Chapter 6: The Old Lair

The forest kept everything that was ever left in it and was not particular about what. A boot, an antler, a hundred summers of leaves laid down over something nobody wanted to look at: all of it stayed where it fell, and the vines grew over it, and nothing was ever given back. Angeau took this as a warning. As far as anyone could tell, the forest was simply bad at returning things.

Crispin knew where most of it was. He had spent his whole life going the long way around the worst of it, on the sound principle that a place nobody visits cannot do anybody any harm. He was about to be asked, in a very cheerful voice, to go and visit it.

Noëlle apologized on the fourth morning after Gaspard, and no, I had not been waiting for it. I had been extremely fine for days, which is easy if you keep your ears very still and your eyes on the fire.

She was kneeling by the basket, sorting yarrow into bundles, and she said it to the yarrow. “I owe you a sorry.”

I looked at the fire harder.

“For ‘I’ll tell him you approve.’ You were being nice and I hit you with it. That was mean, and I knew it was mean, and then I sulked at a jar of salve for four days.” She tied off a bundle. “I’m sorry, Crispin.”

I had carried those words around for days, and they had not gone anywhere on their own. They never do with me.

“That’s... one,” I said.

Her hands stopped. She looked up with the yarrow still in her fist.

“You don’t get to use my list against me while I’m apologizing.”

“It’s... a good list.”

“It is, actually.” She was grinning and a little pink. My tail gave one thump against the floor, and I let it, since there was no point arguing. “Okay. That’s settled. Now I’m going to ask you something, and I want you to appreciate how long I waited.”

My ears went back before she had asked anything. They had been braced for this since the morning she first scratched them.

“What really happened,” said Noëlle. “With the wolf and the girl in the red cloak. Not the bedtime version, yours. And where. Your ears folded flat when I made that joke, and I have thought about it every day since. I don’t think it’s only a story to you. I think it’s a place.”

I had a sentence ready for this. I have had it for years, in case anyone ever asked, which nobody ever had: “It’s only an old story, and the real one isn’t much better.” It was a good sentence with a nice shrug in it.

What I said was, “It’s... people tell it... there are a lot of... versions...”

“Crispin. Was there a wolf?”

“There was a wolf. A... like me.”

“Did he have a name?”

I told the floor. It took me a while. “Fenris.”

“I’ve never heard that.”

“The town doesn’t have it. They just say ‘a wolf.’” My tail was wrapped around my own leg by then. “He was my... he was my great-great-grandfather.” I said the last part into my collar, and I said it fast, like pulling a splinter.

She did not recoil, and I had spent twenty years certain anyone would. She sat back on her heels with the yarrow forgotten, and she grinned at me, delighted, which was the worst possible reaction, and also the one I should have predicted. She was a girl who had walked into the forbidden forest and stopped to draw a fern. Of course she wanted the family tree. I sat there with my ears pinned and a tail that would not stop moving.

“Your great-great-grandfather. You’re related to the legend.” She leaned in. “And the girl?”

“Scarlet.” I had never said it to anyone. “Her name was Scarlet.”

“The town doesn’t even have her name,” Noëlle said, softly, and then, much less softly, “Where is it? Where did it happen? You know, don’t you. You know exactly where.”

“No,” I said.

I gave her reasons. It was too far, and goblins used some of that ground. Both were true. The real reason was that I did not want her standing in the one place in the forest I was ashamed of, and then turning around to look at me.

“It’s not... it isn’t somewhere you visit,” I said. “It’s not nice. It’s just a rock with... things in it.”

“I’m a healer. I have seen a lot of things in a lot of people. A rock will be fine.” She put the yarrow down, folded her hands, and said the rest very reasonably. “Here is how this goes. I’m going to see it. You can take me, and I’ll do exactly what you tell me all the way there. Or I can wait until you’re asleep and go looking for it myself.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“I’d get very lost, very happily, and you’d have to come and find me, and we’d end up there anyway.” She waited a second. “If it’s a real no, say so, and I’ll never bring it up again. Is it a real no?”

I opened my mouth, and a real no was not in it.

The reason it wasn’t in there is one I am less proud of. In twenty years nobody had asked to see any of it. I had wanted, all that time, for someone to stand there with me.

“It’s not... a real no,” I said.

“Good.” She was already up. I took her cloak off its peg and held it out to her myself, which is how I know who won.

I banked the fire before we left, slowly, longer than it needed. She waited at the steps and did not say a word about how long it took. When I finally straightened up she held out her hand, palm up, to send me ahead of her, and I walked past it with my ears burning and my tail making a speech I did not want translated.

We set off in the one direction I avoided. Past the last place I had any reason to go there was no trail, only the direction I remembered and my ears keeping watch for goblins. Thorny stems caught at our knees and branches caught at our faces, and the vines started, hanging in ropes from the canopy, some as thick as my wrist, with lianas looped between the trunks so low that we had to duck under them and climb over them by turns. It had rained in the night, and the air under all of it was hot and wet. I kept hoping the vines would get too thick to get through, and they did not.

“How far is it?” she asked, early on.

“Far. Past where I like to go.”

“You go everywhere,” said Noëlle.

“Not there.”

She left that alone for a while, which for her is a real effort, and I was grateful and a little frightened by it.

