Chapter 7: How the Magic Works

Angeau had firm views on what a sensible girl did with a dangerous piece of information. She said thank you, she took it somewhere quiet to think it over, and she did not go back for more. Angeau had raised a great many sensible girls on this principle and was proud of every one.

The healer of Angeau had just been handed a very dangerous piece of information. She had rust on her fingers, and she was not thinking about quiet places. She was thinking about her next question, and the one after that.

I rubbed the rust between my thumb and two fingers all the way out of the lair. It crumbled to a fine dust that worked into the creases of my knuckles, and I didn’t wipe it off, because I wasn’t ready to be finished with it.

Crispin held the vine curtain back with his arm so I could duck under. He came out after me and let it drop, and he stood looking at the stone behind it for a good while, the way you check you’ve latched a gate. His ears were pinned and his tail was wrapped around his leg.

I asked my question again when we reached the first thorns.

“What does the wolf do first?”

“Not... here,” he said. “Can we get further... from it?”

“Of course,” I said, and I meant it, and I followed him through the brush for a long stretch without another word. That was the most self-control I showed all day. When the thorns thinned, I asked again, in a smaller voice. I learned that method on Mother. You never get louder. You get gentler and gentler until the other person gives in just to make the gentleness stop.

“He chases her,” Crispin told a tree.

“Chases her where?”

“Anywhere. It’s not... about where.” He pushed a branch aside for me and looked at it instead of at me. “The chase is what wakes it. The bond. Nothing starts until the wolf runs her down. That’s the first part.”

“Wakes it how?”

“I don’t know how. I just know that without it, nothing... happens. You can’t skip it.” He took a few steps. “It has to be a real chase. Not walking.”

The university part of me sat up. “So it’s a condition. The chase is the key,” I said, in the voice Nana says makes me unbearable. The tip of Crispin’s tail twitched, which I counted as a win. “And the second part?”

His tail wrapped tighter around his leg.

“He has to mark her.”

“Mark her how?”

“With his...” He touched his own jaw, quickly, and took the hand away. “Teeth.”

“A bite. Like the root bites,” I said.

“Not like the root.” He had gotten red to the tips of his ears. “A real one. On the shoulder. It isn’t a... figure of speech. People make it sound like one, and it isn’t. It’s magic. It does something.”

I stopped walking. Every book I had read at university treated binding rites as symbols, a knot or a cup passed between two people. This was a bite, with a real mouth and real teeth, doing real magic on a real person. It was like reading about swimming for a year and being shown the lake.

“Which shoulder?” I said.

He walked into a branch. “I don’t... does it matter?”

“Professionally, yes.” I hooked a finger in the neck of my top, pulled it aside, and pressed two fingers into the muscle between my neck and my shoulder. “Here? There’s plenty to bite and nothing big to hit, if you’re careful. Any lower and you’ll meet the collarbone, and you’ll want to keep your teeth.” I tilted my head out of the way. “Come and look. I’m asking as a healer.”

I was not asking as a healer.

He looked for about one second. The tip of his tail lifted off his leg, and he put it back. “I’ll... take your word for it,” he said, to the sky.

I let my top go and felt very good about the morning.

“What does the mark do?” I said. “Not what it means. What it does.”

“Everything gets sharper. For the one who’s marked. Smells, sounds, all of it, louder. She can see further in the dark, I think.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “And the two of them are tied. The wolf and the one he marks. They’d know where the other one is, roughly, even apart. That’s what I was told.”

“Told by who?”

“It’s... just what the Old Wolves did,” he said. “It got passed down.”

It was the second time he had said it that day, and I let it stand. Something else had caught in my head.

“Both ways?” I said. “You’d know where I was, and I’d know where you were?”

“I... yes. Both.”

The whole of Angeau could find me by walking out to my front door. Nobody had ever offered to let me find them back. I thought about a boy who had spent twenty years not being found, and how I could walk straight up to him in the dark any time I liked, and my stomach did something I enjoyed.

“So you couldn’t hide from me,” I said.

His ears came forward, stopped, and tried to decide. “No.”

“Good. Is there a third thing? You look like there’s a third thing.”

“The forest.” He said it so quietly that I had to lean toward him. “It wakes the forest’s power. In whoever wears the mark. Whatever’s old, in the trees, in the ground. It starts... answering her.”

“Answering how? And wears it, like a ring, only with teeth?”

“It’s like a scar, I think. I’ve never seen one. I’ve never done... any of it.” He glanced at me and away. “I’m telling you what I was told. I haven’t tested a word.”

I walked beside him a while, rubbing at what was left of the rust on my fingers. It was the best thing anyone had ever told me, and it had come out of a cave with chains bolted into the rock. “Does it hurt?”

“I’d think... yes. A little. A bite is a bite.”

“Does it wear off?”

“Nobody ever said it did.”

We walked, and I caught myself planning how I would clean and dress a bite like that on myself, one-handed. A jay shouted at us from somewhere high up, and Crispin’s ears swung toward it and back.

“Here is the part I can’t get past,” I said. “Fenris did all of it by force. Where does it say it has to be force?”

He stopped, one foot still lifted. His ears came up off his skull for the first time since the lair.

“The chase wakes it. The bite makes it. Neither of those is a chain. Did anyone ever tell you the chains were part of it?”

He thought about it for so long that a second jay joined the first. “No,” he said slowly. “I was told what he did. All of it, together. I think I just took it as one thing.” He put the foot down. “It might have been... only him. Nobody said it had to be forced.” He said the sentence carefully. His tail unwrapped from his leg and hung there, trying out the idea for itself. I was so proud of that question that my fingers itched for my notebook.

