Chapter 4: Everything the Tail Knows

The bedtime story had no morning in it. The wolf was waiting in one scene and the girl was gone in the next, and the part in between, where somebody wakes up and has to work out what to do with his own hands, was never thought worth telling.

Crispin knew the story by heart. He woke up inside the morning it left out, with a girl’s hand already resting against the side of his head, and the story had no advice for him at all.

I woke up soaked. My hair was stuck to my forehead and the furs under me were wet through, and I was cold, because the fever had finally left and taken all the heat with it. I was weak enough that lifting a hand was a big errand. My head was clear, though, clearer than it had been since the beech, and I lay still and worked out what I had. I still had my jeans on, and there was a clean rag around my ribs with the cut aching underneath it. My own ruined T-shirt was in a heap by the fire, and my spare was twisted across my chest, damp, where somebody had dried me with it and then given up and left it.

I remembered a little of that.

The other thing I worked out was that her hand was against my head, and that my head was turned into it. I will only say this once. I was not asleep when I turned. I was awake enough to know where her palm was, and I moved toward it, and I have no excuse.

“Hi,” said Noëlle. “Don’t sit up. What’s the ceiling doing?”

I looked. “Holding still.”

“Good.” She was sitting on the edge of the nest with her hair coming out of its tie in every direction. She had stayed up all night and was not going to mention it. Her cloak hung on its peg. And at the foot of the steps, where my boots had been left, her boots stood next to them, with the toes pointing the same way.

I looked at that for longer than I should have.

“I was so good,” she said. Her hand hadn’t moved. “I’ve wanted to touch your ears since about an hour after I got you in here, and you were sick, so I sat on my hands all night. You’re not sick now.” She took a breath. “So I’m touching them. Say stop if you hate it.”

I opened my mouth to say stop. It was the polite thing to say, and I had it ready, because I always do.

It did not come out. What came out was nothing, and while I was lying there with nothing, my tail slid across the furs, long and slow, and I heard it do it.

She looked at the tail and then at me. Her face had gotten very pink.

“Hi to you too,” she told it.

Her fingers found the base of my left ear and scratched, and my eyes closed by themselves. A noise came out of me that I am not going to describe. I had spent twenty years trying to keep my ears pinned down, and it turned out that they had been waiting their whole lives for exactly this and had never mentioned it.

Her hand smelled of resin and beeswax, and I knew that smell. I breathed through my mouth for a while.

“You have a system for the pinecones,” she said, after a bit.

My eyes opened. “It’s not a system.”

“Smallest to biggest, down the shelf. That’s a system.”

“It’s just... they were... I put them there so they wouldn’t roll.”

“And the feathers.”

“They were on the ground. I didn’t take them off anything.” My ears were trying to fold down under her fingers, and her fingers did not let them. “You looked at everything.”

“I did,” she agreed. “For most of the night. It was that or watch you sweat.”

I wanted to argue, but my ears had started to sag, and it is hard to argue with your ears going down. “It’s not... nobody has... I wasn’t expecting anyone. I’m sorry. About all of it. The mess.”

“That’s six.” She was grinning down at me. “I like it. I like all of it. I want to know where the bird’s nest came from.”

“The ground. It was empty. Obviously I didn’t...”

“Obviously.” Her thumb went in a slow circle behind my ear. “Your tail is saying a lot of things right now. I’m not going to translate.”

I put both hands over my face. The tail kept on, over by my knee, with no shame whatsoever.

I wanted her to keep going. I wanted it so much that it scared me more than the goblin knife had, and I lay there hiding to keep from saying so. Nobody I could remember had ever put a hand on me for no reason, and I had no idea what to do about it.

She had gone quiet and kept scratching, in no hurry. When she spoke again she was smiling, and I could hear it.

“You know what they say in town,” she said. “A wolf took a girl in red, and she never came home. Should I be worried?”

My ears pinned back against my skull, right under her fingers.

In Angeau it is a bedtime story, and nobody there could tell you the wolf’s name. It was Fenris. He was my great-great-grandfather, and that is all I am going to say about him here. She was flirting with a story she had heard in her cradle, and she had picked, out of everyone in the valley, the one boy it was not a story for.

“It’s... a story,” I said. “People make things up. It’s old.” My hands came off my face. “Are you hungry? I can find something. There’s... the stream’s close. I could...”

“Okay,” said Noëlle.

Her hand stopped for less than a breath and started again, slower than before. She checked my ears and then my face, taking her time over it. After that she smiled, and I think she put her question down somewhere she could find it again.

I lay there with my ears down under her palm until they came back up. It took a long time. She didn’t take her hand away once.

Some days had passed by the time we went out, and I was on my feet, moving carefully. The cut had closed to a stiff line that pulled whenever I twisted, so I had learned not to twist. She dressed it every morning with her Nana’s salve and told me off for scratching, and every morning I stood very straight and let her. She did not go to her grandmother’s, and I did not ask why, because she might have answered.

She had no willow bark. She told the fire this at breakfast: she had sat through a night of fever with nothing to give for it, and she was not doing that twice. The only willows I knew of grew near the edge of the forest, in a low wet place just inside the first big trees. I said I would take her, and I said it before I had thought about it.

