him who had taught him, and his eyes had already closed.

On the furs, though, his tail had stopped its twitching. It slid across the cushions in a long, lazy sweep, once, and lay still again with its tip curled against my knee.

“I’m taking that as a good review,” I said quietly, to nobody.

It was the last thing either of us said for a long time. Toward morning, I put my palm on his forehead and waited, and then I kept it there longer than I needed to. The fever had stopped climbing. I had hoped it would break. It stayed where it was, steady and hot. I could work with that. I had worked with worse. I put on a fresh rag.

The basket was on the floor beside the nest. I had meant to leave it on the steps, ready for the walk to Nana’s. I left it by the nest, where I could reach the elderflower, and I unlaced my boots, carried them across the floor, and stood them next to his at the foot of the steps. I came back and stretched my feet out toward the fire.