The way back was easier than the way in. I noticed late, the way you notice a tooth has stopped aching. The same vines hung in the same ropes, and none of them took hold of me. The thorny stems that had raked my knees that morning missed them, and I walked behind Crispin with my hands free and my hood down. He had broken the trail going in, I decided, and that was all it was.

The cloak had dried stiff along one side and smelled of wet leaves. I thought of Nana for a stride and a half. What would she make of a boy who apologized to rooms? She would have told me to eat something, which is her answer to most things, and I kept walking.

“One more,” I said. “Does it matter when? Time of day, the season. Does the moon—”

He flinched at the word before I had finished it. His whole body did it, tail first, and he walked faster for a few steps.

“I don’t... know,” he said. “Can you ask me something else?”

I could. I wrote moon? on the inside of my head and underlined it twice, and I asked him instead what the first jay had been so angry about. He told me. It was a squirrel. By the time the bramble bank came into view I knew how the whole thing worked and was holding it in both hands. I was not afraid of it at all. He lifted the long cane for me.

Crispin did not say a word through supper. He ate fast and neatly with his ears at half height, and he washed his bowl before I had finished mine, which is how I know somebody is in trouble. When he had run out of things to wash he came back to the fire and sat down as far from me as the fire allowed.

“I need to say something,” he told the coals. “About earlier. It sounds...” He grimaced. “It sounds bad. A chase, and a bite, and then she’s tied to him. I hate how it sounds.” He looked up at last. “It doesn’t have to be that. Nobody has to do anything. It’s just a thing that’s true. We can leave it back in the cave, and I won’t ever... bring it up...” His ears had dropped so low they were nearly lost in his hair. “I wish I... I wish it wasn’t me that knew it.”

He meant every word, and it made me want to get up and take his face in my hands, and I stayed where I was, because I had a better idea.

I had decided somewhere between the bite and the moon. I’d like to say it was a scholarly decision, since that is what I told myself on the walk, and it was partly that. I’ll get to the rest.

“Okay,” I said. “I volunteer.”

He looked at me. “You... what?”

“I volunteer. For the chase, and the rest of it if the chase goes well. I’m the girl, I’m here, and I’m offering.”

“Noëlle, you can’t just...”

“I can. I’m twenty and I have good boots.” I got up on my knees to say it properly. “You said it wakes with a chase. So you chase me. You can. I’m certain you can.”

His tail did one slow, appalled sweep across the floor. “I don’t... I’m not sure that I’m... what if I’m bad at it? I’ve never. I couldn’t even stand up the first time we met.”

“You were bleeding. It was allowed.”

“I’d have to run you down.”

“You’re a wolf,” I said. “You went through those vines this morning and held the worst of them back with one arm, and you found a cave I’d have walked right past with my eyes open. You’ll catch me so fast I’ll be insulted. Here’s a bet. I bet you can’t even catch me. Loser cooks supper for a week.”

He blinked. “That’s a... terrible bet. You just said I’d catch you so fast. You said you’d be insulted. So you’ve bet against yourself.”

“I never said I was good at betting. I said I bet.” I folded my arms and grinned at him. “Are you taking it or not?”

I fully expected to lose. I planned to run as hard as I could and lose anyway.

Crispin did not take it. He put a hand over his eyes. “Noëlle... I’d be chasing you. On purpose. Through the woods. I’d have my... teeth in you...”

“I know.”

“Do you? Do you really, because it...” He dropped the hand and looked at me, and for once he didn’t look away. “Are you sure? Do you mean it?”

“I mean it.”

“If you want it stopped... any time... you say, and it stops. Right then. Even in the middle.”

“I know that too,” I said. “And you can stop it the same way. You call it off, and I’ll never ask why.”

“Me?”

“You get a vote, Crispin. Everybody does.”

He stared at the fire. His ears rose a finger’s width and fell back, and rose again.

“Why?” he said finally. “Why would you want to?”

I gave him the stated reason first. I told him nobody in a hundred years had been able to ask a living person how it worked. All of that was true.

Don’t laugh at the rest. I was curious, in every part of me at once, and I’d been curious since the chains. And back in the cave, with a rusty cuff in my hand and being unbearable, I had looked up in time to see his tail come loose from behind his knee and swing toward me, and his whole face with it, before he put it away. Nobody had ever looked at me like that when I was doing nothing for anyone.

And I was a little horny about it. He had said the word teeth with his hand at his jaw and his face on fire, and I was twenty, and I had just been told that somebody could run me down through a forest, on purpose, and that did it. I was extremely in favor.

None of that came out of my mouth. What came out was, “Because I think it’ll be fun.”

“Fun,” Crispin said weakly.

“A dare between friends. The loser cooks.”

His ears rose, finally, and stayed up. He opened his mouth and shut it, and when one corner of it went up he tried to put it back down. He put his face in both hands, and I kept my arms folded, because my hands wanted to go over there and peel his away.

“I’m going to... lose,” he said, through his fingers. “You’re going to be so fast...”

“In that case you’re cooking.”

He gave up and laughed, short and helpless, and when he lowered his hands his face was red and he was smiling so hard it must have hurt. The tail behind him was thumping the floor in plain view, and he reached back to stop it and it did not stop.

“Fine,” he said. “You’re on. I’ll catch you.”

“That’s the spirit.”

“I might... die of this. I’m not changing my mind.”

“I know,” I said, and held out my hand past the fire.

He shook it, solemnly. His hand was warm, with no fever in it, which I checked without meaning to, and he held on a moment longer than a shake needs, and neither of us said a thing about that.