I went first and held the worst of it back with my arm. Noëlle talked for the first stretch, mostly about a fern, and when she stopped talking I knew it was getting hard. At one point she took hold of the back of my shirt so she would not lose me in the vines, and I walked the rest of the way with that small tug between my shoulder blades and was extremely brave about it. One side of the cloak was soaked from the vines, and it dripped down her leg. A branch swung back and caught her across the shoulder, and she told it she forgave it.

By the end she was breathing hard behind me, and I was breathing harder. My ears swiveled at every drip. A good way off, something moved that was either a goblin or a pigeon, and I decided on pigeon. The brush stopped pushing back, and we were there.

A wall of gray rock rose in front of us, furred with moss, and nearly all of it was hidden under a curtain of vines and lianas that hung straight down from the top. You would walk right past it. Anyone would. I had always been grateful for that, and standing in front of it with her, I could not remember why I had ever thought that was the same as being safe.

I stopped well short of it. My feet did it without asking me. I pointed with one finger and looked at the ground.

“That’s where... you know. Where it happened.”

Noëlle did not wait for me to find a better sentence. She took the curtain in both hands, pushed it aside, found the opening behind it, and stepped in, and the vines dropped shut behind her with a soft, wet sound.

I was in after her before I had decided to be. Going in was bad, but her being in there alone was worse.

The cold hit me first, a damp cold after the heat of the walk, and then the smell of old iron and wet stone, and under that an animal that had been gone a very long time. Green light came through the vines and lay over everything, her face and the red cloak included. The floor was bare stone, and somewhere water was dripping out of sight. Along one wall a shelf of rock rose off the ground, and the rest of the cave was dark corners and a ceiling I did not look at for long. I had been in dark places my whole life without minding it. I minded this one.

“That’s the shelf,” I said, since somebody should name it. “For the... for the furs. There aren’t any furs now.” There were bones, though, old deer bones, lying where they had been left, and a dark rot in the corners that I was not going to go into.

At the back of the chamber, bolted into the rock at arm height, were the chains.

She went straight to them without looking where she put her feet, and she laid her fingertips on the nearest link and drew them down the iron. It was dark with age and rough with rust, and the rust came away on her skin in flakes. I wanted it off her, and I had no way of saying so.

She followed one chain up to the bolt where it was sunk in the stone, and put her thumb against the join. I stood where I was. My tail had pulled itself in around the back of my knee, which is where it goes when I am trying to take up less room than a person can.

“Look at the pitting,” she said, to the wall. “Look at the links, they’re all a little different. Somebody made these one at a time, for this.” She said it in the voice she gets for old books. She turned around with rust on her fingers, and asked me as calmly as if she were asking the name of a plant.

“Tell me, Crispin, what was this for?”

My face got hot all the way up to my ears, and they folded down.

“That’s where he... kept her,” I said. “Not very nice, if you ask me...”

She waited.

“Come here,” she said. “You’re mumbling at the vines.”

I went over and stood beside her at the wall. A link shifted against the stone next to her hand, with a small dry tick, and my ears turned to it before I could stop them. “Settling,” I said. “It’s old. It’s nothing.”

She was looking at my face and not at the iron. “Kept her how? And why? You said it like there’s more.”

There was more. I took a breath that did not help. “It wasn’t only... he wasn’t only being cruel. I mean, he was. But it wasn’t only that.” I looked at the nearest link instead of at her. “It was the old magic... the kind that ties two people together. And he did it by force... the chase, and the bite, and the keeping. That was how it was made... all of it was how it was made.” My voice did something I would rather not describe. “I know how that sounds.”

I had never said it out loud to anybody, and out loud it was worse. It was a sentence with a person chained at the end of it.

Noëlle pressed one rusty hand flat to her chest and said, “It’s real? Two people tied together, on purpose, with a method?”

“It’s... yes.”

“Professor Aubert would lie down on the floor.” She said it to the ceiling, and then to me. “Every book I’ve read says that’s a manner of speaking. You’re telling me there is a method.”

“I’m not telling you it works. I’m telling you what he... what the Old Wolves did.”

“Crispin.” She was nearly laughing. “All my life the town gave me the boring version, with every good part cut out.”

I was getting a sentence ready about what the good parts were when she lifted the nearest cuff with two fingers. She held it in her palm and turned it toward the light.

“How does it work? Is it the bite that does it, or the chase, or does it need all of it together? Does it hurt? Does it wear off? What does she get out of it, and what does he?” She held the cuff beside her wrist, not on it, and looked at the size of it with the face she wears for a new fern. “Does it have to be these? Or are these only where he did it?”

She was standing at the wall with that cuff open in her hand, bright and eager, and my tail came loose from behind my knee and swung toward her. Something in me went with it, low and quick, and I did not trust it or know whose it was.

I put my hands in my pockets so they would have somewhere to be. I looked at the bones until my face was mine again.

“You’re doing the face,” she said, glancing up at me. “The one where you apologize to the room. Do you want to stop?”

“I’m... fine. I think I’m apologizing to her, a bit.”

“That’s fair.” She nodded and looked back at the iron. “I’d say I’m sorry for her too, if I thought it would help. But she’s been gone a hundred years, and I really want to know how it works.” She turned the cuff over. “Okay. Start at the beginning. What does the wolf do first?”

I asked the stone floor, with real feeling, to open. It was a very old floor, and it stayed exactly where it was.