The honest reason is that I did not want her to go alone, and the second honest reason is that I did not want her to go at all. She would have found the willows without me. She would also have come to the edge of the trees, in sight of the town, and I was afraid she would look at it and keep walking. So I came. I walked slowly, with one hand pressed against my side, and she slowed down for me and pretended she hadn’t.

The tree line was as far toward people as I dared go. We came up through the beeches in the middle of a bright, still morning, and from behind the last thick trunk I could see out across the stumps and the cut grass to the town. There were a few roofs, and smoke going up from one chimney. Nobody was in the field, and I stood in the shade with my back against the bark and my ears turned every way at once, listening for voices.

“You can stay,” Noëlle said, keeping behind the trunk herself. “I’ll be quick. As far as Angeau knows, I’m at Nana’s.”

“I’ll come to the willows.”

“Look at you, being brave.”

“It’s a few steps.”

She patted my arm and took her basket down the slope, and I followed her into the hollow, where the trees still covered me.

The willows grew in a hollow where the ground stayed damp all year, long gray-green branches trailing into the moss. She cut the bark in thin strips with her little knife, talking the whole time, because she could not stay quiet for long. It had been used for fevers since before anyone wrote anything down, she said. It was the grandmother of half of what the university gave out in bottles. She said it into the branches with great pleasure, and I stood a few steps off with my arms crossed over my ribs and listened, and my ears stayed turned toward her no matter what I told them.

I was thinking about two things I had not told her.

The wardens were working their way north through the valley. I could hear it, a little closer each week, and I had said nothing. And the moon was a bit fuller every night, and I had said nothing about that either. I had a plan for both of them, which was to tell her myself before either one arrived. I had meant to do it every day since the fever. I did not know how to begin a sentence like that.

“Done,” she said, holding up a bundle of bark. “Look at that. Perfect.”

She came back up the hollow toward me, still talking, with the cloak swinging off her shoulders. She put her boot on a log furred over with green moss. The moss was wet, and the boot did not stay.

My arm was out and my hand had her wrist before the rest of me knew about it, and I pulled, which was exactly the wrong thing to do. Pain went up my side. My knees folded, and we went down together in the moss with the whole red cloak coming down over us like a tent.

For a second nothing moved.

I had my back on the ground and a mouthful of her hair. It smelled of honey and willow. The weight of her was on my chest, all of it, and her knee had landed between my legs, where it had no right to be, and my hand was flat against the bare skin of her thigh, because that was where it had ended up. I noticed the hair first. I noticed the thigh second. I noticed her face third, and that is the order I am least proud of, and I swear I got to her face in the end and stayed there. She had a leaf in her hair. Her eyes were very wide and very close, and her mouth was open to say something, and she did not say it.

“Ow,” I said.

“Oh no, your side.”

“It’s fine. It’s only... it’s mostly... ow.”

“Okay, hold on, I’m getting off.” She pushed up on one hand. The cloak had wrapped around both of us, and the moment she moved, it pulled tight around me, and she dropped back down with a small gasp, an inch from my chin. My ears were pinned flat. My tail, which had gotten out from under us, was slapping the moss as fast as it could go, and she looked down my body toward the noise.

“Your tail is hitting my leg,” said Noëlle.

“It’s not on purpose.”

“I’m not complaining.” She was red from her collar to her hair. I was redder. “I’m going to move my knee now. Tell me if anything hurts.”

“Everything hurts. In a... good way. I mean...” I shut my eyes. “I mean the side.”

She laughed. It came out of her helplessly, with her forehead dropping against my collarbone, and I held very still and let it shake through me, because I could not have done anything else. She got up on her knees, tugging at the cloak, and I got up on an elbow, and the cloak finally came loose.

She held out her hand. I took it. She hauled me up and let go of it a second later than she needed to.

“Don’t say it,” she said. “I fell on you. Not one word.”

“That’s... one,” I said.

“One what?”

“Fall. I’m keeping a list,” I said, and my ears got so hot I thought they might come off.

She pointed at me. “Oh, that’s dirty.”

She made me lift my shirt anyway. Her hands were quick and steady over the bandage, and her face stayed turned toward my ribs the entire time. I did not want her looking at my face. The rag was fine and so was the cut. She patted it twice, which had nothing to do with healing. I stood there with my shirt bunched in one fist, trying to think of a single thing to say. I got as far as “Thank you for falling on me” and had the sense to stop there, so I said nothing and she said nothing, and somewhere above us a jay yelled at both of us for it.

We climbed back up the slope with the bark in her basket. The beeches closed over us and the town dropped behind, and once I could hear nothing from it at all, my ears stopped hunting for it. It was well into the afternoon by the time we got back to the place where the path forked, and I could smell goblin again. The left branch ran off through the ferns toward her grandmother’s, and Noëlle stopped. So did I.

She faced the left branch for as long as it takes to breathe in. My tail sank against the back of my legs, and I started getting a polite sentence ready.

“This needs to dry before it’s any use,” she said, lifting the basket. “We should get it back to the fire.”

She took the deer track, toward the den, and my tail gave one thump against my leg with nobody’s permission. I stood with my hand on my side. The cloak swung behind her. Her bare knees were green with moss, and she turned to check I was coming.

I let myself enjoy it, all of it, the walk and the leaf still caught in her hair. And I was so afraid of how much I was enjoying it that my hands shook, and I followed her anyway.